Selling Beauty: How Neuroaesthetics and the Evaluation of Beauty Play a Role in Neuromarketing

Have you ever bought something on the internet just because it was aesthetically pleasing, and wondered why you paid $100 for a vase you never needed in the first place? 

Your brain is the culprit. 

Neuroaesthetics has become increasingly studied in the realm of cognitive neuroscience, and has become a hot topic of discussion, particularly with regard to the objectivity of beauty. 

The objectivity in beauty, as discussed in the article “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer”, is largely due to the processing fluency theory, which states that “the easier it is for a perceiver to process the properties of a stimulus, the greater its aesthetic response will be” (Aleem et al.). If you had to choose between a car with asymmetrical angles and a noisy multi-colored pattern on the exterior, or a sleek, minimal, and streamlined design of another, which one would you purchase? Or for instance, why are butterfly wings so exquisitely beautiful? Objectively, it is due to the fluency of the symmetrical pattern on its wings. 

As one can tell, this knowledge regarding the aspects of objectivity of what an individual or a group of people would consider as aesthetically pleasing is immensely lucrative, and propelled research in businesses’ most crucial question: what drives consumers to choose one product over the other (and also how can that be effectively monetized)? Neuroaesthetics play a profound role in consumer neuroscience, where it is an essential component of advertisements, logos, etc., and its connection to the realm of neuromarketing was thoroughly analyzed in the article “Consumer Behavior Through the Eyes of Neurophysiological Measures: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends”  (Cherubino et al.). These advertisements, which overwhelm individuals daily through all forms of media, are “deconstructed by the brain into their constituent elements,” which consist of values of processing fluency like shape and color (Cherubino et al.). At the very essence of it, marketers have the tools and ability to infiltrate our brain and encode their product design or brand into both short-term and long-term processes so that we will be more compelled to purchase their product. Why does this happen so prevalently? Because the products are made to look so good that we - biologically and psychologically - cannot refuse. This mechanism of “aesthetic appraisal” is taken advantage of by companies to design products that appeal to us from an evolutionary standpoint, as symmetric and balance are facets of processing fluency that also arise from the same mechanisms as survival and learning (Aleem et al.).

Now this is not to say that understanding the theory of processing fluency is a definitive guarantee to selling a product to all consumers one hundred percent of the time. Understanding what makes a product “beautiful” is not that simple, as the individual consumer and their specific community plays a significant role in aesthetic learning. While we may see products that stimulate reward-based circuitries in our brain, we still rely on our individual motivational states to make the best choice for ourselves (Aleem et al.). The environment and culture we each are raised in affect our views of what we personally appreciate as aesthetically beautiful. This process of evaluating an object and making a decision about it based on our environment and personal experiences is noted as “mental workload” in Cherubion’s article. In her group’s analysis, characteristic EEG spectra demonstrated that human performance in decision-making decreases when mental workload is too high or too low (this differs person to person), which fortunately for companies and unfortunately for the wallets of consumers is a tailored aspect of both neuromarketing and in measuring indices of cognitive engagement when consumers are making a decision about a product. 

If the notion that people “buy with the heart and justify with the mind” rings true, then it is to the benefit of advertisers to utilize neuromarketing strategies and appeal to individual motivational states and logical reasoning (Cherubino et al.). 

As artists learn to improve their art by understanding the dynamics of the audience’s cognitive processes, companies on social media too can learn to tailor strategies via media - specifically social media - to appeal to an audience and sell their product. Therefore, the next time we scroll through Instagram and have the urge to purchase that sleek, aesthetically pleasing vase that we never needed, we need to remind ourselves that this is precisely how the advertisers on the other side of the screen expected us to appraise the beauty of their product.

Sources:

1. Aleem, Hassan, et al. “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer.” Springer Series on Bio- and Neurosystems Mobile Brain-Body Imaging and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation and Creativity, 2019, pp. 101–110., doi:10.1007/978-3-030-24326-5_11. 

2. Cherubino, Patrizia, et al. “Consumer Behaviour through the Eyes of Neurophysiological Measures: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends.” Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, Hindawi, 18 Sept. 2019, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6766676/.