Neuromarketing is a hybrid field involving three main fields: neuroscience, psychology, and marketing. Neuromarketing uses neuroscience technology (e.g., electroencephalography (EEG)) to study, explore, and understand consumers’ unconscious behavior in response to marketing and advertising research. Neuromarketing refers to the academic use of neuroscience to study and better understand the neural and physiological responses of the customer, such as decision making, emotions, attention, and memory, in response to marketing stimuli including television advertisements.
1. Introduction
Researchers and marketers have largely relied on traditional marketing methods, such as self-report measurements, to assess and understand consumers’ behavior toward marketing practices such as advertising
[1][2]. This is despite the fact that traditional marketing methods do not provide reliable, valid, and generalizable information about consumers’ unconscious behavior (e.g., decision making and emotion)
[3]. According to Zaltman
[4], approximately 90% of consumer behavior, such as thinking and emotion, happens unconsciously or subconsciously. Additionally, Thuermer
[5] mentioned that there is a significant split between the conscious processes, which drive advertising practices and market research, and the unconscious processes (e.g., emotion), which drive most decision-making processes. As Bargh and Morsella
[6], and Morsella and Bargh
[7], mentioned, the unconscious is a total lack of awareness, such as when you are anesthetized, while the subconscious is defined as “one level below conscious awareness”
[8], for example, emotions. Recently, subconscious behavior has been more significant in marketing practices such as advertising activities
[9][10][11]. Accordingly, many researchers and practitioners have become interested in exploring consumers’ unconscious behaviors in response to marketing practices
[3][12]. A novel approach called “neuromarketing” was coined in 2002, and defined as the neuroscience technology implementation in marketing by Professor Smidts
[13].
Neuromarketing uses neuroscience technology (e.g., electroencephalography (EEG)) to study, explore, and understand consumers’ unconscious behavior in response to marketing and advertising research
[14][15][16]. Thus, academia and industry have investigated how marketing research can benefit from applying neuromarketing to develop advertising campaigns and marketing research
[17]. As mentioned by Witchalls
[18], “The ultimate goal of neuromarketing is to identify a ‘buy button’ in the brain which can be targeted and triggered by future commercials”
[19]. Interest in the term “neuromarketing” has experienced rapid growth in the last ten years
[20][21][22][23]. Therefore, neuromarketing has induced great interest among academia and professionals for providing more accurate information about consumers’ unconscious responses (e.g., emotion, attitudes, preferences, and motivation) in response to marketing stimuli
[24][25][26].
2. Neuromarketing
Neuromarketing is a hybrid field involving three main fields: neuroscience, psychology, and marketing
[27][28][29][30]. Several definitions of neuromarketing have been selected based on the focus of the research. This definition refers to the application of neuroscience tools in the marketing context that actually reflect the obstacles, challenges, and limitations for social science researchers in conducting research using these tools, which include fMRI (see
Table 1). Even though the neuromarketing term emerged in 2002, it had been used previously to understand consumers’ responses to products and to address the marketing issues of several companies, including Pepsi Co.
[12][31]. In Malaysia, the first use of the EEG tool in the business field, such as for advertisements, was in 2016 by Samsuri et al.
[32].
Table 1. The summary of the neuromarketing concept.
Neuromarketing tools have enabled the recording of neural signals and mapping of individuals’ brain activity [37][38], and the interactions between individuals and the environment [39]. Neuromarketing tools can be classified due to the sort of measurement [40][41][42][43]. Therefore, according to Ramsoy [44], neuromarketing tools are divided into four categories, as follows: (i) neuroimaging tools, (ii) physiological tools, (iii) behavioral measurements, and (iv) self-report methods (Table 2).
Table 2. Classification of neuromarketing tools.