On the Use of EEG or MEG Brain Imaging Tools in Neuromarketing Research

Here we present an overview of some published papers of interest for the marketing research employing electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG) methods. The interest for these methodologies relies in their high-temporal resolution as opposed to the investigation of such problem with the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) methodology, also largely used in the marketing research. In addition, EEG and MEG technologies have greatly improved their spatial resolution in the last decades with the introduction of advanced signal processing methodologies. By presenting data gathered through MEG and high resolution EEG we will show which kind of information it is possible to gather with these methodologies while the persons are watching marketing relevant stimuli. Such information will be related to the memorization and pleasantness related to such stimuli. We noted that temporal and frequency patterns of brain signals are able to provide possible descriptors conveying information about the cognitive and emotional processes in subjects observing commercial advertisements. These information could be unobtainable through common tools used in standard marketing research. We also show an example of how an EEG methodology could be used to analyze cultural differences between fruition of video commercials of carbonated beverages in Western and Eastern countries

The Feasibility of Neuroimaging Methods in Marketing Research

On July 17, 1990, President George Bush issued “Proclamation #6158” which boldly declared the following ten years would be called the “Decade of the Brain” (Bush, 1990). Accordingly, the research mandates of all US federal biomedical institutions worldwide were redirected towards the study of the brain in general and cognitive neuroscience specifically. In 2008, one of the greatest legacies of this “Decade of the Brain” is the impressive array of techniques that can be used to study cortical activity. We now stand at a juncture where cognitive function can be mapped in the time, space and frequency domains, as and when such activity occurs. These advanced techniques have led to discoveries in many fields of research and clinical science, including psychology and psychiatry. Unfortunately, neuroscientific techniques have yet to be enthusiastically adopted by the social sciences. Market researchers, as specialized social scientists, have an unparalleled opportunity to adopt cognitive neuroscientific techniques and significantly redefine the field and possibly even cause substantial dislocations in business models. Following from this is a significant opportunity for more commercially-oriented researchers to employ such techniques in their own offerings. This report examines the feasibility of these techniques

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

This is your brain on neuromarketing:reflections on a decade of research

In this commentary, we reflect on the last decade of research in the field of neuromarketing and present a schematic illustration of the basic process of a typical neuromarketing study. We then identify three critical points of interest in this illustration that have not received enough discussion in neuromarketing-relevant literature, and which we consider to be somewhat problematic. These are the dominance of event-based designs in neuromarketing, the potential of alternative modalities in neuromarketing and the current focus on reverse inference in neuromarketing. We argue that, taken together, these points have substantive implications for the development of a more reflective neuromarketing, which in turn has greater potential to make a positive impact on marketing knowledge, marketing practice and public perceptions of marketing activity in general

Neuromarketing empirical approaches and food choice: A systematic review

Consumers' food choices are often driven by reasons of which consumers are not fully aware. Decision-making about food is influenced by a complex set of emotions, feelings, attitudes, and values that are impossible to assess simply by asking consumers their opinions. Indeed, traditional techniques, such as self-reports or interviews, mainly allow the measurement of conscious and rational reactions to a product or advertising. Recently, there has been a rapidly growing interest in the multidisciplinary field of “neuromarketing,” which takes advantage of neuroscientific techniques to study consumer behavior. This discipline applies neuroscientific methods and tools that allow the measurement of consumers' emotional and spontaneous reactions in a more objective and observable way. The aim of this paper is (a) to describe neuromarketing's underlying assumptions, techniques, and the advantages of this perspective, examining the scientific literature on the use of neuromarketing in food studies; and (b) to suggest best practices to apply this novel approach in the food marketing domain, with a specific focus on non-invasive methods. Finally, although the perception of nutritional elements has already been explored, the health content of labels, the presence of additives, and the evaluation of the information conveyed by food packaging remain other possible elements of interest in future food neuromarketing research

Neuromarketing and Evaluation of Cognitive and Emotional Responses of Consumers to Marketing Stimuli.

