Positioning Through Neuromarketing

Recently I was surfing for term neuromarketing on the web. After a great deal of digging, I found simplest definition from Wikipedia.org to restate here:

Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in one's physiological state (heart rate, respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it.

My next search was on to understand the use of neuromarketing beyond color of the packaging, the sound the box makes when shaken, lights used in the store and near display. The question in my mind was how neuromarketing sinks with positioning strategy of a brand. Or is it a merely sales conversion strategy at the moment of truth? And I found a beautiful article written by Anoothi Vishal in Business Standard on August 04, 2009; “Tweaked to please” on positioning strategy of Le Meridian Hotels in India. And I would love to restate some lines from the same article here before discussing positioning through neuromarketing:

When you step in to any of the eight Le Meridien hotels in India, indeed any in the world, you should be able to smell almost as soon as you step into the lobby — emerging through a portal, an art work usually, at the hotel entrance — a peculiar scent of old books and parchment in a library. The scent machines in the lobby, not always visible except to the most discerning of the guests, are there to get you in the “right frame of mind” in sync with the hotel chain’s positioning as a destination for “guests who seek out a new perspective and cultural discovery in their travel experience”.

This is a good example of neuromarketing activity which actually demonstrates the positioning of the brand directly to the target customer. Though this is the example of a hospitality industry, neuromarketing, if properly defined, will work in any kind of industry.