You’ve probably heard of neuroscience in business and marketing by now. Many neuroscience-based strategies are commonplace nowadays. This subject helps companies understand their customers and employees better than traditional methods.
But why do companies and marketers focus so much on neuroscience? The reason is quite simple; data shows that 95% of decision-making happens subconsciously. You can significantly improve your marketing efforts by understanding what motivates customers to buy from you. Moreover, you can make your workforce more productive by learning how employees respond to certain conditions or choices. Therefore, this article shows you how neuroscience helps companies expand and prosper.
- Health
The applications of neuroscience also involve how one’s meals affect one’s thoughts. Organizations should realize that healthy eating patterns will likely lead to healthy thought patterns. Companies prosper when workers refrain from overworking themselves, adopting sedentary lifestyles, eating too much junk food, falling sick, and taking days off from work. Healthy habits make employees more productive, neuroscience states.
- Shared experiences
Experts have found that workers can become more faithful to their organizations and motivated to work when they share certain experiences with their colleagues. For this reason, companies arrange office picnics, events, and other outings to build office-based friendships. Healthy relations derived from these shared experiences can improve the workplace culture and climate, make a company thrive and be more productive.
Business owners can leverage distance learning to learn how neuroplasticity makes you better at running a company. Therefore, you should pursue a course in neuroscience for business to know more about the power of neuro-leadership. You will learn some great leadership strategies and how to motivate your workers via neuroscience-backed methods by pursuing such a course.
- Fun
You can observe how tech giants such as Tesla, Google, and Facebook are trying to make themselves look like “fun” places to work at, i.e., friendly, exciting, and wholesome. It’s because neuroscience shows how unique methods such as gamification can make employees more competitive (in a healthy way) and better performers. Therefore, making your company fun gives workers a reason to be productive and stick by for the long term.
Gamification inserts game-exclusive elements such as point-scoring into real-world scenarios, e.g., rating employees based on performance. The points earned by workers can be turned into rewards that can be redeemed within the company.
- Let them speak
Some leaders may be cautious about granting workers the freedom of expression. But neuroscience dictates that actively listening to the workforce’s concerns can help you resolve these problems and make the workplace a more productive arena. You can give your workers more autonomy by:
- Creating online surveys for your employees
- Holding regular meetings to listen to your workers
- Letting them express themselves and share their ideas
- Allowing them to fearlessly brings matters to your attention
- Offering anonymity to an employee to improve communication
- Value-based work
Moreover, workers are more productive when their work has some meaning. Meaninglessness burns a person’s motivation to become productive. BBC reports that many modern-day employees look for this “meaning” at work. According to a recent survey, 70% of employees state that their work defines their sense of purpose. But how can you create a sense of purpose for them? We can come up with a few solutions:
- Establish some clear-cut objectives
- Show workers the impact of their work
- Give them more autonomy over their tasks
- Clarify your company’s progress in front of them
- Make all of them perform a “meaningfulness audit”
- Starting with difficulty
Another neuroscience-based strategy involves asking your workers to begin with complicated tasks. Researchers have found that a person’s willpower works like muscles; the practice makes it stronger, but it gets exhausted when overused. That’s why keeping the most difficult task for the finale can be harmful to your workforce’s willpower, motivation, and productivity. In contrast, finishing the most difficult task early can motivate employees to go on with their day.
- Avoid multitasking
We know that multitasking worsens your productivity, but neuroscience explains why. Experts have stated that our brains are simply not engineered to perform two different tasks simultaneously. We prosper when we attend to a single thing wholeheartedly and only move to another task later.
In other words, when you’re multitasking, your brain keeps switching back and forth between these two tasks in a matter of nanoseconds. Therefore, instead of being productive at one thing, you only become unproductive at both things. For this reason, it’s better to avoid multitasking whenever it’s an option.
- Choice overload
Now, let’s discuss how neuroscience makes your advertising more effective and brings in more sales. A study has concluded that offering customers too many choices can prevent them from buying something altogether. It is called the Jam Study, and it shows that people are ten times more likely to purchase jam when the available flavors are reduced to 6 from 24. Therefore, the fewer the choices, the higher the chances of selling your product. Choice overload is something brands should avoid.
- FOMO
Another neuroscience-backed marketing strategy involves the fear of missing out, aka FOMO. According to this phenomenon, customers are more driven by the fear of losing than the desire to acquire. In other words, they will do anything to prevent losing something or missing out on a golden opportunity, and a brand can easily convince more people to buy just by issuing a limited-time offer.
Similarly, offering something for less than the actual price – $4.49 instead of $4.99 – can motivate many customers to purchase your product. The trick is to simply emphasize what they might lose by not making a quick decision! Avoid sounding beseeching or intimidating; focus on a customer’s god-given need to avoid the pain of losing. That’s how neuroscience dominates advertising in today’s digital market.
Conclusion
Neuroscience involves using the right psychological and behavioral triggers to motivate people – customers and employees alike – by knowing what makes them more responsive. Therefore, fewer choices and the FOMO (fear of missing out) can motivate your customers to make quick purchasing decisions. Similarly, your employees can be motivated to increase their productivity via workplace wellness, shared experiences, and value-based work. Let them speak up, discourage multitasking, and ask them to always start with difficult tasks. These effortless neuroscience-based techniques help organizations prosper through increased efficiency and higher profitability.