Dr. A.K. Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus, Inc.

Each year a trillion dollars is spent on communicating to and persuading the human brain, yet few understand how the brain really works—what’s attractive to it, how it decides what it likes and doesn’t like, and how it chooses to buy or not buy the infinite variety of products and services presented to it every day. Neuromarketing research is revealing a myriad of fascinating insights that help improve the effectiveness of every aspect of clients’ brands, products, packaging, in-store marketing, advertising, and entertainment content.

Synchronized Senses
Among the five senses, vision is the most pronounced and the brain will discount information that is not in concert with the visual stimuli it receives. The sense of smell is quite powerful too, as it is the most direct route to emotions and memory storage. Being linked with a pleasant, iconic smell can significantly improve a product’s success in the marketplace.

Brains are also quite empathic and it is a neural “monkey see; monkey do” mechanism that can help companies around the world create and market products and services that consumers will find naturally compelling. Mirror neuron theory says that when someone watches an action being performed, he or she performs that action in his or her own brain. Activating this mirror neuron system is one of the most effective ways to connect with consumers. Consider how watching a close partner handle a stressful conversation can cause your blood pressure to rise; how seeing a bicyclist zoom down a hill will elevate your heart rate and give you a feeling of alertness and possibly even a mirrored endorphin jolt.

Defining Differences
While human brains are remarkably similar, there are some fundamental differences such as age and gender that affect how we respond to stimuli.

The Boomer Brain: There are 44 million baby boomers in the U.S. who control 77% of all financial assets. After age 50, the brain becomes less able to screen out distractions, presenting a huge implication and a great opportunity for marketers. A key difference between the older and the younger brain involves the amygdala, the brain area devoted to primal emotions, which in young people responds to positive and negative stimuli, but in older people, more strongly to positive stimuli. Another key trait among older adults is the tendency to overlook the negative. It’s called “preferential processing,” and several studies have highlighted it. They indicate that, when presented with a negative message, older brains can “delete” the NOT and remember it as a DO over time. A real world example of how this neuroscience discovery is useful for marketers is when crafting a message for the Boomer Brain, say “Remember the milk”, not “Don’t forget the milk”.

The Female Brain: Despite the fact that women’s spending capacity has increased to a whopping $13 trillion annually worldwide—more than the GDPs of China and India combined—it has only been in the last decade that the female brain has been studied in any depth and detail. Marketers are waking up to the fact that the female brain has four times as many neurons connecting the right and left hemispheres, greatly enhancing its ability to process information through both rational and emotional filters—a fact that must not be ignored when crafting a message.

The Mommy Brain: Pregnancy and motherhood present women with the most significant changes their brains will experience in their adult lives. Importantly, those changes will last their entire lifetimes. The highly evolved Mommy Brain is largely responsible for our status at the top of the food chain, and mothers control 80-85% of all household spending. The millions of Moms across the country are an army—mobile, nimble, vigilant, in touch like never before through social media, and powerful—if your product or messages hit home with them, you have won over powerful allies who will support you through instant communication networks beyond anything you could create for yourself. But the reverse is also true.

Precise Measurement
The group of world-class neuroscientists, neurophysiologists and marketing experts at NeuroFocus measure and analyze actual brainwave activity across the full brain using a combination of electroencephalographic (EEG) testing and sophisticated eye tracking equipment that records exactly where a person is looking while experiencing a stimulus. This combination allows precise measurement of exactly how a person’s brain is responding to a certain stimulus in terms of three primary NeuroMetrics: Attention, Emotional Engagement, and Memory Retention, and correlate that with exactly where the person’s eyes are focused at that same millisecond. The results are unprecedented in depth, accuracy, and detail, and unequalled by any other form of research.

Companies around the world, including the largest and most successful global giants, are increasingly turning to EEG-based full brain neurological measurements because they offer far more accuracy, reliability, and actionable results than conventional market research methods alone such as surveys and focus groups. In the near future manufacturers, marketers, retailers and content creators that take the time to know the real consumer at the subconscious level will survive and prosper. Those that treat consumers like a number in a survey or a nameless wonder in a focus group will perish.

NeuroFocus CEO Dr. A. K. Pradeep, is the author of the forthcoming book, The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind, which provides the knowledge and the tools necessary to help marketers understand how to appeal to the subconscious on a very practical level by covering the five major areas of neuromarketing practice: brand, products, packaging, in-store marketing, and advertising.

