INFLUENCE OF PRICE AND QUALITY TO CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: NEUROMARKETING APPROACH

MOKSLAS – LIETUVOS ATEITIS 2009, 1 tomas, Nr. 3
SCIENCE – FUTURE OF LITHUANIA 2009, Vol. 1, No 3
Verslas XXI amžiuje
Business in XXI Century
© Vilniaus Gedimino technikos universitetas ISSN 2029-2341(print)/ISSN 2029-2252 (online)
http://www.mla.vgtu.lt 1 7
INFLUENCE OF PRICE AND QUALITY TO CUSTOMER SATISFACTION:
NEUROMARKETING APPROACH
Aurimas Dapkevicius1, Borisas Melnikas2
Vilnius Gediminas Technical University
E-mail: 1aurimasdap@gmail.com; 2melnikas@vv.vgtu.lt
Annotation. The purpose of this article is to analyze literature and find out empirical evidence on product price and quality
influence on customer satisfaction through neuromarketing approach. Customers’ satisfaction on their purchase is a significant
factor that leads business to success. In recent times, customer satisfaction has gained new attention within the context
of the paradigm shift from transactional marketing to relationship marketing. Even it is agreed in the literature that price
and quality has high effect on customer satisfaction; still there is little empirical evidence exploring this relation. Almost
nothing is known about the human neural mechanisms through which it affects the decisions made by individuals. So, in
this article there are reviewed two neuromarketing study cases as neuromarketing provides qualitatively different information,
ostensibly better quality comparing to that obtained by traditional methods. The whole article reveals that price and
quality is an important factor for customer satisfaction which leads to marketing managers’ decisions complexity nowadays
as markets are becoming more and more complex and overloaded.
Keywords: marketing, neuromarketing, customer satisfaction, quality, price.
Introduction
Customers’ satisfaction on their purchase is a significant
factor that leads business to success. In recent
times, customer satisfaction has gained new attention
within the context of the paradigm shift from transactional
marketing to relationship marketing (Grönroos
1994; Sheth & Parvatiyar 1994). Customers who are satisfied
with a purchased product will buy the same product
again, more often (Reichheld 1996), and will also recommend
it to others (Oliver and Swan 1989). Customer
satisfaction is commonly related to two fundamental
properties (Ostrom & Iacobucci 1995), including the
customer’s judgment of the quality of the product and his
evaluation of the interaction experience he or she has
made with the product provider (Crosby et al. 1990).
Kotler sums this up when he states: “The key to customer
retention is customer satisfaction” (Kotler 1994). Even it
is agreed in the literature that price and quality has high
effect on customers satisfaction; still there is little empirical
evidence exploring this relation. Almost nothing is
known about the human neural mechanisms through
which it affects the decisions made by individuals.
The purpose is to analyze literature and find out
empirical evidence on product price and quality influence
on customer satisfaction through neuromarketing approach.
The market environment is certainly complex for
the customer and poses huge problems for them. Maynes
(1985) characterizes most markets as informationally
imperfect where there are extensive price dispersions,
even when quality is constant. In such markets, consumers
may pay too much for products. Maynes suggested
three key factors underlie the present-day shopping environment:
− The overabundance of brands in the marketplace
leads to information overload.
− The technical complexity of many products makes
quality assessment virtually impossible for
the average consumer.
− The urbanization of our society creates an environment
where there are too many stores offering
similar goods.
The situation has got even worse as information
technologies came, markets had spread, and now there is
too many products available at too many stores and too
little time.
Marketers have used the mantra of “customer satisfaction”
for at least the last four decades; assuming the
Marketing Concept had accurately captured a prime consumer
motivator. Unfortunately, satisfaction is a short
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lived phenomenon. Surveys indicate that even satisfied
customers leave the firm on a regular basis. The explanation
to this conundrum may lie inside the brain. The striatum
in the brain quickly gets used to new stimuli and
tends to react only to the unexpected (Coy 2005). This
provides a neural-based explanation why marketing experts
now exhort us to “delight” our consumers instead of
simply satisfying them.
During last years it became essential to understand
customers’ behavior and neuromarketing is a big step
closer to it. As Martin Lindstrom points out in Buy-ology,
our purchase decisions are not as rational as people think,
and they never have been. Walking through a supermarket,
customers pick products from the shelves based on
thoughts and emotions of which they are largely unaware.
In a split second, they are drawn to a particular brand of
shampoo or toothpaste without really knowing why
(Lindstrom 2008).
Neuromarketing as a field of marketing
In this section I am going to review what is neuromarketing,
what are its goals and what is its contribution
to marketing.
