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To accomplish this, we employ what’s called a social mindset. A social mindset focuses more on people than processes and gives everyone an active role in building the company’s vision. 

Let’s learn more about what a social mindset is, how you can encourage one in your workplace, and the many benefits that come from this business structure. 

What is a Social Mindset?

In today’s interconnected world, it’s no wonder that we turn to others for their thoughts and opinions and as a result, view ourselves through other people’s eyes. In psychology, social mindset means putting an emphasis on emotional aptitude and individual skills and knowledge versus focusing just on processes or results. 

With a social mindset, employees feel heard and understood because the company is structured around their opinions. It’s a mindset that’s inclusive of everyone, no matter their background or hierarchy in the company. For example, at fullfunnelservices we love generating new ideas with our teammates, whether they are interns or our executives. No matter how “experienced” you might be, a social mindset makes you feel engaged and important. 

4 Benefits of Implementing a Social Mindset

By cultivating a company culture that focuses on a social mindset, you will enjoy higher employee retention, more creative ideas, and more impactful decisions. 

Here are some of the benefits of having a social mindset in business:

Faster Decision-Making Velocity

We’ve talked before about how to improve your decision-making velocity, or how fast and accurate you can make important decisions. Improving your company’s social mindset can help employees make decisions because they will feel more secure in their choices. Rather than rely on the traditional decision-making process (an employee needs to make a decision that they then bring to their manager or executive for permission), a social mindset empowers all employees to own their decisions. The team trusts that their coworkers have the company’s best interest in mind. 

A Clear Company Culture

If you’re working on implementing a social mindset for your business, a good exercise to start with is to have the team develop the company culture. At fullfunnelservices, we review our mission and company culture and values every quarter and ask the team if they think there should be any changes. 

Enhanced Creativity

Our business is all about creative thinking, and what better way to encourage new forms of creativity than to pursue a social mindset and listen to everyone’s opinions? Too often in business, you have to have a certain title or years under your belt to make a difference. With a social mindset, the focus is on creativity and ideas, not just tenure. 

High-Performing Team Members

It’s simple: when employees feel valued and understood, they’re more passionate about the work they’re doing. Having a social mindset for your business is one of the best ways to encourage employee retention and even employee referrals. A healthy workplace encourages everyone to speak up and be heard. 

How to Have a Social Mindset at Your Company

Now that you understand what a social mindset in business is and some of the main benefits, let’s look at what you can do to have a social mindset at your own company. We’ve been working on this structure at fullfunnelservices for years (and are still working on it every day!). 

Here are some ways to start creating a company culture that values a social mindset:

• Show how each employee or department contributes
• Provide employees autonomy to execute their own ideas
• Offer opportunities for frequent feedback and support (both from the top-down and from the bottom up)
• Simplify communication channels
• Facilitate engaging conversations both in and out of the office
• Clarify the company’s purpose (and no, not just growing the business)
• Show employees how they contribute and reward those contributions
• Invest in the relationships at your company
• Encourage on-demand learning
• Build trust between executives and employees
• Respect all team members, regardless of experience
• Listen more than you talk

When it comes to having a social mindset, this quote summarizes it nicely: “We learn best when we learn together.” Have you implemented a social mindset at your workplace?

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Neuroscience

Neuroscience is a very complex and advanced study of the nervous system. It denotes the study of brain disorders and their effect on cognition, emotion, and behavior. It has many branches. But, for the study of consumer behavior, we deal with “cognitive neuroscience” and   “affective neuroscience.”  Cognitive neuroscience describes the scientific research of biological aspects of cognition like attention, thinking, memory, and problem-solving and affective neuroscience is the study of the brain based on emotions and feelings. 

Cognitive neuroscience and affective neuroscience together imply “consumer neuroscience.” When neuroscience meets marketing for consumers, we call it neuromarketing. Neuromarketing connects neuroscience and marketing strategy to unlock the psychology behind consumer behavior.

Neuromarketing aims to measure marketing and advertising’s impact on customers and capture customers’ responses to marketing materials. Neuroscience techniques like eye-tracking, facial coding, skin conductance,  Magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI), and electroencephalography (EEG) are used to measure people’s indirect responses to marketing strategies and brands.

Why do we Need Neuroscience?

Neuroscience offers new possibilities for market research and leads to real-world marketing success. With neuroscience, we can predict real-time customer needs. These needs cannot be predicted using methodologies like surveys, questionnaires, interviews, group discussions, or focus groups.

The main reasons why neuroscience is successful are:

• There is a gap between what customers say and what they do. 
• Customers might not be aware of their subconscious drivers.
• Sometimes hiding the truth and not wanting to show our genuine emotions can also hinder getting accurate results.
• We don’t always give real answers in surveys and questionnaires, which can lead to corrupted data. 