AbstractThe effect that certain publicity campaigns, brands and products have upon us, from a cognitive and emotional point of view, is being assessed, by measuring the attention, the encoding and the emotional engagement. This article has investigated the literature regarding the neuromarketing tools, methods and specific techniques. Given that neuromarketing has borrowed a series of neuroscience-specific methods and techniques, the neuromarketing or consumer's neuroscience represents a passing from marketing specific instruments, such as the focus group, the observation, the direct enquiry, the interview to a series of instruments which record both the brain's electrical activity and the metabolic activity

Neuromarketing and Consumer Neuroscience – The Evolution and Current State of the Art, an Integrative Review

Abstract Neuromarketing or consumer neuroscience is a rather new field of research, which utilizes neuroscientific tools, such as EEG (Electroencephalography) and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to identify marketing related phenomena, such as decision making, liking, brand image etc. This Master Thesis takes an Integrative Review approach, combining narrative review, historical review and systematic review frameworks for researching neuromarketing overall to create a timeline of the evolution of the field during it’s’ still rather short existence. 42 articles from the years 2002-2019 were qualitatively analysed to obtain this overall image. The research is of qualitative nature and focuses on identifying different themes surrounding neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience and the goal is to create an overall image of the field to provide valuable information for scholars as well as managers on how to implement neuromarketing in future research and in practice. Three key areas/themes were identified where the evolution of neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience can be best observed. These key areas were 1. The understanding of quality 2. The evolution of attitudes and 3. The growing interest towards the field vs. lowering entry barriers. In these almost twenty years, the understanding of what is good quality neuromarketing research has evolved from almost inexistent to a solid understanding, while the amount of actual quality neuromarketing research is still to follow. The attitudes started from fairy-tale-like high hopes, like finding the “holy grail” of marketing, which would be a “buy button” inside the consumer’s head and painting dystopian future scenarios, where the consumer is stripped down from his autonomy and the marketer’s control their minds. Since then attitudes have evolved to a much more realistic optimism, where the potential is recognized but not overhyped and the dystopian imagery has shifted to reasonable ethical concerns, like neuroimaging safety. As a characteristic for the field, the entry barriers for new researchers have been rather high. As time has went on, the interest towards the field has simultaneously grown as a lot of valuable research work has been done to considerably lower the entry barriers. In the light of these results the author suggests that managers should remain cautious should they invest on neuromarketing consultancy or engage in decision making based on neuromarketing findings. This is mainly, because the current literature consists mostly of conceptual research articles and the current empirical findings are largely of subpar quality and scattered in nature. Additionally, there are many consultancy companies offering neuromarketing based consultancy, which should consequently be approached with caution. For the scholars, neuromarketing remains an interesting field of study and it seems that the current understanding offers a solid groundwork for quality future research. The author suggests that future research would start focusing on empirical research, since the necessary theoretical foundation is solid and offers sufficient guidance to conduct quality empirical research. Increasing the amount of empirical research would also seem like an organic evolutionary step at the current stage of neuromarketing as a research field. New solid empirical findings would finally claim neuromarketing’s long recognized potential. Tiivistelmä Neuromarkkinointi (neuromarketing) tai Kuluttajan aivotutkimus (consumer neuroscience) on melko uusi tieteenala, joka tutkii markkinoinnillisia ilmiöitä, kuten päätöksentekoa, mieltymyksiä (liking), brändäystä, imagoa jne. aivotutkimuksellisia keinoja, kuten EEG (aivosähkökäyrä) tai fMRI (magneettikuvaus) apunaan käyttäen. Tämä Maisterin tutkielma ottaa yhdistelevän katsauksen (integrative review) näkökulman, yhdistellen kertomuksellista, systemaattista ja historiallisen katsauksen viitekehyksiä, muodostamaan aikajanan neuromarkkinoinnin kehityksestä tieteenalana. Tutkielma on kvalitatiivinen ja tarkoituksena on tunnistaa neuromarkkinoinnin tieteenalan ympärillä kunakin aikana vallitsevia teemoja ja tätä kautta muodostaa kokonaiskuva tieteenalasta ja sen kehityksestä. Tätä varten kirjoittaja analysoi kvalitatiivisesti 42 artikkelia vuosilta 2002–2019. Kokonaiskuvan muodostamisen tarkoituksena on tarjota informaatiota johtajille, sekä tutkijoille, jotta he voisivat tehdä hyviä päätöksiä koskien neuromarkkinointia esimerkiksi investoinneissa tai tulevassa tutkimuksessa. Tutkimuksessa tunnistettiin kolme pääteemaa, joista neuromarkkinoinnin evoluutiota on mielekkäintä tarkkailla. Nämä pääkohdat olivat 1. Laadun ymmärrys neuromarkkinointitutkimuksessa 2. Asenteiden kehitys tieteenalaa kohtaan ja 3. Kasvava kiinnostus tieteenalaa kohtaan vs. alalle sisääntulon kynnysten alentaminen. Näiden melkein kahden vuosikymmenen aikana, ymmärrys laadukkaasta neuromarkkinointitutkimuksesta kehittyi lähes olemattomasta vakaaseen ymmärrykseen. Laadukkaan tutkimuksen määrän kasvun odotetaan seuraavan perässä. Asenteet puolestaan alkoivat satumaisen korkeista odotuksista, kuten markkinoinnin “Graalin maljan” eli “Ostonapin” mahdollisesta löytämisestä kuluttajan aivoista ja dystopian kaltaisten tulevaisuuskuvien maalailusta, joissa kuluttaja on menettänyt autonomian ja markkinoija hallitsee täysin hänen päätöksiään. Sittemmin, asenteet ovat kehittyneet kohti realistisempaa optimismia, jossa neuromarkkinoinnin potentiaali tunnistetaan, mutta ei etsitä Eldoradoa. Myös dystooppisten tulevaisuuskuvien maalailusta on sittemmin luovuttu ja on siirrytty kohti kohtuullisempia eettisiä huolia, kuten aivotutkimusten turvallisuuden varmistaminen. Neuromarkkinoinnin alalle tyypillistä on korkeat sisääntulon kynnykset. Ajan kuluessa, kiinnostuksen kasvaessa neuromarkkinointia kohtaan, tutkijat ovat tehneet huomattavan määrän arvokasta työtä alentaakseen näitä sisääntulon esteitä. Tämän tutkielman tulosten valossa, kirjoittaja suosittelee johtajien käyttävän erityistä harkintaa halutessaan perustaa päätöksentekoaan neuromarkkinoinnin tarjoamiin tutkimustuloksiin tämän hetkisen empiirisen tutkimuksen hajanaisen ja vaihtelevan laadun vuoksi. Lisäksi, neuromarkkinointiin pohjautuvaa konsultointia tarjoavia yrityksiä on olemassa jo huomattava määrä. Kirjoittaja ei voi tämän tutkielman tulosten valossa suositella investointeja näihin palveluihin. Tieteenharjoittajille neuromarkkinointi ja kuluttajan aivotutkimus tarjoavat mielenkiintoisen tutkimusalan. Kirjoittaja suosittelee painopisteen siirtämistä kohti empiiristä tutkimusta, koska olemassa oleva teoreettinen kirjallisuus tarjoaa tarvittavan pohjan hyvälle empiiriselle tutkimukselle. Uudet empiirisen tutkimuksen tulokset lunastaisivat viimein neuromarkkinoinnin kauan tunnistetun potentiaalin ja siihen liittyvät odotukset

