The Ultimate Neuromarketing Research Guide
The Ultimate Neuromarketing Research Guide:
Neuroscience, Methods, and Ethics
By Christophe Morin
As Morin states in his latest book The Ultimate Neuromarketing Research Guide: Neuroscience, Methods, and Ethics (published in 2019), decoding brain response to marketing or advertising stimuli is ‘the logical evolution of where the study of consumer behavior takes us: the pursuit of a more rigorous, scientific process to investigate and explain the “why” behind buying decisions’. Continuing to trust that consumers can accurately and properly describe the cognitive and emotional impact marketing stimuli have on them is a problem, as too much of our experience of an ad or how we navigate a website is driven by factors that affect us way below our level of consciousness.
The Ultimate Neuromarketing Research Guide aims to give anyone interested in neuromarketing a practical understanding of what neuromarketing research is, bringing the theory and practice together. The book is organized into three sections and chapters. The first chapter, The Neuroscience of Advertising Effectiveness, explores how specific brain structures influence the responses generated by humans below their level of awareness when they see an ad or trigger a buying decision. The author also uses metaphors in order to help the reader understand the concepts and learn how each part of the reptilian complex, the limbic system, and the neocortex structures are employed in certain processes.
The second chapter, Key Methods to Collect Neurophysiological Data, explores the most popular methods used in neuromarketing research, with ‘down to earth’ descriptions of the pros and cons, offering case studies in order for the reader to understand which research questions are being answered, what is being investigated or measured and the value it can bring above and beyond traditional marketing research. Technology The Ultimate Neuromarketing Research Guide: Neuroscience, Methods, and Ethics Author: Christophe Morin Reviewer: Monica Diana Olteanu now allows the study of attention, emotions, hormones, memory or sweat glands, as they all play an important part in the cognitive responses that move humans towards action. These responses can be tracked with different tools and techniques presented in this book, such as: galvanic skin response, electrocardiogram, eye-tracking, layered voice analysis, facial coding, implicit association tests, electroencephalogram, magnetoencephalogram or functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The last chapter, The Question of Ethics: Why Bother? addresses an important issue raised when conducting neuromarketing research: whether it violates certain rights or the privacy of people's thoughts, but also the effect of the findings. Morin discusses subliminal messages, mind-controlling messages and whether they exist or how they affect our brain, reinforcing his opinions with academic research results. The author recommends we read The Persuasion Code (by Christophe Morin and Patrick Renvoise, published by Wiley in 2018) in order to find out more on the topics discussed.
Although the book presents complex concepts, the author presents them in layman's terms, which makes The Ultimate Neuromarketing Research Guide a great read for anyone interested in neuromarketing research, no matter their experience.