Neuromarketing makes the art of persuasion more effective

For years, scientific and management literature has been exploring the most effective strategies for capturing and managing audience attention in an increasingly information-intensive environment. The human brain struggles to pay attention to the thousands of ads we're all exposed to every day.

The first to discuss the "attention economy" was American Nobel Prize winner Herbert Alexander Simon in the 1970s. The underlying assumption, consistent with the concept of "cognitive load" developed by psychologist George A. Miller in the mid-1950s, was that the richer the information, the scarcer the attention. This resource is consumed in direct proportion to consumers' consumption of content . This complex dynamic is made even more evident by the digital ecosystem , as it increases the possibility of creating and distributing messages, especially through audiovisual narratives.

Attention is a precious resource, precisely because it is limited. This is especially true in the corporate world, as Thomas Davenport and John Beck stated at the beginning of the century in a book written for Il Sole 24 Ore. Attention is lost as quickly as it is acquired. Considering marketing 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0 according to Kotler's classification—that is, marketing of connected relationships and marketing focused on the use of artificial intelligence and the Metaverse —it becomes necessary for companies to work towards easier content discovery, authenticity, and personalization .

In this regard, Song, Guo, and others, in a recently published scientific paper, argued that the advent of the Internet of Everything is already capable of revolutionizing neuromarketing techniques, enabling real-time adjustments based on consumer insights, resulting in improved advertising effectiveness. Neurological data is used, in short, to create personalized messages that have a stronger impact on certain types of consumers. For this reason, it is now possible to create highly targeted and impactful marketing campaigns—campaigns that improve engagement levels and increase conversion rates.

Neuromarketing , therefore, comes to the rescue in the attention challenge. In a 2024 paper published in Cogent Business & Management, Bhardwaj, Seema, Surya Bahadur Thapa, and Aradhana Gandhi explained the factors that most influence the decision-making process and the conversion of purchase intention into actual purchasing behavior. These scholars distinguish two groups of factors: intrinsic factors related to consumers and extrinsic factors rooted in the surrounding environment.