Giulia Panozzo: Fundamentals of Neuromarketing: How Brains Decide - and Brands Win

This talk explores the intersection of neuroscience and marketing, primarily focusing on neuromarketing. The speaker discusses how implicit decision-making influences user behavior and how understanding this can improve marketing strategies. They highlight the importance of removing friction points in the user experience and employ various tools, including biometrics, EEG, and eye-tracking, to analyze user responses to stimuli. The session also covers cognitive biases and heuristics that affect decision-making, emphasizing the need for relevancy and emotional connection in marketing to foster trust and drive conversions. Ultimately, the speaker advocates for a user-centered approach to create meaningful interactions in a highly stimulating digital environment.

That's great. Thank you for that. However, before that probably there were a thousand decisions that you made without even being aware that you were making a decision. And that's what happens to us every day. Every day we walk around the world and we make decisions that we're not even aware we're taking. So today, for example, you decide to have breakfast. You decide to come here. And maybe

you decide to scroll on socials. You clicked on something. All of those are decisions that are pretty much implicit, right? So some of these decisions are determined by habit, by what we do every day. Some of them are um are driven by our motivations. Some of them actually are driven by external stimuli and external pressures. So a lot of them though are implicit are preconcious and that's

exactly what we're talking about today. So some of those decisions whether they were implicit or explicit led me to my own hometown in Italy uh to study neuroscience and then going to London um to um work in a neuroscience lab at Goldman University and then I did a 180 on my career and I ended up in marketing and I ended up doing SEO search engine optimization and

while everyone was talking to me about the algorithm I was always drawn to the user and what the was thinking when they were you know doing a search and I think this is a place now where we are where we all are because we know that now with the age of AI there's a lot of focus on human behavior [snorts] however there's the misconcept behavior is what

we see but there's so much more that goes on below the surface that we can isolate with neuromarketing so what is neuromarketing neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience to marketing. So essentially we go and study what the brain does when we make a decision when we um experience something and we try to apply to marketing for better ROI. um it sits at the intersection between neuroscience, marketing,

economics and sometimes you will see the term consumer neuroscience that's the the academic application and then when uh when we take research and we apply it to a brand for example that's when neuromarketing um comes into action. So the questions that we try to answer with neuromarketing are for example how to frame certain element within the page. So inform design, inform pricing stat strategies, uh understand how

people respond to certain stimuli before they're even aware of what they feel or what they perceive. And this can lead to a number of outcomes of course and I also want to make a caveat of what it's not because we do get a bad reputation. A lot of time neuromarketing is used in the same context as you know brain hacking or manipulation and that's not what we

want to do. There's ethical standards that we want to comply by when we have to work with humans. It's not encouraging dark patterns. We are not leading users to do something that they don't want to do. So what do we do in practice? My mission as a neuroscientist in marketing is actually to remove elements of frictions and lead seamlessly the users to an outcome that they wanted

to reach anyway. And I think this is specifically important now because we live in a world that's full of stimuli. Not only the external stimuli that we perceive every day as part of our normal experience with the word, but also in the digital space where we have so many, you know, um so many entry points to an experience or many exit points. And when we when we

do a search, when we experience something within the digital environment, there there is this um um you know this concept of high cognitive load. When we have too many things to explore, it leads to decision fatigue. So that leads to abandonment. And that's exactly the reason why we want to remove frustrations before before they even uh become apparent to the user. So what do we actually measure?

We use a number of tools uh and essentially we try to um bring together the puzzle not only determining what users need because I think this is what traditional marketing research also informs but we also go and look at how people decide and how they decide within different stages of the journey. As I mentioned we use different tools specifically I specialize in biometrics. So I use heart

rate variability and electromal response. This is to isolate the nervous system response to certain stimuli. How we feel, our gut reaction uh in response to certain stimuli. We also use EEG and fMRI. So these are measures that allow us to see what networks within the brain are activated at what specific time in relation to certain events that we come into contact with. We use quite a lot

of eye tracking as well. uh there was a great talk by Felix yesterday about eyetracking and this is great to isolate visual spatial attention so to understand what users see but also what they don't see and what doesn't get processed and finally we also look at implicit associations at what users think before they're even aware that they're thinking that particular thing. So these all of these things

