NEW DELHI: Passion is an extremely desirable virtue sought after by brands. While every brand seeks to entice, educate and garner interest in their products and services, gaining a passionate consumer is often a rarefied achievement. Brands that are able to produce that kind of response often manifests in the form of consumers obsessively following the different activities and releases of the brand, actively seeking out more information about the brand, being willing to spend more on products, and keenly recommending and promoting the brand.

While a part of general English lexicon, Neurons Inc, a global applied neuroscience company has been able to decipher the physiological and neurological implications of passion. Though some of these responses are conscious – mainly subjective enjoyment and mental preoccupation, passion shows itself physically in the changes in heart rate, respiration, pupil dilation, grip strength and response speed.

From a neurological perspective, this passionate response exhibits high activity in the emotional centre of the brain – the amygdala, as well as the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with expectation and wanting responses. It is this heightened emotional state along with strong desire during sports that lends itself to a stronger response towards brands advertised, boosting the purchase intent of ads. In addition, effects are also seen in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, responsible for processing of information, planning and execution of choice.

While the inculcation of branding takes many forms, advertising, in all its different formats is still the most preferred form of drawing consumers to itself. In addition to the creative and narrative aspects of an ad, and ensuring it gets seen by the most number of people, its placement and context plays a significant role in its success. 

In that case, if a brand is looking to incite the spark of passion in their consumers through their advertising, they are likely to see greater effect by placing it within a genre that garners the strongest passion response from viewers – sports. 

Research by Neurons Inc. India carried out by mapping the brain waves of viewers showed that sports garners 15 per cent more passion than GEC shows, 20 per cent more passion than news content, and 12 per cent more passion than movies.  

Be it cricket or football, sports has a special relationship with viewers – with the ability to excite and engage unlike any other genre. With its constantly moving visuals, loud sound designs and most importantly a narrative with a vested interest, sports provides a compelling medium to watch – and along with it a distinct pattern of brain activity. 

Following your favourite team isn’t too dissimilar from engaging with your favourite brand.
Take the recent India tour of Australia for instance, where the Indian cricket team once convincingly beaten and with a limited talent pool, rose up from behind to ultimately win the series and create an underdog narrative that social media is still talking about. 

Passions were certainly running high this series and due to a psychological phenomenon called the Halo Effect, the high emotional investment towards sports adds to the overall engagement of brands being advertised. In the same experiment, Neurons Inc India observed that the passion response towards the same set of ads was significantly higher within sports content, with it being 3.67 per cent more than GEC, 13.33 per cent more than news content and 7.67 per cent more than movies.

The cumulative effect of watching sports thus results in a more passionate and receptive consumer, easily driving subconscious motivations in favour of the brands and driving purchases. What this suggests is that with the advent of modern neuromarketing techniques, it is now possible for brands to eschew age old guesswork and actually measure the impact and efficacy of their media planning spends scientifically.