Why do you remember certain brands? The sound of a Coke bottle bursting, the way an iPhone appears, or the scent of fries from McDonald’s might all be it. That pull isn’t random. Neuromarketing is at work.
This field of study looks at how the brain responds to ads, goods, and events. It doesn’t attempt to estimate what individuals enjoy; instead, it keeps a watch on their eye movements, brain waves, and even subtle changes in their facial expressions.
What Is Neuromarketing?
Brain science, psychology, and business are all used together in neuromarketing to find out what really makes people buy. It doesn’t just ask what you think about an ad; it also looks at your brain messages, your eyes, and your heartbeat.
Traditional analytics tell companies what you clicked. Neuromarketing shows what emotion made you click. That’s a huge difference.
What Is Neuromarketing Used For?
Brands use these tools for a wide range of things:
- Testing ads before launch.
- Designing packaging that grabs attention.
- Finding out what feelings people connect with a logo.
- Laying out stores so people spend more.
- Crafting stories that hit emotional triggers.
- All of this leads to better experiences and higher sales.
All of these translate into a better user experience and higher sales.
Benefits of Neuromarketing (Quick Overview)
When companies know what really stirs emotions, they can:
- Make ads that stick.
- Raise conversion rates.
- Win stronger loyalty.
- Stand out against rivals.
- Build positive associations.
- Increase return on investment.
In short, they don’t just sell. They build deep connections.
Brands Leading the Way
Now let’s see how five well-known businesses are using these tools.
#1 Coca-Cola: The Original Brain Hack
Essentially, Coca-Cola created neuromarketing before anyone could think up a name for it. Everything changed after a famous 2004 paper by Baylor’s Read Montague (McClure et al., “Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks,” Neuron, 2004). Here’s what they did: They provided people with Coca-Cola and Pepsi in an fMRI machine. Blind taste test? People preferred Pepsi — their brain’s pleasure center (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) was more activated for Pepsi.
But when they knew they were drinking Coke everything changed. Your hippocampus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex went off the rails – the areas of your brain that process memory and higher level thinking. Coke wasn’t winning on taste.
It was a winning battle because your brain was literally remembering every Christmas commercial, every polar bear, every “share a Coke” scene you had ever seen. The brand had hijacked memory centres in order to override actual taste preference. The study’s findings were even wilder: The brains of Coke drinkers responded the same as someone recalling a good feeling from childhood.
Pepsi was just soda. Coke was nostalgia in a bottle. Subsequent research done in 2008 found that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex could not be swayed by the Coke brand – they chose based on taste only, preferring Pepsi (Koenigs & Tranel, “Prefrontal cortex damage abolishes brand-cued changes in cola preference”, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2008). Your brain must be in tact for branding to work. Coca-Cola still has a wide use for neuromarketing. Their new eye-tracking research informs their shelfing, packaging re-designs, and those personalized bottles weren’t an arbitrary decision – brain scans showed people’s reward centers were lit up harder when they saw their own name.
#2 Apple: Your Brain Thinks It’s Family
Apple users’ brains literally treat iPhones like family members. Not metaphorically – literally.
In 2011, neuroscientist Michael Platt compared Apple and Samsung users’ brain activity in response to good and bad news about both brands using fMRI machinery. Apple users identified with the Apple news just as they identified with news about their own family. Bad Apple stories stimulated pain centers. Good news increased activity in reward centers.
Samsung users? Nothing. No emotional response to the news from Samsung. But get this – they demonstrated what is known as “reverse empathy” for Apple. Good Apple news stimulated their pain centers. Bad Apple news activated their reward centers. Samsung users were practically only Samsung users because they hated Apple.
Steve Jobs knew this years ago before the scans proved it. In 1997 Apple exec John Sculley remarked about Apple: “Apple was a marketing company. It was the marketing company of the decade. Jobs didn’t sell computers – he sold to be a member of a tribe.
The dopamine hits are very carefully designed. The new phone announcements with controlled leaks, the ‘one more thing’ moments, artificial scarcity – all purposefully activated the same brain chemicals as cocaine. Seriously. A Duke University study found that simply being exposed to the Apple logo (compared to IBM) caused people to perform better on creative tasks: the brand literally altered the way their brain processed information.
Apple Stores are neurological playrooms. Because of the open layouts, there is reduced cognitive load. Touching the whole thing activates the whole brain trust response. The Genius Bar installation is modeled on social bonding situations. A 2020 study concluded that the minimalist design aesthetic has measurable stress-reducing and focus-enhancing effects on brain chemicals, specifically stress hormones and focus neurotransmitters.
That $1,000 phone isn’t overpriced. Your brain thinks it’s buying connection to your tribe.
#3. Frito-Lay: The Cheetos Orange Dust Revelation
Back in 2008, Frito-Lay had a problem. Cheetos were seen as kids’ food, and adults felt guilty buying them. So they hired NeuroFocus (later bought by Nielsen) to literally scan people’s brains while they ate Cheetos.
