The heart, brain, and body of marketing: Complementary roles of neurophysiological measures in tracking emotions, memory, and ad effectiveness

Abstract

While neuromarketing research delineates how specific neurophysiological methods offer predictive power beyond traditional survey methods, few studies explore how these methods can be used concurrently to measure outcomes across marketing contexts. We address this gap by simultaneously eliciting multiple neurophysiological measures: inter‐beat interval from heart rate, skin conductance response, and frontal alpha asymmetry from electroencephalography (EEG) across multiple stimulus categories, and associating them with distinct psychological (emotional valence and arousal) and marketing (ad recognition and ad effectiveness) outcomes. We found that inter‐beat interval was associated with emotional valence while skin conductance response was associated with emotional arousal across all stimulus types. Critically, self‐reported arousal and inter‐beat interval at both the aggregate and frame level were associated with ad recognition, but self‐reported valence was not. Finally, inter‐beat interval and frontal alpha asymmetry played complementary roles in predicting out‐of‐sample ad effectiveness. Specifically, while inter‐beat interval was a significant predictor of out‐of‐sample brand recognition and not purchase intention, frontal alpha asymmetry was associated with purchase intention and not brand recognition components of ad effectiveness. Our results demonstrate distinct and complementary marketing applications for inter‐beat interval, skin conductance response, and frontal alpha asymmetry and provide valuable insights to practitioners seeking to incorporate findings from these neurophysiological methodologies into their marketing decisions.

A systematic review of the prediction of consumer preference using EEG measures and machine-learning in neuromarketing research

“…Several studies have shown that measures of arousal and EEG TF responses are modulated by advertisement preference and memorability [ 1 , 44 , 46 , 58 , 83 , 203 , 266 , 266 , 267 , 267 , 269 , 269 , 270 , 270 , 271 , 271 , 272 , 272 , 273 , 273 , 274 , 274 ], as well as differences in product features [ 43 , 50 , 278 ]. However, physiological measures of arousal appear to be unable to differentiate between different emotional and cognitive responses, while EEG TF measures can [ 1 , 22 , 24 , 50 , 52 , 83 , 110 , 189 , 191 , 192 , 195 , 232 , 266 , 273 ]. For example, [ 50 ] Chen [ 49 ] showed that HRV measures of arousal could only differentiate between the intensity of mouthwash flavours, while FAA distinguished between flavours and was predictive of self-reported preference and purchase intention.…”

Virtual is so real! Consumers' evaluation of product packaging in virtual reality

“…Third, this study employed only HMD. Future studies could integrate the experimentation using tools that track movements of the body or collect biometric measurements (Baldo et al, 2022) to understand consumer behavior more in‐depth and take full advantage of the use of autonomous technologies in conducting experiments.…”

Heart rate variability in marketing research: A systematic review and methodological perspectives

“…This provides an incentive to validate heart rate variability measures with other consumer neuroscience tools (see Supporting Information: Appendix ) and rigorously validated selfreports, to provide a robust picture of consumer emotions (Mcaleer et al, 2022). In their recent work, Baldo et al (2022) concurrently used heart rate variability, electrodermal activity, electroencephalography, and selfreport responses to examine the effect of stimulus type (images, videos, and TV advertisements) on consumer decision‐making. The results revealed that heart rate variability correlates with selfreport valence and predicts advertisement and brand recognition.…”