09 Nov 2018

Winning “hearts and minds” of consumers have never been easy, and while contemporary marketers more or less learned how to win “minds,” the situation with “hearts” and emotions remains complicated. That’s why today’s marketing research are streamlined towards the exploration and control of consumers’ emotions and behavior. At the same time, advertising becomes more emotional, while marketing campaigns are directed not just at the promotion of the product but at selling the brand’s values and story.

Let’s face it, from the rational point of view it’s difficult to differentiate two pairs of top brands’ sneakers in terms of the quality of materials, durability or comfort. The main differences to which customers pay attention today are design and the brand’s positioning on the market, as well as associations it entails. Though, these are things which you can assess from an emotional point of view (i.e., “I like/don’t like it”) rather than from rational perspective (i.e., “It’s practical/not practical”). So, let’s take a closer look at how you can leverage modern technologies and peculiarities of human brain functioning to achieve outstanding results in managing your customers’ behavior with the help of marketing and advertising.

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Video advertising is the flagship of changes

The shift from text marketing materials to video content is already obvious to everyone. 87% of online marketers use video in their marketing campaigns, while thousands of video ads are produced every day. Advertising specialists claim that an average person is exposed to around 5’000 ads daily, and the overwhelming majority of it is visual content dominated by video.

Video content is so popular because it’s easier consumed by customers, requires less time to transmit a message, engages several types of memory, and what is the most important is a powerful and effective tool for the transmission of emotions. Though, the process of creating emotional links with products is complicated. Very often, videos don’t produce the expected impact on the audience, regardless of the budgets and time invested. There are two main rationales behind this.

Emotions are preset in our brains, and you can’t get around it

You can’t provoke emotions which are by default absent from the minds of consumers. Only if people relate particular product with a particular function or concept in their brain, they will be able to form an emotional connection with it. The advertising should resonate with concepts already existing in customers’ brains.

It means that when you are advertising diesel cars, you don’t talk about environmental friendliness. Instead, you emphasize on fuel efficiency and dynamics of the diesel engine. Parents will perceive diapers as a positive thing only if they believe that this product really helps their child to feel more comfortable. If they don’t, advertising depicting a happy kid wearing diapers just won’t resonate with them. And changing opinions and creating new associations is a far more complicated task which can’t be accomplished by one video advertising and requires a proper research-based content marketing strategy.

Examples above show that customers always want to be right. On subconscious level they want advertising to support their opinion and perception of things. That’s why it’s crucial to understand which emotional associations customers have with the product and brand on the subconscious level. The answer to this question will allow you to get the most out of your advertising efforts.

Subconscious emotional links rule the advertising game

As you might have already understood, emotional connections with things, places, and people are deeply rooted in our subconscious mind. Thus, the main goal of good advertising is to target those connections directly. Regardless of the widespread prejudice, those spots are not so hard to identify. All you need is to track subconscious brain activity during the interaction of customers with your marketing materials, including video content. The application of neuromarketing tools which allow to register and analyze the subconscious brain activity of customers while they interact with a product or advertising materials in real time is the most effective way to do it.

Actually, if the advertising is based on behavioral research and designed to target particular emotions, it can influence customers’ perception of brand and product even when they are not paying direct attention to it. Just remember the last time a song, an image or a slogan popped-up in your mind, and you couldn’t identify its origin, but after reflecting for a while you realized that it’s from advertising you recently came across. That’s exactly how our limbic, unconscious system works – it tracks and registers things without signaling this process to our conscious brain. By a “strange” coincidence this system also processes our emotions.

Thanks to the development of modern technologies, getting inside consumers’ brain without even making them realize it, became as easy, as never before thanks to neuromarketing tools. Thus, if you can leverage them to improve your product, better engage the target audience and create a greater consumer experience, why not to use them?