Neuromarketology: The Next Frontier in Strategic Marketing?

What is neuromarketology? And why the blazes should you care about it?

Here’s why: It may just be the next best thing in strategic marketing.

Traditional mass marketing brand strategy dictates reducing the brand to a single attribute, its essence, if you will, and market that to the greatest number of people. It requires developing one consistent message that will best motivate that targeted group to purchase the product/service.

The thinking was/is, if you find that one asset, and have your team of Don Drapers do a good job of creatively selling it, you will generate a two percent response rate. The design of the strategy, by default, eliminates 98 percent of the market.

That response rate was/is considered the mark of a successful campaign. Brian Fabiano, CEO of integrated strategic marketing firm FabCom, in Scottsdale, AZ, begs to differ. He doesn’t think a two percent response rate, out of 100 percent, is a success. He believes marketing campaigns can and should drive higher response rates. Much higher.

That is where neuromarketology comes in.

Neuromarketology is a methodology, developed by Fabiano, that  “maps each of your target audience's behavioral, demographic and psychographic connection points to your brand,” he explains.  It combines a slew of skill sets, including those from data mining; technology-driven message distribution; strategically propelled creative; cross channel, cross media programming; and content development.

“The bottom line – the entire methodology is supercharged by hyper-segmentation of target audiences combined with an automated creative/production system that delivers the right message to the right person, at the right time on the right platform to optimize recipient relevance and, therefore, ROI,” says Fabiano.

What he aims to do is bring “high-level enterprise marketing tactics and deploy them in medium-sized businesses. When you have that kind of hyper relevancy, it’s phenomenal what can be achieved,” Fabiano says.

Simply put, it means taking your brand’s assets—not just the single essence, but all of your brand’s selling points—and finding the specific points where it meets your customer’s needs. So for instance, let’s say you are a graphic services provider. Your assets are that you offer one-stop shopping for a company’s graphic needs, one-day turnaround, handholding customer service, and on-line print buying. Neuromarketology maps each of your target audience’s behavioral, demographic and psychographic connection points to those assets. Your marketing messages are then tailored to that specific individual’s target group, on the platforms that they prefer.

Neuromarketology came about because of “a perfect storm of converging technologies and advancements,” says Fabiano. These advancements include everything from Microsoft releasing is API for its SQL Server, allowing different databases to “talk” to each other to retrieve information, to development of frequency-modulated MRI’s that show how the brain responds to stimuli to social networking capabilities, bandwidth, and dynamic database accessibility.

Fabiano introduced the world to his methodology in 2010, publishing a book, Neuromarketology, Harness Converging Technologies and Diverging Audiences to Create Dynamic One-to-One Marketing and Astonishing ROI, now in its third printing after selling out the first two.

“At one time people received information about the world around them in one or two ways,” notes Fabiano. “As the 21^st century emerged, I realized the marketing playing field was about to undergo significant change and it was essential that marketing approaches change too. That change has escalated, transforming the playing field of marketing more in the past three years than in the previous 10 years.  As customers demand more and utilize more communication avenues, it’s important that we adjust the way we market to them. Traditional methods of marketing messages fall by the wayside, getting lost in translation and in transit. That’s because they’re not targeted and hyper segmented.” 

The methodology was long in the making; for more than 20 years, Fabiano’s strategic marketing agency, FabCom, has create integrated, multi-channel dynamic marketing programs for its clients. 

“While neuromarketing is a new and powerful concept, it’s not the complete answer to marketing success,” says Fabiano. “What had been lacking previously was the systematic application of neuromarketing to real world marketing challenges. My book finally closes the loop from the science of neuromarketing to increased ROI. I take readers step-by-step through the application of neuromarketing via a dynamic automated marketing workflow. Neuromarketology is the application where the rubber meets the road of all the neuromarketing studies and debates. “

It’s the Content, Stupid

Using the research that came of out the MRI developments, science has proven that our core brain responds to specific marketing messages, timing, and imagery. No surprises here; put George Clooney up on the screen and you’ve got my attention; Justin Bieber, not so much. Fabiano’s point is simple: if we can understand what are the specific stimuli that a person’s brain responds to, then we can create marketing messages and campaigns that are relevant to that individual. It’s the ultimate in one-to-one marketing.

Target audiences are formed into subgroups that share similar characteristics, values, and beliefs. Knowing the quantitative, qualitative and emotional connection points of each best potential target audience for a particular brand, product or service will provide the basis for making a profitable marketing and lasting relationship between your brand and each individual prospective target. 

Marketing programs involve using different platforms to deliver the targeted message. “Print is still an important component to our client’s marketing mix,” says Fabiano. “However, today’s print is very different than traditional print.  We are no longer creating a generic message and sending it out the masses via a purchased list.”

Instead, FabCom generates its own lists through other components in the campaign, allowing the agency to send dynamic print to those who are already likely to convert.  Print is now sent out on an on-demand basis, in real time and with personally relevant imagery and CTAs.

“We drive to the web/mobile web through print,” explains Fabiano. “The days of a well crafted piece of static copy and imagery still work when done to precision to a mass market, but the variable, dynamic and interactive optimization of digital assets is infinitely more nimble in (again) meeting our clients target audiences and key-stakeholders in the right place at the right time.”