The term ‘neuromarketing’ identifies a new field of
research championed by both academics and self-labeled
companies using advances in neuroscience that permit
powerful insights into the human brain’s responses to
marketing stimuli (Renvoise, Morin 2007).
The equipment capable of performing neurological
studies has been around only for several decades. There
are 3 ways to get necessary data from brains for neuromarketing
researches:
1. functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
2. electroencephalography (EEC)
3. magneto encephalography (MEG)
These devices were and still are used primarily as
medical diagnostic devices. These instruments provide
colorful film images of real-time brain activity based on
changes in ion polarity, temperature, or electronic impulses.
But this data can be used in field of marketing to
gather precise information about customers’ behavior.
The goals of neuromarketing studies are to obtain
objective information about the inner workings of the
brains of consumers without resorting to the subjective
reports that have long been the mainstay of marketing
studies. Thus, neuromarketing provides qualitatively
different information, ostensibly better quality comparing
to that obtained by traditional methods, about the economically
valuable topic of consumer preferences. Knowledge
of the areas in a consumer’s brain that are activated
when they are shown a particular product can be a much
more ‘honest’ indicator of their cognition compared with
other traditional measures such as focus groups where
responses can be biased.
According to an industry executive, “we can say
goodbye to those endless expensive bloody research
groups where consumer either lie their heads off or tell us
what they think we want to hear” (Walton 2004).
Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that
studies consumers' sensors, recognition and affective
response to marketing stimulus. Researchers use technologies
such as functional magnetic resonance imaging
to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, electroencephalography
to measure activity in specific regional
spectra of the brain response, and sensors to
measure changes in one's physiological state (heart rate,
respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why
consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of
the brain is telling them to do it.
Empirical evidence of influence of price and quality to
customer satisfaction
In this section I am going to review two neuromarketing
researches results that reveal the influence of price
and quality to customer satisfaction through their brain
activity in parts responsible for this experience.
First research investigates quality and customer satisfaction
relation. This research demonstrates the role of
the subconscious mind in consumer decision-making by a
2004 study by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine.
The researchers offered 67 committed Coke and Pepsi
drinkers a choice, and in blind testing, they preferred
Pepsi. When they were shown the company logos before
they drank, however, 75% preferred Coke. The researchers
scanned the brains of the participants during the test
and discovered that the Coke label created wild activity in
the part of the brain associated with memories and selfimage,
while Pepsi, though preferred by most, did little to
these feel-good centers in the brain. In the blind test half
the subjects choose Pepsi, and it tended to produce a
stronger response than Coke in the brain's, but when the
subjects were told they were drinking Pepsi three-quarters
said that Coke tasted better. Their brain activity had also
changed. According to Prof. P. Reed Montague, director
of the Brown Foundation Human Neuroimaging Laboratory,
“there’s a huge effect of the Coke label on brain
activity related to the control of actions, the dredging up
of memories and self-image.
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Therefore, as a better taste can be considered as a
better quality, the research reveals crucial proof how
people are mislead about it through properly chosen marketing
strategy.
The second research was made for investigating relation
between price and satisfaction. According to researchers
at the Stanford Graduate School of Business
and the California Institute of Technology, if a person is
told he or she is tasting two different wines – and that one
costs $5 and the other $45, when they are, in fact, the
same wine – the part of the brain that experiences pleasure
will become more active when the drinker thinks he
or she is enjoying a more expensive vintage.
“What we document is that price is not just about inferences
of quality, but it can actually affect real quality,”
said Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing who coauthored
a paper titled “Marketing Actions Can Modulate
Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness”,
published online Jan. 14 in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. “So, in essence, price is
changing people's experiences with a product and, therefore,
the outcomes from consuming this product.”
In the study there were recruited 11 male graduate
students who said they liked and occasionally drank red
wine. The subjects were told that they would be trying
five different Cabernet Sauvignons, identified by price, to
study the effect of sampling time on flavor. In fact, only
three wines were used – two were given twice. The first
wine was identified by its real bottle price of $5 and by a
fake $45 price tag. The second wine was marked with its
actual $90 price and by a fictitious $10 tag. The third
wine, which was used to distract the participants, was
marked with its correct $35 price. The wines were given
in random order, and the students were asked to focus on
flavor and how much they enjoyed each sample.
After the study the participants said they could taste
five different wines, even though there were only three,
and added that the wines identified as more expensive
tasted better. The researchers found that an increase in the
perceived price of a wine did lead to increased activity in
the brain because of an associated increase in taste expectation.
