Experts urge caution around over-reliance on neuroscience techniques

Rachel Kennedy and Haydn Northover of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, a marketing research institute within the School of Marketing at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia, offer this advice in an article: How to Use Neuromeasures to Make Better Advertising Decisions – Questions Practitioners Should Ask Vendors and Research Priorities for Scholars, in the latest Journal of Advertising Research. 

They write that neuroscience offers new possibilities in an area where traditional measures of effectiveness are often insufficient in terms of fully understanding responses to advertising. However, they urge that they should not be seen as an infallible guide. 

"Neuro approaches are promising, but not yet perfect: The data needs to be manipulated to ‘see’ the patterns; the outputs require interpretation; and different software can give different answers," the authors wrote.

But, they go on, advancing theory "faces challenges until neuroskills are developed more widely among more advertisers and more broadly across the different advertising conditions".

"In addition, there also must be more consistency and transparency across providers, including conceptualising clear operational definitions, such as a message’s emotional tone versus the audience’s emotional response."