Interview Summary

The interview featured Katie Hart, a neuromarketing expert, discussing the field's core principles, techniques, and applications. Hart defined neuromarketing as the intersection of neuroscience and marketing, focused on understanding the unconscious brain processes that drive consumer behaviour, such as perception, memory, and decision-making. She addressed ethical concerns, stating the goal was to make marketing more engaging and easier for the brain to process, not to manipulate consumers. The conversation covered the physiological measurement tools used, like EEG headsets and skin sensors, which allow for research outside of traditional lab settings. Hart provided examples of neuromarketing in action, including the analysis of emotions in advertisements, the strategic use of senses like smell and touch, and the counterintuitive finding that slightly harder-to-read fonts can improve memory. She also discussed cultural and gender differences in responses to marketing stimuli and argued for the continued relevance of physical media in a digital world due to the brain's preference for tangible, three-dimensional experiences. The interview concluded with Hart announcing her upcoming book on the subject.

 

Interviewee Background

Katie Hart was identified as a senior tutor with Cambridge Marketing College. She was also described as a speaker, trainer, and researcher specialising in the field of neuromarketing. At the end of the interview, she revealed she was a soon-to-be-published author, with a book on neuromarketing scheduled for release in March 2026.

 

Key Points

  • Neuromarketing applied insights from neuroscience to understand the 95% of decision-making that occurs at an unconscious level.
  • The field's purpose was to facilitate consumer engagement by presenting information in brain-friendly formats, rather than to manipulate people.
  • Modern technology, such as portable EEG headsets, enabled researchers to conduct studies in real-world environments like supermarkets, capturing more authentic physiological responses.
  • Neuromarketing insights were applied across all marketing elements, including the selection of facial expressions in imagery, the use of scents in packaging, and the choice of fonts on a webpage.
  • The brain's limited cognitive capacity meant it quickly decided whether to engage with content based on its perceived complexity; marketing that caused "cognitive stress" was likely to be ignored.
  • While some emotional expressions were universal, factors like color perception and emotional triggers were highly dependent on culture.
  • Hart's research indicated there were significant gender differences in how people responded to marketing messages and offers.
  • Physical, tangible marketing materials (like print brochures) could be more effective than digital ones because the brain found it easier to process and recall information from a three-dimensional, kinesthetic experience.

 

Interview Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Announcer (00:00):
This week on the Cambridge Marketing Podcast, Katie Hart on Neuromarketing.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (00:04):
One of the things that the brain does very quickly is make an assessment of whether we think we've got the capacity to deal with something. Something in the region of 11 million bits of information a second our brain is processing, and all the time it's diverting resources and making decisions about where it's going to allocate the resources and capacity it has.

Announcer (00:24):
This is the Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College.

Kiran Kapur, host (00:28):
Hello and welcome. This week we are in the exciting world of neuromarketing, and I'm absolutely delighted to welcome back Katie Hart, who is a senior tutor with the college and also a speaker, trainer, and researcher in neuromarketing. Katie, welcome back. You are on a couple of years back now talking about neuromarketing, and I know that it's a field that changes constantly, but I think we better start with some definitions. So what is neuromarketing?

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (00:57):
Well, that much hasn't changed, Kiran. So look, thank you for having me back. Yes. Neuromarketing is the meeting of neuroscience and marketing. So essentially it's understanding our brain and the way processes in our brain work, particularly the processes which we are going to be using whenever we are producing marketing content. So processes like perception. What is it that catches our attention? Processes like memory. How is it that some brands and even some jingles and things endure and stay with us for years and yet other things don't? And processes like decision making, how is it we actually reach a decision about which product or which service we're going to purchase? So it's understanding the internal processes and then using all of that to apply it to make our marketing messages really more engaging and more impactful.

Kiran Kapur, host (01:57):
Does that sound like manipulation? Should I be worried that we're into sort of propaganda here?

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (02:04):
A panic not. We are a long way away from manipulation. I mean, I've got to say, all of marketing to some extent is manipulation, isn't it? And I think in fairness with the neuroscience element added to that, we are adding more insight. We are helping organisations to be more focused and more profitable with their marketing, but we are not in the business of enabling people to purchase things that they don't want to purchase in the first place. So there is nothing that we are doing which is in manipulating people to that extent. It's just about being able to present information to them in formats which their brain actually finds easy to engage with. So it's about facilitating and supporting our cognitive processes. And the brain is really loving that and looking for information that is presented in easy and accessible ways.

