How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our purchase decisions? An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle? Great marketers wrestle with these questions in order to make us notice and, ultimately, buy whatever they are selling. What is that power of persuasion? Recent research suggests that many of our buying decisions are influenced by unconscious thought processes. 

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There is no doubt that there’s science in persuasion, and a lot of the science is quite surprising.

It would be nice to think we rationally consider all the available information to make a purchase decision. But, in the increasingly overloaded lives we lead, and the avalanche of incoming stimuli the brain processes throughout the day, we rely on shortcuts to guide our decision-making and often they occur so deep within our subconscious minds that we're aren’t even aware of them.

 

Thanks to advances in technology, marketing has evolved into neuromarketing. Neuromarketing is taking the world by storm and has been utilized by almost every major company and university in some way or form. The term neuromarketing was coined in 2002. In an article published by the American Marketing Association in 2019, neuromarketing is a brand new field of marketing research that employs the principles of neuroscience and the medical technology of brain imaging to learn about how consumers unconsciously respond to advertisements and branding elements. One of the leading thinkers in this area, Roger Dooley - the author of Neuromarketing and Brainfluence - maintains that neuromarketing is based on the premise that 95% of all our thoughts, emotions and learning occur before we are ever aware of it. In other words, traditional marketing strategies only talk to 5% of their customers’ brains!

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The following Neuro Nuggets may enlighten you about some of the tricks of the trade!