Neuromarketing and design walk together. On the one hand, in fact, we have the fusion between marketing and neuroscience; on the other, thefunctional aesthetics hand in hand with culture and times. Knowing neuromarketing and design provides tools to understand why certain brands, their content, theirs the packaging and theirs dealer they have certain effects and achieve certain results.
This knowledge can be useful for us to become aware users. Or, if we work in the sectors involved, they help us develop engaging solutions and improve the overall quality of our work from both a technical and ethical point of view.
Let's start?
Content index
Let's define neuromarketing
Neuromarketing is the cross between marketing and neuroscience.
Lo purpose of this relatively new and experimental approach lies in understand how people react to advertisements, products and brands a unconscious level and why. Before seeing what the techniques are, let's specify that neuromarketing is not an exact science.
Indeed different emotional and cognitive reactions can be measured, but their motivations may be subject to different interpretations. The environment in which the experiment is carried out can significantly change the answers, different from when you are at home or on the street, alone or in company. Furthermore, since it is also marketing, one can never know with granitic certainty what works and what doesn't.
Having said this, however, we can get close to interesting and relatively exact interpretations.
Techniques and approaches
In trying to achieve the purpose of neuromarketing we connect to multidisciplinary approaches and use techniques through neuroscientific tools. For the former, let's think about psychology of color, already widely studied by designers. Or atsemantic analysis, which deals with understanding how people connect words and meanings.
With regard to specifications one of the most common and used is theeye tracking, or eye tracking. As the name indicates, this technique tracks what the eyes look at in an image and how they orient between cues and symbols.
Then there are techniques based on measuring the activity of different areas of the brain. These are:
- la functional magnetic resonance imaging,
- la near infrared spectroscopy,
- electroencephalography,
- , positron emission tomography
The Biometry, which includes a number of different physiological measurements. Yes they can analyze facial expressions. And finally, through le skin conductance measurements, the variations in electrical resistance of the skin following sweating are traced, which can be a symptom of stress or emotional arousal.
Experimenting with these techniques and cross-referencing your data allows us to give interpretations that direct the creation of advertising campaigns, packaging solutions and creation of optimized websites.
Neuromarketing insights direct design choices
That's where the meeting point is. Neuromarketing is not an exact science, but it is true that we can have some certainties about very specific elements.
For example, if we discover that a certain Patterns of symbols and colors induce a sequence of recurring eye movements, we will have a precise solution to make the graph realize the mockup of a site.
Again, if we see a recurrence of facial expressions in relation to a post social we will know with some certainty what its emotional value is common to a certain segment of the population. And from here we will know better how to orient ourselves creating the design in relation to the message.
On the contrary, if we subject to biometric and brain activity tests a different range of people in front of one Television advertising, we cannot know with certainty which of the many elements the reactions are connected to. It could be the music, the presence of certain people, how the editing is done, the photography, the past relationship with that brand (if you can guess what it is) and so on... or maybe a precise combination of these elements.
Or perhaps, the very fact of not being in a natural environment favors certain reactions rather than others.
This is why on the one hand we are able to have certainties that help us in our design choices. On the other, questions, suppositions and intuitions.
The challenges of design-related neuromarketing
So the various neuromarketing techniques and data provide us solutions and questions. The challenges remain essentially the same as the marketing and the choices of design. In light of data that over time becomes canonical, also thanks to public responses, we proceed step by step by continuing experience and see how people react. Until the canons are ready to be questioned.
Since we are dealing with people, let's remember how the resonance of a certain narrative (which can also be composed only of images) it depends on other factors that are more difficult to grasp than the simple quality of the message, such as timing.
In other words, talking for example about regrowth before or after an economic, pandemic or environmental crisis has a completely different meaning, as do the related images, both cognitively and emotionally.
This contextualization work is done a lot in design. One of the most demanding, but at the same time potentially fruitful, challenges is that of link cognitive and emotional responses, analyzed through the techniques of neuromarketing, to the narration of our exact historical moment.
This is perhaps where neuromarketing and design are most happily linked.