Kiran Kapur, host (03:00):
Okay. So could you give me an example? I think that would sort of help me understand better.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (03:05):
Yeah. I mean, there's lots of examples. So I think the sort of crux of what makes neuromarketing so exciting is the fact that what we do is we are studying below what people are consciously aware of. So conventional market research absolutely has a place, but the sort of latest insight is that something like 95% of what goes into every decision we make is unconscious information. So no amount of focus groups and interviews and surveys is going to enable you to understand the majority of what's going on in your consumer's mind because they aren't aware of that themselves. So a lot of what we do in neuromarketing is we use physiological measures to actually interrogate that 95%, that unconscious part. So yeah, lots of examples of things we can do. So we can understand much more about things like emotions. I've been doing quite a bit of work recently on emotions and looking at the way our brain responds when we see emotions.

(04:19):
So typically lots of campaigns, lots of images have human faces in them. And what we need to be very tuned into is the fact that these faces have expressions. And as humans, we are very adept at reading these expressions. And therefore, when we are selecting images to use, we need to really make sure we are choosing the right images which convey the right expressions. So by studying what happens within the brain when we see emotions, we get a far better picture of actually what emotions are desirable for us to convey. So for instance, when we're looking at emotions, there are really three aspects that we are studying inside the brain. One of those is how pleasurable it is. So is it an emotion that we like, we enjoy? So something like happiness is obviously really high on the pleasure scale. The second part is arousal and happiness is really low on that because if we're in a happy place, we're not motivated to do much or change much.

(05:26):
Why would we? Life's good. So arousal is the second factor. And then the third factor is dominance. To what extent do we feel we have control or are being controlled? So lots of the key emotions that we look at, we're really exploring these parts within our recipient's brains and this is all information that we could never access any other way. We can understand it when we look at the results we get, but a lot of it is kind of counterintuitive to what we may expect to see. So things like that give us fabulous insights into really what's going on when we are presenting our audience with images that involve human faces. That

Kiran Kapur, host (06:10):
Sounds fascinating. You've said several times knowing what goes on in the brain. So I've now got visions of you standing over someone with a scalpel, which I'm sure isn't right. [laughter] So how do you technically do that? How do you look inside someone's brain without taking the brain apart?

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (06:25):
Thankfully not with the scalpel. And that's the interesting thing. And that's really why neuromarketing is a thing now or it's becoming more of a thing now, is historically we couldn't study the brain. If you think about having a live brain, as it were in front of you, it doesn't convey anything about what it's doing. Whereas lungs you could see inflating and contracting and all that sort of thing. The brain reveals nothing. So it's really only as a result of developments in technology that we can now study what's going on in the brain. And thankfully scalpel's not required. We can do it all in very non-invasive ways. So at the lower end of the scale, some of the things we can use are skin sensors. So they're called electrodermal activity sensors, or sometimes you hear them called galvanic skin response. And these are measuring changes in the conductivity on the surface of your skin.

(07:26):
Because when the brain receives information, the next step is for it to make changes, to equip our body to handle the situation. So if we see something that we anticipate is, or we identify as being stressful or threatening, the brain instantly triggers off a whole series of changes in our body. And one of the first of those that we can pick up is a change in the conductivity in the surface of our skin. So by using electrodermal activity, we can pick up those first hints about the way the brain is interpreting what's going on in the environment around it. We can also use things like voice recording. So we can slow voice recordings down and we can detect changes in voice patterns, which can be quite useful if we're doing market research interviews, for instance. But when I talk about looking at what's going on in the brain, most of what I do uses technology called EEG.

(08:27):
It's electroencephalography And it's a headset that I put onto participants in research and it measures the electrical activity which the brain uses to communicate. So it's measuring tiny little electronic impulses that the brain produces and it's measuring 256 of those per second across 14 sensors on the headset. So we are picking up microscopic changes which take place incredibly fast.

Kiran Kapur, host (09:00):
Wow. And those are the things that look a bit like a sort of skull cap or a swimming cap that have got the little sensors pressed around them. Is that right?