can help us uncover implicit processes that happen beyond below the surface. And what we aim to master really is understanding how to gather attention and how to foster a connection which is paramount in today's age because I think we're all familiar with this. How many of you have seen this before? Hopefully everyone. [laughter] So we're moving from a marketing funnel now to a marketing lobby because there's

so many entry points but there's so many exit points at every stage. So capturing the attention in today's age is paramount is the first gateway to get a user. So how do we do it? As we mentioned today's age is quite hard of stimuli. They're all competing for attention. So when we do a search, we have so many things that that we can focus on, but we

cannot realistically focus on all of them and evaluate all options. So it can become quite overwhelming to decide what to focus on. And the way that we normally process information and we decide to select some information for further processing while ignoring everything else that goes that goes on is a process called selective attention. And it can be driven by different things. There's two parallel processes that can

drive selective attention and bring something into focus. One is the one that we are probably most familiar with which is something called indogenous orienting. This is when we have a motivation, a goal that allows us and that drives us actually to focus on a certain task or a certain stimulus. But the one that we're going to focus on today, especially in the first part, is a process

called exogenous orienting, which is when the attention is driven by something that's external to us. Something that's related to the perceptual features of the object. So, for example, a loud sound or a bright light. If now you're paying attention to my presentation, but the alarm goes off, probably that captures your attention, too. And that's something that's not task relevant. It's something that's related to the perceptual um

experience that you're having. So I want to focus on these ones because these are the ones that we can play with when we want to f when we want to draw the attention to us especially when you know a a user is not necessarily already paying attention to us and they're already engaged in a task. So the first one is relevancy. Relevancy is the the very first

gateway to uh to get attention. Have you heard about the cocktail party effect? So the cocket party effect um it's an example to show relevancy and salency specifically. So think about you know after the conference you're having a drink with your colleagues and you're engaging this very meaningful and engaging conversation and then somebody on the other side of the room mentions your name and you're like wait

a second. So your attention goes directly to that source of conversation and maybe your friend hasn't even noticed because it's not relevant to them but it's very relevant to you. So naturally we know that we need to be relevant but this has to do with hyperpersonalization as well of the experience. We need to understand what users want to see and what they need at a certain point

so that we can be relevant even when they're already engaged in a task, even when they're doom scrolling because relevancy again is the first gateway to attention. But there's so much more that we can use as well. Movement is a big one. I mean, I I think it's a shared experience when I'm reading my emails and then a Slack message comes on and I keep on like

going back to the Slack message. So, I had to deactivate it actually because it was quite distracting. But I think we can all relate to this aggressive popups and all of that. Obviously, we don't want to disrupt the experience, but when we want to attract the experience, um, especially in social media when the attention span is quite bad and quite short, we use visual hooks. We use

movement to capture and retain the attention because we do have pretty much three seconds to get the attention. And then whatever doesn't get the attention doesn't get engaged with and doesn't get served. Another thing that that is quite good in catching the attention is anything that stands out. Anything that deviates from the norm because our brains take everything that we experience, every learning and puts them into

patterns that we can recognize. And we're great at recognizing patterns and filling in gaps. So we know that this says swimming pool. H unless your childhood has been particularly problematic. Um but it also makes us quite attuned to spotting outliers because when something doesn't match the pattern, when something goes outside the pattern, then it's something that catches the attention automatically which can drive CTRs as well. There's

a lot of tests on this and this is quite you know basic if you want. And the interesting thing about it though is that violation of expectancy, anything that stands out is not only you know um something that is a marketing gimmick is actually related to how we experience um how we experience violation of expectancy within our brain. So um violation of expectancy is mirrored in EEG

readings. So whenever we go and measure the activation of uh the brain, there's certain activation patterns specifically for anything that stands out. So we call this um well in this case we call them mismatch negativity. Anything that's related to a particular event is called ERP. So event related potential. So there is to go back a little there are specific patterns um that are common to most of

