Methodological structure for future consumer neuroscience research

Consumer neuroscience—as a valuable complement to traditional, largely behavioral, research methods—is attracting increasing interest from researchers of marketing and consumer behavior. Although this field has made very important contributions, most consumer neuroscience studies to date have mainly focused on individuals' brain responses to simple marketing stimuli in solitary, lab-based, albeit well-controlled, experimental settings. Thus, previous studies may not yet have tapped other promising approaches involving more ecologically valid, “real,” or social consumption experiences, which could add key extensions to past methods and results. This paper summarizes current findings of consumer neuroscience, including a brief overview of past approaches and topics of focus, and then more expansively targeting these emerging approaches, and proposes a methodological structure for future research emphasizing a movement from a single-brain frame, in which single individuals passively observe and respond to marketing stimuli, to also multibrain perspectives, where group of consumers actively engage in consumption activities. Accordingly, a three-layer approach to analysis is suggested, emphasizing not only (1) activation patterns and brain regions but also directed (2) intra- and inter-brain networks with (3) dynamic processing. This review provides an important next step in the understanding of neural cognitive mechanisms underlying consumer behavior.