As technology continues to advance, these innovations get increasingly more mind-blowing. Take what’s happening in the marketing industry, for example. Technology has already gotten smart enough that it can customize the ads users see on their Facebook timelines, combing their online presences to uncover their favorite brands, new products that they’ve clicked on, even suggesting products to them that they’ve only thought about once before.

Some consumers find this to be rather ominous, while others are happy that they’re no longer forced to scroll through an onslaught of advertisements every day that hold no special interest to their personal tastes. As the number of online shoppers continues to rise, marketers want to be sure that their audience and their products continue to be a perfect match.

We are exposed to 4,000-10,000 ads every single day, depending on how frequent our internet use is. Wouldn’t you want the advertisements you see to be as close to your interests as possible?

This is what keeps marketers busy. Their jobs are centered around developing strategies that better match consumers with the right products — for their audience, that’s their specific products. There is one new field of research that could change how we market products to consumers forever, and that’s neuromarketing.

Neuromarketing uses medical technologies such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study how a consumer’s brain is stimulated by certain marketing tactics. This data informs why consumers behave the way they do, and what parts of the brain are responsible for these specific responses. In other words, technology makes it possible to be able to directly plug into the consumer’s brain and truly understand what they want from their products, even down to the right color for the product’s packaging. 

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi story, but neuromarketing could likely be the future of the marketing industry as we know it. Like with any new innovation, neuromarketing has its critics, but major corporations have already been using this technology to understand how to design their products and build their marketing campaigns. 

Frito-Lay is one example of a company already on top of the neuromarketing trend. After designing packaging they thought would appeal to their audience, they conducted a few studies and found that consumers didn’t respond well to the shiny bags they produced, but preferred matte bags instead. They scrapped the shiny packaging and immediately replaced them with the matte options, which hit the stores almost immediately.

Similarly, PayPal also used neuromarketing to find that their customers preferred commercials that focused on speed and convenience rather than on safety and security. This information influenced an entirely new ad campaign for their service. 

Neuromarketing has been around for at least a decade, but it’s now finally starting to grow in popularity. It isn’t quite at its height of notoriety yet, but this technology is right around the corner.