Neuromerchandising: how to win over the subconscious shopper

Have you ever driven a well-known route only to arrive with no real memory of the journey? Have you ever brought a premium product over a cheaper one, despite knowing the ingredients were exactly the same? Chances are you have, but won’t have spent too long dwelling on why. Unless, that is, you are one of a growing number of psychologists, brand owners, packaging technologists and creative agencies now investigating what by its very nature escapes our attention most of the time. Introducing: the subconscious.

Thanks to the likes of 18th-century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the unconscious mind actually needs, for most of us, little introduction. But what may surprise, and perhaps unsettle, is just how powerful it is. And whereas brand owners, retailers and psychologists have dabbled in investigating the effect of the non-rational, emotional part of the brain on buying decisions in the past, it’s suddenly starting to gain much more traction.

As Philip Adcock, MD of shopper research organisation SBXL, explains: “Neuromerchandising has been around a long time but it stopped at the end of the 1980s - these things often go in cycles. And for many years emotion was hard to measure, so professors at universities just worried about the cognitive side. But people have now worked out this emotion is much more powerful than we thought, and we’ve now found ways of measuring it, understanding it and altering it.”

“There’s a wealth of information out there but you wouldn’t know it from walking around a lot of supermarkets”

These new ways of measuring include a whole wealth of technologies, whose creation and fine tuning have undoubtedly played no small part in reviving interest in neuromerchandising. Techniques now being rolled out include skin temperature testing, EEG caps, eye tracking and MMR brain-scanning machines - all ways that you can build a picture of how customers are responding to certain stimuli and how large a part instinctive, unconscious parts of the brain play.

“Our non-conscious is responsible for the majority of our decision making,” says Tony Coates, director of MMR Research. “It is critical that marketers and brand owners account for this in their brand building.”

So how exactly is neuroscience affecting the world of fmcg? Until now, believes Adcock, neuro has been “round the edges” of activity.

“Some brands, such as Diageo, Coke, Unilever and P&G, have big virtual reality units in head offices. Most of that is about testing new store layouts as that’s the cheapest way of testing them - so neuro is round the edges,” he says. “But there are now more companies with little tiny corners that are allowed to go and experiment.”

“Unilever has been thinking about this for some time,” adds Charles Spence, head of the University of Oxford’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory, and a specialist in the design of multisensory foods, products, interfaces, and environments. “They’ve be doing this kind of thing for 20 years.”

At the same time, it’s often smaller start-ups that have the opportunity to play with the packaging more, Spence adds. “Often larger companies like PepsiCo, say, are more resistant to changing their packaging, for example. If someone comes up with a new packaging shape, rather than retooling all of their lines, they’ll just wait until a new player comes along and buy them up. ”

Engage with the primal

Packaging is the area that’s currently witnessing the most activity. Brands are realising that, in ever-more crowded and aggressively stimulating retail environments, grabbing attention isn’t just about the loudest packaging. Much more effective, explains Simon Preece of brand design consultancy Elmwood, is engaging with primal, instinctive human reactions.

The specific brand of neuromerchandising Preece advocates and applies, is centred on ‘biomotive triggers’ - identifying whether a person’s subconscious is responding to instincts hardwired in every human brain, or rather culturally conditioned predispositions. It’s a tricky business. Preece has a strong track record of redesigning packaging to tap into survival impulses. He’s a strong advocate of using fang and claw-like ‘cusp’ shapes, which humans associate with danger, to draw the eye; and of including imagery of creatures shot from above, to engage nurturing instincts. He says that subtly incorporating faces into logos and packaging imagery taps into a primal need to assess others to see if they’re a threat or, almost as importantly, a mate. A notable example of this is the Amazon.

“In nature if something looks at you, you have to look back to see: am I a source of food, or do they fancy me?” explains Preece. A lot of designers have been instinctively applying some neuromerchandising techniques for years, but what is changing is the evolution of this into a consciously applied science.

“It is critical that brand owners account for our non-conscious in their brand building”

Not all activity is focused on on-shelf standout. In fact, some of the most startling recent findings, or rather rediscoveries, relate to how someone experiences a product once they’ve bought it. Sporadic research has been done in the past into how the colour of packaging can have an impact on how it tastes. But this is now being more frequently applied, says Oxford University’s Spence. “Barney’s beer microbrewery in Edinburgh is one example. He’s changing the labels on his beer bottles, adding yellow or green to bring out the citrus notes,” he says. “That has worked just as well as Cheskin said it did anecdotally back in the 1950s, when he reported people thought the 7Up recipe had been made more lemony just because the packaging was 15% more yellow.”

Another area now receiving much more attention is just how much impact senses besides sight have on the subconscious. Again, because it can be rolled out on to packaging, the easiest non-visual sense for brands to engage with currently is texture.

Spence says brands such as Dove and Unilever now place brand loyalty-building information on the indentations of bottles, tapping into the innate impulse to navigate and understand the world. Drinks brands like Heineken and Budweiser are also starting to experiment in this area.

Serious attention is also being placed on scents and sound. Diageo has found, for example, that consumers drinking a glass of single malt in a room with the sound of a lawnmower and birds chirping, reported the whisky to taste “grassier”. And some retailers - Tesco and Asda, anecdotally - are apparently experimenting with changing their store smell from the old classic of baked bread, to the scents of more high-value items. Others, according to Spence and Adcock, are discovering that including subtle sounds like popping in music can, quite incredibly, direct a consumer to buy products, such as crisps, associated with that sound; while playing well-known music slower can make a shopper browse more slowly and buy more.

It sounds like compelling stuff, but there’s a significant obstacle, according to Adcock - the retailers. “The biggest phrase killing retail at the moment is ‘it’s not corporate.’ In a store you’re not allowed to say ’I want to put some Coca-Cola PoS in certain places. It’s against their corporate rules,” he says. “When you see somebody eating a banana, neurons give your brain the experience of eating the banana, ergo you fancy a banana. But show me a supermarket that has a picture of anybody eating food in it.”

Adds Rob Smith, MD at design agency Blacksheep: “There’s a wealth of information out there but you wouldn’t know it to walk around a lot of supermarkets. From an evolutionary, foraging perspective, we’re programmed to look down. But stores more often hang stuff from the ceiling and expect people to stop and read it.”

For neuromerchandising to really take off retailers need to embrace the idea, says Adcock. “Brands are getting ready for when this revolution is allowed to take place. All the troops are on the top of the hill waiting for somebody to say ‘charge.’