the population when we experience certain events. One of these is essentially the violation of expectancy. So anything that stands out and it can be on the auditory level. It can be on the visual domain. So anything that stands out visually. But where I want to put your attention is we can get something to catch our attention and to produce a certain alarm uh bell into our brain

with um at the semantic level with something that doesn't match the context. Not only when we present for example an unconventional ending to um to a sentence that people expect to read a certain way but also when we put within an ad. These ensures an attentional shift because it stands out. They have to do a double take and our brain essentially you know um brings in these

patterns. Another pattern that we notice that has a preferential way to be um to be um processed is phases. So there is this other ERP that's called the N170. It's called like that because it presents itself as a negative deflection as we see here. A negative deflection 170 milliseconds after the presentation of faces. Now 170 milliseconds is a very short time. It means that we have essentially

we we are processing faces straight away [snorts] and we know that faces are powerful and it it responds not only to faces that are biological faces that look like us but it responds also to faceike configuration which means that emojis are a great way as well to um to determine this pattern. Uh, emojis have shown to um modulate attention and also the way that we feel about

a certain uh a certain stimulus and to drive CTRs. Naturally, emotions are emojis are quite a tricky one if it doesn't really match your um your context or if it doesn't really match your industry. So, be careful. But those are a great way to attract the attention. And when we talk about biological faces, we have seen from eyetracking studies that when we have a face within the

presentation of a product, not only the only presence of the face modulates the attention, the memorization and the attitude, but also when the gaze is directed towards a product, all of these things come into play even better because we display patterns of shared attention. We love So to recap, what captures your attention? Relevancy is one elements that violate expectations. Movement, sound, faces, and faceelike configuration. And this

is all great, but we're just at the very early stages here. Right here, you just are looking to get somebody to click through. So, how do you actually drive somebody to make a decision? Because making decisions, especially as a user, is a hard work. Now, [snorts] we've established that we can grab the attention with anything, even when somebody is essentially already um already focused on a task,

but when they're already engaged in a task, then they all have all of these things to to think about already and it can be quite hard to focus on one specifically because we're not aided by the fact that when we have so many stimuli and our attention span is getting shorter, [snorts] these changes as a function of how we're presented with stimuli. So there was this study

that was quite good uh that looked at retention of intention across groups that were um that were seeing either Tik Tok videos, so short form videos or YouTube videos. And what they noticed is that when they told people, okay, you got to retain these actions. So remember that you have to, you know, write this sentence after watching this video. um they noticed that whenever the group was

watching Tik Tok videos they were much less likely to retain that um that intention which means that every time we consume something on social media as well for users it's much harder to even remember what they came to social media in the first place with. So a lot of the time they will rely on making decisions with built-in mental shortcuts um which are cognitive biases and uristics.

These are ways that we make decisions without using up all of our power because we don't have all the cognitive resources that are needed to process everything around us, evaluate all options and evaluate uh every outcome. So we just use shortcuts essentially. The first one is cognitive biases which I mean I think they're quite common in marketing. You hear about them a lot. We refer to cognitive

biases as systematic errors in thinking that affect the way that we process information. But also we make judgments and I think these are you know quite exploited sometime and it feels like it might be a um you know a book of trick tips and tricks but it's not really because they're also context dependent and they're also person dependent. Not all of us use the same biases. It

depends on our experience. So I hate saying like oh exploit cognitive biases because you can reach a user anyway. I'm like not really a user has agency. Of course, they don't have all the power in the world to make decisions that are super great at every point, but they will have agency and the more they get um they get tricked by uh you using and exploiting cognitive

biases, the more they will be aware of it. So, just use carefully and use them inance of that more than like to trick them into I'm not going to go through all of them of course because it's more than 150 but this is how many have been isolated. They are uh related to different domain. So we use cognitive biases when for example we have too much information

that we want to filter or when there's not enough information and we need to fill in the gaps or when we have an action to make fast or or when we want to remember something but obviously we cannot remember anything. So I'm going to focus on a few of them only that I think are particular pervasive of the marketing experience but just bear in mind that you

can go down your own rabbit hole. The first one is called serial position effect. This has to do with the way that we present information on a website for example or in copy. So we are much more prone to given a list or given a series of arguments to remember what comes first and last. uh and this doesn't only go for how we see and remember information.