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

Consumer neuroscience: usability of brain imaging methods in marketing research

Consumer neuroscience (neuromarketing) is an emerging field of marketing research which uses brain imaging techniques to study neural conditions and processes that underlie consumption. The purpose of this study was to map this fairly new and growing field in Finland by studying the opinions of both Finnish consumers and marketing professionals towards it and comparing the opinions to the current consumer neuroscience literature, and based on that evaluate the usability of brain imaging techniques as a marketing research method. Mixed methods research design was chosen for this study. Quantitative data was collected from 232 consumers and 28 marketing professionals by means of online surveys. Both respondent groups had either neutral opinions or lacked knowledge about the four themes chosen for this study: benefits, limitations and challenges, ethical issues and future prospects of consumer neuroscience. Qualitative interview data was collected from 2 individuals from Finnish neuromarketing companies to deepen insights gained from quantitative research. The four interview themes were the same as in the surveys and the interviewees’ answers were mostly in line with the current literature, although more optimistic about the future of the field. The interviews also exposed a gap between academic consumer neuroscience research and practical level applications. The results of this study suggest that there are still many unresolved challenges and relevant populations either have neutral opinions or lack information about consumer neuroscience. The practical level applications are, however, already being successfully used and this new field of marketing research is growing both globally and in Finland.siirretty Doriast

New frontiers in neuromarketing research:Benefit and potential applications of GRAIL

Recent years has seen an explosion in the application of neuroscience techniques to market research, known as neuromarketing. The aim of this paper is to contribute to both theoretical and practical aspects of neuromarketing research by presenting a new and innovative neuroscience tool for studying marketing-relevant behavior, namely GRAIL. GRAIL combines different devices (e.g. EEG, ET, facial EMG) into one single real-time device. It can help researchers and practitioners to measure physiological responses (external reflexes) and brain activity (internal reflexes) simultaneously. We argue that this new tool can improve neuromarketing research in several ways, namely in reducing the costs of neuromarketing research, improving the efficiency and accuracy of neuromarketing experiments, and recreating real-life purchase experiences using virtual reality and personalized scenarios