Consumer neuroscience: A method for optimising marketing communication

Today’s research in cognitive neuroscience suggests that decision making is less deliberate than once thought and instead relies heavily on early emotional responses. Traditional market research methods, such as focus groups and surveys, have been unable to clearly demonstrate consumers’ initial, preconscious reactions. Now, consumer neuroscience methods are revealing insights into the early emotional responses that are crucial to understanding decision making and, therefore, are capturing a more complete view of multicultural consumers. While many methods can be applied to reveal the hidden insights, drivers and motivations of consumers, electroencephalography (EEG) uniquely provides fine temporal resolution of cortical activity in a scalable fashion, making it an ideal resource for the analysis of marketing material. Using EEG, researchers are able to evaluate the attentional effort, emotional engagement and memory activations in response to stimuli on a secondby- second basis, enabling optimisation of marketing communications at a highly granular level. These metrics have been tested for reproducibility and validated with in-market performance, ensuring applicability to consumer behaviour and providing unique insights about consumer groups that have historically been difficult to capture.