How do marketers, agencies, and neuroscientists connect with each other? Richard talks to Carla Nagel about the NeuroMarketing Science & Business Association about gathering all the people focused on marketing with neuroscience, both in-person with conferences and via regular publications. Carla talks about ten years of building the association and the broadening horizons of neuroscience in industry. And if you're looking for case studies about success with neuromarketing, you want to be a member - there are hundreds of case studies to learn from!
Brandon Wehn (00:06):
Welcome to the show. This is Brandon Wehn, and you are listening to the Understanding Consumer Neuroscience Podcast, brought to you by the folks at CloudArmy. In this episode, Richard talks to Carla Nagel, founder of the Neuromarketing Science and Business Association, about connecting marketers, agencies, and neuroscientists together at events and in their quarterly publications.
Richard Campbell (00:34):
Hi, this is Richard Campbell and thanks for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience. Today my guest is Carla Nagel, who is the Executive Director of the Neuromarketing Science and Business Association, and the founder of the Neuromarketing World Forum. She's an open-minded community manager and master of getting things done in a nice and friendly way. Although she does not have a background in neuromarketing, she developed an objective helicopter view of the industry worldwide. Carla founded the NMSBA in 2012, and since then, she runs it with enthusiasm.
(01:03):
Together with her team, nicknamed Carla's Angels, she's responsible for the publication's insights and the Neuromarketing Yearbook and the Shopper's Brain Conference series in the Neuromarketing World Forum. Welcome to the show, Carla. Thanks for coming on.
Carla Nagel (01:17):
Oh, thanks for having me.
Richard Campbell (01:19):
CloudArmy, who sponsors this show, was at the last NMSBA, which I believe was in Berlin.
Carla Nagel (01:25):
Correct. It was the 10th edition.
Richard Campbell (01:27):
10th Edition. Congratulations. Of course, I'm involved in events. You and I are similar in the sense that we both work in events and we're not experts in neuroscience, so I've been having a lot of fun as a marketing person talking about neuroscience to some of these extraordinary people that you gather for your forum. Since 2012, I've got to think after 10 years, irrespective of interruptions caused by pandemics, they must have evolved a lot in the past decade.
Carla Nagel (01:58):
That is so true. In the beginning, most companies in the industry were focused on EEG, and nowadays it's a wide spectrum of all kinds of technologies from FMRI, EEG, eye tracking, of course.
Richard Campbell (02:15):
Yeah.
Carla Nagel (02:16):
Reaction time.
Richard Campbell (02:17):
Yeah. All these different tools.
Carla Nagel (02:17):
And a lot of AI and ML. Yeah, all this different little scripts.
Richard Campbell (02:26):
Yeah. Again, my background in technology, I think in the past 10 years, cloud has massively emerged. So there's this incredible resource available to us to gather neuroscience data in different ways and make it easier to understand. So your World Forum's got to be a place where everyone's comparing notes about how they're going about gathering neuroscience data for different clients.
Carla Nagel (02:51):
That's right. The audience also changed and [inaudible 00:02:57] a bit.
Richard Campbell (03:00):
What do you see as the role for the World Forum and the association as a whole?
Carla Nagel (03:04):
Well, the association as a whole is bringing together all the things that are happening. So we have a quarterly magazine where we publish news where we focus on, oh, okay, hey, what is purpose in marketing? How does it work? How does it work in the brain? Or how do you integrate color? It's not a recipe if you put red into your local industrial habit, but how does it work? So we dive into these topics that are of interest to marketers.
Richard Campbell (03:36):
Yeah, for sure.
Carla Nagel (03:37):
For the industry as a whole, I think we bring together the people from science. They want to know what business is looking for. We bring together clients and vendors.
Richard Campbell (03:50):
Right.
Carla Nagel (03:51):
It's very specific niche markets. It's bringing together neuroscience enthusiastics or, well, to put it nicely, nerds in the field.
