Applying Neuroscience to Marketing and Consumer Research: a Review of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies

Abstract

This paper reviews prior applications of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in marketing and consumer research. After documenting and characterizing key applications from the past years, we discuss important methodological issues related to fMRI and assess the quality of previous applications in terms of three aspects: (1) issues related to the initial conceptualization of theoretical models of interest and operationalization for an fMRI experiment, (2) issues related to data acquisition, and (3) issues related to estimation and testing of theoretical models on fMRI data. On the basis of our findings, we identify problem areas and suggest avenues for improvement. These suggestions are applied to own fMRI data, which we collected in an experiment with 16 subjects.