Nielsen goes Neuromarketing

I’ve noticed that Neuromarketing as a word still frightens a lot of people. To avoid this I prefer to talk about “unconscious behavior” and “consumers saying one thing but doing another” since it’s easier to relate to.

Let’s be honest. All marketing departments and agencies are talking about it – Don’t trust what consumers say.

Traditional research companies tended to, at first, dismiss Neuromarketing’s claims. Citing the technology’s early stage and a lack of transparency regarding some of the field’s data analysis process.

The global market research industry is going through a diversification boom, both in its traditional service offerings and in the introduction of new methodologies and high tech devices to study consumer choice and behavior.

At Straylight we believe that real insights lies in the combination of new and traditional research methodologies. We’ve been working as pioneers within the field for three years but the ones we see as the most avant-garde are our clients. Some of the largest advertisers in the Nordics are testing their campaigns, print ads, products etc with EEG, Eye-Tracking and Implicit Association Test.

The multi billion dollar market research company Nielsen first bought NeuroFocus and recently followed this up by buying Innerscope. Nielsen is now offering a new division called Nielsen Consumers Neuroscience.

Nielsen’s acquisition of Innerscope, following its acquisition of NeuroFocus, sends a strong signal to the industry that Nielsen sees Neuromarketing techniques as both valid and necessary for a complete understanding of the consumer.

“We’ve been able to compare these techniques with a lot of Nielsen market data and they’ve proved to be valid and they correlate with the behavior of the consumers’” says Joe Willke, President of Nielsen Neuro, to the magazine Neuromarketing Theory & Practice.

Nielsen’s move shows the world that Neuromarketing will be huge and they don’t want to miss out.

The question is: Which company is next in line?