In a world filled with fear and uncertainty due to COVID-19, businesses should pay attention to how customers think and feel in today’s retail landscape, a neuroscience expert maintained during a recent webinar for Araneta City lessees.

Neuroscience can help businesses attune themselves to the needs of their customers, US-certified neuroscience coach and Amplius NeuroManagement Consultancy Managing Director Ben Ampil maintained in a Zoom exclusive webinar, "Understand Shopper Behavior this 2022".

Neuroscience is the study of the interplay of the brain and the human nervous system.

Having a consumer-based mindset grounded squarely on neuroscience helps businesses understand the ever-changing needs and demands of their target market, he argued.

“Shopping involves emotions, and that is something that you as players in the retail industry must capitalize on and do excellently, and the problem is that the world is changing because of COVID. All of us, most importantly your shoppers, are worried,” Ampil explained.

“These psychological changes can be difficult to reverse because what we experienced caused our brain structures to change.”

With the collective trauma caused by living with the constant threat of the pandemic looming large over all, the amygdala, the part of the brain that constantly scans for threats and dictates our fight or flight response, is often caused to go into overdrive.

To address this, Ampil said businesses should remember SCARF—Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.

“If you want to be able to delight your customers, always remember SCARF, take care of it, do not diminish their SCARF,” he urged.

“Accord your customer high status. Accord your customer certainty to the best you can. Accord your customer autonomy. Accord your customer with relatedness and a sense of belonging. Accord your customer with fairness. Do these and you will be able to weather COVID well.”

By making sure that retailers take care of these five behaviors, they can help customers have a better experience which can then translate to sales and continued patronage.

Another approach is via the equation E=MC2.

Emotion (E), which guides all purchase decisions, creates positive or negative memories (M), which then drive consumer choices (C2).

“Emotions, which they are looking for in a shopping experience, create memories," said Ampil.

"If you have a satisfied customer, they’ll tell one person, but if you have a dissatisfied customer they’ll tell a hundred and this is amplified by social media. You want to give them emotions—good emotions.”