Research has shown that consumers are concerned about corporations’ improper use of consumers’ information in the digital era. Complementing the literature with novel neuroimaging techniques can ...provide direct evidence of related implicit mental processes. This study uses privacy-related behavior adopted by corporations in the digital age to decipher brain mechanisms that underlie consumers’ reactions to breaches of privacy, thus providing implicit evidence that consumers perceive pain from such breaches. In Study 1, an online experiment used corporations’ behaviors to delve into underlying psychological mechanisms that shaped consumers’ responses to certain kinds of corporate use of private information. Our findings highlight the perceived harm resulting from privacy breaches and its effects on consumers’ intentions to take punitive action against companies that are responsible for such breaches. In Study 2, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to identify brain regions involved in these implicit responses. In the course of this study, we observed a correlation between consumers’ perception of harm from corporations’ improper use of private information and brain activation in regions of the amygdala and the temporoparietal junction. The inferior parietal lobule and the anterior cingulate cortex were also found to play roles in evaluating such behavior. By leveraging these novel neuroanatomical insights, our study explains consumers’ inclination to avoid harm in response to privacy breaches and their behavior in response to improper use of their information.
Like the Tigris-Euphrates rivers in the Middle East, Yellow-Yangtze rivers in China, and Mississippi-Colorado rivers in the United States, our brain has two neural pathways (or rivers) where we ...perceive two distinct values in marketing exchange processes. We identify two neural pathways of reward and information value (RIV) perceptions in the consumer brain leading to engagement, recommendation, and sharing (ERS) behavior in social media marketing. Using fMRI, we show that the first river in the brain (i.e., reward value area of the nucleus accumbens) is activated when consumers are shown visually aesthetic and appealing (versus unappealing) objects in social media advertisements. The second river in the brain (i.e., information value area of the prefrontal cortex) is activated when consumers are shown new (versus outdated) products in social media advertisements. This paper is the first attempt in marketing to provide an integrative brain map for customer value perception in SNS marketing. The conceptual model presented in this paper can be traced back to the traditional consumer attitude change theory as dual processing models of persuasion, yet it can explain the underlying mechanisms of consumer value in the social media context. Using this two rivers brain map, marketers can better identify how their offerings can satisfy the diverse and unique needs of consumers based on RIV.
Whether neuromarketing methods can add value to marketing research depends on their cost-utility ratio and their ability to offer hidden information that cannot be obtained using other marketing ...research methods. Due to the limitations of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for real-world situations and its high costs, the aim of this study was to examine the feasibility of a mobile functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) system. Two experiments dealing with brands and labels are used to discuss how and if neuromarketing can enrich marketing research and to what extent existing limitations and challenges can be overcome.
In both experiments, differences in prefrontal cortex activity were measured. Thus, it is possible to measure brand- and label-related prefrontal cortex activation using fNIRS. As fNIRS is mobile and allows for experiments outside the laboratory, this considerably expands the field of usage of neuroimaging processes and can therefore decrease the costs of neuroimaging.
•Significant differences in activation of prefrontal cortex between different stimuli•Using mobile functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in marketing•Higher activation viewing labels and brands compared to non-labeled products•Significantly higher activation when in drinking cola compared to just viewing a picture situations•Results indicate the feasibility and high potential of mobile fNIRS.
Marketing scholars and practitioners are showing increasing interest in Extended Reality (XR) technologies (XRs), such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), as very ...promising technological tools for producing satisfactory consumer experiences that mirror those experienced in physical stores. However, most of the studies published to date lack a certain measure of methodological rigor in their characterization of XR technologies and in the assessment techniques used to characterize the consumer experience, which limits the generalization of the results. We argue that it is necessary to define a rigorous methodological framework for the use of XRs in marketing. This article reviews the literature on XRs in marketing, and provides a conceptual framework to organize this disparate body of work.
The first decade of consumer neuroscience research has produced groundbreaking work in identifying the basic neural processes underlying human judgment and decision making, with the majority of such ...studies published in neuroscience journals and influencing models of brain function. Yet for the field of consumer neuroscience to thrive in the next decade, the current emphasis on basic science research must be extended into marketing theory and practice. The authors suggest five concrete ways that neuroscientific methods can be fruitfully applied to marketing. They then outline three fundamental challenges facing consumer neuroscientists and offer potential solutions for addressing them. The authors conclude by describing how consumer neuroscience can become an important complement to research and practice in marketing.
