The Application of Biometric Approaches in Agri-Food Marketing: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

A challenge in social marketing studies is the cognitive biases in consumers’ conscious and self-reported responses. To help address this concern, biometric techniques have been developed to obtain data from consumers’ implicit and non-verbal responses. A systematic literature review was conducted to explore biometric applications’ role in agri-food marketing to provide an integrated overview of this topic. A total of 55 original research articles and four review articles were identified, classified, and reviewed. It was found that there is a steady growth in the number of studies applying biometric approaches, with eye-tracking being the dominant method used to investigate consumers’ perceptions in the last decade. Most of the studies reviewed were conducted in Europe or the USA. Other biometric techniques used included facial expressions, heart rate, body temperature, and skin conductance. A wide range of scenarios concerning consumers’ purchase and consumption behaviour for agri-food products have been investigated using biometric-based techniques, indicating their broad applicability. Our findings suggest that biometric techniques are expanding for researchers in agri-food marketing, benefiting both academia and industry.

Eye Tracking as an Instrument in Consumer Research to Investigate Food from A Marketing Perspective: A Bibliometric and Visual Analysis

“…Despite these fluctuations, the linear trend in publication numbers shows a steady increase. Accordingly, studies using eye tracking as an instrument in the research field are experiencing growing research interest, which is also confirmed by other reviews [2,16,18].…”

“…It can be considered a starting point for eye tracking research as Bialkova and van Tjip [38] (p. 592) stated that eye tracking "seems to be a promising tool for answering puzzling questions in consumer attention and decision-making with straightforward potential extensions to enlarge its scope." This is also supported by the increase in the number of publications in the following years (see Figure 2), which shows that eye tracking as an instrument of investigation became increasingly important in consumer research [2,16,18].…”

“…Other studies question these results as they show that in many situations, consumers tend to simplify their information-seeking and information-processing behavior, meaning that preferences are often constructed and not always disclosed by consumers [5,[13][14][15]. To improve understanding of consumers' sub-conscious behavior and bypass consumer secrecy when confronted with seemingly "real" food-related choices [16], marketing researchers gradually adopted eye tracking as an evaluation instrument [17] to find out what factors (both bottom-up and top-down) ultimately lead to consumers' responses [2]. Since then, the use of eye tracking as an instrument in consumer research to investigate food from a marketing perspective has been growing steadily [2,16,18].…”

“…To improve understanding of consumers' sub-conscious behavior and bypass consumer secrecy when confronted with seemingly "real" food-related choices [16], marketing researchers gradually adopted eye tracking as an evaluation instrument [17] to find out what factors (both bottom-up and top-down) ultimately lead to consumers' responses [2]. Since then, the use of eye tracking as an instrument in consumer research to investigate food from a marketing perspective has been growing steadily [2,16,18].…”

“…Over the years, eye tracking technology and methods evolved, and they are now used in almost all areas of life. Research institutions and businesses have specialized in using eye tracking in the food sector to investigate consumer behavior [2,16,18]. To obtain an overview of studies that used eye tracking as an instrument in consumer research to investigate food from a marketing perspective, a bibliometric review was carried out while asking the following five research questions: Which authors published in the outlined research field and were cited most frequently (RQ 1)?…”