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Research Paper
What Does Neuromarketing Tell Us about Our Brain?
Strategic Marketing Management
February 9, 2015
Se Hyun Lee
133505

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Abstract
Firms spend thousands of dollars for advertisement through different media channels such as TV,
Internet social media, radio, magazines and newspapers. Many of these advertisement methods
have the different levels exposers to potential customers, and the price of advertisement varies
based on the exposers to the customers. However, marketers realized that exposing the contents
of the advertisement is not everything of reaching out to the customers. As the advertisement
price increases the marketers want to make sure their marketing strategy and advertisement on
television screen really works well. As a result, the marketers approach to the area of the study,
neuromarketing, to research on how human brain works as they watch the advertisement on the
Television screen. Neuromarketing is the area of study, integrating both marketing and
neuroscience by using brain-scanning technology in order to study the response of human brain
to the television commercials and other marketing methods. Neuromarketing also has a
significant implication on research on decision-making process and how human emotion
affluence the human decision-making process. Neuromarketing has broad range of areas to
studies, but this paper will focus on human decision-making process, how it works in consumer’s
behavior based on literatures on neuromarketing.

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One of the largest events in the United States would be National Football League (NFL) Super
Bowl. There are many different reasons why people watch Super Bowl, but one of the reasons
revealed was that people watch Super Bowl to see the commercials. Ron Siltanen says, “Several
studies have proven that 50% of the Super Bowl audiences watch it just to watch the ads”.
(Siltanen) According to Siltanen, it cost 4 million dollars for 30-second spot, and 8 million
dollars for 60-second spot for advertisement. In order to make commercial cost 4 million, the
marketers have to make sure that the commercial should work worth more than 4 million at least.
This is a good example of why marketers were interested in investing on brain scanning
technology for addressing marketing issues from late 1990’s. (Wrenn, 2010, p. 1)
Neuromarketing is the term describes brain research on the effect of marketing stimuli. (Kotler,
2012, p. 108) By using braining-scanning technology, marketers are able to discover which part
of brain responds to the commercial or stimuli. And marketers want to know exactly when and
why customers make decisions to buy the products while the customers are exposed to the
products or the commercial. Therefore, neuromarketing is not only on a study of human behavior
in the market, but marketers have specific target and purpose of having neuromarketing strategy
in order to find what triggers the human decision-making behavior. Neuromarketing is not only
projected and utilized in business area, but also in politics. In the past decade, marketers and
politicians thought a lot about ways and meant to sell better their products and ideas, and they
realized that the traditional brain-scanning technology can be used as neuromarketing method.
(Vecchiato, 2013, p. 1)

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Two important reasons discussed in Vecchiato’s book are about why neuroelectric brain imaging
is relevant. First, Vecchiato says, “Marketers hope that neuroimaging will provide a more
efficient trade off between costs and benefits. It is based on assumption that people would not
share about their feeling.” Therefore, it is not possible for marketers to know their hidden
feelings and how this people make decisions. Thus, the marketers want to know about hidden
information, unconscious because emotion is an important part of brain to make decisions.
Second, “the marketers hope it will provide an accurate marketing research method that can be
implemented even before a product exists.” It is also based on the assumption that neuroimaging
data would give a more accurate indication of the underlying preferences than data rom standard
market research studies. (Vecchiato, 2013, p. 5)
There are few different methods in brain scanning. The first method is called
Electroencephalography, abbreviated as EEG. “EEG is a technology to correlate brand activity
with physiological cues such as skin temperature or eye movement to figure out how people
react to advertisement.” (Kotler, 2012) Also, “EEG is known as oldest method, uses electrodes
attached to the scalp to measure electrical activity synchronized to stimulus events or behavior
responses.” (Camerer, 2005, p. 12) EEG is relatively cheaper than other methods, so it is used
broadly. However, Brian Knutson describes EEG as “standing outside a baseball stadium and
listening to the crowd to figure out what happened.” (Kotler, 2012) basically, it implies that EEG
can show the researchers that there is a stimuli and our body respond back to it. However, it
doesn’t mean that we can trace back to the source to the original brain part that responded. Thus,
we may know that human brain responds to the commercial they watch, but EEG doesn’t tell us
which part of brain actually responded. Therefore, we cannot know what exactly and why our

