Salience and Choice: Neural correlates of shopping decisions

Marketers are fundamentally interested in how consumers make buying decisions. A recent method of non-invasive brain imaging, magnetoencephalography (MEG), was used to observe subjects making decisions on a virtual (video) supermarket visit. At each of 90 stops, the subject was invited to choose one of three brands. Package height and color discrimination tests provided control experiments. Subjects also completed a questionnaire to indicate their familiarity with each of the brands shown in the video. The objectives were to identify the brain regions that become differentially engaged when choosing brands, as against discriminating packaging height or color. As expected, activations in brand choice differed from those for height or color discrimination and were faster when one brand was more familiar. Brand choice appeared to involve silent vocalization. The right parietal cortex was only activated where the brand was salient, operationalized here as strong relative brand familiarity. This therefore appears to be a key location for brand equity both because it is only activated for the most salient brands and because it seems to be linked with intentionality. This is probably the first time any element of brand equity has been located in the brain. Some gender effects were found. The paper concludes with the benefits for marketers and marketing research. This research pioneers new techniques using relatively few subjects and against a limited theoretical background. As such it must be classified as exploratory.