The EEG results? Pure gold. Turns out adults experienced what researchers called “giddy subversion” from getting that orange dust all over their fingers (NeuroFocus study, 2008). Not just tolerance – actual pleasure. The messy fingers that should’ve been a product flaw? They triggered the brain’s reward centers.
Nobody would admit this in a focus group. Hell, most people probably didn’t even realize it consciously. But the brain doesn’t lie.
Frito-Lay ran with it. Their 2009 “Orange Underground” campaign showed Chester Cheetah encouraging people to use Cheetos for pranks – stuffing them in someone’s nose on a plane, dumping them in a laundromat dryer full of white clothes. Focus groups HATED these ads, called them mean-spirited. But those same people’s brains showed massive positive responses when wearing EEG caps.
The campaign won a Grand Ogilvy Award from the Advertising Research Foundation. Frito-Lay’s chief marketing officer Ann Mukherjee later said the brain data gave them confidence to ignore the focus groups entirely.
They’ve kept this going too. Their 2018 “Operation Smile” campaign put actual smiles on chip bags after brain studies showed facial expressions on packaging triggered mirror neurons. Your brain literally mimics what it sees, so you smile back at the bag. Creepy? Sure. Effective? The sales numbers say yes.
#4. PayPal: When Security Doesn’t Sell – Go For Speed
PayPal changed their entire marketing strategy with their neuromarketing discovery. For years they sold security as their number one selling point. I understand – you are giving them your money, right?
Wrong. Their brain research showed that speed and convenience messages activated the brain’s reward centers much more than did security messages. The word “fast” evoked more intense responses than did the word “safe.” Instantly beat protected every time (PayPal neuromarketing study conducted with many companies, not publicly disclosed but seen in many industry reports 2009-2010).
This was in complete contrast to their survey data showing security as the most important concern for customers. But brains don’t lie – people got more excited about saving time than safeguarding money.
PayPal pivoted hard. Their annual advertisements now focused on getting us money “in seconds” rather than keeping it safe. And they made small tweaks to the machine and credit card purchase experience so that it felt quicker even when the actual time to complete the purchase had stayed the same. Just adding a fast moving progress bar made a 12% increase in conversions.
The results? PayPal became the default payment method for millions of paying customers who initially didn’t need it. They have transitioned from not being able to compete with credit cards, to making $936 billion in payments by 2021.
Even now, neuromarketing is very popular. Another study looked at different button colours, and clocked that orange Pay Now buttons received 8% more clicks than their blue counterparts, even though blue is a colour commonly associated with trust in a financial service. The brain was interested in action, not reassurance.
#5 McDonald’s: Hijacking Your Senses Since 1940
McDonald’s doesn’t advertise food. They engineer sensory experiences that bypass your conscious brain entirely.
That french fry smell? Completely artificial. McDonald’s adds beef flavoring to their fry oil that creates a specific scent profile tested to trigger hunger responses in the limbic system. A Millward Brown study with Martin Lindstrom found that smell and taste ratings for McDonald’s were almost perfectly correlated – people either loved both or hated both. Your brain can’t separate them.
The colors matter too. Red triggers urgency and appetite. Yellow creates feelings of happiness and grabs attention from peripheral vision. Together, they create what researchers call “the ketchup and mustard theory” – your brain associates these colors with food before you even process what you’re looking at.
The “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle was tested using EEG to ensure it activated the right emotional and memory centers. It’s only five notes, but those notes were specifically chosen because they create an “earworm” effect – your brain literally can’t stop processing them. Studies show the jingle activates the same brain regions as happy childhood memories.
McDonald’s spends millions on what they call “sonic branding.” The sound of the fryer, the beep of the machines, even the specific frequency of the cash register – all tested to create what they internally call “the McDonald’s soundscape.” Your brain learns to associate these sounds with reward.
Recent eye-tracking studies guide everything from menu board design to app interface. They found people look at prices for 0.3 seconds but pictures for 2.1 seconds, so guess what got bigger? Digital menu boards now change based on time of day because morning brains process information differently than evening brains.
The Happy Meal toy isn’t for kids – it’s for parents’ brains. Seeing your child happy triggers oxytocin release, which your brain then associates with McDonald’s. You’re not buying food. You’re buying a hit of the bonding hormone.
They even tested the optimal temperature for their restaurants (72-74°F) because that range keeps you comfortable enough to stay but not so comfortable you linger too long.
#6. Netflix: Your Thumbnail Is Different From Everyone Else’s
Netflix doesn’t talk much about their neuromarketing, but former employees have spilled plenty. They’ve been using eye-tracking since at least 2014 to see exactly where people look on their interface.
The data is insane. Average time spent examining thumbnail before deciding: 1.8 seconds. It says that 70% of browse time goes into the first row of content. In their eye-tracking studies (per former UX Director Zach Schendel, 2021), Netflix found that 91% of their users rejected an option based on the thumbnail image alone, typically in that first second of consumption.
So Netflix has created AVA – Artwork Visual Analysis. It generates several thumbnail versions for each show and experiments to see which ones get people to click. But here’s where it gets tricky-intelligent thumbnails that adjust themselves based on what you’ve watched in the past.