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brain respond to certain way. The other method is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging,
abbreviated as “fMRI.” Different from EEG, we can locate active system by using fMRI.
Because of fMRI technology, we can locate the spot, and figure out what cause people to
respond in certain way. (Wrenn, 2010, p 2.) Further, researchers can figure out whether the
response is coming from the part where emotion works or other parts dealing with reason in
human brains. Lastly, Magnetoencephalography is another method, and it is abbreviated as
MEG. MEG is a method that depends on the electrical character of neural signaling. As electric
currents cause magnetic fields, the brain and skull are surrounded by minute fluctuating magnetic
fields. This can be measured by “devices called SQUIDS (superconducting quantum interference
device) operating at the temperature of liquid helium.” (Ambler, 2014, p. 251 )
Neuroscience can attribute insightful background of neuromarketing. It is worth to take a look on
Two Dimensions of Neural Functioning chart.
Table 1
Two Dimensions of Neural F
Cognitive Affective
Controlled Processes
- serial
- effortful
- evoked deliberately
- good introspective
access
I II
Automatic processes
- parallel
- effortless
- reflexive
- no introspective
access
III IV
(Camerer, 2005, p. 16)

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“Automatic processes are not accessible to consciousness.” (Camerer, 2005, p. 13) Automatic
processes can be described as if human see someone attractive or people being sarcastic on their
attitude or language. The Amygdala, the part of brain is responsible for many important
automatic affective responses. (Camerer, 2005, p. 17) Thus, automatic processes can be
described as natural/unconscious decision-making process. “Controlled processes occur when
automatic affective response is interrupted.” (Camerer, 2005, p. 18) As a human faces situation
when our automatic processes cannot solve the problem, then controlled processes activated,
utilizing our cognitive function to make decisions. “Affect processes are embodies not only
human emotions but also drive states such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire and motivational
states such as physical pain, discomfort and drug craving.” (Camerer, 2005, p. 18) Cognitive
system is a process of making decision by reason, but cognition cannot motivate human.
Cognitive processes should work with affective system in order to see production of actions.
There is another insight from the research done by Richard Davidson, who argues that “the
prefrontal cortex is often considered to be the province of higher cognitive control, it has also
consistently been linked to various features of affective processing.” (Davidson, 2003, p. 317)
Davidson’s observation gives us implication that emotional input for human decision making has
significant role. Moreover, Davidson also states that “We and others have speculated that the
increase in activation in visual cortex in response to emotional stimuli may be a function of back
projections from the amygdala to primary vision cortex…the visual cortex is more activated in
response to the emotional compared with the nonemotional stimuli.” (Davidson, 2003, p. 320)
These are the evidences from neuroscience perspective that human emotion has significant
influence on human decision-makings. Neuromarketing experts seem to understand this already
and apply it to very practical terms. In the textbook it says, “as a largely unconscious habitual

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process, as distinct from the rational, conscious, information-processing model of economists
and traditional marketing textbooks” (Kotler, 2012) As Dr. Wrenn analyzed the Pepsi/Coke case
study in his article “Neuromarketing” states “the brands satisfy a powerful emotional need that
goes beyond the functional performance of the product” (Wrenn, 2010, p 3.)
Neuromarketing as this heavy emphasis on understanding human brain especially related to our
emotional behavior. It is obvious that human emotion will be getting involved with decision-
making process. Furthermore, even cognitive functions can be affected by affective (emotional)
system.
By adding neuromarketing technology does not give only positive messages to the society. There
are concerns in terms of business ethics on one side, and there are concerns on the relevancy of
the brain scanning methods. For someone who has concerns on ethics, they worry about
customer privacy issue, and developing emotional stimuli strategy on marketing might cause
customers become like a robot, being in a market without having free will to choose what to buy.
On the other side, there are still many people who are not convinced the fact that brain scanning
technology is relevant to read customer’s emotion. Although fMRI technology available for the
researchers to scan human brain to spot out the provinces where active vocalization happens
when the stimulation occurs, it is too early to make conclusion that vocalization of one segment
of the brain will cause emotion based decisions. There are many experiments documented, but it
was pointed out that the choices that participated experiments made may have different
causations other then just vocalization of one part of the brain. There have been ethical concerns
on neuromarketing because what if the researchers can find brain stimuli to stimulate the part of
brain to activate motivation to buy certain products without free will? One research states that
“neuromarketing within the neuroscience literature have strongly questioned the ethics of

