By Dr. A.K. Pradeep, CEO and founder, Sensori.Ai
What will it take to make more than 50% of Advertising to succeed, and more than 80% of Innovations to WIN in the marketplace? What might be that transformative tool that can make this magic happen? Consumer Neuroscience makes the shiny new toy – GenAi, becomes a trusted new tool in the Innovator’s toolbox and can find new answers to the questions at the heart of brand marketing: why do customers buy what they do? How can brand and product innovators anticipate their needs and even unlock their hidden desires?
Steve Jobs famously used to say “Don’t ask consumers what they want, they just don’t know !”. Yet how is it that the consumer who seemingly does not know what they want suddenly recognizes a new product they just “cannot live without”. It is simply because 95% of consumer desires lurk in the nonconscious of the human mind while every market research tool measures effectively the conscious, and they are inadequate when it comes to innovating for the consumer. It takes a genius like Steve Jobs or Jonny Ive to envision what the consumer truly desires. What neuroAi provides is a toolset that makes “Jobs in a Box” possible by providing ways and means to access the data that feeds, nourishes, architects and builds the nonconscious mind of the consumer. This rich data set, and ways to systematically access it allows one to create a hit product every time instead of just “hoping for the best”.
Currently, the conscious brain is constantly assaulted by the volume of quantitative and descriptive verbal information screamed by each product. In response, consumers navigate this harsh terrain using emotional cues, breadcrumbs, or simple-to-understand metrics. Neuroscience-powered GenAI offers advertisers a number of ways to make it easy for consumers — here are the top three.
Big Aha 1: Sensorial Innovation
The world’s fragrance and flavor are controlled by a handful of companies – and most manufacturers have no idea how to transparently translate consumer profiles to appropriate sensory notes. Have you ever smelled something and been taken back to a different time and place in your memory? Maybe you associate the smell of baking cookies with the holidays, and you feel content or excited. Evoking these emotions or remembered experiences gives the brain something to connect a product with and simplifies the decision making process.
Imagine creating a fragrance that captures the essence of a consumer’s daily experiences in a bustling city like San Francisco, with notes of sea salt or coffee or chocolate to remind shoppers of a beautiful day on the Bay. Perhaps you want to create a new flavor that enhances a familiar beverage in an unexpected way — the pumpkin spice latte didn’t exist for Starbucks until 2003, but it’s now so iconic that the coffee chain releases it in August to capitalize on (and drive) consumers’ yearning for fall.
NeuroAi utilizes a deeper understanding of how the brain perceives, catalogs, and associates fragrance in its template for recording things. This knowledge along with algorithms , trained on vast amounts of nonconscious data and a deeper understanding of extant combinations of scents or flavors can rapidly put out a number of different ideas for you to try – and even rank them by likelihood of success with consumers.
Big Aha 2: Category Busting Metric
Whether it’s megapixels for a camera, gigahertz for a computer, or even the number of lenses a phone has, the consumer’s brain has a single request: give me a SINGLE number it a category that helps me separate products, , or I will use price to differentiate. These are “category busting metrics.” These numbers help consumers skip the mental gymnastics when shopping and comparing products.
Extracting metrics that capture the imagination in a category can lead to extraordinary business success. The success of Halo Top in the world of ice cream is just a consequence of adding a denominator to a number and making a fraction out of it – it wasn’t just Calories, but Calories/pint !! This truly gave the consumer an opportunity to consume an entire pint of ice cream in a guilt free manner. Be it ice cream or chicken, neuroscience guided GenAi algorithms can imagine and extract metrics for a given category that make it easy for consumers to compare, and purchase a product, and most importantly, feel good about their purchase.
Big Aha 3: DNA of Desire
Why are there long lines in Apple Stores on launch day with consumers barely able to contain their excitement? Our conscious and unconscious brains constantly assess if we want things and how much we want them. If not enough consumers feel an overwhelming and compelling desire to acquire and experience the sheer joy of the product, then the effort to create this product and identity has been wasted. Successfully nurturing these inclinations and impulses in such a complex and crowded market requires drawing on the neuroscience of desire.
Neuroscience of desire, based on neurotransmitter release mechanisms identify 6 dimensions of desire. : Novelty, comfort, trust, simplicity, social bonding, and self-actualization are these dimensions. Our nonconscious minds are wired to desire along these dimensions.. While everyone’s desires are slightly different, we know enough about how minds work in general to tap into these unconscious needs.
Making a product irresistible isn’t a new concept, however, utilizing the lens of neuroscience to find the DNA of desire in a given category is the breakthrough. The algorithms of GenAi are now trained to evaluate the desire in either a marketing message or a piece of copy, and then rewrite and re architect it to evoke desire. Simply the trillions of product descriptions, product messaging, and brand messaging can be scored on the Desire Framework, and then be redesigned to evoke Desire.
The nonconscious mind of the consumer is forever on – even while asleep. It is the forever on, forever online, forever informed, forever influenced consumer that algorithms of GenAi speak to. Powered by neuroscience, GenAI is set to give Brand marketers and Innovators a tool they have always desired to win consumers in the crowded and competitive global marketplace.
