Branding and a child’s brain: an fMRI study of neural responses to logos

Branding and advertising have a powerful effect on both familiarity and preference for products, yet no neuroimaging studies have examined neural response to logos in children. Food advertising is particularly pervasive and effective in manipulating choices in children. The purpose of this study was to examine how healthy children’s brains respond to common food and other logos. A pilot validation study was first conducted with 32 children to select the most culturally familiar logos, and to match food and non-food logos on valence and intensity. A new sample of 17 healthy weight children were then scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Food logos compared to baseline were associated with increased activation in orbitofrontal cortex and inferior prefrontal cortex. Compared to non-food logos, food logos elicited increased activation in posterior cingulate cortex. Results confirmed that food logos activate some brain regions in children known to be associated with motivation. This marks the first study in children to examine brain responses to culturally familiar logos. Considering the pervasiveness of advertising, research should further investigate how children respond at the neural level to marketing

Covert brand recognition engages emotion-specific brain networks

Consumer goods' brands have become a major driver of consumers' choice: they have got symbolic, relational and even social properties that add substantial cultural and affective value to goods and services. Therefore, measuring the role of brands in consumers' cognitive and affective processes would be very helpful to better understand economic decision making. This work aimed at finding the neural correlates of automatic, spontaneous emotional response to brands, showing how deeply integrated are consumption symbols within the cognitive and affective processes of individuals. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was measured during a visual oddball paradigm consisting in the presentation of scrambled pictures as frequent stimuli, colored squares as targets, and brands and emotional pictures (selected from the International Affective Picture System [IAPS]) as emotionally-salient distractors. Affective rating of brands was assessed individually after scanning by a validated questionnaire. Results showed that, similarly to IAPS pictures, brands activated a well-defined emotional network, including amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, highly specific of affective valence. In conclusion, this work identified the neural correlates of brands within cognitive and affective processes of consumers

Made in America: The affects Cognitive Load Consumer Ethnocentrism and Country of Origin have on Consumer Purchasing Decisions

Previous research suggests that cognitive load affects decision-making tasks. As well, a consumer varies his or her purchasing decisions based off of his or her personal level of Consumer Ethnocentrism (CE) and the Country of Origin (COO) of the product or brand. Eighty individuals participated in the study. Some participants were put under cognitive load by having remembering an 8 digit number span. All subjects were randomly exposed to one of two product sets, where COO was manipulated. Each product set consisted of 5 advertisements followed by a series of 4 questions. These questions regarded their willingness to purchase the product in the advertisement, their familiarity with the product, and a quality rating of the product. All participants then answered the CETSCALE questionnaire in order to measure their CE. It was hypothesized that participants with high CE regardless of cognitive load will tend to favor purchasing American products over products with a foreign COO. In addition, participants with low CE under cognitive load will be indifferent when making purchasing decisions on domestic versus foreign products

Using brain imaging to measure emotional response to product appearance

Brain imaging systems are a set of techniques that allow visualizing the regions of the brain that are activated when (emotional) stimuli are presented. Their advantage over traditional methods of measuring emotion, like self-reports is that they leave out response biases. This paper presents what brain imaging measurement can do for emotional design. It also reviews the brain imaging studies that have been performed in the field of emotional design. Very few such studies were found, and they were dispersed among different disciplines: design, marketing, advertising, human-computer interaction. One of the results of that investigation is that the complexity of brain imaging systems and of designing adequate experimental setups imply that brain imaging be reserved for some very specific purposes, like obtaining the very first impression of a product design

Le basi neurologiche del rapporto tra il consumatore e la marca. Il contributo del neuro-imaging alle ricerche di marketing

Consumer develop very tight relationships with brands. In many cases, consumers develop positive relationships with their preferred brands and goods. In some of these cases true “love” relationship may occur. Sometimes, also negative relationships arise, often as a reaction toward unsatisfactory experiences, bad practices, etc. Companies aim at developing strong and positive emotional relationships between their brands and their customers. When they succeed, the brand is immediately recognized, it elicits positive affective responses, it is more difficult to be substituted for by competitors. The aim of the present study is to measure behavioral and emotional brain responses to covert visual recognition of brands. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity in 15 healthy subjects (7 females, 23-33 years) that were exposed to four stimulus types: coloured scrambled pictures, coloured squares, brand logos, and IAPS pictures with positive and negative valence scores. Sixty-three popular brands were selected among 8 different product categories. Two specific patterns of activation emerged for like (amygdale) and dislike brands (anterior medial cingulate, left inferior frontal gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, medial cuneus). Implications for interpreting the role of brands in consumer mental processes are given, with special reference to the asymmetry between positive and negative evaluations