Where is Neuroscience Used?

There are six major areas where we use neuroscience to understand consumers’ brains in marketing.

Branding

Branding has the power to connect companies to their audiences. Neuroscience helps measure brand associations and growth. Evaluating how consumers feel about a brand must be understood at the subconscious level using neuromarketing.

Product Design and Innovation

It is tough to articulate what consumers want from products and services. Neuroscientific methods can help measure consumers’ automatic, emotional, and subconscious responses to various products. Neural research has led to many innovative ideas for some of the world’s most popular product designs.

Advertising

Many advertising campaigns impact the human brain through nonconscious means. TV advertisements or online ads significantly impact the human mind and create an image of the product. 

Packaging

Companies focus on packaging more and more these days and packaging also impacts us subconsciously. How a product looks and feels is very important during the buying process. 

Shopper Decision Making

Neuroscience can help calculate how a store’s environment directly influences the shopper’s decision to buy a product or not. This setting refers to the store’s colors, the products’ packaging, and even their arrangement on the shelves. All of this can subconsciously impact a consumer’s thought process. 

Online Experiences

The online world provides new challenges for our brains. There are so many online shopping strategies to weed through and neuroscience can help make this process easier.

Key Metrics of Neuroscience

The three key metrics of neuroscience include attention, emotion, and memory. 

Attention

Attention is one of the key metrics to measure consumer focus. It’s essential to understand which parts of an event capture attention, and when attention wanes. Humans are prone to lose attention in a fraction of a second.

Emotion

Emotion is the most critical aspect of both human behavior and research. Emotions drive our decision-making and are notoriously difficult to measure. 

Memory

The memory metric measures both short-term and long-term memory storage. A consumer can recall a memory of a product from their childhood or build a new memory with a new brand right away. 

How to Hack the Consumer’s Brain Using Neuroscience

With neuroscience, the face of marketing has changed. The companies that have embraced this new way of thinking about consumer behavior and branding push ahead of their competitors.

There are three keys to hacking the consumer’s brain:

Truly Understand the Human Mind

There are two parallel circuits in our mind. One is the ‘thinking mind,’ and the other is the ‘doing mind.’

A lot of processes run in the mind subconsciously without us being aware of them. The person’s non-conscious mind (or ‘doing’ mind) is driven by memories of past sensory stimuli (such as ads, purchase and consumption experiences, word-of-mouth, etc.), emotions, stereotypes, associations, visual images, spontaneous behavior (such as an impulse or habitual buying), intuition, non-verbal communications and more. The non-conscious ‘doing’ mind makes 95% of brain activity and purchase decisions. The doing mind is fast and can think of multiple things at one time.

In comparison, the ‘thinking’ mind is driven by working memory to process verbal messages, evaluate the cost-benefit of options, and plan ahead (e.g., preparing a supermarket shopping list). The thinking mind works when consumers respond to surveys, interviews, and group discussions and explain why they do the things they do. The thinking mind works slow and thinks about one task at a time.

Successful marketers target the ‘doing’ mind because it drives most of the purchase decisions. 

In comparison, consumers’ likelihood of buying your new product based on group discussions or interviews is much lower. Consumers simply don’t know what they will do. This is one reason why 85% of new products fail, despite having been researched in group discussions and surveys.

Create Great Neuro Content

Creating great Neuro Content means crafting your content with neuromarketing in mind. Neuro Content includes verbal cues, visuals, and information, as well as marketing research and strategy.

Marketers need to use Neuro Content to appeal to their consumers’ emotions, sense of humor, empathy, and memory. This kind of content creates a much more significant impact and can leave a lasting impression on the doing mind. 

Shape Consumer’s Memory

For marketing success, the marketer needs to develop an emotionally-strong product and brand memory and link it to their customers’ goals. We all see so much content every day and the content that sticks are the pieces that we associate with our memories. 

Memory refers to learning that has been stored and can be retrieved when required. The consumer relies on these memories for any product experience and keeps updating this information after making decisions in real-time.

A consumer’s decision-making process includes the following steps:

Applying neuroscience insights in marketing makes it possible to establish your brand image in the consumer’s mind. 

Conclusion

More and more brands are using neuroscience to improve their marketing efforts. Many companies, such as Hyundai, Google, eBay, Yahoo, Facebook, and Coca-Cola, are using this science in real-time to drive brand awareness and sales.

Neuroscience is here to stay and can also help consumers better understand their buying decision process. Companies and consumers are both getting smarter with the help of these advancing technologies. 

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Neuromarketing, sometimes called consumer neuroscience, is a new and emerging field in marketing which benefits from knowledge about how the human brain works.  Neuromarketing takes advantage of brain imaging technologies such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine the brain’s responses to marketing cues and stimuli.