Therefore, this research reveals crucial evidence on
price and satisfaction relation. Hence we may conclude
that higher customer satisfaction is based not on real
quality, but the price as they use it as an indicator of
product quality.
On the one hand, it is a fact that when people perceive
that a product is overpriced they are less likely to
make a purchase. But, on the other hand, now we have
multiple studies showing that people enjoy a product
more when they pay more for it. That is why marketers’
decisions become more complex and marketing researching
needs to step forward to neuromarketing. With each
discovery comes the opportunity for correction and improvements
in marketing management decisions.
Neuromarketing in services
Neuromarketing can be also used to help service researchers
even that services are largely intangible and
more difficult to evaluate both pre- and sometimes post
purchase. This is because service products that exhibit no
immediate rewards (e.g. home protection systems, insurance
policies, preventative medicine, etc.) do not generate
much emotional involvement and, therefore, may receive
relatively low processing priority – unless emotional
rewards can be invoked. One of the distinguishing characteristics
of services is simultaneous production and
consumption. While this allows for greater customization
of services, matching capacity levels to demand levels,
and the like, it also increases the probability that a service
customer will perceive some level of relative unfairness
when comparing the service performance they received to
that received by another. When customers think they are
being treated unfairly, a small area called the anterior
insula becomes active. It means that transactions between
a service provider and a service customer are presumed to
be based on trust. When trust is high, a hormone called
oxytocin fills different areas of the brain. As a result,
service marketers could theoretically experiment with
different levels of trust to see which generates satisfying
levels of oxytocin given services production parameters.
It would also allow the services marketer to determine
how quickly these levels are internalized; meaning the
level of trust might need to be increased to maintain that
sense of pleasure. This information would allow the services
product marketer to determine which critical incidents
are most damaging so he could plan more efficient
and targeted recovery effort for service failure, and thus
reduce customer loss.
Neuromarketing penetration and future
Neuromarketing is spreading widely in many countries,
especially in innovative countries. There are now
more than 100 neuromarketing consultancies in the US
and major corporations regularly using their insights include
Procter & Gamble, GM, Coca-Cola and Motorola.
There are many more in Europe. Agency clients include
20
Fortune 500 manufacturers and notable service firms like
McDonald’s, movie studios, several large banks, and at
least a few political campaigns. The leading UK exponent
is the Oxford-based Neurosense, which conducted the
Viacom Brand Solutions study. It has undertaken projects
for many high-profile UK brands.
Even there are groups believing that neuromarketing
is (or could lead to) the ultimate invasion of privacy and
distract customers’ purchase choices; still it is and going
to be used in many companies marketing researches to
make better marketing strategies, advertising campaigns
and brand building.
Conclusions
1. Market complexity leads consumers to paying too
much for the products. As well our purchase decisions are
not rational as there is virtual understanding of product
quality based on unreliable information.
2. Higher customer satisfaction is not the result of a
better quality because quality may be influenced by over
weighted information.
3. Price is used as an indicator of product quality,
which results in better expectations from the product and
determines higher satisfaction.
4. Both quality and satisfaction have subordination
to price; therefore, quality and satisfaction are also related.
5. Marketing decisions should be more concentrated
on price rather than quality, as quality is more objective
and should be conveyed through other marketing instruments.
6. Neuromarketing is used widely now and has a lot
of future prospects in companies marketing researches to
make better marketing strategies, advertising campaigns
and brand building.
Literature
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Here. B&T (Australia), 19 November.
KAINOS IR KOKYB S ITAKA VARTOTOJU
PASITENKINIMUI: NEUROMARKETINGO POŽIURIS
A. Dapkevicius
Santrauka
Šio straipsnio tikslas – išanalizuoti literaturos šaltinius ir
surasti praktiniu irodymu, kaip produkto kaina ir kokybM veikia
vartotojo pasitenkinima neuromarketingo požiuriu. Vartotoju
pasitenkinimas yra svarbus veiksnys, vedantis versla i ilgalaike
sMkme. Nors yra daug teoriniu modeliu, kaip tai veikia vartotoja,
taciau mažai praktiniu irodymu. Šiame straipsnyje apžvelgiami
du neuromarketingo tyrimai, kurie atskleidžia kainos ir kokybMs
svarba vartotoju pasitenkinimui. O tai atskleidžia ir marketingo
specialistu priimamu sprendimu sudMtinguma, pobudi ir svarba.
Reikšminiai žodžiai: marketingas, neuromarketingas, vartotojo
pasitenkinimas, kokybM, kaina.