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applying imaging techniques to the purpose of “finding the ‘buy button in the brain’ and ….
Creating advertising campaigns that we will be
unable to resist’” (Wrenn, 2010, p 3.)
On the positive side, marketing strategy will
become more practical. This is the example of
Alfa Romeo car model television commercial, and
University of Rome made EEG scanning on
selected people. When Alfa Romeo made video
commercial, they could able to see which
scene has weak impact and which other scenes
have frames that impact customers emotion.
So they were able to adjust the length of the
video according to the emotional rate so that
Alfa Romeo can target different groups of
people. At the same time, they could adjust the
length of the commercial based on the target
group in shorter running time. For example, Alfa Romeo had different edition of commercial for
Champion’s league soccer
game because the main target
would be male audience. And
the same commercial is
edited differently for women
audience. For this case, it

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would be a good example of utilizing neuromarketing technology.
The challenges for neuromarketing methods are familiarity. There is one research indicates, “We
cannot ignore familiarity because people tend to choose products which they are already familiar
with.” (Braeutigam, 2004, p. 299) Another study also mentions about familiarity. It says “when
familiarity is strong, decision making may related to just those processes where the outcome is
consistent with some form of intention.” (Ambler, 2004, p. 257)
Currently, Eye tracking, biometric and facial monitoring is also known for neuromarketing tools.
Biometric is using a device similar to a polygraph, known as lie detector. In polygraph consisted
of many other devices such as respiratory cuff, finger clamp that rests on participant’s finger to
measure galvanic skin response, and a blood pressure and a pulse monitor. Biometric is the way
to collect data from the body as participant’s body responds to the product or commercial.
(Howard and Merrell Coporation, 2015) Eye tracking is another way to get participant’s physical
responds. Eye tracking and facial monitoring are the tools to get the data from participants.
In conclusion, the bottom line for neuromarketing approach is that marketing experts cannot
ignore unconscious area of our human brain as customers make their decisions. Many researches
tried to find out how this under surface human mind works and interconnects to our daily routine
life. Many different forms of tools exist helped us to identify unconscious human mind has
influence especially as our brain makes decisions. For marketers’ stand point, marketing experts
should understand how these potential consumers think in their mind. Knowing about the
greatest needs in unconscious will give people confidence and feel comfortable to come back to

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have another business transaction. That’s why; neuromarketing can be useful to find the needs
and wants from customers. However, there is a story on the other side that marketers have to
remember that negative consequences or ethical implication on having neuromarketing stretagy.
As authors of journals mentions, it is important to be reminded that neuromarketing methods are
not recognized universally. Although neuromarketing methods are used in many different
marketing areas, but neuromarketing methods itself cannot stand alone to prove the causation of
decision making in human brain. Therefore, marketers should be aware that neuromarketing
itself is not the final answer for their research.
Although neuromarketing has its weak point, the methods can be utilized in many different ways
to improve engaging with potential customers. As Alfa Romeo’s commercial case indicated,
EER or fMRI can help marketing process if neuromarketing tools were used to identify the
different perceptions of different gender groups. Alfa Romeo’s way of employing
neuromarketing strategy seems appropriate. But neuromarketng methods and tools shouldn’t be
trying to bypass the opportunity for human brain to digest the information. Furthermore,
neuromarketing methods should not be used to create stimulation on human brain to make
decision based on inappropriate information and stimulation.

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