Using fMRI, researchers can look at the brain’s activity and gain key insights into consumer decision-making, as well as the neuroscientific theory driving their marketing strategy.

Neuromarketing can answer questions about consumer preferences that cannot be revealed by surveys.  It may be possible to ask a shopper, “Do you like this product?”

However, neuromarketing takes analyzing consumer preferences one step further.  With fMRI and similar brain imaging technologies, neuromarketing allows researchers to look at the neural basis of a marketing campaign.

For example, thanks to the rich neuroscience of emotion and cognition, neuromarketing researchers can determine whether a product activates regions associated with pleasure, reward, familiarity, and other aspects of the consumer experience.

In this way, neuromarketing can be used to determine whether products are appealing on the neural level.

Crucial insights gleaned from neuromarketing can include what type of stimuli a consumer may react to, such as the color of a product’s packaging or the music used in a commercial.  It can also inform the marketer about cognitive processes that may be occurring, such as a feeling of reward or happiness upon exposure to the stimuli, that may be difficult to assess via surveys.

While the research on what makes a product desirable is still in its infancy, neuromarketing can be used to drive product decisions.  Neuromarketing would be used to identify neural signatures that underlie appealing aspects of products.  Eliciting these neural signatures would, therefore, be the goal of neuromarketing research.

How Does Neuromarketing Work?

In reality, neuromarketing is more complex than the examples described above.  Neuromarketing is derived from the rich academic neuroscience literature on brain activity, particularly as related to emotion and cognition, which can inform marketing strategies.

Harvard Business Review defines “neuromarketing” as referring to “the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers’ motivations, preferences, and decisions, which can help inform creative advertising, product development, pricing, and other marketing areas.”

Neuromarketing Tools

Neuromarketing works by obtaining insights regarding brain activity which can drive marketing decisions.  The neuromarketer’s brain imaging and physiological response toolkit is very diverse, including not only fMRI but also electroencephalography (EEG) and physiological tools such as eye tracking.

• Both fMRI and EEG can measure engagement and recall and help improve branding.
• fMRI can additionally reveal emotional responses and can be used to set pricing.
• EEG can be used to improve advertisements.
• Physiological measurements can be used to measure engagement and arousal with advertisements and products.

How fMRI Works

fMRI measures blood flow in the brain and is measured by an MRI scanner, which can be expensive and therefore difficult to come by unless affiliated with specific neuromarketing or biomedical research institution.  The fMRI tracks blood flow in the brain, as areas of high activity in the brain consume higher levels of oxygen than other parts of the brain.

However, the fMRI signal is slow. So, while fMRI can be useful to figure out what areas of the brain are activated by a particular product, the immediacy of this response (e.g., an immediate reaction to a product that one likes or does not like) cannot be measured via fMRI on any realistic timeframe.

Source: iMotions

How EEG Works

EEG, on the other hand, is much cheaper and ubiquitous, but has some drawbacks.  EEG measures electrical fields generated by neurons on the scalp’s surface, and is typically obtained using specialized electrodes placed on the brain.

fMRI offers excellent spatial sensitivity, but has a time scale on the order of seconds.  EEG, on the other hand, while less useful to determine where brain activity is happening, can be used to track brain responses in milliseconds.

Other Neuromarketing Tools

Other types of neuromarketing tools include eye tracking and facial-expression coding and are much cheaper and easier to use than fMRI or EEG.

• Eye tracking can measure both consumers’ attention (by examining where people fixate on a given product or advertisement, for instance) and arousal (by examining pupillary dilation).  Eye tracking helps neuromarketers obtain useful insights more easily than brain imaging.
• Facial-expression coding is another technology that can help neuromarketers gain novel, actionable insights.  In facial-expression coding, the small movements of the facial muscles are analyzed to examine emotional responses.  Other types of measurements, such as heart rate, respiration rate, and skin conductivity, can measure arousal — the state of being physiologically alert, awake, and attentive.  These methods can be used to help improve the impact of advertisements and product designs.

A new field, neuromarketing has only existed since the early 2000s.  This is largely due to the newness of fMRI itself, which was invented in 1992, and gained popularity as a correlate for brain activity underlying aspects of cognition in the ensuing decade.

A Neuromarketing Experiment

Harvard Business Review relates one of the first landmark studies in neuromarketing which paved the way for future neuromarketing discoveries.

In 2004, scientists at Emory University performed a study in which sodas such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi were offered to subjects participating in an MRI study.  When participants were not informed of the brand names, there was a neural response which was consistent and identifiable.

However, when subjects were told that the sodas were Coca-Cola and Pepsi, the study participants’ brains showed activation in limbic regions, which are the areas of the brain responsible for emotion, memory, and unconscious processing.

