Neurosegments, segmenting the consumer mind.

Neuroscience has proved that any consumer first decides the purchase through the emotion and after, justifies the decision through the reason. This sequence, as simple as powerful, opens a path in the way of understanding the consumption as well as the purchase and their motivations, in definitive, it opens a path in understanding the consumer in the essence.

The essence belongs to the base of discovering the main consuming motivational levers of a specific brand. What makes it attractive? What seduce us from it? What emotional guideline underlines? What triggers the purchase?

A brand should build its relational discourse through knowledge of these motivational levers and to do that it should define, as a main objective, the weight of each in the final purchasing decision.

As simple and as complex as to segment the consumer thought in decision rules through the emotions.

Imagine an urban family that wants to change their car due to the arrival of twins at the house. For that they are considering to buy an European berlina premium with more capacity in the boot. They don’t want an all-terrain for the reason that is not practical to move around the city. What brand should they choose? Audi, BMW or Mercedes? What model, Serie 3, Serie 5, A4, A6, a C-class or an E-class? What kind of bodywork, normal or Touring/Avant? With or without total traction? As Xdrive, Quattro or 4Matic. Ultimately, there appear ten of elements to decide through the detection of different emotional “insights” that justify the reasoned decision.

How can we detect these motivational levers? Through the knowledge of the consumer reality in 3 stages:

• Stage 1: Through the ethnographic analysis it can be detected the real connection between the brand and the product through the daily experience with the same, with their real context, defining the interaction level with the self-propulsion market in this case, analyzing values, attitudes, habits and needs. What reality coexists with the car? What needs are detected? What is projected to the future?

• Stage 2: Through the Neuromarketing, analyzing the impact that has the competition set analyzed between the consumers and the potential buyers. What kind of emotions causes the real view of the competition set? What attracts that? What generates rejection?  What role is the brand playing in building the emotion? For this we can use techniques as the EEG (Electroencephalography) that will offer us the main measures of the cerebral answers on the stimulus presented, in this case, the different models of cars preselected. Use Eyetracking glasses (coordinated with the EEG) to detect the elements where the consumers put the eye on the car and be able to get heat maps of those aspects that re more relevant for the consumer. Complement with tools of "facial coding" showing us the main emotion expressed about the presented stimulus, that allow us to detect the basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, contempt).

• Stage 3: Cluster the different motivational levers found through advanced segmentation techniques that allow defining behaviors patterns related to the competition set. If we are able to segment by motivations (do not confuse that with life style or psychographic behavior) we have a powerful strategic tool to activate empathy elements with our potential buyers. We are addressing to the primary root of decision and can influence aspects of communication, relational aspects and aspects of the product.

Getting the last decision base we are getting the behaviour reality of our potential buyers.

It is exciting the future opened about the consumer behaviour analysis.

Jordi Crespo