Neuromarketing – The Art and Science of Marketing and Neurosciences Enabled by IoT Technologies
Biometric sensors that track heart rate, respiratory rate and galvanic skin response are already available through wearable devices such as fitness trackers, smartwatches, rings and pendants. The costs of these devices continue to drop rapidly and are becoming increasingly mainstream in their use and adoption.
fMRI and EEG technologies are by far the most advanced and difficult to access. fMRI is costly at a rate up to $ 1,000 per hour to use while volunteer or consenting subjects need to lie completely still in a large machine while in a supine position. EEG is a cap of electrical sensors that a subject wears on their head. It allows for movement while electrodes measuring electrical waves produced by the brain track emotions such as happiness, sorrow, anger or excitement. However, unlike fMRI, EEG does not provide the ability to see deep parts of the brain where the pleasure center is located to fully understand how consumers are really responding to advertising messages.
Interestingly, the advancement of biometric tracking technologies and always-on sensors brings up the issue of fair use and consent to use, for what purposes? While consumers generally do not object to marketing and sales efforts targeted at them using information they knowingly and voluntarily provide, the idea of using personal information that was involuntarily obtained for marketing and sales efforts is a highly sensitive topic. Generally speaking, capturing consumer information in an openly public setting, such as age and gender, with no personal identifiable information associated is acceptable without consumer consent. But, brand risk remains and retailer action so far shows they air on the side of caution by using an opt-in model of obtaining explicit consent when using these types of sensing and biometric technologies.
APPLICATIONS OF NEUROMARKETING IN IOT RETAIL
In addition to augmenting existing applications in Retail, such as Loyalty / CRM( customer relationship management system), nueromarketing has the potential to help retailers address the very pressurized situation they are facing today with consumer shift to online and the continuous need to maintain a physical footprint.
From a neuromarketing perspective, new capabilities provide retailers with an opportunity to right-size physical locations while meeting or exceeding customer expectations. Neuromarketing provides retailers an opportunity to enhance their marketing mix through improved measurement, deeper insights and timely action while improving the customer experience. As a basic example, today’ s retailers primarily use laser and thermoimaging( thermo) people-counting technology at store entry to count in-store traffic and alert staff of new consumers. Although these types of technologies provide effective measurement of people, their ability to measure a qualified buyer is limited. Thermo’ s ability to assess height as a classifier between adults and children is limited past a certain age, and it cannot provide nuanced information, such as women primarily shop with male shoppers during the week and with other females on
IIC Journal of Innovation 31