Neuromarketing: The Effect of Attitudes on the Perception of External Business Communication

Abstract

For centuries, countless hours of research have been dedicated to explaining human behavior in decision-making situations. As early as the late nineteenth century, John Wannamaker, who opened America’s first shopping mall in 1876, said the following: “I know that half of my money spent in advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which is such a half”. Every year businesses invest billions of euros in communication activities, whose effectiveness cannot be clearly confirmed. This is because classic research efforts could not clearly answer the central question: “What motivates the customer to buy?” For this reason, a new economic discipline known as neuromarketing has been trying to find the answer since the 1990s by combining economic and scientific findings. With the help of medical devices used to measure brain activity, the discipline aims to explain mostly unexplored processes and procedures within the human brain’s so-called “black box” during economic decision processes. The focus here is on researching processes like perception, attitude, and motivation, which are difficult to record empirically and which can hopefully be used to gain a better understanding of consumers, thus making a contribution to sustainable and efficient use of communication measures.

Despite the new opportunities opened up by neuromarketing, it has yet to receive sufficient attention in classical research. For this reason, this elaboration in an exploratory investigation of a correlation between the central determinants of consumer behavior attitude and perception is based on neuroscientific approaches, thus contributing to the implementation of this new branch of research. Neuromarketing methods are employed here to operationalize the little-researched correlation between an attitude and the perception of business advertising within an industry at neuronal level and then test this with an EEG measurement. The present study design draws upon two industries with different attitudinal connotations: the automotive sector as a generally positively seen branch and the insurance industry, generally seen negatively.