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May 19, 2021

Neuromarketing - the secrets behind consumer behavior.

Are consumer’s purchase decisions based on facts, reason and logic? Or emotions, feelings & intuition? When it comes to tapping the credit card, who is in charge? The conscious mind or the subconscious mind?

The study of neuromarketing is exactly what it sounds like: neuro - for neuroscience - meets marketing. Consumer behavior may not be a topic that you have ever considered from a scientific perspective, but for any business owner, it helps to know a few things about it.

In recent decades, neuroscientists have proven the following 2 very interesting points about decision making:

1. 95% of our decisions are made by the subconscious mind
2. Decision making cannot be done without involving the emotion center of the brain


With these two truths considered, it’s fair to say that marketing, purely targeted at the customer’s logical side of the brain... is not the kind of campaign that you want to be putting money into.

Being mindful of the data on neuromarketing is a key component to marketing success. In fact, failure to do so is one of the main reasons why 9 out of 10 new products fail and why over 100 billion dollars is wasted on fruitless marketing campaigns each year.

Here are just a few examples of things that matter to the subconscious mind...

Color - It’s a known fact from scientific research, that colors influence our emotions. In fact Google, who are aware of this, investigated whether there was a specific shade of blue that would encourage higher click through rates on links. Google tried 50 different shades of blue before choosing the one they use now. By changing links on Google searches to this specific shade of blue, the company increased their click through rate and subsequently, their annual revenue by a staggering 200 million dollars.

User experience
- Our subconscious brains can detect incremental improvements in user experience that our conscious mind is completely unaware of. Amazon, for example, increased their sales by 1.7 billion dollars just by increasing the speed of their website by one tenth of a second!

Sound - according to a study carried out in a wine retail shop, consumers’ buying decisions can be influenced by the type of music played in the store. In the study, when the store played Italian music, Italian bottles outsold French bottles at a ratio of 3:1. This ratio was reversed when French music was played in the store.

Social influence - a survival mechanism in our brains is programmed to opt to follow decisions made by a crowd, because it is judged to be the ‘safer’ option. In one study, volunteers were asked to rate the quality and price of 2 different jars of cookies based on taste. One jar contained 10 cookies and the other only 2, because, as explained to the volunteers, the latter cookies were in high demand and short supply. The volunteers rated the quality and price of the 2nd jar of cookies to be higher than the first jar. The information about supply and demand presumably distorted their perception on taste & quality because both jars contained exactly the same brand of cookies.


At Spruce Tree Media, we are fascinated by the ever advancing field of marketing. Our clients love working with us because we make sure that their websites and other digital marketing tools are optimized for the user experience. If you need assistance with marketing, we would be happy to help, contact us today at hello@sprucetreemedia.ca

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