Neuromarketing and the “poor in world” consumer: how the animalization of thinking underpins contemporary market research discourses

ABSTRACT

Consumption research has been informed traditionally by cognitive psychology but it has now incorporated the diagnostic techniques of neuroscience to give rise to neuromarketing. Using bio-imaging technologies to track how consumers respond to advertising stimuli, neuromarketing aims to predict and manage consumer buying behaviour by decoding how instinctive drives can be triggered to enact buying habits. This paper examines the primary discursive reduction that occurs in the popular text/talk of neuromarketing: the reduction of the consumer to the state of a poor in world animal (animalization of thinking). Using a hybrid analytic of textual analysis and a Heideggerian philosophical frame, this work traces how discourses used to sell neuromarketing represent specific kinds of non-knowledgeable consumers. This hybrid approach offers consumption scholars a new perspective for understanding how animal representations of the consumer are deployed in neuromarketing as a discursive world.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy of technology
• hermeneutics
• neuromarketing
• market practice
• science and technology studies

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jonathan Schroeder, the editor at large of Consumption Markets & Culture, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments. I am also grateful to Andrew Feenberg and Megan Boler for their guidance on my larger research project from which this paper emerges.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.