The rise of Neuromarketing: a better understanding of consumer’s behavior?

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INTRODUCTION 
 
The world is moving forward, it is progressing towards the future; and it’s happening 
exactly in the same way also for the sciences, the arts and disciplines that have been 
created and studied by the humankind. They are evolving towards a new frontier, which 
is proving to be increasingly close to perfection, as much as humanly and physically 
possible. Take for example fields like physics, science, architecture, engineering or 
marketing, they all explain how our culture is developed on non-static concepts and 
assumptions, but are instead based on principles that are constantly expanding and 
changing. The same thing happened to marketing which, thanks to the application of 
other scientific matters and discoveries such as the Neuroscience, it has encountered a 
new dimension of application and of relevance, that has led it to the achievement of  
results more and more surprising and precise. The meeting between an issue of 
economic matter, such as marketing, and neuroscientific researches and methodologies, 
resulted into the creation of the Neuromarketing. My thesis explains and develops the 
path with which nowadays Neuromarketing it has estabilished as a new science of 
economic value. The evolutionary process that brought Neuromarketing to be what we 
know today, with all its basic principles and techniques thanks to which it can be 
applied, is analyzed and explained in the first three chapters of my thesis; which ends by 
giving voice to persons who have managed to use this science to brilliantly create and 
lead economic nature realities in the Italian territory. 
The first chapter arguments the biological and scientific assumptions that characterize 
Neuroscience, the underlying discipline at the basis of anykind of experiment and 
methodology for this topic. There are many sciences oriented in understanding why we 
perform determined tasks, what are the mechanisms of our thinking, what part of the 
brain is activated when submitted to specific actions or emotions, they range from 
behavioral science and computational neuroscience to cognitive science, neurology, 
psychology and many others. For this reason we can state that Neuroscience, and indeed 
Neuromarketing, was created thanks to the merge of many scientific disciplines that 
joined together to create a unique human behavioral framework. The development of 
Neuroscience was supported by the creation and the development of brain imaging 
technologies, which are usually applied on the head of samples in order to identify and 
measure the level of brain activity under certain stimuli. These techniques can be
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functional (EEG, PET, fMRI) or structural (CT, MRI) and each one of them has its own 
characteristics and unique ways of providing data analysis (they are often used 
complementarily). The following paragraphs discuss about several experiments and 
findings that have been made throughout the last century that, in my opinion, are 
fundamental for the understanding of all the assumptions underneath Neuroscience. 
These scientific findings were obtained through the observation and analysis of certain 
behaviors of monkeys, in the case of the discovery of mirror neurons, and through the 
analysis of the substances released in our brains when we receive or do something that 
satisfies us, such as in the reward system. These revolutionary findings are essential for 
the study of sciences based on behavior and decision making processes. 
The second chapter shifts the focus from Neuroscience to its application on an 
economic environment, that takes the name of Neuroeconomics. The meaning of this 
chapter explains how all the findings and the researches obtained with neuroscientific 
techniques can be applied to other fields, like for example in economics, in order to 
understand what are all the brain activities that codify certain behavioral attitudes of the 
consumers when in front of purchase decisions. There are many variables like fear and  
emotions, risk and uncertainty, social rewards or phsycal damages that activate different 
parts of our brain leading to actions and decisions that could not be interpreted and 
predicted if not with neuroscientific techniques (considerable are the discoveries 
achieved by Damasio about the pre-frontal cortex functions and about the somatic 
markers). The final part of the chapter describes the different parts of the brain that, 
thanks to the techniques of analysis with which they are subjected, indicate which areas 
are activated and wich substances are released when submitted to predetermined 
stimuli. 
The third chapter contains all the notions since here analyzed, that must be adopted in 
support of a more thorough analysis of the main argument of the thesis: the 
Neuromarketing. Like for every form of art or of discipline, there are many different 
point of views that struggle to assert their position at the expense of that of others: 
in modern scientific literature there have been many writers from around the world who 
are passionate about the newborn science and who carried out studies and researches on 
the subject, sometimes bringing opposing views on Neuromarketing. The first section of 
the chapter is dedicated to the most famous and significant considerations taken by 
authors of various kind and then, subsequently, it focuses on two authors who have had 
a crucial importance in the elaboration of my thesis, either for the importance of reading
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their books, either for the innovative ideas proposed by them: Roger Dooley and Martin 
Lindstrom. It follows a comprehensive analysis of Neuromarketing through the 
objective proposal of its positive and negative aspects, collected through the reading and 
the processing of many researches and academic articles. 
The confirmation and the adoption around the world of this new scientific-economic 
approach has been possible only thanks to the creation and the improvement of several 
advanced scanning techniques (facial recognition and eye-tracking), that have joined 
the already mentioned brain imaging ones that were adopted by Neuroscience and 
Neuroeconomics’ studies.  
The last part of chapter 3 begins by reporting how large multinational companies apply, 
in a practical and tangible way, Neuromarketing techniques to increase the selling of 
their well-known products that probably each one of us has purchased at least once. The 
most notable examples bring the name of Ebay, Yahoo, Microsoft, Hyundai and many 
others. There is one final concept that is fundamental for the correct understanding and 
use of Neuromarketing, namely the direct communication channel that must be 
estabilshed with one specific part of our brain: the old reptilian brain. It has been proved 
that this specific ancient area of the human brain is related to all the primal instincts that 
led the human race to survive until today. This particular region has undergone no 
changes during evolution but it remained unchanged for hundreds of millennia; however 
it necessarily had to adapt to the different lifestyle of humans that was no more directed 
to a frantic research for food or to a continuous self-defense against the dangers, but 
rather to the cooperation and social interaction in the modern society. All the 
unconscious, irrational and emotional decisions, that are the basis of the buying 
behavior of each of us, are encoded and transmitted by the reptilian brain, and it is for 
this reason that the latter assumes a fundamental importance for the understanding at 
subconscious level of our behaviors. The reptilian brain is the true decision maker and 
many different techniques have been developed to directly communicate with it: the 
adoption of the traditional methods of marketing researches (such as focus groups, 
interviews, questionnaires, etc.) are no longer useful and efficient. 
The last chapter collects several interviews that I have created ad hoc and that I have 
sent to different companies’ representatives, which carry on their activities in the Italian 
territory, and that use the principles and techniques of Neuromarketing in their strategic 
policies or as a source of advice/communication for other companies. This chapter it’s 
extremely important for the correct understanding and valuation of the potential that the
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adoption of Neuromarketing can bring to companies operating in Italy, allowing them to 
build a strong and durable competitive advantage that could hardly be imitated by 
competitors. As reported and explained in this section, Neuromarketing has no limits in 
the amount of benefits that it can provide, for this reason every kind of company can 
apply its principles to be more competitive, increase sales, increase brand awareness, re-
engineer the packaging of their products and many other important features.  
The different methods of how companies are using these principles and how they apply 
them, are seen and explained through my interviewees’ eyes, thanks to which I had the 
chance to provide a real tangible evidence of their business activities. 
 
 
 
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