Neuromarketing: Inside the mind of the consumer

Managers today are under tremendous pressure to uncover factors driving customers’ attitudes and behavior that can serve a source of competitive advantage. Unfortunately, traditional methods of generating customer insights suffer from well-known limitations, and have remained largely unchanged since their introduction decades ago. As a result, there is growing interest in brain-based approaches that may enable managers to directly probe customers’ underlying thoughts, feelings, and intentions. The goal of this article is to provide practical guidance to managers on using these tools. In particular, we focus on two distinct use cases: validation of existing insights and generation of novel insights. Throughout, we stress that managers should see traditional and brain-based approaches as complements, rather than substitutes, in discovering insights.