How Brands Target Your Brain With Neuromarketing

Perception is everything when it comes to marketing, and decades of neuroscience and psychology research have given businesses greater insight into how we can make decisions and deftly shape our expectations.

Influencers are able to generate a significantly stronger emotional response and a higher level of retention than TV commercials, according to research aimed at extending the measurement of influencer marketing effectiveness beyond reach and engagement metrics.

 

To test whether influencers evoke intense emotions and create lasting memories, various tests were conducted with three teams of 60 participants, who performed a series of tasks.

Watch TV, watch YouTube videos, and browse their own Facebook feeds. Meanwhile, a series of ads were shown that formed part of the brand campaigns while measuring brand activities.

“When you look at the heatmaps of brain activity, it's clear that there is an obvious difference,” says Shazia Ginai, CEO of Neuro-Insight. “The response to TV ads with lots of blue [little activity] and green [average] is poor compared to Influencer ads with lots of red [high], pink [too high].”

 

If we compare key metrics across formats, study participants found that they responded much more strongly to Influencer ads than to TV ads: The former provided 277% more emotional intensity and 87% more retention (which correlates with future action and decision making).

Test takers stop watching when TV, Facebook, and YouTube ads are interrupted. However, if they've seen an Influencer post from the same campaign before, they're more ready to watch the TV commercial and expect to watch it without ignoring it.

 

"It's a really big shift and a great result for influencers," says Ginai, something that has implications for media planning and flight times.