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (09:09):
Yeah, they certainly used to. And some of the laboratory grade ones still do. However, thankfully, most of them now are much more portable. So the ones I use use Bluetooth technology, so I can actually take them out and about. I can put a headset on somebody and set them off walking around a supermarket, for instance, or sit in a boardroom meeting and have an interview with them or present them with some marketing materials. And all of the bit of the cap that you describe as being the swimming cap, that's now gone. So what we actually have are a number of sensors which sit on ... It's a bit more like a sort of hairband than anything else. So it's very accessible now. And again, that's made a huge difference that we're no longer asking people to come into labs to do research, but we can actually take it out to their workplace, to their home environment.

(10:08):
And as I say, send people off around different environments and capture their responses in real time.

Kiran Kapur, host (10:14):
That's really interesting. So yes, you're no longer ... It makes market research suddenly become field research. You're actually out doing things and then naturally reacting to them as opposed to there being any white coat syndrome or Katie's watching me, so I'm going to try and react differently.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (10:31):
Absolutely. I mean, let's not kid ourselves. They are wearing a headset. So as field research goes, it is still, to some extent, something they will be aware of the fact they are being researched. But again, the beautiful part of measuring these physiological responses is they can't be skewed. So that's another reason why we are finding there is such a demand for neuromarketing, is that this isn't something that we can control. These subconscious physiological responses happen without us ever being made aware of them. So a lot of what we do, we don't really have to worry too much about experimental bias or anything like that because actually the brain just does what the brain does and it's producing so many responses all the time that we can capture those and we can record those and we can analyse those knowing that they are independent of the participant themselves being able to influence them.

Kiran Kapur, host (11:35):
So I mean, we tend to think about neuromarketing and one of the things that always comes up is, oh, colour. We're influenced by colour, but I suspect there's many other things that we're reference by that I'm just not aware of or haven't thought about.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (11:48):
Yeah. I mean, it literally creeps into every possible part of marketing, which is exciting. It can also be overwhelming for some people though in terms of where to start.

(12:00):
But yes, so colour is a very common one and we quite often see a lot of content on that. Smell is a very interesting one, which I think a lot of brands are engaging with more and more. So actually controlling the smell of their store or even controlling the packaging as people open their delivery, which has just arrived on the doorstep. We know that smell is really quite unique in that the other senses when they're processed in the brain go through the thalamus, which controls some of that processing. However, smell doesn't, it bypasses that. And so that's why we have incredibly strong connections with smell and very often, we know we know the smell, but it takes us a while to identify where it's from.

(12:53):
I don't know if it's something you do, but my daughters at the moment sort of scented candles, quite often there's all sorts of scented things come into the house. And I find myself holding it under my nose thinking, "Oh, what is that? What does it remind me of? " And I know I know it, and I know it's a positive thing. I know I'm not afraid of it or worried by it, but it takes that bit longer for our brain to find the pathway through to connecting what it is. So smell is incredibly powerful and a lot of brands are picking up on that. Sound, I think, is one that we've been using quite effectively for a while. There are some very evocative sounds, even from the intel, chime, things like that, that happen around us all the time. Netflix, very simple intro to any Netflix movie or series that you watch.

(13:49):
They are very compelling. And again, the repetition of those works really strongly, but it can come down to even things like the font that we write in. So the amount of cognitive effort we have to put into reading something actually correlates to memorability to a certain extent. So there are arguments that say if you've got some text, if you've got a page of text on a landing page or something like that, where you've got call to action, or if you've got particular details on that text, you want people to remember. So it might be your USP or your core values. If you present them in a different font, which is slightly harder to read, the fact we have to put a little bit more cognitive effort into it means we're more likely to remember it.

Kiran Kapur, host (14:41):
Really? So you're actually putting friction back in to help it to be memorable.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (14:45):
Small amounts, please, Kiran, [laughter] small amounts. Yeah. And again, this is where I'm saying it's quite often counterintuitive. When you learn about some of these opportunities, it goes against perhaps what many of us have learned in marketing over the years. But yes, by just putting a little bit of friction back in, obviously we want it to be legible. We can present it in ways that it looks like it's actually been done to make this text stand out, but the selection of the particular font, we know can do a lot towards enabling people to be able to recall that information later on.