Richard Campbell (04:03):
We like the scientists, but yeah, they're their own interesting group of folks. They definitely think and speak differently around this. I got to think that the agencies are getting more involved as well. It's not just big companies doing neuroscience directly, but a lot of these art direction firms and media firms now are taking neuroscience more seriously.
Carla Nagel (04:23):
That is so true. Yes. I think 10 years ago we all thought this is just a tipping point and a big boom is going to happen. It took a little longer, but you can tell that the field has majored a lot, and also that the newer technologies are much more closer to what normal marketers understand and are used to.
Richard Campbell (04:49):
Yeah, it's becoming kind of table stakes that you need to know this to actually optimize your marketing.
Carla Nagel (04:54):
Yeah, yeah. Yes. Well, there are companies, of course, that's put reaction time on a normal survey and marketers understand surveys. So if you put reaction time to it, it's not so hard to understand. Another thing that was presented in Berlin was adding EEG or biometrics to your focus groups. So, okay, this person is a little bit shy, but you see that he's or she's engaged in the conversation, so you can ask specific questions that makes you curious if you look at the results behind your screen. So that's a whole new way of thinking.
Richard Campbell (05:35):
Yeah, it's a great insight that they don't have to be the loudest person in the room to still have some significant reactions to the conversation-
Carla Nagel (05:41):
True.
Richard Campbell (05:42):
If you can measure them, though I find EEG a bit invasive but it's still an... You're really measuring person's response, not just what they say.
Carla Nagel (05:53):
Yeah. [inaudible 00:05:54] is now bringing EEG into the rooms. They have started a panel with I think 3,000 families that know themselves how to put on an EEG headset and they can participate in studies from abroad.
Richard Campbell (06:09):
Wow. So not just in the laboratory, but in the home.
Carla Nagel (06:12):
True. Yeah. That is already happening for biometric results, heart rate, other companies, they have [inaudible 00:06:21], things they can put on your hands or your heart.
Richard Campbell (06:24):
Galvanic skin response, eye trackers are not that expensive these days. You can certainly put those in people's homes. It is just becoming easier to gather that data in multiple forms.
Carla Nagel (06:35):
Yes.
Richard Campbell (06:35):
So it's not just a conference, it's also the association with the newsletters and so forth. So there is a subscription, you can sign up, become a member?
Carla Nagel (06:42):
Yes.
Richard Campbell (06:43):
So what does membership get you?
Carla Nagel (06:45):
Well, membership gets you, of course the quarterly magazine, but also 10 years of newer marketing articles in digital format on our website. So you can search for whatever topic you would like to dive into and you find all the articles related to it.
Richard Campbell (07:00):
Nice.
Carla Nagel (07:01):
You get a printed copy of the Neuromarketing yearbook. We bring out a yearbook every year with the 10 to 15 best scientific papers summarized in an easy-to-understand format and business cases from all kinds of companies from all over the world.
Richard Campbell (07:20):
Interesting, because the conversations I've had many times is a marketer is starting to understand the value of neuroscience and wants to get more involved, but they've got to convince the hires up too. So it sounds like you have the materials to help communicate that story to a larger part of the organization-
Carla Nagel (07:37):
True.
Richard Campbell (07:37):
And get more commitment to it. So it's nice to know there's a repository somewhere. It's not just an individual book or bits and pieces like that, but to be part of the association.
Carla Nagel (07:47):
It was quite some work to digitalize it, but now we have it, we are very proud. It definitely has its value. Also for ourselves sometimes to look back, "oh, was that another article?
Richard Campbell (08:01):
Yeah.
Carla Nagel (08:02):
You can find it easy.
Richard Campbell (08:03):
Well, you're reaching a point now at 10 years where you have a story arc of how neuroscience has evolved and how marketers have changed in thinking. Clearly, it's changing over time as things mature and more people have success.
Carla Nagel (08:17):
Yes. In the pandemic, we spent our time on developing an exam, it's called Neuromarketing Fundamentals Exam. So people can study themselves and bring themselves to a level that... Well, it's valuable for a marketer to learn about what is an emotion in the brain? How do you get attention? How do you measure attention? What kind of neuromarketing technologies are there and what should you ask if you are working with a vendor?
