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Financial Planners, Want Free Marketing and Publicity? The Key is Understanding the Media
The media need you. Need the information and expertise you offer, that is. But they are not encyclopedias. They don’t serve up information. They serve up stories. That heap of paper that thuds onto your doorstep early each morning – it’s called a...
"KISS Marketing - the Basics"
Regardless of whether your business is a small Mom & Pop type atmosphere or a larger than life organization, your approaches and strategies must be of the highest caliber to reach your target audience. Professionalism is the key! Often there is a...
Let Your Mistakes Improve Your Marketing And Your Profits
Have you ever sent out a sales letter and received little or no response, or put up a web site and found hardly anyone visiting it. Have you worked hard on an article only to find that few people read it and even fewer contacted you as a result?...
Marketing-Minded Financial Planners, Create Your Very Own Story to Get Free Publicity
One big mistake that many marketing-minded financial planners make when contacting the media is to drop what's called an "information dump." Sending a reporter statistics on the growth of your business (no matter how impressive) or on the success...
The Importance of a Marketing Plan
There aren’t many things in life that you would get into with out a plan. Marketing is no different. Your overall marketing plan should cover about a six month period, and should be made up of weekly and monthly marketing schedules. This is how...
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Neuromarketing: Smart Marketing Or Jedi Mind Control Trick?
Copyright © 2005 Priya Shah
http://www.priyashah.com
In the international bestseller "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell explains why our decisions to choose brands, select a mate, sue our doctor or make choices that decide Presidential elections, aren't as simple as they seem.
Why we often let unconscious biases affect our opinions about people who are taller or have a different skin colour. And why we find it even harder to explain them when asked.
I consider "Blink" essential reading for all marketers. I mean, which blue-blooded marketer wouldn't love to know how the workings of their customer’s brain will decide if their new packaging is going to work or fail?
Or why their new website is converting far fewer visitors than the old one? Of course we would.
But is it really possible to understand why people choose Budweiser over Coors? George W. over John Kerry? Coke over Pepsi?
No one knows for sure. And asking people why they took those decisions doesn't necessarily give the right answers.
Why? Because most of us really haven't a clue as to why we make those choices.
95% of consumer decision-making occurs subconsciously, according to research from Harvard University, cited in an article in Time. That's a hell of a lot of decisions we have little or no conscious control over.
http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1101040308-596161,00.html&e=9707
In Blink, Gladwell also shows how sometimes the sort of data that marketers rely on - such as market research and focus groups - can fail miserably because they don't always predict actual consumer behaviour, as Coca-Cola discovered during the New Coke fiasco.
But new research is beginning to shine a light on the mysterious workings of the neural processes behind those snap decisions.
Known as "neuromarketing," this controversial science could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes, according to an article in Wired
News.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67597,00.html
The Time article also cited research that seems to have solved that eternal mystery – why people prefer Coke over Pepsi. The answer lies in how people identify with brands. Although consumers preferred Pepsi’s taste they choose Coke because they identified with its brand better.
A branch of cognitive neuroscience, neuromarketing relies heavily on the ability to visualise how the brain sees choices and takes decisions, using brain scans and a process called functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. fMRI measures the level of oxygen in the blood and tells scientists which parts of the brain are most active.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,65775,00.html
According to the Wired article, this research even recently revealed the differences in the brains of Democrats and Republicans.
Consumer groups worry that the research could lead to companies using more effective "mind control" to brainwash consumers into decisions that the companies desire, and have issued calls to ban the technology.
http://www.commercialalert.org/index.php/category_id/1/subcategory_id/82/article_id/202
Imagine if the tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries (or even worse, politicians) should start exploiting such information to manipulate the weak minds of their zombified consumers.
But the experts insist we are light years away from such an Orwellian scenario, and believe that the research will help businesses better understand the needs of their consumer and show them how to make life better for their consumers.
Whatever the outcome, neuromarketing is certainly going to be a bone of contention between marketers hoping to get a better grip on their consumer’s decision making processes, and consumer activists seeking to help consumers retain control over their minds.
About the Author
Priya Shah is the CEO of eBrand360. She writes the Marketing Slave blog. This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked.
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