Better market research through neuroscience. And the one number that will never change.
Try as we might, marketing is still more a guessing game than anybody wants. Eighty percent of new products and services fail within their first six months. Most Hollywood films and TV pilots fail. And that includes those that were vetted by focus groups. “The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and negative,” writes Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman. That’s why, although focus groups are good at identifying attitudes, they suck at predicting behavior.
The reasons for this are many, and include group dynamics, incentives, and the fact that focus groups do not mimic the real world. One of the biggest reasons, though, Zaltman adds, is that most of our decision-making happens on an unconscious level—far from the conscious explanations the focus-group leaders gather.
But here comes neuromarketing, or the application of neuroscience’s observations and discoveries of how the mind works and what that means to marketing (and branding). With neuroscience, we’re taking baby steps toward understanding how what happens on the unconscious level influences what we decide to buy. Neuromarketing is not perfect and it is expensive, but larger companies are moving toward it. And why not? Mammoth failures like New Coke and the DeLorean car—which relied on traditional marketing— show that even the big boys fall on their faces.
With the phenomenal growth in the past decade of neuroscience and its analytic tools, there is finally a chance for agencies to provide less subjective opinions, and more proof that what they offer is worth the expense.
And the growth of neuromarketing is happening fast. It was only seven years ago that a neuroscience firm—Brighthouse Institute—could claim having a Fortune 500 consumer-products company as a client. Now companies are measuring more than brains. Coke is starting to grade its marketing agencies based on four criteria, including sales and market-share gains. Procter & Gamble is testing a similar approach. Many observers expect this Darwinian model to be the wave of the future, at least for the big boys.
In my opinion, though, even this better-marketing-through-science approach will never improve the overall failure rate for products and services. That is because success, by definition, will always be the minority. It is no coincidence that we talk about an 80 percent failure rate for products and services; we use the same percentage when talking about business failures. (Eighty percent of new businesses fail within the first year.) We may argue over the reasons and offer improvements, but the number will always stay the same.
But this doesn’t mean you throw in the towel. After all, 20 percent of you already embrace change and improvements in your marketing, and neuroscience will increasingly be one of those things. But what about the not-so-big boys who can’t afford neuroscience methods and other neuroscience tools? What does all this mean for us?
Read
There is a host of excellent books on the burgeoning field of neuromarketing. See this blog’s bookshelf for titles and authors, and visit other blogs on the subject, especially Roger Dooley’s Neuromarketing.
Collaborate Wisely
Collaborate with a marketing agency that is familiar with neuromarketing and what it can contribute to understanding your customers better.
Work
Neuroscience will offer incredible insights, but no panacea and no short cuts. The information you have available to you is available to all. It is just a matter of who works hardest to use it best.
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Why The Usual Suspects—Focus Groups—Suck
Better market research through neuroscience. And the one number that will never change.
The reasons for this are many, and include group dynamics, incentives, and the fact that focus groups do not mimic the real world. One of the biggest reasons, though, Zaltman adds, is that most of our decision-making happens on an unconscious level—far from the conscious explanations the focus-group leaders gather.
But here comes neuromarketing, or the application of neuroscience’s observations and discoveries of how the mind works and what that means to marketing (and branding). With neuroscience, we’re taking baby steps toward understanding how what happens on the unconscious level influences what we decide to buy. Neuromarketing is not perfect and it is expensive, but larger companies are moving toward it. And why not? Mammoth failures like New Coke and the DeLorean car—which relied on traditional marketing— show that even the big boys fall on their faces.
With the phenomenal growth in the past decade of neuroscience and its analytic tools, there is finally a chance for agencies to provide less subjective opinions, and more proof that what they offer is worth the expense.
And the growth of neuromarketing is happening fast. It was only seven years ago that a neuroscience firm—Brighthouse Institute—could claim having a Fortune 500 consumer-products company as a client. Now companies are measuring more than brains. Coke is starting to grade its marketing agencies based on four criteria, including sales and market-share gains. Procter & Gamble is testing a similar approach. Many observers expect this Darwinian model to be the wave of the future, at least for the big boys.
In my opinion, though, even this better-marketing-through-science approach will never improve the overall failure rate for products and services. That is because success, by definition, will always be the minority. It is no coincidence that we talk about an 80 percent failure rate for products and services; we use the same percentage when talking about business failures. (Eighty percent of new businesses fail within the first year.) We may argue over the reasons and offer improvements, but the number will always stay the same.
But this doesn’t mean you throw in the towel. After all, 20 percent of you already embrace change and improvements in your marketing, and neuroscience will increasingly be one of those things. But what about the not-so-big boys who can’t afford neuroscience methods and other neuroscience tools? What does all this mean for us?
Read
There is a host of excellent books on the burgeoning field of neuromarketing. See this blog’s bookshelf for titles and authors, and visit other blogs on the subject, especially Roger Dooley’s Neuromarketing.
Collaborate Wisely
Collaborate with a marketing agency that is familiar with neuromarketing and what it can contribute to understanding your customers better.
Work
Neuroscience will offer incredible insights, but no panacea and no short cuts. The information you have available to you is available to all. It is just a matter of who works hardest to use it best.