Search

Copyright of Olsztyn Economic Journal is the property of Olsztyn Economic Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We set out to forecast consumer behaviour in a supermarket based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Data was collected while participants viewed six chocolate bar communications and product pictures before and after each communication. Then self-reports liking judgement were collected. fMRI data was extracted from a priori selected brain regions: nucleus accumbens, medial orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, inferior frontal gyrus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex assumed to contribute positively and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and insula were hypothesized to contribute negatively to sales. The resulting values were rank ordered. After our fMRI-based forecast an instore test was conducted in a supermarket on n = 63.617 shoppers. Changes in sales were best forecasted by fMRI signal during communication viewing, second best by a comparison of brain signal during product viewing before and after communication and least by explicit liking judgements. The results demonstrate the feasibility of applying neuroimaging methods in a relatively small sample to correctly forecast sales changes at point-of-sale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We use neuroimaging to predict cultural popularity — something that is popular in the broadest sense and appeals to a large number of individuals. Neuroeconomic research suggests that activity in reward-related regions of the brain, notably the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum, is predictive of future purchasing decisions, but it is unknown whether the neural signals of a small group of individuals are predictive of the purchasing decisions of the population at large. For neuroimaging to be useful as a measure of widespread popularity, these neural responses would have to generalize to a much larger population that is not the direct subject of the brain imaging itself. Here, we test the possibility of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to predict the relative popularity of a common good: music. We used fMRI to measure the brain responses of a relatively small group of adolescents while listening to songs of largely unknown artists. As a measure of popularity, the sales of these songs were totaled for the three years following scanning, and brain responses were then correlated with these “future” earnings. Although subjective likability of the songs was not predictive of sales, activity within the ventral striatum was significantly correlated with the number of units sold. These results suggest that the neural responses to goods are not only predictive of purchase decisions for those individuals actually scanned, but such responses generalize to the population at large and may be used to predict cultural popularity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The rise of neuroscience's study, based on the technological development that allows to investigate brain processes by neuroimaging, has led to a new research area which after the neuro prefix covers studies such as neuroeconomics, neuromarketing and social neuroscience . This paper provides a review based on different research projects with the aim of presenting social responsibility, often conceptually linked to organizational paradigms, as an evolutionary trend of neurological human development, which could be called Neuro-responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper serves two purposes. First, it reviews the neuroimaging literature most relevant to the field of marketing (e.g., neuroeconomics, decision neuroscience, and neuromarketing). Second, it posits that evolutionary theory is a consilient and organizing meta-theoretical framework for neuromarketing research. The great majority of neuroimaging studies suffer from the illusion of explanatory depth namely the sophistication of the neuroimaging technologies provides a semblance of profundity to the reaped knowledge, which is otherwise largely disjointed and atheoretical. Evolutionary theory resolves this conundrum by recognizing that the human mind has evolved via the processes of natural and sexual selection. Hence, in order to provide a complete understanding of any given neuromarketing phenomenon requires that it be tackled at both the proximate level (as is currently the case) and the ultimate level (i.e., understanding the adaptive reason that would generate a particular neural activation pattern). Evolutionary psychology posits that the human mind consists of a set of domain-specific computational systems that have evolved to solve recurring adaptive problems. Accordingly, rather than viewing the human mind as a general-purpose domain-independent organ, evolutionary cognitive neuroscientists recognize that many neural activation patterns are instantiations of evolved computational systems in evolutionary relevant domains such as survival mating, kin selection, and reciprocity. As such, an evolutionary neuromarketing approach recognizes that the neural activation patterns associated with numerous marketing-related phenomena can be mapped onto the latter Darwinian modules thus providing a unifying meta-theory for this budding discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]