Emotional impact
Neurophysiology and human sciences, beyond neuromarketing, to understand how emotions guide our behavior more than we are willing to accept.
Emotions drive our behaviour more than we care to admit.
Explaining emotional intensity in words, however, is an extremely complex process.
People’s emotions are the most valuable part of the research into the value and quality of experiences, because they are a unique and substantial element that contributes to the improvement of the experiences themselves.
From a psychophysiological point of view, the combined use of eye tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) allows us to measure and understand the emotions/reactions triggered by a product, whether it be physical (packaging) or digital (e.g. video & display advertising).
The finalisation of an ad hoc experimental design then allows us to create the right conditions for testing different versions of the product itself or to compare the product with those of competitors.
PLEASE PAY ATTENTION: why don’t we talk about neuromarketing?
And it will be so predominantly in all the institutional pages of TSW and obviously less in the articles where we present perspectives or points of view which are also external.
The word neuromarketing has nothing negative in it, or wrong if you wish, if not perhaps a simplistic approach and a tendency to be used more for fashion or pseudo-modernity. It is certainly not necessary to discuss here the jargon of marketing and its abuse of anglisms or pseudo-differentiating neologisms, because they follow every “modern” innovation or new “cool” fashion.
Why neuromarketing (as a word at least) does not find space in the listening approach that TSW pursues?
There are sciences and neuro-sciences, there is marketing and not neuro-marketing.
Neuromarketing, a single word, is at most configured as the field of application of research that comes out of neurosocial laboratories and creeps with greater or lesser appropriateness, competence or cogency in the economy and in marketing.
In TSW works a team of psychophysiologists, cognitive psychologists, ergonomists, anthropologists, sociologists who started their research in academic laboratories and with TSW were able to apply or test the methodologies in real contexts, with companies and with people.
It is on this, people, that we find the positive aspects in neuromarketing in countertrend or in contrast with models that are distant from people, from their experiences, from their needs or experiences.
The magic bullet model, for example, is a theory that considers the mass media (and the marketing of the end of the last century has counted much and too much on the hegemony-TV-industrial complex) as propaganda tools and persuasion of a passive and inert mass.
In bullet theory, as can be seen from the literal translation, the “bullet”, or the message, should directly affect a passive subject. This theory, now abandoned, still has a schematic and simplifying value, unfortunately very widespread in marketing, which brings with it the concept of a target, literally “target”, used in advertising to indicate the recipients of an advertisement or to indicate consumers “objective”of marketing activities.
Sometimes neuromarketing is presented precisely as a tool to literally enter the minds of consumers (having taken note that the TV is no longer able to spread the products as once did and that thanks to digital it is in decline since the first decade of years of this century).
This way of presenting neuromarketing implies a reductionistic and simplistic vision of people first, and secondly a reifying or instrumental approach towards consumers. Neuromarketing, even in its most deleterious or instrumental realization, cannot fortunately achieve such a reductively psychagogical goal.
However, a truly positive aspect of neuromarketing, whatever the way it is interpreted or carried out, is that it puts back at the center the person, the individual whose psychophysiological data is recorded. And it is not a small thing, to get out of the logic of targets, indexes or users. In fact, only thanks to the possibility of involving people in the studies it will be possible to use, or even exploit, these techniques. The fact that our listening model brings with it the hope that people are approached as such and not as tools is then a question of goals and values.
Meanwhile, what we do are applications of psychophysiological measurement techniques to the world of consumer study and the experience analysis of users, which we call people, not by chance.