Eye tracking has been used for decades to provide insight into the cognitive processes that underlie consumers' decision-making. Since there is a wide variety of tools, ranging from information ...display boards to functional magnetic resonance imaging, that can be used to better understand these processes, eye tracking should not be viewed in isolation. In order to understand the roots, current developments, and future research avenues of eye-tracking research, it is necessary to focus on process-tracing research on consumer decision-making. This paper addresses this issue by quantitatively analyzing 347 articles, along with their 17,798 cited references, by means of factor and social network analysis. Six distinct, but to varying extents interconnected, key research streams dominate the field's research agenda. Revealing the emergence and growth of these research streams shows how their prevalence has changed over time. Several conclusions, based on the results, are drawn and used to indicate possible future research.
•EEG measures predict within sample future product choices, and commercials’ success at the population level.•EEG measures increased prediction accuracy based on self-reports alone.•Multiple types of ...EEG measures captured different aspects of valuation.•Machine learning models show promise in neuromarketing applications.
A basic aim of marketing research is to predict consumers’ preferences and the success of marketing campaigns at the population-level. However, traditional marketing tools have various limitations, calling for novel measures to improve predictive power. In this study, we use multiple types of measures extracted from electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and machine learning (ML) algorithms to improve preference prediction based on self-reports alone. Subjects watched video commercials of six food products as we recorded their EEG activity, after which they responded to a questionnaire that served as a self-report benchmark measure. Thereafter, subjects made binary choices over the food products. We attempted to predict within-sample and population level preferences, based on subjects’ questionnaire responses and EEG measures extracted during the commercial viewings. We reached 68.5% accuracy in predicting between subjects’ most and least preferred products, improving accuracy by 4.07 percentage points compared to prediction based on self-reports alone. Additionally, EEG measures improved within-sample prediction of all six products by 20%, resulting in only a 1.91 root mean squared error (RMSE) compared to 2.39 RMSE with questionnaire-based prediction alone. Moreover, at the population level, assessed using YouTube metrics and an online questionnaire, EEG measures increased prediction by 12.7% and 12.6% respectively, compared to only a questionnaire-based prediction. We found that the most predictive EEG measures were frontal powers in the alpha band, hemispheric asymmetry in the beta band, and inter-subject correlation in delta and alpha bands. In summary, our novel approach, employing multiple types of EEG measures and ML models, offers marketing practitioners and researchers a valuable tool for predicting individual preferences and commercials’ success in the real world.
Although much progress has been made in relating brain activations to choice behavior, evidence that neural measures could actually be useful for predicting the success of marketing actions remains ...limited. To be of added value, neural measures should significantly increase predictive power, beyond conventional measures. In the present study, the authors obtain both stated preference measures and neural measures (electroencephalography; EEG) in response to advertisements for commercially released movies (i.e., movie trailers) to probe their potential to provide insight into participants' individual preferences as well as movie sales in the general population. The results show that EEG measures (beta and gamma oscillations), beyond stated preference measures, provide unique information regarding individual and population-wide preference and can thus, in principle, be used as a neural marker for commercial success. As such, these results provide the first evidence that EEG measures are related to real-world outcomes and that these neural measures can significantly add to models predicting choice behavior relative to models that include only stated preference measures.
Despite the large body of research that has investigated the effect of ad appeals of television advertisements on consumers' internal responses and behavior, our understanding of how different ad ...appeals are processed remains limited. Complementing existing literature with novel insights from neuroimaging techniques can be valuable, providing more immediate insights into implicit mental processes. The present study explores the neural responses to functional and experiential executional elements in television advertisements by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Comparing a unique set of different commercials for the same brand enabled examination of the influence of differences in ad appeal on brain responses and subsequent advertisement effectiveness. Findings show that functional and experiential executional elements engage different brain areas, associated with lower- and higher-level cognitive processes, and that the extent to which these particular brain areas are activated is associated with higher ad effectiveness.
•Neural responses to functional and experiential ad appeals are explored using fMRI.•Functional and experiential ad appeals engage distinct networks of brain regions.•Findings suggest a distinction between lower- and higher-level cognitive processes.•Activation of both networks is associated with higher ad efficacy.
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