The neuropsychology of consumer behavior and marketing

Insights and tools from neuroscience are of great value to marketers. Neuroscientific techniques allow consumer researchers to understand the fundamental neural underpinnings of psychological processes that drive consumer behavior, and elucidate the “black box” that is the consumer’s mind. In the following review, we provide an overview of the fundamental tenets of consumer neuroscience, selectively outline key areas of marketing that consumer neuroscience has contributed to, compare and contrast neuroscientific tools and methods, and discuss future directions for neurophysiological work in marketing. In doing so, we illustrate the broad substantive landscape that neuroscience can add value to within marketing.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141563/1/arcp1006.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141563/2/arcp1006_am.pd

Neuromarketing: a review of research and implications for marketing

In this research, we reviewed existing studies which used neuromarketing techniques in various fields of research. The results revealed that most attempts in neuromarketing have been made for business research. This research provides important results on the use of neuromarketing techniques, their limitations and implications for marketing research. We hope that this research will provide useful information about the neuromarketing techniques, their applications and help the researchers in conducting the research on neuromarketing with insight into the state-of-the-art of development methods

Objective Measures of Emotion Related to Brand Attitude: A New Way to Quantify Emotion-Related Aspects Relevant to Marketing

With this study we wanted to test the hypothesis that individual like and dislike as occurring in relation to brand attitude can be objectively assessed. First, individuals rated common brands with respect to subjective preference. Then, they volunteered in an experiment during which their most liked and disliked brand names were visually presented while three different objective measures were taken. Participant's eye blinks as responses to acoustic startle probes were registered with electromyography (EMG) (i) and their skin conductance (ii) and their heart rate (iii) were recorded. We found significantly reduced eye blink amplitudes related to liked brand names compared to disliked brand names. This finding suggests that visual perception of liked brand names elicits higher degrees of pleasantness, more positive emotion and approach-oriented motivation than visual perception of disliked brand names. Also, skin conductance and heart rate were both reduced in case of liked versus disliked brand names. We conclude that all our physiological measures highlight emotion-related differences depending on the like and dislike toward individual brands. We suggest that objective measures should be used more frequently to quantify emotion-related aspects of brand attitude. In particular, there might be potential interest to introduce startle reflex modulation to measure emotion-related impact during product development, product design and various further fields relevant to marketing. Our findings are discussed in relation to the idea that self reported measures are most often cognitively polluted

Unravelling the Consumer Brain: The Role of Emotion in Purchase Behavior

The present research used electroencephalography (EEG) measures to examine the neural mechanisms of purchase behavior. Specifically, this study examined how affective priming influences a purchase decision when brand and price are varied. Participants were presented with Yes/No purchase decision trials for 14 different grocery products- seven national brand and seven private label products- while EEG activity was recorded. Price was increased or decreased relative to a base reference price. Prior to product onset, an emotional prime was flashed. The prime was a positive, negative, or neutral image from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Main behavioral results showed that fewer products were bought following a negative prime relative to positive or neutral, regardless of brand type or price. Event-related potentials (ERPs) locked to the product onset revealed very early effects of emotion (VEEEs), consisting of differential brain activity between positive/negative and neutral primes at posterior sites around 125 ms. Although the positive prime did not appear to have an overall behavioral influence, this result indicates that its emotional content was still captured at the neural level. A late positive complex (LPC), which reflects an association with positive outcome, was observed between 650-1000 ms at fronto-central sites. Main LPC results showed increased LPC activity for purchase trials following a positive prime. Overall, the results are consistent with similar research and show that buying decisions are malleable. The present research is among the first to demonstrate the effect of emotional priming on purchase behavior, and offers insight on some of the brain processes that drive purchase decisions, not all of which are manifested at the behavioral level

Led into Temptation? Rewarding Brand Logos Bias the Neural Encoding of Incidental Economic Decisions

Human decision-making is driven by subjective values assigned to alternative choice options. These valuations are based on reward cues. It is unknown, however, whether complex reward cues, such as brand logos, may bias the neural encoding of subjective value in unrelated decisions. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we subliminally presented brand logos preceding intertemporal choices. We demonstrated that priming biased participants' preferences towards more immediate rewards in the subsequent temporal discounting task. This was associated with modulations of the neural encoding of subjective values of choice options in a network of brain regions, including but not restricted to medial prefrontal cortex. Our findings demonstrate the general susceptibility of the human decision making system to apparently incidental contextual information. We conclude that the brain incorporates seemingly unrelated value information that modifies decision making outside the decision-maker's awareness