Like to watch a lot of Uma Thurman movies? Your Pulp Fiction thumbnail has her in it. Prefer comedies? The dance scene could be shown in place of the guns. Romance fan? What you get is Travolta and Thurman making love. Same movie, different activation of the brain.
They measure everything. Pause/resume patterns, repeatability (replaying shows), how long to give up the show. Based on patterns of interaction, the algorithm is able to tell if you’re really engaged or mindlessly letting it run in the background. Former Netflix data scientists have said they can predict with 80% accuracy whether you’ll finish a series using how you watched the first episode as a guide.
The company says 75-80% of all viewing is now by algorithmic recommendations rather than browsing. That’s billions of brain science-driven hours of content consumption.
#7. Campbell’s Soup: The Most Expensive Label Redesign Ever
In the years between 2008 and 2010, Campbell’s went completely crazy with neuromarketing. That’s 1500 test subjects, three research firms, two years of studies. Everything was used: EEG, eye-tracking, micro facial expression analysis, galvanic skin response, some thing called ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) interviews.
Why? Their soup sales were dying. Traditional market research told them that their ads were working but sales continued to decline. VP Robert Woodard pretty much said ‘to hell with it’ and let’s look at people’s brains instead.
The findings were brutal. That iconic red Campbell’s logo up top the can? It was distracting – eyes bounced around it instead of on the product. The traditional picture of a spoon lifting soup from the bowl? Zero emotional response. Literally nothing. In the pictures, the soup didn’t even appear warm (Innerscope Research, Merchant Mechanics, and Olson Zaltman Associates studies, 2008-2010).
So Campbell’s did everything differently. Moved the logo to the bottom. Removed the spoon. Added visible steam. Changed shiny labels to matte labels due to biometric results showing women saw shiny packaging as a trigger for guilt. Even spanned the reworked bowls to become more modern.
Did it work? Depends who you ask. Campbell’s sales for claims rose, particularly from their target demographics. And critics say you don’t mess with 100+ years of brand recognition – Andy Warhol didn’t paint the new cans. The truth? The biometric-authenticated changes did improve their “Select Harvest” and organic lines by double digits, but their condensed soup line still has a ways to go.
#8 Hyundai: Engineering Cars Based on Brain Waves
“We’re interested in what consumers think of a car before we make thousands of them.” That’s according to Dean Macko, brand strategy manager of Hyundai, who explained why the Korean automaker hooked 30 people up to EEG machines in 2011.
For up to an hour at a time, test subjects wore brain caps while they examined various angles and features of the Hyundai prototypes. The company used an electrical activity meter to find out which design features set the parts of the brain that say “I want to buy this.” Not what people said looked good – but what their neurons actually did respond to.
And the results shifted their whole philosophy of design. Certain curves and angles tested badly in surveys, but they lit up the brain’s reward centres. Interestingly, the front grille configuration that was deemed to be “aggressive” by focus groups actually elicited positive emotional reactions in the EEG activity (Hyundai EEG study, 2011).
What’s weird is that based on this data, the exterior design of their production cars actually did change, at least with Hyundai. Not hacks – but big shifts in design. The sporty silver model they tested formed the template for their entire range.
They didn’t stop there either. More recent studies in 2019 used EEG and eye tracking to test interior layouts to determine the best placement for buttons. Turns out your brain does get stressed when you don’t have controls within 15 degrees of your natural sight line when you’re driving. Now all Hyundais place any important controls in that range.
Neuromarketing Techniques:
- EEG (Electroencephalography): Tracks brainwaves to measure engagement and excitement.
- fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging): Maps brain activity tied to decisions.
- Eye Tracking: Shows what people look at first and what they ignore.
- Biometrics: Measures things like heartbeat and skin response.
- Facial Coding: Read micro-expressions that reveal hidden emotions.
- fNIRS: Portable brain scanning, used in real-world settings like stores.
- IAT (Implicit Association Test): Reveals subconscious brand preferences through reaction times.
Last Thoughts
These tricks not only influence retail or advertising, but also other industries. In gambling, for example, you can see how much the experience has improved by claiming a bonus at https://casinosanalyzer.ca/casino-bonuses/slotozen.com and trying out the slots yourself.
Your rational mind might think it’s choosing products based on quality, price, or features. But these companies know better. They’re designing for the part of your brain that decides before you even realize you’re deciding.
That’s the real lesson for any company. Find out what people want, but don’t stop there. Learn more about them, see how they react, and plan activities that will make them feel something. That’s how to make a company stand out.
References
Links and Sources:
- Netflix eye-tracking and UI research: https://productpeas.medium.com/case-study-2-zach-schendel-director-of-ux-research-at-netflix-e8986f840f75
- PayPal neuromarketing findings: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/what-neuroscience-tells-us-about-consumer-desire
- Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15473974/
- Apple Logo Stimulates the Brain: https://www.npr.org/2008/04/05/89408933/study-apple-logo-stimulates-the-brain
