Intuitive Marketing
Intuitive Marketing:
What Marketers Can Learn from Brain Science
In recent years, despite technological developments and the huge amount of research carried out in areas such as psychology, neuroscience or behavioral economics, marketers have continued to follow old patterns and to employ techniques that do not deliver the required result. In his recently published book entitled 'Intuitive Marketing: What Marketers Can Learn from Brain Science', Steve Genco proposes a different way of thinking about marketing by presenting us with the mechanisms of intuitive marketing.
Before reading the book, you may wonder what intuitive marketing is. Stephen Genco states that intuitive marketing acknowledges and addresses both conscious and unconscious processing systems in the human brain, and context over content is considered to potentially have greater influences on the consumer’s response, even if it may not need to make sense. An important principle of intuitive marketing is that direct attention is optional, not required, to achieve marketing goals. You will find out why by taking the journey of reading this book. The book presents concepts such as attention (and marketing in its absence), processing fluency, consumer preferences, memory, priming, emotions, motivation, goals (connecting with aspirations and identity) and ethics.
But who are intuitive consumers? They are most easily recognizable by what they don’t do, rather than what they do, they are naturally attracted to things that are simple, familiar and comfortable, and are naturally suspicious of novelty. In addition, they are also unaware of the extent to which they are influenced by unconscious processes outside their conscious awareness.
I appreciate the honest view of the misconceptions that are promoted nowadays concerning neuromarketing, but I also welcome the solid arguments that the author presents. Stephen Genco simply defines neuromarketing as a new set of methods and tools for measuring how people respond to marketing, advertising, products, and brands in both conscious and unconscious ways.
The author challenges us to shift our way of conducting marketing and to rethink how consumers think, how consumers’ attention is used - as attention is not a spotlight, to rethink novelty and familiarity, to rethink processing fluency, to rethink preferences, to rethink emotions, to rethink goals and motivations, to rethink learning and memory, to rethink consumer choice and find the shortcuts to consumer preference. I recommend this read to any professional or aspiring marketer, but also to anyone interested in behavioral economics. Due to the wide variety of scientific evidence detailed in this book, it will give them ways to find the right messages or to better understand the consumer.
This is the book that can equally teach you using the overwhelming amount of research, make you enjoy discovering new insights about how we think or make decisions and also see your profits leap if you decide to apply these insights. This book is about the future of marketing, and should prompt marketers to ask new questions and conduct marketing in new ways, shifting from trying to persuade to trying to influence.