Richard Campbell (08:50):
I would also think that's really valuable when you then want to dig through 10 years worth of materials from the association, to have that common language of what we mean by emotion and by a test and all of the elements that goes into effective neuromarketing?
Carla Nagel (09:05):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (09:06):
How much has the industry grown into your perspective over this past decade now? Is it common language? Do you find most marketers know about this? How far have we come?
Carla Nagel (09:17):
I find it hard to say. We actually should start measuring this because it's a question that comes up very often. I would say it's still a small market.
Richard Campbell (09:29):
Right. People still rather buy clicks online than actually tune their marketing-
Carla Nagel (09:34):
For [inaudible 00:09:36].
Richard Campbell (09:37):
For better or worse. There are certainly plenty of organizations out there that are quick to take your money and tell you they're going to do advertising for you. Well, how well you can measure that value is a separate question entirely, and it takes time to figure that out.
Carla Nagel (09:52):
But I think it's a good sign what you were saying that's agencies are hopping on the bus. They can distinguish themselves from standard agencies to say, "Okay, our work, our creative work is backed up with science." And so that's the development I'm very much interested in.
Richard Campbell (10:09):
Yeah. And I appreciate the idea that we do less sort of gut reaction to a given storyboard or mockup of an ad and say, "Okay, these six ads, which one do you want to spend on?" To actually say, "Let's go test them all and maybe get some dimensions around that ad's going to work better for this demographic versus that demographic." A little more measurable science to soliciting a response from a potential customer.
Carla Nagel (10:43):
I think that is the right way to go. I'm curious how many storyboards are still chosen by gut feeling?
Richard Campbell (10:50):
You famously think about agencies that way, that these are folks that work on this every day and they're supposed to be the experts to give you the confidence to say, "They think this is the best one, go with it." I still rather have the data. I'm a data guy. I think that's always the frustration, is you're not going to know until you've spent so much that it's irrelevant whether you're a writer or not. So it's better to spend a little more to do the testing and have some better data to know this is why we went this way and look at the results from there. Waiting until the sales come in or don't come in, it's kind of too late at that point.
Carla Nagel (11:30):
True.
Richard Campbell (11:31):
Yeah. I understand that the NMSBA has a collection of case studies?
Carla Nagel (11:36):
That's true.
Richard Campbell (11:37):
Where do they come from?
Carla Nagel (11:38):
Well, we have vendor members in over 30 or 40 countries, I guess.
Richard Campbell (11:44):
Wow.
Carla Nagel (11:45):
And they are eager to share their latest work. That is how the Neuromarketing Yearbook started. We asked, "Do you want to share a business case?" We will put them all together in a case study format.
Richard Campbell (11:58):
Awesome. So is that one of the things that's in the yearbook, is are these case studies, as a member you'll get to-
Carla Nagel (12:03):
Yes.
Richard Campbell (12:04):
You get this every year?
Carla Nagel (12:05):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (12:05):
That's pretty powerful.
Carla Nagel (12:06):
And you get access to all the articles, all the cases from the past.
Richard Campbell (12:10):
Right.
Carla Nagel (12:11):
We have digitalized. Those also in the article archive.
Richard Campbell (12:16):
And do folks use this as exemplars of how to go about a study? Is that the driving force behind them?
Carla Nagel (12:24):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (12:24):
I've also run into companies where when they've had success with neuromarketing, they really want to keep that to themselves too. That becomes their secret sauce and, ""We don't want our competitors to know what we are able to do and what we are able to understand about our customers too." I don't know if you ever run into that where it's like people don't want to share their studies.
Carla Nagel (12:41):
Yeah. Sometimes you hear stories, "We cannot share," which is a pity, which is a pity.
Richard Campbell (12:46):
Yeah, it is a challenge. Obviously, NMSBA has been around for 10 years there. How many case studies have you got?
Carla Nagel (12:54):
400 or so.
Richard Campbell (12:54):
That's a more than I would think. A yearbook can only be so big, but to have hundreds is really something.
