Farewell to illusions

 
Neuromarketing Thanks to neurological research, marketing departments have a new set of tools at their disposal. 
When 10,000 English schoolchildren across England are asked to drop their sandwiches from the table, it is either for an entry in the "Guinness Book of Records" or for a scientific experiment. At least in 2001, the latter was the case. Because Robert A. J. Matthews is a physicist. And scientists have an irresistible urge to want to explain the world and all its oddities. If a friend tells you that you utter countless exclamations of astonishment every day, he has either observed you well or read a neurological study on the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC for short. All science begins with observation and then searches for patterns from which generally valid rules can be derived. Although such rules are not truths, they make it easier to predict whether a particular event will be repeated.
Just as physicists generally don't concern themselves with sandwiches, neurologists are just as unconcerned with marketing issues. We should not forget this in the excitement surrounding neuromarketing and the question of the latest state of research. What is of interest is not how far the chemical, physical and neuro-physiological processes in the ACC have been decoded, but how much we already know about the basic functioning of the human brain. And the answer is: too little to create a human-like robot - too much to send marketing textbooks into the next edition without drastic changes.
Thanks to the latest technologies, we can now watch the brain at work. And what we assume by closely observing healthy and brain-damaged people can be simulated and displayed on screens. But what we see there is not a new, completely unknown person. We have long known or suspected what neuroscientists have to say to the marketing and advertising industry. We just didn't want to admit it.
The scientific evidence alone that human behavior is largely controlled by the unconscious should cause unease in marketing departments. But neuroscientists now have much more to offer. They explain how we absorb information, in which memory areas it is distributed and stored, what happens when we remember, which patterns are general, individual or culturally influenced and in which situations we are particularly susceptible to manipulation.
Neuromarketing in the sense of applied neurology primarily means saying goodbye to illusions. This applies to market researchers as well as planners and strategists. Neuromarketing means asking new questions. Or reviving old questions. What story do I need to tell? How do I incorporate the random into my strategy? How do I translate the sign language of the unconscious into an applicable set of tools? What replaces the outdated AIDA formula, Maslow pyramid or SWOT analysis? How do common sense and analytical thinking work together?
Neuroscientific research is now at a stage where we know enough about the fundamentals to revise our own models. We should now be dealing with the sandwiches instead of waiting for quantum physics to contribute to the synchronization of nerve cells.
Werner T. Fuchs
See also:

Brand impact in the mind
 
 
 
Vita Werner T. FuchsWerner T. Fuchs
He earned a doctorate in German and theology and, after working in various positions in Germany and abroad, entered the advertising industry. At the end of the 1980s, living with his disabled daughter prompted him to take a close look at the findings of modern brain research. At the end of 1999, he founded Propeller Marketingdesign to transfer the results of this research to everyday practice. In his book "Tausend und eine Macht. Marketing and modern brain research"
Werner T. Fuchs has developed a set of tools that makes the sign languages of the unconscious visible. A continuously updated and annotated bibliography on neuromarketing can be found at www.1001macht.ch.