Measuring brand association strength with EEG: A single-trial N400 ERP study

Abstract

Companies need to ensure that customers perceive their brands as intended, with strong and unique associations, when facing a competitive market. Traditionally, brand associations are measured using conventional techniques such as surveys and questionnaires albeit both conscious and unconscious factors can influence the collected data and the outcome of a campaign. Neuromarketing can shed light on how the customer’s brain processes marketing stimuli. We report here on an EEG study aimed at gauging mental associations with brands. We focus on the N400 event-related potential, an EEG component most strongly elicited in response to a concept unrelated to a preceding concept. We considered two video on demand brands, Netflix and Rex&Rio , and selected a set of words grouped in 4 categories that were either related ( Television , Relaxation , and Price ), in varying degrees, or unrelated ( Unrelated ) to the said brands. The experiment started with both brands’ TV commercials, as a common reference for our participants. We then applied a semantic priming paradigm in which a brand logo (“prime”) was followed by a word (“target”), and the strength of the N400 response to the word used as an inverted measure of the association strength with the brand logo. We clustered N400 responses to identify, for each brand, natural groups of associated words. As a result, for Netflix the cluster with the smallest N400 responses (i.e., strongest associations) consisted of words related to Television but for Rex&Rio it consisted of words related to Relaxation . We also evaluated the relationship between the two brands and determined which associations they share or which ones not. It turned out that associations related to Relaxation and Television distinguish the two brands. Interestingly, survey data did not show any difference between the two brands as they were equally associated with Television and Relaxation . These findings show that our N400 technique can reveal brand associations, and natural categories thereof, that would otherwise go unnoticed when using conventional surveys.

Is EEG Suitable for Marketing Research? A Systematic Review

“…Brown et al ( 2012 ) use a simple study with soft drinks to answer this question: even when the taste of a soft drink is identical, participants tend to prefer the known brand, reporting higher perceived pleasantness, showing low price elasticity, and displaying high amplitude value in the alpha spectrum over the frontal lobe area (associated with emotions). In a study on brand association, Camarrone and Van Hulle ( 2019 ) present a series of combinations of familiar brands and common words. The amplitude of the event-related potential components N400 indicates the incongruence between two concepts and is used to reveal associations between brands, product categories, and consumers' emotions.…”

“…This notion becomes particularly relevant when dealing with decision-making processes in which non-conscious mechanisms are involved. As an example, using EEG and ERP, Camarrone and Van Hulle ( 2019 ) were able to reveal associations between brands, product categories, and emotions that would have otherwise gone unnoticed with conventional surveys. Further promising is the identification of EEG-derived indices as predictors of commercial success.…”

“…Time frequency analysis focuses on the change over time of a signal, and our list of articles includes two different techniques: Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and Steady-State Probe Topography (SSPT). ERPs extract the variation in the signal that is recorded at the beginning of each trial, aligned with a specific event or administration of stimulus (see Camarrone and Van Hulle, 2019 ). The intensity of the peak within a certain time window (for example 300 ms using a P300 analysis scheme) is compared under different conditions (see Uva et al, 2015 ).…”

Applying Implicit Association Test Techniques and Facial Expression Analyses in the Comparative Evaluation of Website User Experience

“…However, the literature shows a lack of research, enabling to highlight how brand associations may be modified by communication activities, in particular to websites communication strategies. Some research experiments already presented significant results about methods to measure brand image based on the constellation of associations (Till et al, 2011;Schnittka et al, 2012;Camarrone and Van Hulle, 2019). Some other research projects showed how brand associations can be efficiently applied to advertising assessments (Janakiraman et al, 2009;Anderson and Simester, 2013;Caldato et al, 2020).…”

Interactive Human Interface for ERP Component Extraction from Gifted Children

“…This essential response highlights the capabilities in language assessment. It • Semantic categorization/global understanding transmits the capacity of the patient in the semantic process [13]. The N400 component is controlled by an immediate context such as a word a couple of words, or an image.…”