So whenever we see for example marketing copy you know the message has to be the first one and then DTI has got to recall. It doesn't only have to do with the way that we perceive it. It also has to do with the way that we make decision based on it because whatever we see first as well is what we um uh what we essentially use as

a baseline to evaluate all of the other option. This is called anchoring effect. So this is something that is quite useful in guiding how we um frame elements within the page. And I think a really good example and something that you know comes up quite a lot is when people put the most expensive item first because then they're like well everything else then is going to look

like a good deal. And I think this is a great actually um a great example of something that has been also switched to match the context and the expectation of a user in a different country because in n um the English of course is left to right. So the first item is on the left but Arabic speakers normally go normally read um read right to left. So

this has been switched to match that experience which I thought was quite um quite well informed. As humans, we're also more prone to go for something that stays in the middle. So whenever we have, you know, the biggest price at the beginning, we tend to favor something that stays in the middle, even if it doesn't really match what, you know, our budget was and it's a bit

more expensive. So this is another one that informs the way we make decisions. And because we're talking about pricing, there's also numerical biases that we employ when we have to judge, you know, savings. For example, there's two sub effects. Something called the distance effect, uh something called the size effect. I'm not going to go too much in detail about them because what you need to remember anyway

is that as numbers become bigger, it's much harder to be fast and accurate in judging their difference. So, if I was to show you this, you know, you have a sofa that costs £1,700. Which one would you click on? Save 34% or save 50 581 on your sofa. Let's have a show hand for the first one. Okay. And how about the other one? Yeah. So, it's actually

the same price. Like, it's literally the same saving. But a lot of people are much faster and accurate at saying that this is, you know, at judging the difference between 34 and 100. And this looks much higher because we're slower at processing bigger numbers. So a lot of the time you will see bigger numbers on savings because that's what feels better. That's what we're not so fast

at judging accurately. So it will be exploited in marketing when they tell you, "Yeah, use the bigger number because then it looks like you're saving more because we're not so good at judging the difference than then." But whenever you do that, whenever you trick your users into thinking that they're saving more than they actually are, you might fall victim to this yourself um because they will end

on remembering the portion where they felt tricked and not come back to you. And this is part of another bias called the negativity bias. we tend to focus on the negative part of an experience much more than the positive part even if the positives outweigh it. Um, for example, you know, you have a savings page, you get to it, and then the landing page is actually broken.

And are you going to go back to it? Probably not because you're like, well, was broken before, probably will be broken next time as well. So, why do I mention this? Because negativity is great to catch the attention and a lot of people exploit it. There was this study that looked at thousands of CTRs, uh, thousands of, um, headlines, and CTRs were consistently higher for the CTRs

that contain negative words. And this has to do with our own, you know, evolutionary need to be very aware of threats, which was great when we were, you know, chased by lions, but probably now in the digital space, not so much anymore. But we still um, we still fall victim to this bias and we still click on it. But why do I mention it? Why why do

you need to employ it then if you like if I'm telling you please don't use it don't overuse it because you need to be aware of the small inconveniences that then will disrupt the user journey even when they're so engaged in the task and if they're even when they got so far as the checkout page. So this is a study that comes out every year by Bayard

and they isolate all of the reasons why people abandon a checkout and bear in mind that a lot of these are preventable. They're preventable if you're proactive rather than reactive. So my question, my um suggestion, whatever your department is, whatever your function is, work cross functionally so that you can get those um fragmented experiences into one place. Get into your search console, look at the queries, look

at Google Analytics where the journey gets uh stopped. Also go and talk to your UX team, look at user interviews, go to the CX logs, see what users normally complain about. But it doesn't only go with, you know, existing users or existing people that convert already. It also has to do with the experiences that are um that are cut short before people even engage with you. So

look at Reddit, for example, if you want to isolate blockers at the pre- purchase stage because you can find a gold mine there. And the last one is Microsoft Clarity. That's something that even if you don't have eye tracking, obviously eye tracking looks at the gaze, but this can give you scroll paths and heat maps that are based on behavior that even though it's, you know, it's

explicit behavior, it can give you a window into what's happening below the surface. And finally, when we u talk about biases, confirmation bias is one that is quite important to establish because we consume and interpret information based on what aligns with our existing beliefs. H why do I mention that? because it's really powerful in driving perception as well. If we believe something, we will feel something. We

