Neuromarketing in Action

What Cheetos, Campbell’s, Hyundai and PayPal Can Teach Us

From mischievous crisps to soup labels and car design, how brands are using brain science to optimise marketing.

Neuromarketing uses measurements of people’s brain and body responses to better understand how creative, media, packaging, and experiences work; especially the bits people can’t or won’t articulate in a survey.

Typical tools include Electroencephalography (EEG) and Steady State Topography (SST) for moment-by-moment brain activity, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) for deeper brain imaging, eye-tracking for visual attention, Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) for arousal, and facial coding for expressed emotion.

In other words: it’s about reading the effects your marketing has, not mind-reading your customer.

If these terms are already proving baffling – I have included a Glossary at the bottom of this article – check it out!

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How We Got Here – An Evolution in Three Acts

Act 1 – The Lab Era (early 2000s)

Academic studies showed brand cues can change neural responses and even preferences.

The famous Coke vs Pepsi experiment found brand information altered activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex when people were told which brand they were drinking – a cornerstone in understanding branding’s effect on the brain.

Act 2 – The Commercialisation Wave (late 2000s to mid-2010s)

Specialist vendors moved from white coats into brand teams, with firms like NeuroFocus being acquired by Nielsen and the field becoming part of mainstream pre-testing and shopper research.

Act 3 – The Everyday Toolset (late 2010s to now)

In the UK, TV body Thinkbox and partners like Neuro-Insight helped standardise practical metrics such as long-term memory encoding and linked them to in-market effectiveness.

Today, neuromarketing signals commonly sit alongside surveys, brand lift, attention, and sales data.

What Neuromarketing is Good For

  1. Creative optimisation: Identify moments that encode strongly into memory, where attention drops, or where emotion flips from intrigue to confusion, then tighten the edit, move branding out of “low-receptivity” troughs, or choreograph music to support the narrative.

  2. Packaging and retail design: Test whether a pack attracts the eye, evokes approach or avoidance, or signals the right category cues on shelf. Campbell’s famously used biosensory measures to change label design elements.

  3. CX and product flows: Find friction points in onboarding, checkout, or app journeys by combining eye-tracking, GSR, and facial coding with behavioural data.

  4. Strategic messaging: Pressure-test which promise actually moves people physiologically – not just which line they say they like.

Real-World Brand Examples

Frito-Lay Cheetos – “Orange Underground”.

EEG work revealed people secretly enjoyed the mischievous, messy “orange dust” aspect despite claiming in groups that they disliked it.

The campaign leaned into that subversive truth, winning the 2009 ARF Grand Ogilvy Award in the process. It just goes to show that sometimes perception can be wrong – even if initial research showed that people don’t like something about your brand; don’t throw away ideas just because claimed responses are coy or socially filtered!

Campbell Soup – label redesign.

After a multi-year biosensory study tracking skin conductance, heart rate, and more, Campbell’s adjusted visual elements on pack to strengthen emotional connection at shelf.

Neuromarketing tests showed that the old design wasn’t eliciting the emotional response they wanted. So Campbell’s removed the familiar spoon image, enlarged product photography, softened the colour palette, and adjusted steam visuals above the bowl to feel warmer and more inviting. Even the logo was reduced in prominence so that the pack felt less corporate and more comforting; all aimed at building a stronger subconscious connection at shelf.

The marketing “takeaway” (pun loosely intended); is that for packs with huge base sales, even small neurosignalled tweaks can be worth millions.

Hyundai – car design and comms.

Using eye-tracking and brain measures while people inspected a pre-release model helped Hyundai identify which lines and surfaces earned attention and positive responses, informing styling choices and content.

Hyundai used neuromarketing tools such as eye-tracking and EEG to observe how people visually and emotionally responded to car prototypes, advertising, and showroom experiences. The findings guided everything from exterior styling details to the pacing of launch communications, ensuring the designs and messaging aligned with the moments of strongest positive engagement.

You can put this into action by combining design decisions with objective visual and neural data, not just aesthetics debates.

PayPal – message shift.

Neuromarketing work carried out by PayPal indicated “speed and convenience” out-performed “safety” as the primary emotional hook, helping pivot the brand story.

PayPal discovered that the visceral reactions to “speed and convenience” were far stronger than to its long-standing “safety” message, which customers said they valued but did not respond to emotionally. This insight led to a strategic pivot in their communications, emphasising ease and instant transactions in campaigns, a shift that helped boost both adoption and brand affinity.

UK TV creative – practical rules of thumb.

Thinkbox and Neuro-Insight showed how aligning music with on-screen action boosts memory encoding, and how “conceptual closure” before branding can sink recall.

