Is Consumer Cognition Reducible to Neurophysiological Functioning?

• Author: Drugau-Constantin, Andreea
• Position: Report

1. Introduction

   Established brain-based advances are counterparts, and not equivalents, in understanding customers. Marketing stimuli and operations bring about standardized and accountable consequences on the brain, shaping the inventiveness of marketers. Brain-based methods may support observations from established ones and give rise to newfangled insights by supplying cutting-edge or enhanced measures for marketers. Brain-based measures may function as a marker of commitment. As appealing content activates comparable behavioral and psychological reactions across consumers (Bratu, 2018; Havu, 2017; Popescu Ljungholm, 2017), this is emulated in analogous neural responses. Such measures may remarkably surmise subjective measures of commitment and memorability for a heterogeneity of stimuli, and counteract the requirement to determine a clear-cut commitment module of the brain, instead revolving around integrating and relying upon current measures. The fact that brain activity may be located without the requirement to ask subjects enables appraisal of the full consumption experience. As subjects are not impeded throughout the consumption experience, a supplementary level of confidence is gained that assessments are constant to the intrinsically perceived experience. (Hsu, 2017)

2. Literature Review

   Neuromarketing aims to set apart the instant of choice and tackles the mechanism of decision making at a stage further than the consumer's informed awareness, seeking to exclude individuality as a component in decision in order that consumer feedback to an advertising impulse become an automatic reaction to external action. Admitting the technique fundamentally relies on the consumer having lack of restrictions in opting amongst products, the propensity of the domain aims the reification of the targeted individuals. Neuromarketing discourses may cut down consumers' agentic world -constituting capacity to an instinctive connection to external triggers (Cruciani, 2018; Freeman-Moir, 2017; Lazaroiu et al., 2018; Popescu Ljungholm, 2018), built up by displaying messages to articulate preferred consumer feedback. In such a socially designed realm, the consumer functions both as an entity to be influenced by the neuromarketer and as a subject who comes across other commodities. Advertising messages should be put up at a degree of consumer grasp operating beneath discerning awareness with the intention of bringing about certain feedback. (Nemorin, 2017)

   The most prevailing type of inference detected in neuroscience investigations is bottomed on the correlational link between stimulation in a brain area and a particular conduct or practice, and does not assess the intrinsic causal link. The most relevant type of inference is contingent on causality. The first...