So, for example, in this study, um they mislabeled prices or like they put price labels that didn't match the actual price of the wines and consistently when people were like were asked what wine was best or what wine tasted best, the more expensive one always got, you know, the first place. Although it wasn't actually the more expensive one, but people bu wanted to believe that that was

the bet best one because it was the most expensive expensive. [snorts] So whatever people think about your brand will determine what they're going to believe about you know anything that you provide. So that's the reason why we use implicit association testing for example to find out what are implicit beliefs that people come to the search with or to the experience within your So this is essentially we

we cover the biases that look um at what happens below the surface when we make a decision. So all the biases are more are closer to you know when we do a decision mindlessly. But what about the overt decisions that we take when we're actually evaluating options? So at this point we're moving toward evaluating you know options within the page. For example if we have already done

a click we use shortcuts that are called uristics. Um a uristic is a again a mental shortcut or a rule of thumb that allows us to make a decision that's good enough just to go on with our day because again we cannot you know look at absolutely everything and look at every option and have a judgment about them all. So I'm going to tell you a story

about this one. So I went to another conference once and they were giving away free t-shirts. So I'm I suck at decision- making. Like I really really I'm really bad. So I had troubles choosing between two one two t-shirts. One was this one and there was another one. And after creating a queue at the stand, the lady was like, "Look, this is the most popular." Okay, this

is limited edition. Fine. And then if you really want to change it at the end of the day, I'm here. You can change it for free. Okay, fine. Sold it. Why did she sell me on this? Because she employed the, you know, the technique of engaging with my uristics. what I was most likely basing my decisions on. She employs social proof because I wanted to feel validated

in my choice. She employs scarcity making me feel like I was missing out on an opportunity. We do tend to uh assign more value to something I perceived as running out and risk aversion as well. When we are given two options, most times we tend to go for the one that presents the less amount of risks even when it gives us not the best return. So, that's

the reason like I never thought I had to do it, but I had to battle with brands because they didn't want to put a free return option when they did have it. Uh, and they were losing customers, but they didn't want to reinforce that people could actually uh return the items. So, do with that what you will. So, all of these uristics made me feel something because

we're emotional creatures. We want to feel validated. We want to feel safe. And this is a theme that will come back as well. And bear in mind here though that we talked about cognitive bias and uristics as a way to, you know, grab the attention and drive a user towards an action that they were most likely going to get to anyway and to sort of aid their

decision- making. But bear in mind that as their personal investment changes, as it becomes bigger, they're much more likely to make decisions that are not based on the quantity of arguments that we present. So all of the uristics and biases that we present for example, but they're much based on the quality of arguments. So if we actually deliver on the promise. So that's the reason why I

bring it up because you know uristics and biases give you a window into trying to get the attention and to start a connection. But real connection is actually foster with you know an actual effort to get to the user. So how do we get to the user? Familiarity heristic is another one that I want to mention because I think this beats all of the uristics and goes

already into the portion that where it's no longer just a marketing gimmick. It's when we favor information um or like when we favor an option that we have already employed something that has worked with us before then we're just going to go and you know choose it again. So I'm Italian so anytime I go to Tesco I don't go for the Tesco ones. I go for the

