Witness and silence in neuromarketing: managing the gap between science and its application
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2018-09-06
Author(s)
Abstract
Over the past decades commercial and academic market(ing) researchers have studied consumers through a range of different methods including surveys, focus groups or interviews. More recently, some have turned to the growing field of neuroscience to understand consumers. Neuromarketing employs brain imaging, scanning, or other brain measurement technologies to capture consumers’ (brain) responses to marketing stimuli, and to circumvent the ‘problem’ of relying on consumers’ self-reports. This paper presents findings of an ethnographic study of neuromarketing research practices in one neuromarketing consultancy. Our access to the minutiae of commerical neuromarketing research provides important insights into how neuromarketers silence the neuromarketing test-subject in their experiments and presentations, and how they introduce the brain as an unimpeachable witness. This enables us to conceptually reconsider the role of witnesses in the achievement of scientific credibility, as prominently discussed in Science and Technology Studies (STS). We demonstrate that actual and virtual witnesses play an important role in producing credibility in neuromarketing research but that secrets and silences can have important performative effects, too. Instead of considering silence and secrecy as an absence of witnesses, we demonstrate that silence can help produce credibility when it allows virtual witnesses to speak on behalf of actual witnesses
Language
English
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SHSS - Kulturen, Institutionen, Maerkte (KIM)
Event Title
Unspoken, Unseen, Unheard of. Unexplored Realities in Qualitative Research, mid-term conference of Research Network “Qualitative Methods” of the European Sociological Association
Event Location
St. Gallen
Event Date
6-8 September 2018
Subject(s)
Eprints ID
255096