NeuroFocus has distilled and compiled its findings into 67 key points, or "best practices", designed to serve as a roadmap for ensuring that visual communications on a screen match what the brain desires to see the most, and what it responds to the best.
NeuroFocus's findings are broken out into eleven categories, each related to various individual forms of imagery and information that appear on screens:
NeuroFocus's findings are broken out into eleven categories, each related to various individual forms of imagery and information that appear on screens:
- Positioning of imagery
- Positioning of semantics and quantitative information
- Positioning of logos and symbols
- Use of pop-out paradigms
- Use and positioning of animation
- Use of occlusion
- Stroop effects
- Use of motion, novelty, error and ambiguity
- Puzzle resolution
- Locus of eye movements on the screen
- Partitioning of screens
"In very practical terms, what this new research provides to companies and individuals who create messages for display on any type of screens are expert guidelines. For example: if you are showing your company's logo, it's critical to know exactly where on the screen is the best place to put it. But we go beyond that, to make specific recommendations on how to make the presentation of your logo even more effective," [Dr. A. K. Pradeep, NeuroFocus's founder and chief executive officer] said.
Our take:
Neuromarketing is rapidly gaining in popularity as marketers struggle to connect with ever more media savvy (and wary) consumers. While the name conjures numerous ethical and moral implications, the state of today's technology and the company's requirement that all research subjects be fully aware that their habits are being studied essentially reduces the new field's techniques to nothing more than a series of extremely detail-oriented behavioral study. That's a good thing both because neuromarketing does provide details that would be hard if not impossible to realize otherwise, and because it neatly side-steps those people who argue that we should never be studied covertly when the sole purpose of the gathered knowledge is to help marketers.
In addition, marketing messages optimized according to the discovered guidelines can actually help media wary shoppers, since they (theoretically) should be more targeted and use less subversive means and annoying gimmicks to get their point across. Whether this will lead to reduced media clutter or the same amount of clutter with better content remains to be seen, but on the balance neuromarketing should be good for the industry.
Interestingly, many of the report's findings mirror our own research on digital signage content creation, despite the fact that our own research methods were much more low-tech.
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