Do you want to read your consumer?s mind?

What if I can offer you a key to understand what is going inside the brain of your consumer while think about your product and that of your competitors?

I know, you would be excited ? if you get the key you will easily be able to understand what that person does not like about your product or why he or she is selecting another brand rather than buying your product.

Companies spend millions of dollars in surveys to understand what the target audience loves about the product or what they actually want and their needs. And then they spend millions of Dollars to promote the product and the USP among those people. This is the age old or traditional method that companies use to understand the target market.

But tell me one thing ? do you think that the survey results are good enough to provide you a clear demarcation (close to reality)? What can offer you a better result ? his or her unconscious reporting about a product or the conscious effort to answer the question? What plays the more active role at point of purchase (POP) – his or her logical and conscious self or the unconscious one?

Ok, Hirsch is developing an fMRI tool and to put it simply, it can be used to understand the chemistry that goes on inside the brain while viewing a product or evaluating it. And the tests can help you understand the critical responses sent by brain while thinking about a product or may be a brand. Though they have a plan to make it open to commercial development and use, today it is too big in size and as usual too expensive. The report was published by BrandWeek in an article titled Read My Mind.

Ok, it is not full proof:
“The environment of the fMRI can generate emotions in itself, offered Prof. Baba Shiv of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He remains a realist about prospects for neuromarketing. One of his best-known experiments involves giving sips of wine to consumers lying inside an fMRI. Some of the subjects are told the wine is expensive, others that it’s cheap-but they’re all getting the same wine. Unsurprisingly, the brain’s pleasure centers are activated to a greater extent when people believe that the wine they’re sipping is pricey.”

Anyways, how is it going to help the online marketplace? Or even the offline marketplace when every brain may respond to a particular thing differently? And, it is not possible to put every individual (target market) under the scanner. And thus the result you are getting can never be complete.

As far as online market is concerned, we should live happily with eye tracking studies for the time being unless we can develop a solution to manipulate the content of a webpage in real time in response to his visiting path, nature etc. Not just geo or IP specific ? it can be more individualistic.