Even Eminem benefits from neuromarketing

Remember Eminem? He was gone quiet for almost four years. Lately, Post Malone, Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been topping the Global Charts.

Every year in November, MTV Europe Music Awards (EMA) review the year and award the best songs. This year, to everyone’s surprise and confusion, Eminem won the Best Hip Hop song with his most recent creation “Walk on Water”. The song was released days before the EMAs. Even Eminem himself was confused with his award as he hasn’t done anything in years. Was the song so great that everyone instantaneously fell in love with it?

Don’t have the time to search through hundreds of neuromarketing research articles? Don’t worry, we got it!

We've delved into all the articles of this year, and came up with the most read and most interesting ones. Get ready, because these are The 5 best Neuromarketing insights of 2017!

Consider the following scenario. You are walking through your city on a Saturday afternoon, looking to buy a new shirt. All of a sudden, a retail store of an expensive high-end brand catches your eye, with several beautiful high-class shirts in the storefront. You’ve never bought anything from this brand, but you really like it’s style and designs.

Enthusiastically you check how much one shirt costs and are shocked to find that the price tag of one of these shirts almost equals your entire weekly paycheck. Would you be ready to pay this enormous amount of money for a shirt from a brand you’ve never owned anything from?

Influencing behavior through advertisements, both consciously and unconsciously, but especially the latter, has given neuromarketing a bad reputation. Take James Vicary’s famous subliminal messaging experiment from the 1950s as an example. Vicary claimed that subliminal projections telling ten thousands of people to Drink Coca-Cola and to Eat Popcorn during a movie caused a 18 % sales increase for Coca Cola and 58 % sales increase for popcorn. 

For years, neuromarketeers have been in pursuit of the buy button. This specific neural pattern ought to align perfectly with a rising slope in the sales curve.

Unfortunately, reality is more complex than that. While specific kinds of brain activity are certainly predictive of purchase and preferences (the nucleus accumbens and frontal asymmetry pop up time and again), the ultimate response seems to vary with content and strategy.