Italian brand that you know cost a little more but it's what I based my childhood on. So it's not only a reason like it's not efficient just because it allows us to save time because obviously if we go for something that has worked before we cut down all of the decision making that's you know um that we we otherwise use to make a decision and evaluate other

options. But it has it has its own biological marker. We feel a certain way about familiar brands and familiar options. We feel the same way as we feel for you know familiar faces and our friends and our family. So familiarity is a really powerful thing to foster. And let me tell you something that's something that machine learning cannot take from us yet. Any Italians here other than

me? Okay. So you will know that um fear of God the you know this has been translated literally like fear of God um and fear of God is like um you know a brand but here it was which is like very yeah very weird in the title but also whenever there's something that doesn't you know you want to go international um but you're taking shortcuts you're not

fostering that feeling of familiarity and I think this is actually something that they tried to do when they redesigned the FedEx logo. So, if you look at these one, um, and if you are only noticing the arrow now, you're not the first one because I noticed only when I looked at this study, but FedEx had to re-ransate their logo into Arabic. And when they did so, you

can say you can see that the arrow has been moved to match the context of an Arabic speaker. So, the the direction is right to left. However, in doing so, they broken down the grammar. As far as I understand, I don't speak Arabic, but that's what um what fragmented the experience. So, good effort, but not a genuine connection yet because it still feels strange. What can you

do to foster familiarity? Well, when you go international, for example, you can focus on really being thorough with your internationalization. It doesn't only matter in terms of including the currency, the correct currency, the measurements, the CTA, and the microcopy. It also has to do with making sure that you don't go out with a, you know, back to school campaign in the US at the same time as

the as Spain for example because it's not going to be at the same time. It also has to do with making sure that you connect users with their local uh customer service if if you can and also making sure that you address content format preferences. people in Germany might like videos more than for example uh Italians who like to read better or like to to consume their

information in um text and that's just anidal I have not done studies on that um also consider reading patterns as we mentioned like they're quite um they're and another thing that makes us feel safe is as I mentioned peer validation so how many of you like these crocs okay Great. You're validated by a lot of people who got upset when they ran out. So to be honest,

if today you walked in and everyone was wearing Crocs, I would be like, "Wait, am I missing out on something?" And that's because, as I like to say, the brain is socially wired. We look for peer validation because we had like our brains have got a preferential way to you know connect with other people in the sense that when we perform an action there have been uh

studies that have isolated um [snorts] um an automatic um an automatic tendency to imitate that behavior. So there are theories on the mirror system networks and simulation. But whenever we see somebody performing an action and that action has a social cue, that tendency to imitate actually becomes a tendency to complete the action in a social way. And we ran a study in 2012 where we looked exactly

at that. And we could see that we were looking at the motor cortex activation and we were seeing that whenever somebody was looking at an act or performing an action, we could see exa exactly the same thing. We could see even if the person the person observing wasn't actually performing that action, we could see that the motor cortex was activating in the same way. But when that

action became from lifting for example my uh my clicker to giving it to you then you know that action observed in my interlocutor became the action that was needed to complete that so that's the reason why I say that we're socially wired we're much more likely to feel safe in something that's validated by our peers and that's the reason why also we look when we display patterns

of shared attention [snorts] and this goes back in evolution As far as fish, if you place one single fish in a tank, they will swim to the group with the highest where the biggest biggest amount of fish is. Um, we do the same really. We just conform to whatever behavior we feel like. So that's the reason why reviews are great, UGC, all of this thing we know.

But what's the next challenge? Can you scale it with AI? Because I feel like that's a question that I get a lot. Can you foster a real connection and UGC with AI now that AI is so realistic? Well, technically great idea for scaling, but not so much when humans still look for authenticity. There was this study done by the University of Bologna where they looked at uh

the interaction with chatbots and they did notice actually that the more the chatbot looked human, the more people were likely to engage with it and share personal information and also to um consider it competent. However, when I put it to the test with when uh I wanted to test, you know, hyper realism, it still gave me a result that was quite skewed in favor of human faces.

