The Neuroselling Era

In the era of post-pandemic-and-other-disasters pricing inflation, in which -sorry for remembering- we are almost all involved, neuroscience users are not missing the opportunity. Neuromarketing thrived in the last 20 years by promising tools and information that would help customer-oriented covering of needs. So, what’s the thing behind it? And what’s my take on it - if anybody cares?

Roughly defined in my own words as an early ‘retired’ neuroscientist and dedicated learner, neuromarketing would quickly sound like ‘applying the technology of neuroscience to selling’. In other words: neuroscience tools, such as fMRI –functional magnetic resonance imaging– EEG, eye and heartbeat tracking, etc., may sound promising by the hype. The recent knowledge of how the brain works is another tool that can be applied to sell things to people. But the thing is that what is behind here is older than the wheel discovery.

But wait: there is another main discovery we know since the 90s. Do you remember Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence, in which he spreads the word ‘emotion’ for the first time worldwide? He made us conscious that we make decisions based on emotions. Damn… we should have known that! Just because – dramatic pause – SELLING TROUGH EMOTIONS IS THE OLDEST EVER WAY OF SELLING IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN BEINGS. Dot.

A rough historical example would be the following: imagine the era of the Ancient Empires - Greece, Rome, Egypt, or any other dealing with their stuff across the Mediterranean Sea.  Imagine Phoenicians -who were also there, with their boats trading back and forth the sea, doing their business, etc. Then a group of traders enters the first village in the harbour of a Greek island and they try to get food, drinks and goods in exchange for their ‘unique-in-the-world’ anti-hair loss lotion. 

Gotcha. That hits DIRECTLY on a man’s emotions, just because one of the basic expressions of the human condition is love & sex, which means, in biological terms, getting a couple and being able to reproduce. Thus, love & sex, or hitting low passions of the human condition, has been the oldest and most effective way of selling. So useful that nowadays it’s being overexploited.

To close this short essay, my opinion lies on the idea that neuroscience will not report anything new to marketing, besides huge investments in resources, just to – in the best of cases – marginally improve sales in a highly competitive world. Otherwise, we could better think about how to invest resources to get smarter, human-friendly, and more sustainable economics.

As Julius Caesar said, Alea jacta est. 

And as the Pharaohs’ cook said, ‘Where do these carrots come from? Oh no, again that Phoenician…’

Marcel