In recent years, neuroscientific research has expanded to the realm of studying the brain in relation to stimuli influencing the decision and how it affects behaviour and perception. In order to understand the neuropsychological mechanisms in context to sensory marketing and the effect of brand preferences, this section covers the modern views on neuroscience and how it has evolved towards new marketing perspectives.
The connection between marketing and neuroscience and its link to memory and emotions are examined. Furthermore, this section portrays various neuromarketing measures and how to interpret these measures. This section also focuses on branding and on which neuroscientific elements could help create at better understanding of the branding effect. In the final part of this section a critical approach to neuromarketing and the use of neuroscientific experiments is presented.
Modern cognitive neuroscience views
Neuroscience combined with marketing is a relatively modern approach to the marketing strategies that have been used throughout the 20th century. We know now how decision-making is a relation between emotions and cognition, and that the choices we make as consumers is not only based on rational choices but are highly affected by our emotions. (Geuens, Maggie ; De Pelsmacker, Patrick ; Faseur, Tine, 2011)
The last couple of decades of the 20th century we have seen a move toward cognitive neuroscience, as a discipline to understand the brain and how it represents mental events. This new understanding covers the emotional memory, vision and other higher mental processes. (Albright, Kandel and Posner, 2000)
The aim of neuroscience is to explain and understand the biological mechanisms that form the basis of mental activity and underlie how the neural circuit in our brain perceives the world around us. Neuroscience also explains how we recall perceptions from our memory and act upon the memory of that perception. It also seeks to determine how emotions influence our thinking and how mental diseases, such as depressions, mania schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, influence emotions, thoughts and actions. (Tjaco H.Walvis 2007).
There are generally two approaches, which neuroscientists use to handle the huge complexity of neuroscience. The first is the reductionist strategy, which focuses on analysing the elementary units of the nervous system. It is a bottom up approach that examines how neurons communicate and interconnect with one another. These studies are often concentrated around the study of simple animals. The second approach is a holistic approach that studies the mental functions in human beings.
These studies often take advantage of neuroimaging techniques, such as Functional Magentic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which is a specialized brain scan that measures the change in blood flow within the brain. Neural activity is indicated by the increase in the consumption of oxygen by nerve cells within the brain, the response to which is increased blood flow to that area. One other technology is Electroencephalography (EEG) by which records electrical activity of the brain over a short period of time through electrodes that are placed on the scalp. (Tjaco H.Walvis 2007)
Neuromarketing measures
What are the possibilities with neuromarketing and how can it be measured? Whereas a definitive behavioural model is difficult to make right now, the use of brain scanning has shown significant implications for marketing related activities (Tjaco H.Walvis 2007). It could be used for creating advertising effectiveness by gaining insights of the subconscious thoughts of the consumers. Looking at which area of the brain responds to the stimuli could help determine whether the advertisement has succeeded in creating the intended response.
Neuroscience and neuromarketing use clinical information of the functions and mechanisms in the brain to help explaining consumer behaviour. The overall goal for neuromarketers is to locate the consumers so-called “buy buttons” so that they come closer to solving the big mystery of the consumer’s mind and behaviour (Tjaco H.Walvis 2007).
A very big part of the human behaviour seems to be shaped by factors beyond conscious awareness. The brain makes judgements on the basis of automatic affective valuation. Branding seeks to influence consumer choices by maximising the probability that the brand is chosen and wins the competition of awareness between its competitors (Tjaco H.Walvis 2007).
Neuroscientific branding
Branding is, as an activity, aimed to increase the likelihood that a brand gets chosen by the customers. Almost all consumer brand choices are partially based on memory.
Neuroscience is assumed to be the “hard” science of studying consumer memory and put together with the “soft” field of branding an effective tool for research could be developed (Tjaco H.Walvis 2007).
In a study by Tjaco H. Walvis (2007) three laws of branding are synthesised to confirm the probability that a brand creates awareness in our brains as a positive candidate for choice. Even though these laws are no new discovery, H. Walvis argues that the laws should have a more important position in the branding we see to day.
