Blog : What Neuromarketing Says About How Brand Visual Information Is Processed

When it comes to capturing the attention of consumers and reaching them, making them get the products they want to sell, many elements are pressed to try to position themselves more efficiently. Marketing studies have identified many key points, and among them, those related to the visual identity of the brand have appeared regularly among the highlights. Things enter through the eyes, or so popular wisdom says. Neuroscience or consumer psychology is quite an agreement.

The latest study on the issue has focused on analyzing it from the perspective of neuroscience. The analysis, prepared for Warc by specialists from University College London and BrandOpus, has addressed how the brain filters the information that surrounds it every day, how that impacts purchasing decisions, and how it should mark the choices of marketers. Their conclusions are interesting. In general, they allow us to remember and highlight the importance of creating a visual image of the brand, one that is striking and powerful and, above all, that it presses the most successful keys when connecting with the audience.

Initially, the researchers discovered that for a consumer to buy a brand, it must be able to activate the most favorable associations in the brain. That is, the consumer's brain has to link the product and its visual characteristics with elements that already exist in his mind. When this happens, neuromarketing explains, it is when the consumer responds and buys the product. But even taking this reality into account, using it effectively requires a sophisticated strategy because neuroscience has identified two different facts that make things difficult.

The first is that to create these associations between the brand and what is already in the consumer's brain, it is necessary to do a sustained work of integration, connection, and consolidation of the brand image. Marketing work needs to go deep into the consumer's brain and settle. However, and this is the second complicated point, neuroscience has also discovered that the usual things, so to speak, give the human brain 'laziness'. Human beings tend to ignore everything familiar and known, which makes brands need, despite everything, to put different images before consumers.

All of this creates a somewhat paradoxical situation, in which brands need to work with conflicting values when creating their visual identity. They need to connect with the known for the consumer to respond, but they also need to be groundbreaking so that the brain doesn't ignore their messages. For this reason, neuromarketing makes it clear to brands that they have to be very efficient with how they transmit information, and with what point in the processing chain, they position themselves.

The brain, researchers say, processes visual information at two levels, a broader category and a more concrete category of abstractions. For example, they point out, when we see a dog, we first identify it as such, and then our brain processes more visual data to determine things that complete that information (if it is a pet if it is not).

Brands need to control how that process occurs when consumers confront it. Instead of letting the brain think first about the category and then the brand (detergents and then Ariel, for example), they need the first level of entry to be that of their brand and then go to the most specific (and thus be able to transmit more what you are interested in conveying to consumers).