Better brands

With the use of technology and the emerging trend of neuromarketing, better brands with enduring impressions are the focus of the marketing sectors. The use of neuromarketing improves a variety of marketing areas including product innovation and development, advertising, retail and online purchasing, entertainment, and branding. Before developing branding strategies and new advertising campaigns, it can be hypothesized that the consumer’s brain conducts research to determine their reactions to particular goods and advertisements.

Over the years, brand has consistently been regarded as the primary picture. This is considered to change with the scientific study showing that people process known brands with the positive good emotions while the brands which are unfamiliar or being seen for the first time always received with the part of the brain associated with negative emotions since it takes much of brains capacity to process. It is this reaction that leads to the development of neuromarketing after the study of brains response to branding.

To help in the understanding of the development of the years is Naomi Klein who explains the establishment of branding and how it has changed with time to the current world where brain imaging is more preferred than the logo in the 90s and the years before. Gone were the days when companies could focus on the product production before being bypassed by the tendency of the company to just brand the products and sell without actually producing the products. It is postulated that successful corporations mainly produce brands and not the products. Advertising is considered just as one part of the entire branding grand plans same as logo licensing and sponsorships. With marketing seriously established in the nineteenth century, which concentrated on advertising other than branding.

Product production was at a time valued as the heart of economies that were industrialized (Klein 26). In the eighties, all traditional manufacturers based in America were challenged by a new kind of corporation by the Mikes, the Microsoft’s, Intel’s, and Tommy Hilfiger’s. The companies only concentrated on branding rather than marketing owing to the labor reform laws and the victory trade liberalization. These companies produced completely nothing but the images of the brands and it proved profitable unlike in the product production where the company with the most employees produced the most powerful products.

However, the branding seemed to face extinction after sometimes as elaborated in the advertising law of gravity which states that one soon crash down in an event that he is not rocketing upwards (Klein 30). This was due to the increased rates of advertising and much better formulae of reaching the customers since it was believed that it is only through proper advertising that the brands were going to sell. The competition was set in the market forcing the producers and the manufacturers to ensure their speeches pitch so loud that can be heard than the others’ speeches and they had to spend more to make this happen (Klein 31).

As Wall Street declared some brands dead and extinct, some companies were watching from the sidelines adopted for market value every time. Apple, Nike, Calvin Klein, star bucks among others are companies that believed that the ostensible products were mere filler for the real production with the idea of branding fabricated in everything associated with their companies (Klein 36). This was viewed as the bounce back of the branding. The brand wagon has however been leaped by global corporations with religious fervor associated to worshiping of the media images (Klein 45).

Branding remained the better approach of the business field with different developments and innovations being made on daily basis with the recent on being neuromarketing aimed to create more marketing for the brand since both are seriously concerned with the establishment of ideas and how the ideas are linked to the human mind.

In paragraph one Martin Lindstrom articulates that the human brain reacts to stimuli at a higher rate than eve our conscious as interpreted by the consumer’s buying decisions which are always made in a very short duration of time and as a matter of facts, between seconds in the subconscious part of the brain. It is this ideology that science and marketing disciplines would interpret what the consumers want, hate, afraid of or even bored of. The brains reaction indicates the brand’s stimuli which the marketers are much concerned about to help them in designing advertisements, products, and communications to enhance market needs enabling them to connect with more potential buyers.

Traditional market research is flawed due to the fact that the potential buyers and the consumers are not aware neither are they able to articulate nor will they lie in a group about what motivated their purchase on some goods and brands. With neuroscience, there is the omission of ambiguity and subjectivity by focusing on the brain behavior that is observable which is analyzed through emotional engagement, attention level of the respondent and the memory storage capability. Neuromarketers apply brain-wave technologies with the aim to acquire more knowledge about the reaction for consumers on advertisements and products.

Neuromarketing is not that new to some fields since it has been implemented by other players in the market such as the Microsoft Inc that is currently sourcing for data to evaluate the interaction of the users with the computers, Google who partnered with Media Vest and determined that YouTube overlays were more effective with the subjects. The weather Channel has employed the response of the skin and the eye tracking techniques to assist in the measurement human reactions. Others who have hired neouromarketers include Motorola, Facebook. Disney and Unilever.

Neuromarketing faces criticism with the idea being referred to as ‘BrainScam’ by other media meant to be exploited by the marketing consultants and the scientists. Without clear and detailed documentation of the research protocols and the complicated methods, it is not easy to support the value of neuromarketing to the critics. It can be termed to be in its flagship face still since its reception is yet to be realized in the whole world with the failure of some industries such as the film industry to publish their research and content influencing the marketing decisions of the neuroscience (The Buyologist 6).

A common problem facing neuroscience is the pseudoscience which limits its application beyond the clinics and the laboratories. It is however subjected to errors such as the neuroredundancy, neurocentrism and reverse inference which is foreseen to award the imaging of brain with a bad name and may lead to lowering of profits especially when it involves profits (The Buyologist 7)

The refined brain-wave technology (EEG) and the brain imaging advent technology have to lead to the revival of the consumers’ mind in a biological approach. The earliest studies conducted by Zaltman, the father of Neuroscience, led to the establishment of Neuroscience in Oxford which was considered as the first comply to apply the brain imaging to the to the psychology of the consumers (The Buyologist 18). It later led to the establishment of Bright House Neurostrategies Group in Atlanta which attracted most of the corporate giants like the Home Depo, Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines.

Neural information predictive value is foreseen to take its marketplace in the future. Though is currently happening (The Buyologist 20), the information date is not being shared among neuromarketers. Nonetheless, neuromarketing burden falls proves itself (The Buyologist 7) and with the complexity of the science technology that is underlying the methods, their validity access is thus difficult. It has however been reviewed that the neuromarketers are seen to exaggerate of what could be delivered by their tests though the research protocols, documentation methods, and the clarity are essential given the complexities involved(The Buyologist 21).

References

Naomi, K. No Logo; The Guardian First Book Award 2000, Canada.

The Buyologists