To learn more about the book and to discover how neuroscience is impacting the making, selling and buying of projects, visit NeuroFocus.com.

According to the Nielsen Annual Real Estate Market Report, home shoppers are spending 4.5 hours a week on real estate web sites, with specialist web sites such as realesate.co.nz and trademeproperty.co.nz accounting for almost three of those hours each week.  Another 110 minutes was spent on search engines while 106 hours was spent on the sites of individual real estate agents.  The trend to turn to the Internet shows no signs of abating: real estate web site traffic in May 2009 was up 19 percent over the same month on 2008.

“The increased research taking place online is perhaps showing us that property buyers are getting a large amount of their information needs ticked off via the web before using other media options or physically going to see the property itself,” said Tony Boyte, Research Director of Nielsen New Zealand’s online division.

The Nielsen Annual Real Estate Market Report is based on a site-intercept survey on New Zealand real estate web sites conducted in May and June with a sample size of 1,206 respondents.

Listening And Social Networks

Jon Gibs, VP Media Analytics, will be facilitating a Listening Zone Learning Presentation focused on social networking, citing the importance of fostering a listening environment. The presentation will feature new data from Nielsen Online’s social networking study and demonstrate how brands are getting the most out of their listening programs. Gibs will also be giving a talk called: “Measuring Clutter: It Matters.” Read more about clutter here.

Additionally, David Wiesenfeld, VP Marketing Solutions, Nielsen Online and Kristin Bush – CMK Senior Manager, Digital Research, The Procter and Gamble Company will speak on “Listening vs. Asking: Contrasting Consumer-Generated Content and Surveys”

The Future Of Research And Consumer Trends

David Calhoun, Nielsen’s Chief Executive Office will participate in ”The Research Industry Vision,” a panel discussion of strategies to respond to research transformation over the next five years.

Paul Donato, Nielsen’s Chief Research Officer will present “The Media, The Consumer, The Economy,” which investigates how news reports about policy and the economy affect consumer confidence as well as how this information affects purchasing and entertainment decisions.

For a complete schedule of events and for streaming video of select events visit thearf.org.

The recent cataclysmic events in financial markets have jolted many of us into a “back to basics” mentality. Basics such as “what goes up must come down.” Basics such as “live within your means.”

Over the weekend, my colleague Dave Martin and I reviewed a 100 year trend of price/earnings ratios for the S&P 500. For the last 18 years or so, the average has driven far north of the long term average of 15, and a “back to basics” mentality would have indicated that sooner or later it would come back down to the average, and probably overshoot it on the way down. Lo and behold: an article in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal reported that the P/E ratio went below 11.

It’s interesting to note that the P/E ratio “bubble” over the last 15 years pretty much coincides with the introduction, growth and mainstreaming of the Internet and interactive media. And the dramatic correction in financial markets has made me wonder: what kind of correction is due for online media and market researchers? I suggest this should happen because, as with the financial markets, many have gotten carried away with an exhilaration regarding all things interactive, and this exhilaration has caused many to overlook tried and true research approaches that have withstood the test of time. After all, how often have we heard something like this: “The Internet is different…the research that has worked historically for other media isn’t relevant to the Internet”?

The Media Rating Council (MRC) has looked closely at this, and here is what they have to say: “Overall we’re ready to consider some compromises in strict probability sampling in the name of larger Internet samples for currency measurement. But we will not let certain narrow technical issues to allow us to throw out the quality ‘baby’ with the probability ‘bathwater.’” Here are six essential research anchors according to the MRC:

1. Knowledge of the universe
2. Coverage of that universe (e.g. minimizing totally excluded populations)
3. Efforts to minimize non-response bias in general (e.g. optimizing cooperation)
4. Understanding and minimizing differential cooperation (to achieve proportional samples)
5. Consistency of procedures over time (so that results are replicable)
6. Sample sizes

So with this in mind, let’s ask: “Which financial institutions are positioned to survive the current meltdown?” The answer: those that clung to portfolio quality and didn’t let go. The great financial sages foretold that when turning away from quality, one pays for it sooner or later. Time will tell, but I’ll bet the same lesson will hold true in the online media and market research world. What do you think?