Brands that have been built in accordance with these neuroscientific laws have a higher probability of being chosen, than brands in the same category that have not (Tjaco H.Walvis 2007).
The first law portrays the distinctive relevance: “The higher the distinctive relevance of branding efforts, the more likely the brand will be chosen” (Tjaco, H. Walvis, 2007, p 186). A brand can increases the probability that it gets chosen by having elements that are of personal significance to the customer. These elements could be the brand’s product-category, functional and symbolic attributes, use-occasion and self and user image. The brand’s core message must be built around the cues that are important to the specific customer segment.
The second law focuses on the repetition of a specific relevant core message for the brand. The law of coherence: “ The higher the coherence of branding efforts across time and space, the more likely the brand will be chosen” (Tjaco, H. Walvis, 2007, p 187). Repetition of the brand message is needed to create a strong connection between the brand and the customer’s choice criteria. This is required when increasing the cortical representation probability, which again is required for becoming top of mind at the moment of choice (brand recall). It is also important that
the message is specific. If the message is specific while being repeated, it is much more likely that brand is recalled.
The third law emphasises that a rich brand environment increases the likelihood that the brand is chosen: “ The more engaging the branding environment that is created the more likely the brand will be chosen.” (Tjaco, H. Walvis, 2007, p 188). A brand must create as many synaptic connections as possible to win the battle for awareness.
When a brand tempts its customers to be curious or to try, play, practise, socialise or learn, the customers will create a stronger attachment to the brand and therefore a stronger awareness.
These three laws are not to be seen as a definitive answer to how branding could be enhanced but as a neuroscientific guideline to where a brand practitioner should direct his focus. In this case, H. Walvis believes that recognising these principles (distinctive relevance, coherence and participation) would establish a stronger foundation for the field of branding.
Neuromarketing scepticism
Several critics are aware of the effects and the performance of neuroscientific experiments to understand consumer behaviour. In an article, James S. states that people behave differently when they know that they are obvious test objects. He believes that there are no rules about the relationship between brain activity and behaviour and that life stage variables have a far greater influence on behaviour than the brain arousal. He is highly convinced that it is unlikely that neuromarketing will solve all of our marketing problems. (James, S, 2004)
Other critics point out that neuromarketing does not have the capabilities to involve other aspects of study. This could e.g. be peer influence, which is likely to influence the consumer behaviour. Others believe that interpreting brain scans in response to traditional marketing efforts is highly exaggerated and overestimated by people who are not aware of the limitations. An advertising professor even claims that neuromarketing destroys the assumed differentiation between rational and emotional advertising. (James, S., 2004)
Consumer behaviour and neuroscience Value-‐based model of choice
Neuroscience combined with consumer psychology has gained a lot of focus in the last couple of decades. It has become a very popular subject to examine and has created many hits on Google and scientific publications. (Plassmann, Ramsøy, and Milosavljevic, 2012).
In order to understand how consumers make choices between various brand preferences we use the value-based model, which integrates the consumer psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
The value-based model of choice (Plassmann, Ramsøy, and Milosavljevic, 2012) explains how consumer preferences can be divided into four different parts over a specific timeline. It represents 1) Representation and attention, 2) Predicted value, 3) experienced value 4a) Remembered value and 4b) Learning.
This value-based decision model introduces how the brain is encoding signals of value and makes an evaluation for every option considered (Plassmann, Ramsøy, and Milosavljevic, 2012). Focusing on scent marketing, the five steps of the model are analysed here:
Figure 4.1: Value-based model of choice (Plassmann, Ramsøy, and Milosavljevic, 2012).
1) Representation and attention: Here the consumer is presented with a lot of information. How the consumer perceives this information has a huge influence on its behaviour.
Representation: Making a brand decision involves making a choice among a lot of various brand alternatives. The consumers then need to integrate the decisions on an internal state (thirst, hunger etc.) and an external state (social context, location etc.).
These decisions are the ones that drive the consumer attention. In this phase the visual system is highly involved because it allows for the rapid brand and product identification. Here, unconscious processes are present and help shape the process of the decision-making situation. For odour branding, this step is interesting since odour infusion is subliminal and often on the unconscious state, which may create a decision on the internal state or even on the external state.
