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People are surprisingly poor at predicting their own behaviour, whether it's about the products we buy, the music we listen to, or the intention to live healthier. There is a vast gap between what we say and what we do.
This is What Your Brain Reveals About the Future
It is therefore not surprising that many research methods that consciously ask for your opinions and intentions only predict your future behaviour to a limited extent. However, what happens in your brain appears to be significantly closer to the truth in many contexts. Over the past decades, extensive research has been conducted on how brain activity (for example, your neural response during the viewing of a commercial) reveals how your behaviour will unfold in the future, without you being aware of this effect (for example, whether you will buy the advertised product).
In this blog, you will read about the most remarkable findings from scientists on the often surprising choices and behaviours we can predict with brain activity.
Your Brain Activity During Ads Predicts What You Will Buy
Starting with the effect of commercials and advertisements. Marketers hope that their ads make the brand top-of-mind, stimulate brand preference, and thereby increase sales. Researchers have examined how advertising impact can be predicted by self-reported purchase intention as well as brain activity during the viewing of the commercial. In an earlier blog, you could read how predicting ads with neuromarketing works exactly.
Studies that looked at the effect of health advertisements found, for example, that brain activity during the commercial was correlated with the number of calls to a quit-smoking hotline1 and campaign emails opened across the entire population2. On an individual level, this brain activity is also seen in people who, after seeing a commercial, indicate they smoke less3 or use more sunscreen4.
Commercial advertisements measure their success, for example, by purchase elasticity: the extent to which each euro in the advertising campaign contributes to the brand's sales. You might not expect it, but this economic metric can also be related to the brain activity of a small group of respondents. Neuromarketers were able to relate both the market's reaction and the individual response to a campaign to activation in brain structures involved in decision-making processes5.
The relationship between purchase decisions and brain activity during the advertisement has been validated in many studies. A metric that often recurs in this is motivational approach: this feeling of "I want this" can be measured by asymmetry in the prefrontal cortex. But within these studies, many more different brain structures and activation patterns emerge6. This extensive literature ensures that this can also be well applied: Our advertising research has emerged from these studies.
Popularity of Products
Not only a commercial determines the success of the product; the product itself and the packaging it is placed in are at least as important. When you look at a product, various evaluation and decision-making processes in your brain become active, determining whether you will eventually buy it.
For example, brain research has been conducted on shoe shopping. When the shopper's eye fell on the pair of shoes that would eventually be purchased, this was already visible early in the brain7.
This is also visible within the supermarket. The success of new products is better predicted with neuromarketing than by simply asking respondents for their opinion on the new product8.
The Brain Predicts Social Media Popularity
The popularity of an online advertisement or video can be investigated in a similar way with neuromarketing. How do you know which TikTok will top the trending list? The virality of a video or post on social media is related to activity in brain areas involved in social functions and value calculation9.
The number of streams on YouTube can also be predicted based on the brain10. The fluctuation of engagement - also known as engagement - was essential in the video's popularity. The prediction even improved when machine learning11 or deep learning12 was used to enhance the model. Curious about other applications of machine learning in neuromarketing?
The Brain Predicts Blockbusters in the Cinema and Hits on Spotify
Predicting popularity with brain activity actually started in the film industry. The advantage of films as a research subject is that their popularity is well quantifiable: Search for a film title on the internet, and you will find reviews, ratings, and cinema ticket sales. The latter is frequently used in studies that have shown that brain activity when watching a trailer can predict the final revenue of a film.
It turned out that the agreement in brain activity during the viewing of the trailers is an indicator for sales of cinema tickets13. This synchronised brain activity is an indication of engagement and is also known as neural synchronicity.
Music popularity was also well predicted with neuromarketing. The studies with music are distinguished because they took place before it was known whether the music would become popular (as opposed to film research, which was always conducted afterwards). The first study in this area had respondents listen to unknown artists on MySpace and discovered years later that some had become popular. The neural measurement during that first exposure years earlier turned out to be a good predictor for the later popularity of that music on the radio14. Also, the number of plays on Spotify can be well predicted with this synchronised brain activity.15
Much Can Be Predicted with Neuro. But Why?
When you make a choice, multiple cognitive processes are active in your brain. Take, for example, the moment you consider buying a product in the supermarket. This begins with the choice with an emotional reaction to the product, followed by more cognitive considerations that weigh pros and cons against each other. This leads to a motivation to buy or not buy the product (approach/avoidance). Basic emotional responses are more universal than rational price considerations and explain why the results can be well translated into a prediction for the general public.
The doubts and desires that dominate the decision-making process can vary greatly for each individual. Yet, this decision-making process invariably results in a neural conclusion that is the same for many people: motivational approach. This metric is a strong predictor of individual preference and can be well measured with EEG, while the basic emotional responses often occur deeper in the brain, making them best measured with fMRI. Want to know more about the difference between these methods, read that in this blog.
The Downside of Brain Activity
Neural results do reveal what people feel, but it remains a guess as to why they feel that way. Fortunately, there is a lot of psychological research that can help interpret neural results. These insights can often be used to improve communication and thus provide an interpretation for the measurements we make from the brain.
The neuromarketing of the future will focus more on integration with other techniques such as machine learning to enhance the classification and predictions of actual behaviour and emotion. In this way, the field remains dynamic, and we can strive to make good marketing even better.
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