Kiran Kapur, host (15:23):
So is it that some fonts are inherently just easier to remember or is it the fact that it doesn't matter everything else was in comic sans, it's just that you've put one bit in a slightly different font?

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (15:35):
We think it really is about the cognitive effort that goes into it. So yeah, it's about having to apply a little bit more effort, whether that is also relating to attention and the fact it's different and it stands out, it naturally draws our attention because again, that's something we are hardwired to do. Our sort of survival aspects within our brain, we are naturally drawn to things that are new or that are different while our brain works out whether they're safe or something we need to concern ourselves with. So the two of those together, we believe are what creates this additional layer of recall and memorability.

Kiran Kapur, host (16:15):
So I'm really interested in whether there's a gender or a cultural aspect to what you are discovering.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (16:25):
Oh, yes. That's an interesting area to go into. So some elements of it, yes, absolutely. I mean, if we take culture, for instance, emotions are something which we can see being conveyed in universal ways. So Dr. Paul Eckman is in many ways the sort of founding father of the study of emotions, and he identified what he calls universal emotions. So anywhere that we go on the planet, people present the same emotions the same way. However, what triggers their experience of that emotion will vary hugely from culture to culture. So if we look at a tribe in Papa New Guinea, for instance, where he did a lot of his research, we can see that they present anger in the same way in terms of their facial expression, that sort of scowl and the eyebrows and the pursed lips, just the same as we would do. However, it's unlikely that their anger will be triggered by the wifi going down or something like that.

(17:31):
So we have very different experiences of what triggers it, but we present it the same way. And because the way we present it is uniform, it gives us opportunities to be able to adopt that and to kind of use that within our marketing messages, because we know that we are all hardwired to respond to these, again, in uniform ways. So some of it is global and can be used across cultures. Other parts of it have huge cultural relevance and need to be very significantly adapted and tailored for those. So I mean, you mentioned colour earlier, for instance, colour is notorious in that for some cultures, colours like red are associated with love and passion. And in other cultures, they're very much about death and disease. So yes, we need to be very mindful about cultural differences and where they come into play.

Kiran Kapur, host (18:29):
So in neuromarketing research, is there a gender difference as well? So that was the other area I was interested in.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (18:39):
Yeah, we can see. I mean, it's a really controversial area that time and time again, studies are quoting whether there is a gender difference between brains and whether there isn't. My own research, I have time and time again been able to really notice significant differences in the way people respond as a result of their gender. Now, the big question there is whether that is something that we are born with or whether that's something that just occurs as we grow up. It's the classic nature, nurture debate, but I can see time and time again, the way people respond to marketing materials and marketing content can polarise according to what gender they are. So I did some research looking at the same rational offer. So I just created the same offer presented in four different ways. So one said, "Buy one, get one half price." One said "save 50%", one said "50% off|", and one said "two for one".

(19:49):
I think those were the four. And with anything I do like that, I get really clear distinctions in the way people respond according to their gender. So one gender prefers one categorically, one gender might be stressed out by one significantly more than the other. So yeah, time and time again, gender is a factor that we need to consider.

Kiran Kapur, host (20:12):
I find you use the word stressed out, really interesting. So does that mean that there is marketing that you have to be careful about the stress that you are giving the person?

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (20:23):
Yeah, definitely. And again, it's perhaps a great thing that you've picked up on that because when I talk about stress, I'm not necessarily talking about the conventional use of the word that we might have. It's much more about that cognitive stress. So it comes back to how easy it is for the brain to process it. So one of the things that the brain does very quickly is make an assessment of whether we think we've got the capacity to deal with something. So something in the region of 11 million bits of information a second our brain is processing and all the time it's diverting resources and making decisions about where it's going to allocate the resources and capacity it has. So very low level, one of the first things it does is works out whether I've got the capacity to deal with something. So if we present it with a really complicated image or a wall of text, very quickly our brain is going to make that decision that says, "I haven't got what it takes for this.

