The Science Of Storytelling

How neuroscience can affect a marketing strategy.

- Joe Lazauskas

Even in an era of infinite digital metrics, publishers and brands are still faced with an age-old problem: It’s hard to measure how your content affects people.

Mention ROI, and most brand marketers go white from memories of a budget meeting gone wrong. Impressions, page views, shares, scroll depth, time spent, brand lift: The best metrics the web has to offer still fall short and pale in comparison to the hard-dollar ROI of direct response marketing.

After all, it’s much easier to tie revenue to direct response programmatic ads, which trigger immediate transaction, than stories designed to change how people think. This has made good branded content a tough sell, even if our gut tells us those stories are making an impact. We lose out on budget to crappy ads that stalk customers around the internet.

But what if we could show with hard numbers how good brand advertising affects our target consumer’s emotional state and link that emotional engagement to purchase actions?

That’s the idea behind neuroscience tech companies like Immersion Neuroscience and Spark Neuro, which recently released products that help brands measure emotional engagement and can link that response to purchase consideration.