Consumer neuroscience

Consumer neuroscience is the combination of consumer research with modern neuroscience. The goal of the field is to find neural explanations for consumer behaviors in both normal and diseased individuals.

Consumer research has existed for more than a century and has been well established as a combination of sociology, psychology, and anthropology, and popular topics in the field revolve around consumer decision-making, advertising, and branding. For decades, however, consumer researchers had never been able to directly record the internal mental processes that govern consumer behavior; they always were limited to designing experiments in which they alter the external conditions in order to view the ways in which changing variables may affect consumer behavior (examples include changing the packaging or changing a subject’s mood). With the integration of neuroscience with consumer research, it is possible to go directly into the brain to discover the neural explanations for consumer behavior. The ability to record brain activity with electrodes and advances in neural imaging technology make it possible to determine specific regions of the brain that are responsible for critical behaviors involved in consumption.

Consumer neuroscience is similar to neuroeconomics and neuromarketing, but subtle, yet distinct differences exist between them. Neuroeconomics is more of an academic field while neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience are more of an applied science. Neuromarketing focuses on the study of various marketing techniques and attempts to integrate neuroscience knowledge to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of said marketing strategies. Consumer neuroscience is unique among the three because the main focus is on the consumer and how various factors affect individual preferences and purchasing behavior.

Studies of emotion are crucial to advertising research as it has been shown that emotion plays a significant role in ad memorization. Classically in advertising research, the theory has been that emotion and ratio are represented in different regions of the brain, but neuroscience may be able to disprove this theory by showing that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the striatum play a role in bilateral emotion processing.

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