(21:27):
I'm going to cast my eyes over that and move on to something else." So it's really that kind of measure of stress rather than the classic stress response that we might be getting. But it's really important for us as neuromarketers to be able to pick up on that because if participants who are undergoing research identify something as being stressful, then we know that in a complicated environment, the chances are they're not going to engage in that content in the same way that they are in the research. So if I've brought them in and sitting them in front of a screen and showing them some different mock-ups of brochures or webpages and some are eliciting a stress response, we know that in the real world, very quickly, the bounce rate would go up. People would take one look at that landing page and think, "Forget it, I'm too busy, I'm moving on"

Kiran Kapur, host (22:20):
Yeah. And I think we can all identify ourselves in that situation. And we're coming towards the end, Katie, but last time you were on, you blew my mind by talking about yoghourt pots and the weight of yoghourt pots making my brain think that something was more creamy. Is there something else? Is there other examples that you can give that are equally sort of brain frying, that our response is so controlled by what you've given us?

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (22:51):
Yeah, there's lots of them. There's loads and loads. So let me just think of something that might be relevant. So one of the things that's really interesting and quite mind blowing at the moment is looking at digital. So if we consider that our brains aren't really designed for coping with things in a two dimensional format, so we are much more adept at reading information from our environment when it's three dimensions. So all the time our brain is struggling with information that's presented in a 2D format. And when we look at what's happening in our brains and we look at the way our brains responds to things, we can see that there is actually a big argument for still presenting things in very tangible three dimensional ways. So lots of people are now slowly coming back to presenting newsletters in hard copy formats or brochures and manuals and things in hard copy formats.

(23:56):
And when we look at brain activity, again, we can see that there is something about the sort of kinesthetic experience of turning pages, which really shapes the way our brain reacts to the information that it's being presented with. So we find it much easier to navigate around if we've got physical pages that we're turning, and again, we find it much easier to recall that information if we've been engaged with it in a more physical way. So yes, there's lots of insights, lots of discoveries that we are learning about all the time in neuromarketing. And yeah, yoghourt pots was one of them, but thinking about things in a digital world, we need to accept that our recipients' brains are not designed to engage with content in that way. And it may be convenient, it may enable us to reach global markets, but we've got to be mindful about the impact we are having when we reach our audience.

(24:57):
And are there things we could do that would really give us a bit more of an edge? And it seems as though returning to physicality where possible does provide a fabulous additional edge.

Kiran Kapur, host (25:09):
How intriguing, yes, possibly explains why vinyl records are coming back. It's the tactile kinesthetic feel of them.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (25:16):
Absolutely. It's the smell, it's the touch. Yeah. We gain a lot of information from the outside world about through our fingertips and the sense of touch. So again, another one, if you're meeting somebody for the first time, make them hold something warm, offer them a warm drink. And if they don't want one, make them hold yours because the information that comes in through their senses about warmth seems to trigger oxytocin release in the brain, which is the neurotransmitter. And sorry, it's the hormone, which is all about connection and bonds and rapport and trust. So it's a fabulous thing to do when you're meeting people for the first time.

Kiran Kapur, host (25:59):
So the British thing about offering people a cup of tea is actually a good thing to do.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (26:04):
Absolutely. But don't give them a cup and saucer because if they hold the sauce that they don't get the warmth, you need a mug.

Kiran Kapur, host (26:12):
Katie Hart, that was absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for your time and expertise. And I believe you have a very exciting announcement to make.

Katie Hart, neuromarketer (26:21):
I do have a very exciting announcement to make. Yes. I have hot off the press, I can say that officially. I have just received approval for a book which I'm going to be writing. So forgive me if I'm less available over the next few months. But yes, there is a neuromarketing book, which I'm going to be writing, which will be available March 2026 if I meet all my deadlines. So very excited to see how that shapes and very excited to be able to share more of these neuromarketing insights with people who are curious to discover more.

Kiran Kapur, host (26:58):
Congratulations on the book and we'll have you back on when you get to the launch. That would be lovely. Thank you so much, Katie.

Announcer (27:08):
Thank you for listening to the Cambridge Marketing Podcast. And don't forget to listen back through previous episodes to see how you can sell more of your product online, how to conduct brilliantly effective market research, and for the best way to brand your company. The Cambridge Marketing Podcast is made and produced by Cambridge Marketing College, teaching CIM qualifications since 1991. Find out more at marketingcollege.com.