Sharing Responsibility: Neuromarketing and the Qualitative Market Researcher

Abstract

Neuromarketing refers to a range of research methods that study the consumers emotional and unconscious responses (Sebastian 2014; Stipp 2015; Belk 2017; Noble 2017; Romano 2017). Likewise, qualitative research can be used to understand the motivations of consumer decisions (Bryman and Bell 2015). Neuromarketing produces highly objective data (Belk 2017; Noble 2017), whereas qualitative data is subjective (Bryman and Bell 2015). Therefore, does neuromarketing pose a threat to the practice of qualitative research? Whilst this may be the case, the extant literature asserts that all research that seeks to understand human behaviour must be conducted by a human (Seidman 1998; Baron and White 2015). This suggests that neuromarketing may not threaten qualitative practice, but compete with the competency of qualitative market researchers instead. In total, eight in-depth interviews with experienced qualitative market researchers were conducted which sought to understand how qualitative market researchers are being affected by neuromarketing. The findings of this research support existing knowledge on how neuromarketing should be used in qualitative methodologies, and stresses the importance of the qualitative market researcher in the collection and contextualisation of all data. This dissertation concludes that the responsibility of qualitative market researchers is shared across the neuromarketing process with the technology, external research partners and research buyers.