what are the main advantages and disadvantages of neuromarketing?

Neuromarketing is a marketing discipline that more and more companies are using in their strategy and advertising campaigns. In this post we are going to talk about all the advantages that neuromarketing can bring to your strategist but also about the disadvantages, which will help you to make a decision about whether or not to use it in your strategy.

what is neuromarketing?

Before we start with the advantages and disadvantages, let's introduce the term Neuromarketing so that it is clear what we are talking about.

Neuromarketing is a discipline that studies and predicts the behaviour of users and their reactions to different actions carried out by marketing. This discipline applies neuroscience technologies to marketing. What this neuroscience does is to study the functioning of the nervous system and its relationship with higher functions such as emotions or attention.

The information that this neuromarketing provides us with is used to get to know our potential customers, as well as to predict their reactions to different advertising stimuli and to make decisions about them.

Most of our purchasing decisions, specifically between 80% and 95%, are unconscious, that is to say, this neuromarketing will not help us to know why we make these decisions in the face of certain actions.

Types of neuromarketing

Within neuromarketing we can appreciate three different types: visual, auditory and kinesic. They are not mutually exclusive, there can be a neuromarketing strategy that contains all three types.

1. Visual: This includes each and every one of the images that the consumer receives and that create an impact on him, as they are visual, the client will remember them much more, it will be easier for them.
2. Auditory: With this type of neuromarketing we refer to the sounds that help us to remember a specific advertising action, these create certain atmospheres through music or sounds. It is very common in advertising to use the ASMR technique, which is based on using sounds that produce pleasant sensations, such as the crunching of chocolate.
3. Kinesics: Smell, taste and touch also have an impact on the consumer, in supermarkets and physical shops we have to play with this to attract the consumer, such as perfuming a clothing shop or making a product with an excellent touch.

Advantages of neuromarketing

Once we are clear about what neuromarketing is and what types it is divided into, we are going to list the various advantages that it can bring to our marketing strategy.

1. Emotional engagement
   

   Within neuromarketing we are not only implementing different actions to provoke reactions in our customers, but we are also measuring the effects they have on them in order to make decisions.

   Neuromarketing provides many more details to optimise your strategy, so you can know how to design the best images to attract the attention of your audience, how to introduce key information in the best way within an advertisement to attract the maximum attention possible or how to boost the emotional commitment of these towards products or services through certain actions.

2. Provoke emotional reactions
   Every day people go through many states of mind and feel different emotions, all of which influence our behaviour, and in conclusion, what we decide to buy or not. Neuromarketing methods can help to discover what are the triggers of all these emotional responses that our consumers have.
   
   
3. Optimising techniques
   The aim of any company is to achieve a relationship between the mind and the consumer's own behaviour, what neuromarketing is doing is to evaluate what the consumer thinks and feels when they receive a stimulus, whether visual, auditory or kinesic. It is much more important in a strategy to know what a consumer feels, when they feel it and why they feel it than what they say. Their reaction tells us much more than their words.
   
   
4. Deeper data
   With this strategy, we will not obtain the data that is usually obtained with traditional marketing, which are quantifiable, but we will obtain more valuable data, such as the emotions that arise in a consumer after living a specific experience. In this way we will be understanding the consumer and the perception that they are having of our offer.
   
   
5. Evaluation of fleeting reactions
   There are a number of reactions that consumers themselves do not remember, they change over time, and a fleeting reaction may influence consumer behaviour without them even realising it after a while.
   
   
6. Decreases business risk
   This is because what neuromarketing achieves is that products are created specifically for the needs of the consumer, which is why it is much more precise.

Disadvantages of neuromarketing

We are already very clear about the advantages that this strategy brings us, but not everything is rosy, neuromarketing, like everything else, also has disadvantages, we will tell you about them below.

1. It is not general
   When studying the feelings of consumers we are not studying a general feeling that all our customers have when they receive a stimulus, each one will have a different perception and different emotions to the others.
   
   
2. Ethical concerns
   Some people believe that neuromarketing is about getting into the brain of customers, when in fact neuromarketing is a psychological analysis based on customer behaviour.
   
   
3. Equipment is expensive
   For small companies, neuromarketing equipment is really expensive, especially considering that the data obtained is not as good as it was years ago.
   
   
4. Privacy law
   Data protection law will give us big headaches, people want to have control over the data they share, with neuromarketing we don't even know very well what data we are providing to the company.
   
   
5. Intrusive
   Consumers can be intruded upon by this type of strategy, if your consumer feels manipulated into feeling an emotion for your brand, you may have a problem.

Neuromarketing has great advantages to contribute to your strategy, but it is also true that it has a series of disadvantages that can be enough to make you not want to use it in your campaigns. Here you have this post in which you can weigh up which weighs more, the advantages or the disadvantages. And you, do you dare with neuromarketing?