WHY MARKETING ?

Quantum Marketing: 

Harnessing Neuroscience to Transform Brand Connections

In today's rapidly evolving marketing landscape, traditional approaches are increasingly giving way to more sophisticated, science-based methodologies. Among these innovations, neuromarketing stands out as a powerful tool for understanding consumer behavior at a deeper level than ever before. This groundbreaking approach represents what Mastercard's Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Raja Rajamannar calls "Quantum Marketing" — a necessary evolution in how brands connect with consumers.

The marketing industry has long relied on traditional focus groups and self-reported data to guide strategy. However, as Pranav Yadav, global CEO and US founder of neuromarketing company Neuro-Insight, explains: "Only 24% of the time that self-reported data actually correlates to in-market effectiveness."

This striking statistic highlights a fundamental flaw in conventional market research. "Let that sink in for a second," Yadav continues. "If you're spending $1 trillion on marketing and advertising, 750 billion of them are being wasted... because you're actually not getting the right information to act upon."

Rajamannar summarizes this challenge succinctly: "We are expecting consumers to be psychologists and be able to give us very credible answers, which doesn't happen."

Neuromarketing addresses this gap by studying the brain's responses directly. Using technologies like electroencephalography (EEG), companies like Neuro-Insight can measure brain activity in real-time as consumers interact with marketing content.

"Evolutionarily, the way our brains are structured, 90% of all of the decisions that we make on a daily basis take place in the subconscious," Yadav explains. "Neuromarketing is a world where we study the true decision making organ in the body, which is the brain, to figure out how it functions, how people are likely to make decisions based on what we see in the brain."

This approach reveals insights that conscious self-reporting simply cannot capture. By placing electrodes on participants' scalps, Neuro-Insight measures electrical activity across different brain regions, each responsible for different aspects of cognitive processing.

Perhaps most fascinating is Yadav's insight about memory's role in consumer decisions: "Memories are neither an active nor an accurate repository of the past. Memories are guideposts to future behavior."

This perspective challenges traditional marketing assumptions. Yadav explains that "memory is a binary layer. If you have memory you will base decisions on it. If you do not have memory, you will not base decisions on it. No matter the amount of emotion."

The implications are profound. Successful marketing isn't just about creating emotional moments but about ensuring those moments create lasting memories that influence future decisions. As Yadav notes, "The subconscious, long term memory creation is the biggest driver of behavior. And in our work, we've seen about an 86% correlation to predicting sales."

Another surprising finding is that personal relevance often matters more than emotional intensity. "Personal relevance is a higher driver of decision making than emotional intensity," Yadav reveals. "And marketers have known this, inherently, implicitly, for the longest time. But somehow we clumped everything under that emotional bucket."

This nuanced understanding allows marketers to craft messages that connect with consumers on multiple levels—through relevance, emotion, and memorable experiences.

The impact of neuroscience-based marketing approaches can be substantial. Comparing traditional market research to neuromarketing, Yadav states: "The correlation of traditional market research tools to in-market efficacy is 24%. With our technology, there's an 86% correlation to actually predicting sales. So the delta is pretty much double."

These technologies also provide actionable insights for content optimization. As Yadav explains, neuroscience can help marketers identify "the exact moments that you can capitalize on" and determine "if you have a thirty second piece for your TV, then what is the five second piece for Instagram? What is the three second piece for TikTok? What is the still image for out-of-home and banner?"

Beyond commercial applications, Yadav sees neuromarketing as a force for positive change. "Hate, jealousy, superficialism, materialism, sells itself. They don't have to use neuromarketing to be able to do that," he notes. "The people who do need neuromarketing to be able to tell better stories are things like climate change, looking at world hunger, looking at making choices that require people to actually make some sort of a sacrifice and change."

As Rajamannar puts it, "Marketing, as we practice today, was founded on theories and principles from more than six decades ago. Long before the advent of the internet, social media or artificial intelligence... To connect with the savvy consumers of tomorrow, marketing as we know it, must take a quantum leap forward."

This quantum leap involves moving beyond assumptions and self-reported data to understand the brain's actual responses—enabling marketers to create content that truly resonates with consumers on a subconscious level.

By understanding the brain's response patterns and creating content that generates both personal relevance and lasting memories, marketers can develop strategies that connect more deeply with audiences. In an increasingly noisy digital environment, this scientific approach to consumer understanding may be the key to marketing's future.