Neuromarketing is still an expensive approach; it requires advanced equipment and technology such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), motion capture for eye-tracking, and the electroencephalogram.
ZMET quickly gained popularity among hundreds of major companies-customers including Coca-Cola, General Motors, Nestle, and Procter & Gamble.
[8] In 1999, he began to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show correlations between consumer brain activity and marketing stimuli.
[8] The term "neuromarketing" was first published in 2002 in the Master Thesis[10] of Associate Professor Philippe Morel,[11] then a student at the Ecole Nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris-Belleville.
Traditional methods of marketing research include focus groups or sizeable surveys used to evaluate features of the proposed product.
[22][21][3] These include electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye tracking, electrodermal response measures and other neuro-technologies.
[13] Market researchers use this information to determine if products or advertisements stimulate responses in the brain linked with positive emotions.
[21] The concept of neuromarketing was therefore introduced to study relevant human emotions and behavioral patterns associated with products, ads and decision-making.
[16] Neuromarketing is also used with big data in understanding modern-day advertising channels such as social networking, search behavior, and website engagement patterns.
Usually, they include devices that can measure vital physiological functions (e.g., heartbeat, respiration rate, blood pressure) and reflexes (e.g., gaze fixation, pupil dilation, face expression).
Marketers can use this neural information to target adolescents with shorter, attention-grabbing messages (using various media, like sound or moving images), and ones that can influence their emotional expressions clearly.
Teenagers rely on more "gut feeling" and don't fully think through consequences, so are mainly consumers of products based on excitement and impulse.
Neuromarketing methodology takes into consideration multiple facets of each segmentation, such as their behavioral, demographic, and psychographic interests to create a one-to-one dialog and connection to the brand.
[31][21] Many of the claims of companies that sell neuromarketing services are not based on actual neuroscience and have been debunked as hype, and have been described as part of a fad of pseudoscientific "neuroscientism" in popular culture.
[33][34][35] Joseph Turow, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, dismisses neuromarketing as another reincarnation of gimmicky attempts for advertisers to find non-traditional approaches toward gathering consumer opinion.
Major corporations and research firms are jumping on the neuromarketing bandwagon, because they are desperate for any novel technique to help them break through all the marketing clutter.
Neuromarketing is a controversial field that uses medical technologies to build marketing campaigns according to Gary Ruskin, an executive director of Commercial Alert.
"[36] Consumers' expectations and familiarity with repetitive behaviors will make the brain relax its vigilance, and subconsciously will run in products faster and more conveniently to speed up on finishing the process of shopping.
German neurobiologist Kai-Markus Mueller promotes a neuromarketing variant, "neuropricing", that uses data from brain scans to help companies identify the highest prices consumers will pay.
Research requires a variety of technologies such as fMRI, EEG, biometrics, facial coding, and eye-tracking to learn how consumers respond and feel to stimuli.