A Neuromarketing Perspective for Assessing the Role and Impact of Typefaces on Consumer Purchase Decision

Given increasing knowledge about how consumers communicate with texts, our understanding of how brain processes information remains relatively limited. Besides that, in today's world, advancing neuroscience-related technology and developments have changed the understanding of consumer behavior. In this regard, in the 1990s, consumer neuroscience and neuromarketing concepts were revealed. This new concept has brought a multi-disciplinary approach and new perceptions of human cognition and behavior. For measuring consumer behaviors through a new alternative method, research has started combining traditional marketing researches with these new methods. This chapter explores how typeface knowledge from the brain functions using neuroscience technology and the importance neurosciences methodologies have for readability research. Moreover, this chapter will evaluate how typefaces affect the purchase decision of the consumers and offer an integrative literature review.

Consumer Neuroscience

Consumer neuroscience is a quickly growing discipline that harnesses both theoretical principles and applied measures from the decision and affective neurosciences, along with psychophysiology and vision research, in order to explain and predict consumption behaviors. This discipline links several subfields, including neuroeconomics, social and affective neuroscience, and neuromarketing. This emerging field comprises both direct and peripheral measures of neural processing related to consumption behaviors. Consumer neuroscience complements traditional commercial research measures such as self-report, which can often be inaccurate and biased by anticipated or recalled, but not actual, consumption behaviors. All told, consumer neuroscience represents a unique field focusing on the consumer and the innumerable factors that affect individual preferences and consumption behavior. This chapter will provide a comprehensive overview of the field's history, key measures used, case examples of academic and commercial work, and a discussion of the field's continued bright trajectory.

Traditional Market Research and Neuromarketing Research

Marketing research, dedicated to comprehending consumer behavior and purchasing practice, comprises methodical gathering, analysis, and interpretation of related data. Since the understanding of consumer behavior is a comprehensive and complicated task, the contemporary marketing studies argue that traditional marketing research should be supported by neuromarketing methods to explore consumers' psychology, motivation, and behavior. In this chapter, the advantages and disadvantages of traditional marketing and neuromarketing research methodologies and the differences between them are discussed. The traditional market research methods are explained through their qualitative and quantitative dimensions. The most commonly used grouping scheme of techniques in neuromarketing research is presented, namely, neurometric, biometric, and psychometric techniques. The marketing research supported by neuromarketing approaches enables us to look at the consumers' mind as closely as we have never experienced before and opens up new horizons in understanding consumer and marketing relationship.

Understanding Consumer Behavior Through Eye-Tracking

The purpose of this chapter, which is designed to measure where and how the consumer focuses in an advertising brochure, which visual is more striking, and how much eye strain (twitch) it takes, is to measure the density and visual attention of the eyes through the eye-tracking device during the individual examination. For this study, an experimental laboratory for neuromarketing research was used. After watching the videos and images of the participants in the eye-tracking module, the general evaluations were taken to determine what they remembered, and a comparison opportunity was born. According to the findings, logos, and photographs are more effective than texts. Viewers read large text and skip small text. Suggestions for future research are presented in the chapter.

Neuromarketing Insights for Start-Up Companies

As the academic interest about start-ups grows, researchers explore reasons behind start-up failures or success stories, and they aim to develop guides for entrepreneurs to succeed. Literature suggests that marketing is one of the crucial fields for successful start-up companies, among many others. Meanwhile, marketing researchers have recently been paying growing attention to applying neuroscience techniques into the marketing field. Even with the rising popularity of neuromarketing research, start-up companies still fall short of using new era marketing tools due to high costs, although they compete with established firms that massively employ neuromarketing techniques in their marketing mix. In this chapter, it is discussed how helpful neuromarketing techniques could be for entrepreneurs as the success of start-up companies depend on efficient allocation of their severely scarce economic resources, and it is argued that publicly supported start-up hubs, in coordination with universities, shall help develop collective neuromarketing researches for the sake of cost cutting.

From Philosophical Queries to Greater Dilemmas of Neuroethics

This chapter elucidates the origins and changes in understanding of neuroethics. An accent is then put on the role neuroethics should play. As a consequence, limitations in research are identified, especially in connection with ethical questions that had been proposed by philosophers in previous centuries. The urgency of their remarks has intensified due to the expansion of neuroscience. This theoretical part is subsequently enriched by practical aspects and ethical codes of which prescripts are key and neuromarketing practitioners are expected to obey them. Despite a growth of interest in neuroethics, the author presumes that the field still represents a ceaseless combat from within, and he claims that it may even remain invincible as a vicious circle. In conclusion, new trajectories are brought and considered together with recommendations and suggestions of new research possibilities as in case of political neuromarketing. This branch, however, perfectly illustrates the complexities associated with neuroethics.

Importance of Brain Reward System in Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing is a relatively new concept. It is simply focused on the relationship between consumer behavior and the brain. For this purpose, it analyzes various customer behaviors towards the product and purchase by using various brain imaging techniques and behavioral methodology. Some limbic structures of brain such as ventral tegmental area (VTA), nucleus acumbens (NAc), and amygdala have a link to prefrontal cortex (PFC) by dopaminergic mesocorticolimbic pathway. This functional link is called brain reward system (BRS). BRS has a crucial role in the decision-making process of humans during shopping as well as addiction processes of brain. Studies investigating BRS in neuromarketing are very limited. In the chapter, working principles of BRS in neuromarketing and association with human shopping behaviors and shopping addiction/dependence has been investigated and discussed.

Applying Neuroscience to Talent Management

This chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges involved in combining the two fields of neuroscience and talent management (often abbreviated as TM), starting from the assumption that the need to merge them is justified by their complementarities, rather than by the level of analysis they focus on. The authors discuss potential benefits and drawbacks for management research using methods obtained from cognitive neuroscience. Firstly, they discuss distinct advantages in applying techniques allowing researchers to track processes that are essential to the talent management field, warning that neuroscientific approaches and technologies are not commonly used. Secondly, they define main problems, which describe the limits within which management scientists can usefully apply these approaches. Thirdly, they suggest a new perspective that incorporates the complementary capacities of managers and neuroscientists to generate useful information and perspective for both disciplines.

Pattern Thinking

Consumers experience retail environments through the encounters they have. Out of these, the oft-repeated ones become part of the way they experience the world, which lay down and solidify neural connections and firing patterns leading to sight, hearing, feeling, and doing. This ‘doing' shapes consumer experiences. The foundation for such experiences is the fact that human brains are geared towards recognizing patterns and interruptions in patterns. To their benefit, retailers use information about the brain identifying patterns of experience and anomalies in those patterns. This knowledge makes sales promotions so fundamental for engaging buyers. Their visit to their favorite store is interrupted by a sudden discount or an alluring offer, which retailers are forever carrying out to seduce buyers. This chapter explores the neuroscience theories that equip the retailers to send out signals to entice buyers and covers applications of such theories in real retail encounters, including the role of dopamine and the brain, impulse buying, and the thrill of hunting deals.

The Science Behind Neuromarketing

With the change and development of technology, the techniques used in marketing research have also changed. Quantitative and qualitative research techniques have been applied to traditional marketing research. Although these techniques are applied, the purchasing decision process of the consumer is not fully understood. The decision-making processes of consumers are more clearly understood thanks to the neuromarketing approach that arises as a result of the collaboration of marketing with neuroscience and the research methods applied as a requirement of this understanding. In this chapter, research methods used in the field of neuromarketing will be examined, examples of applications will be given, and suggestions will be made to academicians and practitioners.