Neuromarketing For Dummies

Chapter 2

What We Know Now That We Didn’t Know Then

In This Chapter

Understanding how consumer behavior has been viewed and tested for years

Discovering how people perceive and interpret the world around them

Thinking about people as intuitive consumers, not rational consumers

Understanding neuromarketing means accepting some radical new ideas that are very different from traditional ways of thinking about consumers, marketing, and advertising. Neuromarketing asks marketing professionals to look at what they do in a very different way.

In this chapter, we give you all the basics you need to know about the old way of thinking about thinking, and the new way that led to neuromarketing. We start by looking at advertising, because advertising research was the first type of marketing research to appear. We review how people have looked at advertising for years, so you have a sense of how this kind of research developed. We show that this research was based on a picture of how the consumer thought and made decisions, called the rational consumer model. Then we show you what brain science has discovered about how people actually perceive and interpret the world — because when you understand ...