Abstract
In studying consumer behaviors, the inclusion of neuroscience tools and methods is improving our understanding of preference formation and choice. But such responses are mostly related to the consumption of goods and services that meet an immediate need. Tourism represents a consumer behavior that is related to a more complex decision-making process, involving a stronger relationship with a future self, and choices typically being of a higher level of involvement and of a transformational type. The aim of this study was to test whether direct emotional and cognitive responses to travel destination would be indicative of subsequent stated destination preference. Participants were shown images and videos from multiple travel destinations while being monitored using eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) brain monitoring. The EEG responses to each image and video were further calculated into neurometric scores of emotional (frontal asymmetry and arousal) and cognitive load metrics. Our results show that arousal and cognitive load were significantly related to subsequent stated travel preferences, accounting for about 20% of the variation in preference. Still, results also suggested that subconscious emotional and cognitive responses are not identical to subjective travel preference, suggesting that other mechanisms may be at play in forming conscious, stated preference. This study both supports the idea that destination preferences can be studied using consumer neuroscience and brings further insights into the mechanisms at stake during such choices.
Highlights
In understanding human preference formation and decision-making, one recent successful approach has been to combine a neuroscientific approach with the study of real-life choices such as consumer behaviors
To better situate the current study, we have provided a Supplementary Section that goes through the background of destination marketing and how the study of emotional and cognitive responses have been conceptualized and studied, ranging from qualitative research methods to the recent inclusion of neuroscience methods
When looking at the emotional and cognitive responses we found a significant difference between the places on how they score, including frontal asymmetry (R2 = 0.029, F = 6.38, p < 0.0001), arousal (R2 = 0.009, F = 2.04, p = 0.0321), but not for cognitive load (R2 = 0.003, F = 0.80, p = 0.6142)
Summary
In understanding human preference formation and decision-making, one recent successful approach has been to combine a neuroscientific approach with the study of real-life choices such as consumer behaviors. Previous studies in consumer neuroscience have primarily focused on consumption behaviors that are related to more immediate rewards such as food choices, product purchase, and luxury goods In doing so, these studies have been successful in providing insights into the mechanisms of these types of consumer behaviors, and even be able to predict such choices up to several seconds before they occur or are consciously felt[7,8,9]. We focus on travel destination preference as a model to understand this type of non-direct consumer preference formation and choice This area falls in a broader area of destination marketing, which recently has seen the first steps of including neuroscience tools and insights[10,11]. Our basic assumption was that variations in SDP would manifest as rapid emotional responses to visual representations of destinations
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