A Neuromarketing Based Approach on the Usage of Narratives in the Advertising

Introduction

Nowadays, for companies to be successful, it is crucial that it understand consumers’ perceptions of its products, services and brands (Delgadillo, 2004). In this direction, current marketing techniques so far engaged for market research purposes which are mainly based on asking questions attest to be a reliable tool for obtaining actual data but are definitely of much less useful in determining the personal insights, thoughts and feelings of consumers (Katarzyna,2014).Today, an emerging interest within scientific marketing researches is the movement away from consumer research toward the use of direct neuroscientific approaches called as neuromarketing. Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience measurement methods for understanding how consumers react, both unconsciously and consciously, to marketing (Lee et al. 2007;Thomas, Pop, Iorga, & Ducu, 2016).

Though, it is now known that often the verbal advertising pre-testing is defective by the respondents’ cognitive processes activated during the interview, being the implicit memory and subject’s feelings often unreachable to the questioner that uses conventional methods (Vecchiato, Cherubino, Trettel, & Babiloni, 2013). On the other hand, developments in the measurement of neural processes accelerated by splendid improvement in imaging technology have enabled researchers to run research insights as to the neurological dynamics of human emotional and cognitive process (McDonald & Tang, 2014). Today, neuroscience is providing powerful insights into cognitive and behavioral practices, how the mind and body interrelate and is altering the way we think about thinking. (Chang, 2013).

Another emerging concept that named narrative advertising represents one of the crucial methods that advertisers use to explain the gains consumers can achieve by using their services and products (Woodside et al., 2008; Lien & Chen, 2013). In this context, as a marketing communication tool narrative advertising is a form of communication used to convince an audience to take some action with respect to products or service or ideas. In another word, narrative advertising conveys the core message by telling a story (Huang, 2014). While at the same time Narrative advertising, which have also been labeled as advertising narrative (Escalas, 1998), drama advertising (Demangeot & Broderick, 2010) or commercial narrative (Chang, 2012) can activate a narrative style of processing either by framing new data in the form of a story, or by directly instructing customers to envision themselves (Linh, 2017). It is fair to say that, narratives and stories particularly specific, highly detailed stories are the best approaches to build emotional influences and long-lasting bonds with your target group. When people process narratives, they not only generate comprehension of the story but also experience mental simulation, defined as “the imitative mental representation of the functioning or process of some event or series of events” (Chang, 2013).