Customers make purchasing decisions up to seven seconds before they’re consciously aware of it—yet traditional marketing research relies entirely on what people say they think. This disconnect helps explain why 95% of new products fail despite extensive focus group testing, and why consumers often buy products they claim they’d never purchase. For Shopify merchants, neuromarketing research reveals customers spend 2.6 seconds scanning a product page before deciding to stay or leave. This makes image selection, color psychology, and layout optimization crucial for conversion.
Neuromarketing analyzes subconscious responses to branding and advertising by measuring brain activity, eye movements, and biometrics instead of relying on self-reported opinions. Companies increasingly use these insights to design more effective marketing, as neuromarketing can reveal decision-making triggers that traditional methods miss, although skepticism persists about its predictive power and ethics.
Here are the fundamentals on neuromarketing, information about its measurement, and a look at both the benefits and critiques shaping its role in the industry.
What is neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing is a combination of neuroscience and marketing. Neuromarketers measure physiological and neural signals to better understand consumer decision making, motivations, and preferences—much like an interviewer evaluates responses from participants in a focus group. Like a traditional marketer, a neuromarketer then uses that information to shape recommendations for things like marketing campaigns, product development, and pricing strategies.
Neuromarketing offers a few advantages over traditional consumer behavior research methods like surveys, field trials, and focus groups. For one, brains don’t lie. Proponents like that it takes some of the guesswork out of marketing efforts. Rather than parsing out whether a person is telling the truth about your product in a focus group or just being polite, you can look directly at what parts of their brain light up as they experience your products.
Theoretically, marketers can use consumer neuroscience to create products that elicit a positive emotional response, which ultimately means more sales and revenue. With that said, the jury is still out on whether or not neuroscience is advanced enough to achieve this goal, much less tell you the ultimate truth about what a person is thinking.
How does neuromarketing work?
Neuromarketing starts with evaluating neural activity (via brain imaging) or physiological tracking (via eye and facial movement measurements) in response to marketing stimuli. As an example, that stimulus might range from customers drinking two different soft drinks or hearing two different songs, so brands can A/B test their reactions.
Access to the specialized equipment and expertise necessary to execute these kinds of trials is generally prohibitively expensive. In the field of neuromarketing, studies that measure physiological responses have become more popular than neural ones, likely because the technology costs less and can offer similar results.
Let’s review the five most common types of neuromarketing techniques and technologies:
1. fMRI
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) uses strong magnetic fields to detect blood flow across the brain over time. As far as neuromarketing research tools go, fMRI machines are the most expensive and the most invasive.
Still, they offer deep insight into levels of interest, emotional response, and recall. This can be useful in setting prices and improving branding. For instance, one study used neuromarketing science and fMRI to measure consumer preferences between soft drinks.
2. EEG
Electroencephalograms (EEGs) are the other neurally focused option. These machines read brain-cell activity via sensors placed on the scalp. This can help decipher a subject’s level of interest and recall, but might not be as accurate as an fMRI at pinpointing exactly where the activity is occurring in deep, subcortical regions of the brain. When Frito-Lay wanted to market its baked potato chips, it used a combination of EEG and biometrics analysis to determine which packaging design was the most pleasant and appealing.
3. Eye tracking
Eye movement can tell researchers a lot about what interests a subject, what they understand, and how impacted they are by a particular experience. Measuring where subjects look, how much they blink, and patterns of searching behavior—as well as pupil dilation—can help indicate how a consumer is responding to a marketing stimulus. Coca-Cola uses eye tracking to monitor visual reception of packaging, product placement, and branded displays to help inform ad placement in retail environments and digital settings.
4. Biometrics
Biometric machines use skin conductance, heart rate, and respiration to draw conclusions about the subject’s level of engagement and whether a response is positive or negative. In 2009, Hyundai used EEG and biometric data to test a prototype of a new vehicle, concluding that flowing lines and smooth curves were more pleasurable. Participants looked at different parts of the vehicle while brain activity was recorded (in combination with eye tracking and skin conductance).
5. Facial coding
If you’ve ever interpreted someone’s facial expression, you’ve done your own kind of facial coding research. Experts are able to identify microexpressions and interpret those findings into predictions about emotional responses. In this way, companies like Disney can predict how viewers will react to a movie after analyzing their facial expressions for just 10 minutes.
Critiques of neuromarketing
Using neuromarketing to better understand what consumers like is one thing, but ethical issues around neuromarketing come up when companies use it to manipulate consumer behavior. Critics of neuromarketing also assert it doesn’t actually allow marketers to gain insight, and brands might be able to arrive at the same findings with much simpler consumer research tools like focus groups.
For that matter, there’s plenty of dispute about how accurate any of these tools might be in the first place. All of these techniques rely on the assumption brain activity correlates directly with specific thoughts and feelings, but this doesn’t allow for how much variability there is when it comes to what the brain activity might be indicating.
Neuromarketing FAQ
What is a neuromarketing technique?
Neuromarketing tracks physiological and neural signals to predict how customers will react to various marketing stimuli. For example, fMRIs and EEGs map brain activity in response to these types of stimuli. These methods are the most expensive due to the specialized equipment and technicians they require, but they’re also the most accurate at measuring recall, level of engagement, and emotional response.
What kind of brands use neuromarketing?
Due to the high cost of neuromarketing, historically it’s mostly been used by major companies like NBC, TimeWarner, Google, Facebook, and Frito-Lay—all of which can afford to form their own neuromarketing divisions.
How is neuromarketing used in advertising?
Neuromarketing has similar goals to traditional marketing methods: learning more about consumer reception in order to craft better-selling products and effective marketing campaigns for customers. In that sense, it’s useful in a variety of ways, from choosing a new brand logo and testing customer reactions to new products to redesigning packaging or creating a pleasing store experience.
