Trend alert: leading marketers use Neuroscience-AI to win a place in their audiences’ mind
The best way to win in The Attention Economy, is to stay ahead of your competitors by using advanced Neuroscience-AI solutions.
Consumers in North America are overwhelmed by the number of ads they are exposed to every single day. More than 50% of every companies’ visual content is not even seen by the prospective consumers. An even higher percentage is not remembered by them which leads to ineffective use of marketing budget and visual content. Conversion rates suffer, sales growth is hampered and building long term customer loyalty is more costly.
The battle to create brand awareness and sustain brand loyalty has changed. There is a new war for marketers.
The fundamental marketers’ problem is the limited attention span of the target consumers.
Research shows that the human brain can only capture 7 pieces of data plus or minus 2 at the same time. Humans are overwhelmed by the number of brands and the amount of content generated by those brands over a constantly growing number of media platforms (social media, television, outdoor advertising, etc.). As a result, the consumers’ attention has become a scarce and very valuable resource.
This scarcity of consumer attention and the limited ability to recall information is radically changing the way marketers need to think and advertise. Marketers top priority is to make sure they create a lasting brand recall of their various visual content.
Two scientific metrics are at the center of this battle for marketers: Instant consumer attention and lasting brand recall.
Instant attention is the ability of the visual content to stand out and capture the attention of the consumer over every other brand. To capture instant attention brand content needs to excel at creativity and appeal to the consumers’ mind’s eye.
Research shows that neurally-plausible mechanisms through which marketing practices, like the color of packaging, the positioning of the logo, how the store shelf is lit, the apps user interface, etc., have a sizable impact on individual buying decisions, even when those practices are not correlated with the consumers’ preferences.
With even a small attention bias for a brand, the impact on choices can translate into very large profit in a competitive marketplace where consumers choose among many highly liked products or services. For a brand to succeed, it is paramount to capture the consumers’ attention span more effectively than the competition.
The fog maps above, represents what visual content captures the consumers mind’s eye. The longer the consumer looks at specific areas of the visual content, the more that area of the image is visible in this map. We can see that the puppy on the center left captures the most instant attention and that the puppy on the far right is unnoticed.
Human attention has a natural bias for puppies’ faces. There are billions of other attentional biases that impact the human attention span. That is why leveraging neuroscience is critical for marketers in The Attention Economy!
Second, lasting brand recall represents the long-term memory trace created in the consumers mind. During the buying process, the customer seeks out in memory any available information that will validate their decision. The available information is the visual content that created a memory trace or not.
In fact, a study shows that even a weak brand but with memorable added value presented in the visual content, will become perceived as a strong brand because the recalled added value obscures the reasons for its inferiority. In both product design and promotion, it is not unusual to rely on a ‘unique features’ strategy to differentiate a brand and gain advantage over competitors that offer superior core benefits, particularly in the case of durable goods.
In the heat map above, we can see that the consumers remember the puppies’ faces, like we saw with the attention results above, but the consumers also strongly remember the blanket and the basket, even if they didn’t look at it for a long period of time. Put simply, some information is easier to remember than others. Neuroscience identifies which ones.
In short, winning both consumer’s instant attention and lasting recall increases the effectiveness of each impression and gives the product or the brand a competitive advantage in the consumer’s buying decision process.
The question is, how to succeed in The Attention Economy?
Traditional marketers tools are outdated and ineffective. In the best case they provide incomplete and biased information. Attention and memory are brain functions and measuring them is the essence of neuroscience. Some major corporations are utilizing neuroscience predictions to measure the efficiency of their content in terms of attention and recall for their consumers. The shortcomings of the current neuroscience methodologies are significant. They are very expensive, time consuming, one time use, require highly trained expertise and most importantly, are impractical for most companies.
Today, technological advances in neuroscience and AI make neuroscience accessible to all marketers. A cutting-edge Neuro-AI platform simulates the consumer brain and accurately predicts consumers’ instant attention and lasting memory recall.
In a few seconds, marketers can compare multiple designs of multiple visual content (image, video, retailing, social media, website, etc.) and know with confidence the outcome before any consumer has seen the content. It’s pure science-fiction….and it works.
Neuro-AI is the next generation platform every marketer will be using to win in The Attention Economy and capture the loyalty of their consumer simultaneously on all their marketing channels