Critics of neuromarketing’s use may argue that these studies have simply highlighted a neural basis for brand recognition and familiarity, and that you don’t need an MRI scanner to tell you about the power of branding.

However, as science has progressed, so, too, has its utility for neuromarketers.  What we now know about the brain has improved significantly since fMRI’s early days, and so, too, has our understanding of how our brain responds in marketing environments.

These days, as both neuroimaging and neuromarketing have become more established, more academic researchers are ditching the lab for the lucrative marketing world, which will usher in new discoveries in these dynamic and exciting fields.

Examples of Brands Using Neuromarketing

Since its origins nearly 20 years ago, neuromarketing has been used extensively by many brands.  PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay has used neuromarketing to examine consumer responses to advertisements, products, and packaging in international research.

As Frito-Lay’s Ann Mukherjee told Forbes, brain imaging tests can be more accurate than focus groups.

This research has found that potato chip packaging that looks healthy (e.g., has pictures of potatoes) is associated with reduced guilt-related activation in the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, compared to potato chip packaging that features more unhealthy designs, such as chips.

As a result of these findings, Frito-Lay switched to health-branded packaging in February 2009.

Another example of neuromarketing at work is in the 1975 Pepsi Challenge. After a blind taste test, most of the experiment participants preferred Pepsi because it was sweeter. MRI scans showed that the part of the brain that is associated with seeking reward lit up, showing that they were, in fact, drinking their preferred beverage.

But, the results changed when the participants were told which soda they were drinking. In that case, researchers found that most people chose Coke over Pepsi. But interestingly, the part of the brain that was activated is the part that’s associated with higher thinking.

This means that the participants were likely choosing Coke because of its brand messaging and feel-good ads rather than the actual taste.

These days, neuromarketing has become ubiquitous.  Companies using neuromarketing include Cheetos, Yahoo!, PayPal, Microsoft, Campbell’s, and Coca-Cola.  Even nonprofit organizations such as the National Cancer Institute have used neuromarketing to drive advertising-related decision making (i.e., to determine the most effective advertisements to recruit new patients for studies).

6 Ways You Can Use Neuromarketing

These big brands aren’t the only ones who can take advantage of neuromarketing. Neuromarketing is the bridge between neuroscience and marketing strategy and can be used to unlock the psychology behind consumer behavior.

Content Marketing

Neuromarketing can be used to study consumer responses to content, and to determine if your content is making the most impact.  Different content can be assessed for brain and physiological responses to apply a science-based approach to your content marketing strategy.

With neuromarketing, content can stimulate emotions, appeal to the brain’s instincts, and make use of the brain’s tendency to crave comfort and consistency.  The resulting content will be tailor-made to work with the brain’s natural wiring for the greatest effect.

UX/UI Design

User experience and interaction can be improved with neuromarketing. Eye trackers like heatmaps help you understand where people are looking on your website and how you can optimize it accordingly.  Neuroscience indicates that particular UX/UI designs are most optimized to capture attention and captivate consumers.

Social Media and Social Ads

Tweets, Facebook posts, social advertisements, and other content can be presented to consumers in an EEG or fMRI scanner, or be presented while conducting physiological recordings, to determine whether they are making the right impression.

Our brains are shaped by activity on social media.  For example, social media’s features, such as likes and comments, can generate a small dopamine rush in the brain.

PPC

Pay Per Click (PPC) ads can be studied via neuromarketing to determine whether they are enticing enough to receive clicks.  People are not good at verbalizing what types of ads they enjoy.  Neuroscience can help predict the ways in which viewers of an ad will respond based on its content and messaging.

SEO

If you’re not sure if your web content is leaving the right impression, you can use neuromarketing to see what neural and physiological responses are being elicited.  This can be useful to drive web traffic and boost SEO.

According to Antonio Damasio of Harvard, marketing messaging that does not elicit emotional responses makes it more difficult for the consumer to respond positively.  If your SEO content is not neuro-optimized, this may be your SEO strategy’s undoing.

This obstacle to a successful SEO strategy has nothing to do with the competition and everything to do with your own messaging.

Video

Simple physiological assessments such as biometric data collection, eyetracking, and galvanic skin response are frequently used to measure attention and arousal to video content. Research shows that ads which evoke high physiological arousal are associated with improved ad attitude, brand recall, and purchase likelihood, compared to ads which do not evoke physiological arousal.

A field less than 20 years old, neuromarketing has already made foundational contributions to the science of consumer perceptions and desires.  As we learn more and more about the human brain, these insights will continue to be applied to the marketing field, yielding improved insights that can offer greater personalization for creative content and improve its impact.

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