Neuromarketing Insights into Consumer Decision Processes

Abstract

Neuromarketing is now an interdisciplinary science, which finds the unconscious logic behind consumer decisions by synthesizing neuroscience, psychology and marketing. The mixed-method design that the current study adopted consisted of a combination of EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking, skin conductance and heart rate variability along with qualitative focus groups and the thematic analysis. Data was analyzed using structural equation modelling with 300 participants to predict the forecastive value of attention, emotional arousal and memory encoding on the purchase intention. Results revealed that emotionally evoking stimuli significantly enhanced physiological arousal, EEG asymmetry, and fMRI activations within the parts of the brain that were related to reward, hence anticipating a better purchase intention. The young consumers had high brand recall and gender difference existed according to feelings and cognitive processing. Such a mixture of neurophysiological and qualitative data presented a comprehensive approach to the process of knowledge about consumer behavior grounded on the study other than self-reports. The findings are informative to the consumer neuroscience theory, demonstrate the importance of the subconscious processes in the decision-making process and provide the actual world implications to the marketers in the context of developing an emotionally effective, and the morally responsible, campaign. In this study, it was determined that neuromarketing is a very predictive, ethically sound, and power-filled path to understand consumer choice during the technological age.