Neuromarketing: From design studio to C-suite

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With shrinking corporate structures and more of us becoming 'Jack and Jills of all trades' than ever before, job descriptions are no longer as limited as they were even a decade ago.

Take marketing, for example. Once purely the domain of marketers, it was their job to come up with a message about the brand and run with it. Their wording, their format, their audience. But technological developments and the rise of social media have drastically changed the face of modern business, so much so that if consumers don’t have an instant response or acknowledgement of their query or complaint online they escalate, taking the message higher up until their get what they’re looking for.

That’s why Colleen Backström, MD of Kaleidoscope response marketing, says, “It’s no longer OK for the CEO to simply send off the company designer, IT guy or marketer on a course, and then not buy-in when they come back and suggest changes based on what they’ve learned in the real world.”

Proving real ROI remains “the bottom-line of the bottom-line” for most executives, but how will management know whether that marketing or design idea is actually a good one if they’ve been cooped up in meetings themselves and not brushing up on what actually penetrates, in a world where consumers are bombarded with more messaging than ever before?

In Backström’s latest ‘neuromarketing for email’ workshop, held in Cape Town on 22 April, she said that’s the reason this year’s impetus is all about bringing neuromarketing to the C-suite.

Making right-brain creativity key to left-brain logic

It’s time for those top-level executives to step out of the boardroom and take control of what's happening in their in-house design studios and external communication agencies.

The only way to do so is to make sure you’re at the forefront of the latest marketing trends and developments – one of which is neuromarketing (which has been slowly making a mark since 1998) and its impact on email communication. That way, even if you’re not a creative yourself, you’ll know at a glance whether your communication department is actually turning out work that’s based on best practice and proven strategy. At the end of the day, the impact of your email marketing really can come down to the colour of the call-to-action button your designer painstakingly selected – and that’s the importance of neuromarketing or the study of choice.

I’ll go into greater detail about specific aspects Backström covered in the workshop in a series of follow-up articles, so watch this space! In the meantime, brush up on the secrets to improve your email marketing success rate Backström shared last year as well as why ignoring neuroscience is at your marketing campaign’s peril. Good news if you missed the Cape Town workshop - you can catch up on 30 June at GIBS in Johannesburg - click here for more.