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.

Discover how to get consumers to buy more hedonic products by applying the right type of lighting. Research shows that blue lighting influences consumers in their motivation to buy more hedonic products.

What does Snapple have in common with Perrier or 7up? Obviously, these companies all sell soft drinks, but there is another thing these brands have in common. All these three companies have changed their logo recently. Nothing special so far. Companies have to update their visual identity once in a while to keep up with the times.