Neuromarketing tips for business: advice for designers, stylists and creatives

Building connections (and ultimately sales) can be time-consuming and confusing for creatives, agreed? What if you could use easy neuromarketing tips for business to help you?

For digital marketing, what flies one time might sink when repeated.

It’s too easy to sigh and blame social media algorithms, without stacking the odds in your favour by using brainy styling and clever marketing.

Would you like to get more from your digital marketing efforts?

You CAN punch above your weight in the competition for your audience’s attention, by using interesting neuromarketing tips.

One of these is playing around with shapes in your marketing message. I’m going to show you some easy ways to do that in this post.

Your marketing success relies on you making emotional connections with your audience. Neuromarketing can help you to do that too.

So let’s add those neuromarketing tips to your creative skills.

How do you use neuromarketing tips for business to solve the mystery of what connects digitally?

For solopreneurs, including creatives, trial and error is the most common way of testing your visual content. 

Like you, I’ve stopped and started along that treadmill too. Upped the speed of publishing, slowed down again, stepped off when it got frustrating.

But you can use social media’s virtually instant feedback metrics to push ahead.

Added to that, the shift on social towards a more laid-back, authentic aesthetic means your photographs don’t need to be perfect. 

Platforms like Instagram give Business and Creator accounts like yours instant insights into content experiments. So that’s the good stuff!

Time that could be better spent building your business in other ways.

Even with these handy nudges to help you experiment with your visuals, creating content and styling photographs can still be a major time-vacuum for you.

What if you could increase the odds of winning in your favour, by experimenting with some valid, tested neuromarketing tips?

They could help you build connections and brand loyalty with your audience more quickly and easily.

Read on and I’ll show you how.

This post contains a useful bit of next-generation marketing. I will teach you about using visual curves instead of angles, lines and sharp points.

Key neuromarketing tips for business: for the skimmers

In a rush?

Here’s what you need to know –

• Using neuromarketing can help save you time creating effective content.
• Stronger marketing skills will earn your brand more interest and attention.
• Better understanding of what connects deeply with your audience can help transform your followers into superfans.
• One easy takeaway is to add curves to your visuals, to soften lines and angles. Experiment with adding curves to your interiors, products, packaging, branding, website.
• You don’t have to add circles. Try ovals and organic shapes too.
• Our brains’ preference for curves is only a small nugget of neuromarketing gold you can use to elevate your visual marketing.
• This all fits with the digital shift to create authentic, naturally styled, shareable experiences, embracing any flaws as treasured quirks.

What is neuromarketing?

Neuromarketing is the place where psychology, neuroscience and marketing meet for coffee and a chat. 

It’s all about understanding what makes people tick when they decide to buy something.

By applying techniques drawn from neuroscience and psychology, brands (big and small) can engage their audience on a subconscious level.

How can creatives use neuromarketing tips for business to boost their brand?

Isn’t neuromarketing too expensive for small business and solo creatives? 

Many big brands with vast marketing budgets retain neuromarketing experts to use brain imaging or measure eye-tracking on their websites. They aim to optimise the effect of marketing campaigns on their target consumers.

But you don’t have to be a big brand to step in and take advantage of some common neuromarketing tips. 

Smaller, creative businesses are well-placed to pick up the pace on marketing psychology. 

You can apply some of the broad lessons from neuroscience and marketing psychology to help build your brand. In fact, it can help you cut through the digital noise.

Your marketing efforts can come from an authentic place, where you use your understanding of how the brain works to craft your message. By using psychology-led marketing, you can learn to communicate better with your audience just by speaking to their brains.

I’m going to tell you just one easy strategy you can experiment with in your visual content. 

Prepare to embrace playing around with shapes. 

Shape shifting – neuromarketing tips for business

One marketing experiment you can try is to choose the shapes you use in your visuals carefully.

Our brains instinctively favour curves over lines and angles. This article explains the neural basis for shape preference.

I’m going to show you how to use this preference for curves easily for visual marketing, whether you’re a designer, stylist, photographer or creative.

Why experiment with shape?

Are you open experimenting with shapes? You can do this with your branding, photo styling and actual physical spaces. Whichever works best for your brand. 

Product or interior styling is an easy first step to experiment with, to see if it works for you.

There’s no need to rebrand, repackage or redesign.

You can experiment with shape using what you have, combining it with a clever eye for styling.

Here’s why you should choose curves over corners 

Are you a curves or corners person?

Whichever one you favour stylewise, your choice has an impact on the people who view your content.

I want to show you a quick technique that can help you connect with your audience more reliably.

The takeaway here is that curves make people tick more than lines, angles and sharp points.

That’s because our brains associate curves with softness and friendliness. They’re also much more playful.

Multisensory marketing research has even shown that subjects rate the same food as sweeter when it’s served on a round plate.

Those positive associations can lead to stronger emotional responses to curves from your audience.

Why do our brains prefer curves over sharp edges?

I think it’s mainly to do with touch, or the sensory awareness in our brains of how things feel. 

We often hear about “touchpoints” in relation to products or interiors. In fact, even in virtual experiences with products or brands, touchpoints are still so important. Our brains are capable of imagining touchpoints through your visuals.  

And those touchpoints speak directly to our primal instincts.

Simply put, curves are just instinctively more appealing to us, because we can’t hurt ourselves on a curve the way we can on a sharp point.

Our brains also have a strong tendency to find faces in objects, even when none exists. I think this could also tie into our preference for curves.

