Research on Neuromarketing-introduction of fMRI

Neuromarketing is a sub-area of neuroeconomics that addresses marketing relevant problems with methods and insights from brain research.Neuromarketing is still less than a decade since it emerged.Although Magnetic Resonance Imaging(fMRI) has already applied to the practice by marketing practicers,it is controversial in the academic field.The authors reviewed the situation of foreign and domestic neuromarketing academic papers which have already been published.Against this background,this paper showed the most prominent brain structures relevant for consumer neuroscience,and presented specific results of selected studies from this emerging discipline,classified from the aspect of product,price,customer's buying decision,advertisement,brand,customer's preferences,survice marketing,customer's satisfaction and loyalty,and so on. The strength of fMRI is discussed lately.Firstly,with the help of advanced techniques of neuromarketing,a more direct view into the "black box" of the organism should be feasible,and scientific and effective marketing strategies for commercial enterprises could be developed by managers as well.With regard to long-term product strategy,neuromarketing could be used to determine which consumer segments are reached by advertisement strategies,or whether a future purchase of the brand is probable.Secondly,with the proliferation of dazzling images from brain scans in both scientific and popular media,researchers from marketing fields could see that not only psychological responses,but also physiological responses,are influenced by consumers' perceptions of a product based on a manipulation of a basic element of the marketing mix.Thirdly,thanks to neuromarketing,it is easy to compare a consumer's expectation about a product to its actual performance,or customers' expectancy relationships between a product's price and perceived quality.At last,because of the intangible nature of services,the ability to examine what specific brain function is activated during various stages of the consumer's decision-making process should help service marketers improve their efficiency and effectiveness. Although there are so many superiorities for neuromarketing,the application of methods from brain research to marketing relevant problems has already yielded several theoretical and practical implications.As with any new approach,neuromarketing must face a large number of challenges as well.For example,the studies are very cost and time intensive,and are associated with legal and moral considerations.The use of data obtained from brain imaging poses ethical dilemmas for marketers.Potential moral issues emerging from neuroscience applications include awareness,consent,and understanding of individual consumers to what may be viewed as invasion of their privacy rights.Another limitation could be the validity of the studies,which is often called into question.Due to high costs,the number of the participating subjects is usually very low and a small sample size may include the possibility of false positives and a higher probability of committing the error.What's more,different stakeholders,marketing researchers and practitioners,perceive the development and application of neuromarketing knowledge in different ways,causing the research-practice gap in neuromarketing. All in all,neuromarketing is still in the fledgling stages,and current investigations have been mostly targeted to basic research.For that reason,in the end of the paper,the authors put forward several future directions of neuromarketing.In the next years,researchers could refer to the methods in cognitive neuroscience,through the analysis of different activated brain areas,to detect the consumer's real memory for advertisement and brand,understand the impact of subconscious on purchasing decisions,examine the relationship between culture and consumer behaviors,and predict the consumer's buying behavior.