To put this into practice, you need to ensure that you time your brand reveal after an emotional rise, not after the story has fully resolved.

A Practical Playbook for Marketers

1) When to use it

  • High-stakes creative decisions: TV, hero video, OOH, packaging changes, brand platforms.

  • When claimed and actual responses diverge: You’re getting polite positives, but performance lags.

  • Pre-testing “why” for A/Bs: Use neuro to diagnose creative edits before large paid tests.

2) What to measure

  • Attention and visual path: Eye-tracking heatmaps to ensure assets earn a look and your brand is seen early and often.

  • Memory encoding: EEG/SST for second-by-second “will this be remembered later” strongly related to downstream effectiveness.

  • Arousal and valence: GSR and facial coding to spot emotional spikes or cringe.

  • Cognitive load: Indicate confusion or effort during UI flows.

3) How to run a study that pays back

  • Define the decision. “We will choose cut A or B and finalise music” is better than “let’s see what we learn.”

  • Recruit realistically. Use your real category buyers and media contexts where possible.

  • Test against outcomes. Pair neurometrics with brand lift, attention metrics, and sales/MER after launch.

  • Iterate fast. Short, focused neuromarking sprints during edit or design cycles beat one giant post-rationalisation.

4) Budgets and scrappy options

  • Tier 1 – Full vendor study: Best for TV/hero assets and pack redesigns.

  • Tier 2 – Lightweight lab: Eye-tracking plus GSR on 20-50 people can provide 80% of the directional value on digital video or landing pages.

  • Tier 3 – Proxy diagnostics: Use attention measurement, scroll-depth, and scene-by-scene drop-off as behavioural correlates, then tighten creative beats. Treat these as complements, not substitutes.

5) Turning findings into edits

  • Push branding out of low-receptivity troughs. If memory dips before your end-frame, move the logo/packshot or add a final narrative “kick” that raises encoding.

  • Make music work for you. Sync lyrics and cadence to the action to lift memory encoding rather than letting a generic track wash over the story.

  • Sequence for sense-making. Use establishing shots and fluent scene changes to reduce cognitive load before key claims.

  • Design for the eye path. If eye-tracking shows people never look bottom-right, stop hiding prices or CTAs there.

Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Myth: “It tells us why people buy.”

It tells you what your content does to their brain and body, which you infer into creative decisions. Keep pairing neuro with behavioural and commercial data.

Over-claiming precision.

Treat neurometrics as sensitive diagnostics, not absolute truth. Anchor changes to hard KPIs.

One-and-done testing.

The value compounds when neuromarketing is embedded into your edit cadence or packaging pipeline, not as a novelty project.

Ethics and compliance.

Follow the NMSBA Code of Ethics, and in the UK ensure claims remain truthful, evidence-based, and not misleading under the CAP Code. If you use neuromarketing in your own comms (“scientifically proven to…”), you must hold robust substantiation.

Further reading and evidence

TL;DR

Neuromarketing is not a magic mind-reader. It’s a set of sensitive diagnostics that show how your creative and design actually land on attention, memory, emotion, and effort. Treat it like a scalpel, not a sledgehammer: use it for high-stakes edits, packaging routes, and flow fixes where claimed attitudes aren’t matching outcomes. Combine neurometrics with brand lift, attention, and sales. Borrow the UK-validated rules of thumb – avoid conceptual closure before branding, sync music to the action, and place assets where the eye goes. Stay on the right side of ethics and the CAP Code, and you’ll bridge the gap between ivory-tower theory and work-day effectiveness.

Glossary of Terms For This Article

SST – Steady State Topography
A specialised form of EEG analysis (developed by Neuro-Insight) that measures how the brain processes information over time. Particularly useful for identifying long-term memory encoding.

fMRI – Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Creates detailed brain maps by tracking blood flow (oxygen levels). Powerful for identifying which regions of the brain are active, but costly and less practical for day-to-day marketing use.

GSR – Galvanic Skin Response (Electrodermal Activity)
Detects tiny changes in skin conductivity linked to arousal and emotional intensity. Often paired with facial coding or eye-tracking in ad and product testing.

Eye-Tracking
Technology that follows gaze patterns and fixations to reveal what people actually look at, in what sequence, and for how long – vital for packaging, shelf tests, and digital design.

Facial Coding
Analyses micro-expressions (tiny, involuntary facial movements) to infer emotions such as joy, surprise, or frustration while viewing ads, products, or experiences.

Memory Encoding
A neuromarketing metric derived from EEG/SST that predicts whether content will be stored in long-term memory – strongly linked to future brand recall and purchase behaviour.

Arousal & Valence
Two psychological dimensions often tracked together: arousal measures intensity of emotion (calm vs excited), valence measures whether the feeling is positive or negative.