The Potential of Neuromarketing: studying the degree to which neuromarketing is applied across industrial sectors

Abstract

Neuromarketing has revolutionized traditional marketing research by studying consumers' brains to understand their behavior better. Neuromarketing is an emerging discipline considered an innovation for marketing, and more and more companies are adopting neuromarketing to understand consumers better. This research aims to analyze the potential of neuromarketing through the study of the degree of its application in different industrial sectors. In this way, archival research was conducted based on secondary data in form of a set of 31 selected relevant publications. The analysis of these publications was organized according to a proposed structural model, focusing on industrial sectors, application areas, neuromarketing tools and techniques, and research studies. The results, based on the set of 31 selected publications, reveal that neuromarketing has been widely adopted in three sectors: food (30%), automotive (14%) and advertising (13%), which account for more than 50% of neuromarketing applications. In these sectors, neuromarketing has a high degree of implementation because opportunities in terms of techniques and areas of application have been exploited. Nonetheless, it is in the sector of advertising that neuromarketing is most applied, corresponding to more than a quarter of the neuromarketing applications in all combined sectors. However, the results unveil differences in the implementation of neuromarketing between the studied sectors. Neuromarketing is gradually spreading across all sectors and asymmetrically applied, especially also in the communication sectors, such as: television, media, and social networking. However, neuromarketing practices still raise some criticisms like the ones on ethical issues that are, sometimes, holding back its wider adoption by all sectors.