Anticipating the Effects of Communication: A Neuroeconomic Framework for Marketing Purposes

High expectations in neuroeconomics raised the hope of marketers that their (daily business) problems could be solved easily. In fact, neuroeconomics has provided considerable insights for marketing science and business practice concerning consumer decision making over the last two decades. However, tapping into customer’s black box of unconscious and automatic processes, so-called implicit processes, does not require the mandatory usage of advanced neuroimaging techniques, such as fMRI. In order to obtain a specific brand positioning in customer’s head, brand communication is an effective means for the marketing of ideas to gain a promoted cortical representation probability and, consequently, an enhanced perceptual and behavioral impact. The marketing of ideas itself is closely related to the concept of brand associations. Those types of associations can be assessed by implicit association measures from psychology (e.g., Implicit Association Test) comparatively accurately but are less properly measured with neuroimaging due to physiological and scientific fallibility. Against this background, the current work introduces a practical neuroscience-related brand communication framework incorporating explicit and implicit brand-related associations to provide guidance for serious marketing-related communication purposes. Moreover, the performance of the introduced conceptual model is tested. In detail, the presented case study demonstrated sufficient performance to detect associative branding change via a (short) communication contact. Specifically, the combined application of implicit, concretely an advanced latency-based tool, and explicit measures, concretely a conventional self-report, provides an integrated assessment of brand-related marketing efforts in general and brand communication activities in particular.