Neuromarketing Insights for Start-Up Companies

Introduction

Start-up companies have been among the most popular research fields for organizational science researchers as they promise fast economic growth and development opportunities to promote the general welfare. Particularly in emerging economies, start-up companies are seen as an important source for economic growth as well as for boosting sustainable employment growth. Therefore, the reasons behind start-up failures and success stories have been searched in every nook and cranny from different perspectives. Meanwhile, the rise of interdisciplinary research, particularly bringing neuroscientists together with economists and organizational scientists, has gained popularity across the last decade, particularly after the growing popularity of neuroeconomics research (Meckl-Sloan, 2015). In parallel to the fast development of neuroscience tools, application fields have grown at a similar pace. Cognitive neuroscience has involved in consumer research as well as in researches on financial and organizational behavior and also in marketing research (Massaro, 2017). Neuroeconomics suggests that the consumers’ decision-making process takes place in the unconscious mind (Braeutigam, 2005). Therefore, consumer neuroscience techniques have been widely used to understand consumer behavior.

Organizational sciences researchers as well as professional managers have rushed to use these newly emerged neuroscience tools (Cakar. & Gez, 2017). As a result, the concept of neuromanagement has emerged, and it is in a fast popularization process (Drover et al., 2017). Neuromanagement approach from a professional perspective uses new tools created by neurosciences in economic and managerial decision-making processes, while organizational sciences researches use a newly popularized approach to shed light on many unknown areas of the field (Tkachenko et al., 2019). Neuromarketing is the most popular and the fastest growing subfield of the Social Neuroscience approach as the application of neuroscience techniques in marketing research and marketing campaigns have shed light on many unknown points in consumer decision-making processes and they have produced dramatically much more valuable information (Satpathy, 2012).

The traditional approach in marketing research has sought to identify distinctive features of the consumer decision-making process as well as the impacts of external factors such as environment and culture on consumer behavior. However, consumer cognition or decision-making processes have long been seen as an unknown process in the human brain. Organizational sciences researchers have been partnering with neuroscientists in order to identify how consumers’ brains and neural mechanisms work. This new field in question is currently a virgin and hard to evaluate the area, but the interest of researchers has been continuously growing. As a lately emerged field, neuromarketing has focused on unconscious processes behind consumer behavior and propensity (Fischer et al., 2010). The ‘neuro approach’ in marketing research aims to identify unexplained differences in individuals’ consumer behaviors. These differences are observed among individuals from the same region, the same education and even the same family. Marketing researchers have evaluated the concept in many layers from cognitive, individual, local, and national to global. Thus, attempts to identify the distinctive features of consumers based on demographic, sociological, educational, geographical differences have failed to produce desired results (Hsu, 2017).