Marketers spend billions of dollars each year on relatively crude methods such as
focus groups, questionnaires, and measurements of eye movements in the attempt to
understand how the human brain makes decisions and what motivates consumers to
spend. However, with advances in the fields of virtual reality and neurosciences,
marketers can now predict with relative accuracy which design or marketing message
will appeal most to consumers by mapping out which parts of the brain are active when
consumers look at certain products or marketing messages. These relatively new field is
aptly termed as 'neuromarketing', which has stimulated significant innovations in
marketing in general and in marketing research in particular. Neuromarketers combine
virtual reality technologies with neuroscience, brain scanning, or neuroimaging
technologies to help predict which marketing stimuli or marketing messages will appeal
most to consumers by mapping out which parts of the brain are active when respondents
look at certain stimuli or marketing messages. However, critics of this approach are
concerned with the ethical and philosophical issues related to marketers’ ability to probe
mechanisms behind people’s decision-making processes coupled with the dilemmas these
advances in brain science present and who should be allowed to peek into consumers’
brains.
This chapter reviews neuromarketing technologies such as computer-simulated
environments combined with neuroimaging technologies utilized in neuromarketing. This
chapter gives an overview and focuses on the advances in the fields of virtual reality and
neuroimaging and the ability to use brain responses to ascertain how consumers evaluate
marketing stimuli.