Carla Nagel (13:01):
Yeah, it's also the magazine that has case studies every now and then.
Richard Campbell (13:06):
Yeah. So a normal part. So I almost feel like I should make a series of shows just on your case studies because-
Carla Nagel (13:13):
Oh, that would be great.
Richard Campbell (13:14):
Yeah, because people like examples. It would be fun to walk through one of them and just talk through the different kinds of success that folks have with neuroscience.
Carla Nagel (13:24):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (13:25):
They're all different and certainly my experience is just, there's huge array of different approaches to measuring and tuning advertising and marketing attempts to different audiences. So where do folks go to get more information about the NMSBA?
Carla Nagel (13:43):
Nmsba.com.
Richard Campbell (13:44):
Ah, good name. Easy to get there. And what's the Shopper Brain Conference?
Carla Nagel (13:49):
Oh, the Shopper Brain Conference is everything behavioral science and neuroscience applied in retail environments.
Richard Campbell (13:58):
Okay. So specifically focused on the retail side?
Carla Nagel (14:01):
Yeah, and in a way, it totally makes sense because the fast moving consumer goods are the ones that need distinctive packaging, that need to be seen in the shelves. Eye tracking is easy, applicable in store.
Richard Campbell (14:19):
It's easy to fall into thinking about neuromarketing is just for retail, but we've had some great conversations on this show too, about governments using it to encourage their citizens to conserve more and dot litter and not waste energy, those kinds of things, as well as buying the right package of orange juice.
Carla Nagel (14:44):
Yeah. Well, it can go in all directions. Even HR purposes.
Richard Campbell (14:50):
Sure.
Carla Nagel (14:51):
Are my employees happy enough? Do they have a nice feeling about the brand of the company? Stuff like that. So there are a lot of applications around, but for a conference, it's nice to have a focus on retail so people in the room recognize it more.
Richard Campbell (15:07):
Right.
Carla Nagel (15:07):
If it goes from government to HR to just some theoretical stuff, people walk out the room, "Okay, what's in it for me?" And the Shopper Brain Conference, we were doing this since 2013, I believe. It is so much focused on their daily work that they walk out rooms, "Okay, this was practical, this was something I could understand."
Richard Campbell (15:30):
Right.
Carla Nagel (15:30):
So for the hardcore neuroscientists, it's not the best event to go to, but it has a very focused audience.
Richard Campbell (15:40):
On the marketing side and those particular pieces. For the broader science, go to the Forum. That sounds like the place for them.
Carla Nagel (15:46):
Yes. Well, the Neuromarketing World Forum is the latest and the greatest in Neuromarketing. That's how we sell it.
Richard Campbell (15:54):
Right.
Carla Nagel (15:55):
Well, every series [inaudible 00:15:58] around is there, every person that spends his work week on neuroscience is there. So it's an update where it's celebrating the industry.
Richard Campbell (16:17):
Yeah, for sure. And then a quarterly magazine. Magazines are getting rarer. A lot of people, do they read the paper or do they rather just have a digital copy? What's it like making a magazine in 2022?
Carla Nagel (16:29):
Well, it's still a paper version that goes to the coffee tables around the world, but the personal membership only gets a digital version and people are fine with it.
Richard Campbell (16:42):
I tend to read digitally myself, so it's always... But there is something about paper and there is something about color and spreading it on a table and looking at it, depending on the kind of things that are in there too.
Carla Nagel (16:53):
For sure.
Richard Campbell (16:54):
I think your covers are amazing. I think it looks like you put a lot of time into that, but in the end it's about the stories that are inside.
Carla Nagel (17:01):
True.
Richard Campbell (17:02):
Well Carla, thank you so much for coming to talk to us a little bit about what NMSBA has been up to. I appreciate that this exists. It just speaks to neuroscience becoming its own entity and with a bunch of different companies in different roles and having a place to gather and have those conversations and support each other.
Carla Nagel (17:20):
Cool.
Richard Campbell (17:20):
All right. Thanks so much for coming on and thank you listener for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience.