fMRI in neuromarketing

What is fMRI?

Functional Magnetic Resconance Imaging (fMRI) is a neuro-research technique that allows us to track detailed activity of the entire brain. 

fMRI captures both conscious and unconscious emotions and responses happening deep within the brain in order to predict consumer behaviour.

Currently, Neurensics is one of the few companies in the world using this technique.  Specialized neuroscientists are employed at Neurensics to perform this complex imaging technique and analyse its results.

Want to know the details?

How fMRI works

fMRI measures activity deep inside the brain and captures the human subject's (un)conscious emotions and reactions.

The MRI scan uses a strong magnetic field that creates a 3D image of the brain. A fMRI scan captures brain activity through the blood oxygen levels in neurons. Neurons which are active consume more oxygen than inactive ones. If neurons were active, it will be reflected on the scan.

With fMRI, you can capture detailed activity of the entire brain - no other technique is capable of doing this.

The benefits of fMRI

fMRI offers many advantages for predicting consumer behaviour:

1. fMRI is the best neuromarketing technique for predicting consumer behaviour, such as buying behaviour and sales (hard KPIs).
   
   Consumer behaviour is mainly determined by emotions and brain processes, many of which happens under conscious awareness. fMRI is the only technique that measures it all: conscious and unconscious emotions, thoughts and reason.

2. fMRI offers the most complete picture on the effects from marketing communications.
   
   Activity from emotion, cognition, and arousal are distributed across the brain. A complete picture of the consumer can only be made if all these different processes are captured. This is possible with fMRI as it produces a 3D image of the whole brain activity.  

3. fMRI measures the immediate, automatic responses to marketing communications; resembling people's reactions in real life.
   
   In traditional marketing research, test participants are given a prompt and asked to formulate an opinion. This method of surveying opinions leads to post-rationalization - participants verbalize rationalizations for their opinions which may not be related to their own emotions or cognitive process at all. Studies have repeatedly shown that people are unable to accurately report what they think, want or like. In contrast, fMRI captures the emotions and cognitive processes directly by measuring brain activity.

4. Neurensics has made fMRI research scalable and affordable.
   
   Within 5 business days you'll receive more informative results for the same investment as traditional research.

What is fMRI used for?

• Neuro Ad Testing
  fMRI measures the unconscious emotions and reactions activated by your ads.  The measurements are judged against established benchmark for effective advertising. This allows you to optimize your ads and if possible, reduce ad-spending by cutting out unnecessary advertising time. 

• Neuro Concept Testing
  fMRI measures which unconscious emotions and reactions your ad concept activates, allowing you to optimize your ad to maximize ROI before your ad goes live.
  

• NeuroBranding
  With fMRI we can create a Neuro Brand Signature: the pattern of neural associations in the brain of the consumer, unique to your brand. This can be used to test the direct influence from your marketing communications on associations made in your customer's brain. 

• NeuroPackaging
  fMRI measures the influence of your packaging on purchase intention. 

fMRI combined with Eye Tracking and BGI

At Neurensics, we combine fMRI with Eye Tracking and Brain Guided Interpretation (BGI) to obtain additional valuable information.

• Eye Tracking
  To further add value to the fMRI scan, Eye Tracking is used. This measures what people are focused on, for how long and in what order.
  
  It measures which specific elements in a marketing message attracts attention. Eye Tracking uses infrared (IR) sensors that locate and track the position of the eye.
  
  In combination with fMRI, you can get insights to features people are paying attention towards and their experiences.
  

• Brain Guided Interpretation (BGI)
  Similarly, we also use BGI to add value to the fMRI findings. This is an online follow-up study allowing us to add qualitative depth to the fMRI results.
  
  Through BGI, we obtain in-depth information about the activated emotions and reactions and valuable information about explicit KPIs, such as brand linkage and message delivery.