So, I went and looked at the electrodermma response between AI faces and human faces where I had obviously uncanny so like really AI faces and then hyperrealistic faces and consistently human faces got the highest response. we have a preferential activation for um human faces still even when the amount of realism is high. Obviously like if we look at this this is the human face this is the

um hyperrealistic face and this was what I consider uncanny. So h now before we approach the end um I want to ask you two questions. Which one is a campaign that stayed with you and you still remember and why? Does anybody want to answer that? Yes. I still remember the Dolce Gabbana campaign with the spaghetti. They were trying to eat spaghetti with chopsticks and like they were

into uh mediatic problem because uh for Chinese people it was considered to be racist. >> It was pizza not >> Oh yes, pizza. Pizza. Yeah. >> Killed their brand 20 years. >> Yeah. Why do you remember that? >> Probably because of the consequences of their action. Yeah, we tend to remember campaigns for how they make us feel really. Obviously, this was quite a controversial one. Made somebody

feel, you know, quite heated. It made us feel heated as a group. Um, so we do tend to employ quite a lot of our decision- making with emotions. There is this common sentence that says people make decisions emotionally and then they justify them rationally, which is, you know, mostly true for some things. And it's based on this theory by the mazium that talks about the summatic marker

hypothesis. So sometimes we tend to make decisions that are based on gut reactions. Emotional states guide our choices and that's particularly true when we have to make fast decisions. Um and these are some of the things that we can play with in order to foster a We do. I mean, if you're familiar with Pixar and with Inside Out, this is probably the way that you remember the

six basic emotions. Although in the movie they were five, but this is quite a popular theory that is now not so accurate anymore. But essentially, it tells us that we all have six basic emotions that are our way to connect with a user. So, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Now though we are moving towards a different direction where we cannot ignore the personal context anymore.

We cannot ignore the values that everyone um experiences. So this I had to do to learn the hard way because I was running another study always with electromal activity. So I was looking at the nervous system activation when I was showing different videos and my idea was to see if there was a difference in the way the video was produced. So if the video was human, for

example, or if the video was animated, I was supposed to see different things. And to be honest, it didn't really work out. Um, I did get very inconsistent results. And the thing is that the activation for, for example, the PNG campaign, which was one that I consider particularly emotional, did come through, but it came through for the wrong reason. Like when I went and looked at the

questioner that I had given my participants, they didn't react. They didn't have a particular activation because they connected with the brand or like the because they connected with the message, but because they hated the brand. They were attaching their own sentiments about the brand beyond how the content was produced and beyond what the message was saying. The same thing went for the animated one. I was showing

the per an excerpt from the um Polar Express and I saw a massive activation in somebody's uh reading and I was like, why is that? And it was because it reminded them of childhood and looking and watching the movie when they were at home. So it's paramount to use to um it's paramount that we understand our users inside out. Not only what they need, how they make

decisions, but also what expectations they came they come to us with and what emotional states they're in. There's ways to isolate some of these. You can isolate existing biases in queries even when you don't need to uh use you know particular um particular neuromarketing tools and you can also isolate particular emotional states there's words that give away what the emotional state that makes the decision is and

the reason why I hammer on on emotions is that because if you do produce a positive emotion even when you maybe have screwed up a little you can still produce a positive emotion and it's your gateway to creating trust and trust is paramount to um have a customer come back. So, I'm going to close before the takeaways. I'm going to close on this one, which is an

old tweet, but I think it's still a funny one. It says, "Fellas, don't be afraid to chase a girl if she's got a boyfriend. If she's single, you're competing with 20 other guys. If she's dating somebody, you're only competing with one." Where's Martha? I mean, in theory, in theory, yes, that's true, right? But if you think about it, [snorts] whether you're talking about a boyfriend or a

brand, if you have spent time, you know, getting to know them, getting to know their flaws, getting to know, you know, their good sides and creating an emotional experiences. Do we really think that the other 20 dudes have a fair competition? No. So that's the reason why as a brand you need to connect and create an emotional experience with your user. So what practical steps can you

take there to stand out? Don't do everything your competitors do. Especially at the first stages, you have to find a way to stand out because that what gets you the attention. Know your audience inside out and where they are in the journey. Get insights in via queries. Get to know what they need, what they expect. Build dashboards that take into account quantitative and qualitative data because that's

going to give you a full window into what they think and what they expect to see. also work crossf functionally to make the experience a good one across the entire thing because if you work in silos, you're going going to only have one part of the journey that's um good for the user. And finally, bear in mind that people do want to trust you. They want to

choose you. So don't make it hard for them. If you want to work with me or to learn more, these are my contacts. Thank you so much and I'll see you outside. [applause] >> [applause]