Neuromarketing as an Environmental Awareness Tool: The Sustainable Consumption

Introduction

In general, the growing social and ecological awareness of society is influencing citizens, as consumers, to understand the relevance of environmental management and sustainability actions. There is a need to transform consumption into an attitude that is perceived as an engagement in preserving the planet's sustainability and environmental quality. This engagement results in a better quality of life for all people and the planet at large.

In this scenario, for a better acceptance of a product at all levels, in addition to the product quality, the companies must show an attitude towards environmental responsibility, which is necessary to achieve consumers' growing ecological awareness (Bauer, 2011). Currently, transparency and concrete attitudes are considered relevant when consumers evaluate a company. These factors indicate that companies do not just have “green marketing propaganda” and are not greenwashed. In this regard, actions aiming at understanding the behavior and perception of this new green consumer are essential. Those new postures may guide market strategies for the company and, also, for its disclosure as a socially engaged company integrated with the communities in which it operates. Furthermore, those companies can be seen as having a sustainable development and the well-being of all.

In order to understand the green consumer behavior, few studies have been conducted using neuroscience techniques (Lee, 2014; Oliveira, 2014; Balconi, 2019). A large amount of data showing brain areas activated when subjects are exposed to goods (e.g., food and clothing) and leisure activities, instead, studies evaluating cerebral activation in the presence of environmental elements, and their assessments are exiguous. In this line of study, Khaw et al. (2015) evaluated how people would evaluate environmental factors compared to other products assessment. Given that the environment has no market price, the authors evaluated which brain regions are activated when subjects were required to evaluate environmental resources or consumer goods. Data showed that there is no brain activation at environmental valuation, unlike other goods, even if one were willing to pay more for environmental goods than for consumer goods. This study demonstrated that the mechanisms used to value natural goods might differ from those that value other market goods. Therefore, these results indicated the importance of conducting studies relating to marketing and neuroscience, also called neuromarketing, to better understand human consumption behavior (Silva, 2019).

Neuromarketing is a branch of neuroscience research that is still under development and use technologies, already applied in neuroscience, to product marketing. In this interdisciplinary field, it has been sought to understand and investigate consumer behavior through the study of the brain (BERCEA, 2013). Employing qualitative and quantitative approaches, neuromarketing aims to address some limitations of conventional marketing studies (BERCEA, 2013), such as low accuracy and behavioral biases (GREEN; SRINIVASAN, 1990).

It is believed that consumers do not directly express their preferences for marketed products. Thus, the use of neuromarketing can help to identify feelings, afflictions and conflicts present during evaluations and decision-making regarding a product. Through brain activity, areas and even cortical / subcortical circuits can be identified. Part of the human brain has already been mapped, so the triggering of neuronal activity during product exposure or the need to decide which one to acquire (i.e. green vs. regular product) may indicate the types of thoughts that guide human behavior (ARIELY; BERNS, 2010).

Willingness-to-pay reflects the measure of financial resources that the consumer is willing to give for an object for sale (MATTOS; MATTOS, 2004). But how does our brain compute this value?