Review and Prospect of Neuromarketing ERP Research

Abstract

Neuromarketing (NM) uses neuroscience tools, for example, but not limited to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to study, explore, analyze, and explain the neural correlates of consumer’s behavior (i.e., decision-making processes), the cognitive processes (i.e., attention and memory) and emotional processes (i.e., emotion) of interest for marketing research (e.g., advertising, brand, product, price). In the last decades, NM studies appear more often because the researchers are looking for understanding the mechanisms of decision-making in the consumer's brain toward marketing stimuli. This document aims to conduct a systematic review in order to identify evolution and research trends in the area of NM. Besides, on the basis of collating and reviewing the relevant literatures on ERP empirical research in the past 20 years, this paper sorts out and summarizes the neural mechanism of consumer purchase decision and the commonly used ERP components, providing a reference for corresponding brain activity areas for marketing scholars to study consumer purchase decision applying ERP neural technology, which helps marketing scholars better use ERP technology to guide and develop existing marketing management theories and practices. It became evident that NM is still an immature and incipient area with a low degree of theoretical consensus. Additionally, we established corresponding analysis between NM perspective and traditional marketing perspectives.