Demystifying Neuromarketing: A Bibliometric Analysis Using VOSviewer

Introduction

Neuromarketing is a fusion of three mainstream areas namely; psychology, neuroscience and marketing. Neuromarketing's major goal is to research and understand the subliminal mind of customers to make appropriate marketing decisions (Javor et al., 2013; Sebastian, 2014). This marrying of marketing with neuroscience might provide answers to multitude of questions, including how a product or brand, an advertisement campaign, or a marketing decision affects consumer's conscious and subconscious mind and hence buying behaviour (Oliveira et al., 2014).

Although Neuromarketing dates back to early 1960s when Herbert Krugman started employing pupil gauging and Galvanic skin response (GSR) techniques that assessed involuntary pupil dilation as a sign of curiosity and consumers' emotional responses to ad campaigns (Sutherland, 2007), the concept only hit to popularity when Ale Smidts formally introduced this term for the first time in 2002 and described it as a systematic study of human brain to comprehend customer behaviour in order to optimize and enhance marketing approaches (Boricean, 2009). He described how neuroscience instruments like the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) may be employed to appraise buyers' unconscious progressions like emotions, desires, and wants, as well as their responses to inducements like images and sound while making a buying decision.

The taste challenge involving Coke and Pepsi was one of the first manifestations of neuromarketing (McClure et al. 2004). The test subjects were asked to try Coke and Pepsi without knowing what they were tasting. The study examined the participants' brains using a neuroscientific technology called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging popularly known as ‘fMRI’, to evaluate their affinity for Coke all over Pepsi. The customers liked Coke over Pepsi before the test, however they preferred Pepsi over Coke during the blind taste test. According to McClure et al. (2004), Coke's advertising campaign was significantly better than Pepsi's, and it inevitably fooled customers into thinking they liked Coke. Almost everyone who took part stated they favoured Coca-Cola. Customers may convey something different, even if they have an unconsciously different expression in mind, according to the findings of the study (Babu and Vidyasagar 2012). One more well-known survey, done by Campb4ell; the Soup Company between 2008 and 2010, focused on how customers respond to Campbell soup's advertising and their impact on consumer buying behaviour. All of Campbell Soup's advertisements failed and never worked, especially in terms of increasing sales, according to the findings. They discovered that anytime consumers see a Campbell product in the supermarket, they are indifferent. As a result, the Campbell team chose to analyse consumers' buying choices using neuromarketing to examine cognitive and physiological responses. Among other notable neuromarketing research experiments, the Campbell soup campaign concluded that customers' thoughts are stored in their brains, and the brain recognises the demands and needs of the customers (Glaenzer, 2016).

Given the intense rivalry among existing and new product and service suppliers in the marketplace, marketers must shift their focus from extremely transaction-oriented mainstream marketing attempts to neuromarketing strategies that existing research has proven to be more effective. Modern marketing efforts must be linked with subliminal processes in consumers' brains since neuromarketing research is based on human brain function and overlooks many conventional and contemporary marketing notions. In order to discover the fundamental concepts of neuromarketing and its applications, this study undertakes a bibliometric analysis discourse of scientific literature.