If our brains are naturally drawn to faces, it makes sense that softly curving or organic shapes may forge a stronger impression than geometric lines.

What kind of curves should you use in your marketing?

When you think of curves, you probably immediately think about circles.

But you don’t have to restrict yourself to circles. Think about using ovals, organic shapes or scalloped edges.

All you really need is a curvy effect that blurs the edges of a product or interior.

For example, fringing works well in interior products. That’s because it makes the sharp edges of a piece of furniture disappear.

Neuromarketing tips for business: curves are easier to photograph

Photo styling and composition is easier when you include more curves. Curves are far easier to photograph than straight lines.

You’ve probably noticed that your smartphone camera has a grid on the screen. It’s meant to help you line up the verticals and horizontals, to make a more pleasing photograph.

So obviously it makes sense that if you don’t have straight lines, and have lots of curves instead, it’s far easier for you to take a pleasing photograph.

Neuromarketing tips for business: packaging, product & styling takeaways

You can make the most of the brain’s love of curves in your branding by thinking early on about packaging and product design.

However, when you’ve moved on from here, a more budget-friendly experiment is to stick with your existing product design and packaging, then add curves as you style them.

By using different shapes and curvy layers, you can break up that geometric feel very easily.

For a quick fix, style your product photos adding appropriate natural elements, like leaves or rounded blooms. Both are attractive to our brains.

How to add curves to interiors

There are lots of ways you can do this, to make interiors more appealing to the eye and brain.

Here are some quick and easy ways to add curves to interiors.

Doorways

Doors are almost always geometric and composed of sharp lines. The trick is to think of them as a bottom layer, to which you add curves on top.

I’m not a huge fan of the porthole window in a door, but anyone can add a circular wreath. This breaks up the lines and makes the shape more appealing to the brain. 

Add curves with lighting

Lighting is one of the easiest ways to add curves to a space, as the choice is so wide.

Curved or bubble shapes are major features of contemporary lighting, at every price point, and give an instant curvy win.

How to add curves with furniture

It’s can be hard to source curvy furniture, but it’s become more mainstream in the last few years.

The curved sofa has definitely gained momentum recently. Although it’s still very much a minority design, you can now find curved sofas (and especially chairs) at more accessible price points.

In general, the smaller the table, the easier it is to find a curved one. There’s no shortage of curved coffee tables out there. Large oval or round dining tables are few and far between, on the other hand, but worth looking out for.

Add curves with accessories

You could choose round or oval mirrors, instead of hanging square or rectangular ones.

Or add curved accents to your interior with textiles. While most cushions are rectangular or square, you can seek out round ones that break linear patterns. They’re easier to style too. No arranging and squaring off – just layer them on and go.

The same applies to rugs and floor coverings. Most are rectangular, but you can find organic shapes like sheepskin, or round and oval rugs. These break up the geometry on a larger surface like your floor.

Curves on your walls

Most of the time, when you add art to your walls, the frame is geometric. To counter this, a good tip is to choose art that has more organic shapes and curves within the piece itself.

Inevitably, the eye is drawn more to the content within than to the square or rectangular frame.

Add curves with nature

A great quick way of adding curves to your interior is to use flowers and greenery.

You’re looking for things that are soft, not spiky. Think plants with rounded leaves, rather than sharp ones. Maybe flowers with layers of blooming petals, rather than ones that look too angular.

I’ve already told you about the trick of adding a round wreath to a rectangular door. You can also add decorative accessories like floral hoops to your walls, or fallen branches hung from your ceiling.

Tableware

Kitchen/dining rooms are really good places to add organic shaped accessories.

You can find (often handmade) mugs with rugged organic edges. Or chopping boards and platters that aren’t perfectly geometric, but have curved, irregular edges.

Incidentally, you can also get this finish on larger pieces of furniture. Wooden tables with a “live edge” (following the grain of the wood) are more common, and every piece is unique.

More neuromarketing tips for business

These thoughts on using curves more deliberately all link to some of my posts on neuromarketing and marketing psychology.

Here’s a quick round-up.

Choose fonts carefully

I’ve posted about choosing the best fonts for your brand.

One interesting takeaway is that experiments show that wine with a label featuring smooth, rounded fonts is rated differently by tasters than the same wine with sharp, angular text on the label.

Guess what? The sharp-font wine is rated “sharper” in taste, revealing how the visuals interact with our other senses.

You can experiment with going freehand with your branding too. Another way to make effective use of curves is to occasionally use handwritten or freehand creations instead of printed text.

You can also read more about choosing calligraphy fonts and complex fonts in this post.

Include a sense of movement in your photos

I’ve also written about the importance of including motion and movement in your photographs.

This includes using upwards and downwards diagonals in photos (depending on the effect on the brain you want to suggest – energy or relaxation).

Using curvy shapes can also give an impression of blurred movement that you don’t get with clean, straight lines.

Website layout – neuromarketing tips for business

You know those Call to Action buttons on your newsletter or website?

Some research suggests that they get a stronger response if you give them rounded corners.

Obviously other factors come into play here too –

• Eye-catching colours
• Tempting wording (please not “Sign up now”)

However, it’s easy to experiment with rounded corners on your website and newsletters. You may find incremental gains from increased clicks. 

Discover more neuromarketing tips

You could read an excellent chapter (called Play) in Ingrid Fetell Lee’s book, Joyful (affiliate link).

Joyful suggests that organic shapes (like bubbles) are more playful, and inspire more joy, than many geometric ones. It’s an interesting read.