Abstract:

Understanding the decision-making process of consumers and their buying behaviour is still a critical goal in Marketing research. With the turn of the century, Marketing researchers are adopting different techniques and tools in order to study consumer decision-making and behaviour. The last two decades have seen an explosion in the use of neuroimaging techniques to market research, also known as Consumer Neuroscience. The aim of this paper is to contribute to both theoretical and practical aspects of Consumer Neuroscience research. Literature review was conducted to 1) establishing the realized benefits and potential outcome of Consumer Neuroscience research and 2) identifying potential problems in Consumer Neuroscience experiments.

 The findings presented in this paper suggest that Consumer Neuroscience contributes to a systematic understanding of consumer behaviour and decision-making process. It is possible to identify three main contributions of Consumer Neuroscience tools to Marketing research. Consumer Neuroscience can improve 1) our understanding of behavioural phenomena relevant for Marketing; 2) marketing strategy for the four elements of marketing-mix (product, price, promotion and distribution); 3) problems in organizations, like trust, negotiations and pricing. However, problems such as reverse inference, lack of unified theory and definitions, small sample size, absence of Marginal Utility theory can reduce the quality work and scientific knowledge in this field. Overcome these limitations it is essential in order to improve both Consumer Neuroscience and Marketing research.