You may have heard the phrase “If you build it, they will come.” This assumes that the marketeer knows best and the market will recognize this and come to buy. If you, the marketeer, are in love with a product, it’s natural to project that love onto your target audience. However, it may be the right product at the wrong time, or just a product that doesn’t meet customers’ needs.

Marketing managers are only human, and humans have their own personal preferences. These preferences can become a problem, however, when they project them onto a target market that may or may not share their preferences. As a result, they may miss out on capturing sales for a product that really resonates with their audience, while they focus on marketing something that is not as appealing to their prospects. This tendency is called the false consensus effect, or FCE. 

Let’s say that you’re about to buy a new shirt or dress for a fancy dinner party, which brand would you choose? 

RAFUO or rafuo?

Which one did you like best? Chances are that, when looking for a conspicuous purchase as in this example, you’d choose RAFUO because it looks more premium. It is the extent to which the brand looked premium that helped sell the conspicuous product. Psychologists discovered that uppercase characters have a subtle, yet consistent effect on how premium a brand appears to be. 

What are the reasons for consumers to buy specific brands? How can we tell whether a TV commercial will be effective or not? And what is the best way to set up a store? Those are questions central to the field of neuromarketing. But what is and what isn’t neuromarketing? Is it all about research? Or is it also about applying insights from theory into practice? And what does psychology have to do with it?

These questions are exactly why we have written this blog. In this blog you will get a clear overview of everything around neuromarketing. From the research methods to our favorite insights. 

Nobody wants to finish last. Regardless of which sphere of live you investigate, people take significant effort not to end up in the painful last position. Diners in restaurants rarely order the cheapest wine on the menu—with preferences clustering around the second cheapest option (McFadden, 1999). The pain of rejection stings most when one is picked last in gym class, whereas the person in the second-last spot breathes a sigh of relief (Weir, 2012). 

But what about waiting in queues? Is waiting actually more painful for the last person in line compared to someone waiting an equal amount of time with one additional person behind him?

Through an impressive series of five studies on both in-store and simulated queuing environments, the behavioral scientist Ryan W. Buella investigated the psychological dynamics of queuing. He discovered that being the last one in line carries a powerful psychological difference that has striking consequences on our behavior and satisfaction.

For me, personally, when I’m listening to the radio in the morning and the host is telling a personal story, I find myself immersively listening and feeling empathy. However, the moment they talk about the daily news I’m just laid back casually. 

The same holds true for sales pitches where the salesperson starts by telling a bit about his personal life and background before going into the material.