Attention: Consumers select the information that gains a preferential status above other available information. Here, various visual criteria are valuated such as;
colours, size, shape, movements etc. Other attention stimuli could be faces, texts and novelty.(Plassmann, Ramsøy, and Milosavljevic, 2012) Emotions also have a high effect on attention. Research has shown that people more willingly pay attention to emotional than neutral stimuli. Emotional stimuli that create a lot of attention could be loud music, very pleasant or very unpleasant scent, scary faces or fear congruent related visual effects (Vuilleumier, 2005). Here odour branding has proven to maintain the costumers attention for time, which make browse among the product for longer time.
A study (Seo, Han-Seok et al., 2010) examined whether an odour could enhance the visual attention to its similar object selectively. The findings of the study demonstrated that olfactory priming on a visual object congruent with an odour could enhance the participants’ attention more compared to a non-odour condition. This study is a great example of how olfactory stimuli can play a determined role when creating attention among a lot of information bias.
2: Predicted value. The predicted value of each brand available for choice evolves the consumers’ evaluation of how much he or she will enjoy the brand (Plassmann, Ramsøy, and Milosavljevic, 2012). After seeing the product or brand the consumer has to calculate the value of the brand. E.g: A product might have been added a pleasant scent, and the consumer might see himself consuming this product while having a pleasant feeling.
3: Experienced value; this value is based on the pleasure the consumer receives when consuming the product. It is the actual value that is derived from the consumption of the brand. The combination of the predicted value and experience value is the most important part of the value-based model.(Plassmann, Ramsøy, and Milosavljevic, 2012) The experienced value consists of valance and intensity of the consumption experience.
Studies have shown that sensory pleasantness during consumption is crucial for the experienced value. The same studies also showed that branding changes the experienced value signals. E.g. it showed that the response to an odour is depended on the congruent of odour and stimuli. E.g if a cheddar cheese smelled of cheddar cheese the odour would be more positive accepted, than if human body smelled of cheddar cheese (Plassmann, Ramsøy, and Milosavljevic, 2012).
4a) Remembered value: A big part of the value is what is remembered from previous consumption experience. These experiences may influence the buying decision.
4b) Learning: When the predicted value is confronted with the experienced value a learning process occurs. The newly experienced value is encoded in the memory as a learned experience.
Buying behaviour
The environment in a store has a crucial effect on the customer’s buying behaviour and decision-making. Various studies have demonstrated that ambient stimuli with
background elements should appeal to all five senses and so appeal to - and attract customers. (Mattila, A.S. and Wirtz, J., 2001)
The sense of smell is a crucial sensory channel and research has shown that olfactory cues have a significant impact on consumer behaviour in a retail setting. (Bone, P.F.
and Ellen, P.S. 1999)
In a research (Bertil Hultén, 2011) the author tried to discover how visual and olfactory sensory cues impact consumer touch behaviour in the context of buying wine glasses at the point-of-purchase in an IKEA store. The research introduced design and lighting as visual cues and ambient scent for olfactory cues while testing the customer’s desire to touch the wine glasses.
The research emphasised three different aspect of using scent: the present of a scent, its pleasantness and how it fits with environmental and service elements. The result of the study revealed a significant difference in shopping behaviour after the introduction of visual and olfactory cues. The customers stayed longer in the store and spent more time touching the glasses. But most importantly, they bought the glasses after touching them, and the sales of the wine glasses increased (Bertil Hultén, 2011).
This research is a fine example of how sensory stimuli can affect the consumer behaviour and buying decisions, and how scent - ambient especially, is an important cue to influence customer performance in terms of intentions to visit and return to the store.
Sub conclusion
From above findings concerning neuromarketing, buying behaviour and neuroscientific branding methods, a new discussion is born, which is, if sensory branding via odour enhances representation and attention, increasing predicted and experienced value while easing the remembered value. Then, how does a brand smell like, is there an olfactory preference and how can brands teach consumers to recognize the brand via an odour?