Visual Tracking: What Is Neuromarketing?

Neuromarketing is a commercial marketing communication field that applies neuropsychology to marketing research. This type of marketing monitors consumers’ responses to marketing stimuli in several areas, including sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective. Sensorimotor response refers to the integration of senses and motor movements to gain insight and information. Cognition is the process of acquiring knowledge through thought, experience, and the senses. In psychology, affect (affective) refers to the underlying affective experience of feeling, emotion, or mood.

As we delve into each of these areas today to gain a better understanding of neuromarketing and how it can benefit your business, it’s important to think about the type of eye-tracking technology you wish to use. There are a variety of applications across numerous fields, which means that when you order bundles from Gazepoint, we can make eye tracking and neuromarketing research easier. Find what you’re looking for and order your visual tracking equipment today.

What Is Neuromarketing?

At its core, neuromarketing is the effort to create smarter marketing projects that will boost the effectiveness of your efforts without using a larger portion of your budget. Since the goal is to better understand how your customers’ brains work, and the effects your marketing may or may not have on them, it’s important to have the right tools and resources. Visual-tracking technology literally tracks the gaze of a consumer, gathers information on where, when, and how long they focus on an ad or webpage, and provides you with valuable insight into what appeals to your target audience.

Uses for Neuromarketing

Depending on the field in which you work, the feedback you gain from eye-tracking technology might dictate that it’s time for your company to rebrand your packaging, create new designs or graphics, or develop an entirely new ad campaign based on the responses of participants. There are a number of ways that neuromarketing can be used to the best advantage for your business, including:

Changing font styles and weights to communicate simplicity or trigger memory
Utilizing gaze of faces in ads and webpages to direct consumers’ attention
Gaining trust by demonstrating trust — eliminate lengthy screening processes
Strategically placing images of smiling people in your content

It’s important to remember that at the base of your marketing efforts, human emotions are generally the driving force behind a person’s decision. With that in mind, it’s important to look at the sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective responses to marketing.

Sensorimotor

The sensorimotor stage of human development is the first stage that takes place from birth to around two years of age. During this developmental stage, infants develop an understanding of the world around them by using their senses and motor movements. Sensorimotor applies to marketing in terms of the approaches you can take to help a consumer see, touch, and experience your product. The ability to test a product and utilize other appropriate senses to determine the product’s worth in relation to their needs will play a big role in how your consumers respond.

Cognitive

Cognitive marketing focuses on delivering real-time personalization and intelligent sequencing for your systems to learn and create relevant offers to your consumers based on their interests and behavior. “In-your-face” marketing is no longer effective, which means that it’s important for your business to understand the relationship between what a consumer wants and their response patterns. The process behind discovering this link involves cognition. Your consumers’ cognitive approach to your marketing plan helps you make better decisions, identify opportunities, and create highly personal experiences for your consumers. Eye-tracking technology is an invaluable tool in this part of the process.

Affective

An affective response to stimuli refers to the general psychological state of a person, which may include their emotions and mood in a particular situation. An affective sensation is accompanied by a strong compulsion to act on the sensation. For example, the decision to continue eating or to finish eating is a behavioral choice that is impacted by sensory processing in the brain. Given this example, it becomes clear that affective stimuli can create a positive, negative, or neutral response in an individual. Market research has shown that you can influence your target audience to avoid a competitor’s product due to flaws it may have when compared with yours. In this instance, the affective stimuli created a negative response that, ironically, created a positive outcome for your brand.

Eye-Tracking Technology

As you can see, neuromarketing has become an invaluable tool in the realm of market research. Not only can it tell you what consumers react to, but it can also provide insight into the most effective color to use in packaging, the types of logos that are most influential, and even the brand messaging that will create the greatest impression on your target audience. At Gazepoint, we offer a variety of eye-tracking bundles that have applications across a number of fields, including market research, education, medical, and corporate research and development. As a marketer, you want to eliminate the guesswork and create information-driven decisions. Get the help you need with visual-tracking technology from Gazepoint.