This Special Issue aims to examine the underlying neural mechanisms of consumer decisions in the fields of communication, package, price or placement. Applying neurological tools to the study of consumers’ emotional and cognitive responses to marketing stimuli has indeed sparked growing interest in recent years and resulted in the birth of a new field commonly referred to as ‘‘consumer neuroscience” or “neuromarketing”. This interdisciplinary field studies the neural background of consumption decisions and consumer behavior. Recent studies have employed neuroscientific techniques to evaluate processes underlying consumer decision-making in marketing areas such as e-commerce, political advertising, environmental communication and packaging processing. Neuroscientific techniques are able to identify psychological responses of consumers based on objective physiological data and track consumer response in real time (i.e., measurements are possible during the processing of the stimulus of interest, something which is not possible with self-reports as taking self-reports during a task can raise conscious processes and biases). Despite the growth that consumer neuroscience has experienced in the last years, more research is needed to precisely evaluate the neural processing of marketing stimuli in a way that the subconscious origin of consumer decision making can be revealed. At this critical juncture, this special issue is timely given the automatic and subconscious nature of most consumer decisions, more based of low-order emotions than in conscious reactions. Given the Journal of Translational Neuroscience’s emphasis on research excellence in the field of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, this Special Issue endeavors to provide a critical forum for world class contributions which explore the neural correlates of the processing of marketing stimuli, such as price, product, promotion and placement. Therefore, we welcome experimental and review papers using a variety of research neuroscientific methods to address these and related topics, such as:
- Assessment of communication effectiveness through fMRI techniques.
- Neural correlates of package designs.
- Neural underlying mechanisms toward price in different environments.
- Evaluation of distinct product placements.
- Reviews of neuroscience applied to marketing, economics or accounting.
- Importance of neurological tools in interdisciplinary fields.