Page 1 of 41 The emergence of neuromarketing investigated through online public communications (2002-2008) Clément Levallois, emlyon business school, Lyon, France Ale Smidts, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Paul Wouters, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Published version available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1579194 Abstract: “Neuromarketing” designates both a developing industry and an academic research field. This study documents the emergence of neuromarketing through the first mention of the term in traditional and new media until the stabilization of the field. Our main interest is to establish whether neuromarketing developed separately as an academic field and as an industry (with knowledge transfer from the former to the latter), or whether it was an act of co-creation. Based on a corpus gathered from a systematic search on the Web, we trace the multiple forms of engagement between academic and commercial communities, echoed but also shaped by reports in traditional and new media. We find that neuromarketing developed an identity through a set of practices and a series of debates which involved intertwined communities of academic researchers and practitioners. This result offers an alternative to the narrative of “knowledge transfer” between academia and the industry and offers a contribution on how to use new kinds of digital sources in business history. Keywords: neuromarketing, university-industry relations, world wide web, neuroeconomics, digital humanities
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Page 1 of 41
The emergence of neuromarketing
investigated through online public
communications (2002-2008)
Clément Levallois, emlyon business school, Lyon, France
Ale Smidts, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The
Netherlands
Paul Wouters, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The
Netherlands
Published version available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1579194
Abstract: “Neuromarketing” designates both a developing industry and an academic research field. This study
documents the emergence of neuromarketing through the first mention of the term in traditional and new media until
the stabilization of the field. Our main interest is to establish whether neuromarketing developed separately as an
academic field and as an industry (with knowledge transfer from the former to the latter), or whether it was an act of
co-creation. Based on a corpus gathered from a systematic search on the Web, we trace the multiple forms of
engagement between academic and commercial communities, echoed but also shaped by reports in traditional and
new media. We find that neuromarketing developed an identity through a set of practices and a series of debates
which involved intertwined communities of academic researchers and practitioners. This result offers an alternative
to the narrative of “knowledge transfer” between academia and the industry and offers a contribution on how to use
new kinds of digital sources in business history.
Keywords: neuromarketing, university-industry relations, world wide web, neuroeconomics, digital
In the early 2000s, both an academic subfield and a new industry developed around the same theme:
understanding marketing processes from the viewpoint of their connection with the consumer’s underlying
brain mechanisms, such as the processing of sensory inputs, memory encoding and retrieval, or the
valuation of different options when presented with a choice. Neuromarketing, as it is called, is a
manifestation of the growing value attributed to neuroscience in the scientific and business sphere. While
the connection between academic and corporate versions of neuromarketing is likely, the nature of the link
remains elusive. To what extent is the growing influence of neuroscience in academia and in the business
sphere causing or influencing the other?
The pairing of neuroimaging and marketing, as a marketing events promoter wrote it, could sound
“terribly odd” (Minoque, 2003). Yet it would seem that in the late 1990s the intellectual climate was
conducive to such a coupling. Marketing had already a long tradition of investigating consumer behavior
as one aspect of applied psychology, putting marketing researchers in contact with the intellectual and
technological innovations produced in this field (Schumann, Haugtvedt, & Davidson, 2008; Schneider &
Woolgar, 2012). With cognitive neuropsychology and neuroimaging developing rapidly in the 1990s
(Beaulieu, 2000; Dumit, 2003), it was then a matter of time before marketing academics got acquainted
with one of its new key technologies for brain scanning, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
In market societies where individuals are increasingly defined in terms of their identities as consumers
(Thornton, 2011), it is then relatively unsurprising that neuroscientists came to investigate consumer
behavior with neuroimaging techniques. Neuromarketing in academia developed in close relation to the
more general research on the neuroscientific basis of decision-making, commonly referred to as
neuroeconomics or decision neuroscience (Shiv et al., 2005; Glimcher, Camerer, Fehr, & Poldrack, 2008;
Levallois et al., 2012). Neuroeconomists have shown some reluctance to be associated to neuromarketing
in both its academic or commercial version:
“A related, although clearly distinct discipline that seems to be emerging alongside Neuroeconomics is
Neuromarketing. Neuroeconomics is a purely academic discipline concerned with the basic mechanisms of decision-
making. In contrast, Neuromarketing is a more applied field concerned with the application of brain scanning
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technology to the traditional goals and questions of interest of marketers, both those in academia and those in private
industry. While these two disciplines are related, they are also very distinct. This is a distinction often overlooked by
the popular media.” (Glimcher, 2008).
Gregory Berns, professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University and co-author of a widely cited review
article on neuromarketing for Nature Reviews Neuroscience, also identifies a gap between neuromarketing
as practiced in the industry and portrayed in the media, and academia: “the academic community should
take this topic [neuromarketing] seriously and not leave it to the neuromarketers and the op-ed page of the
New York Times.” (Ariely & Berns, 2010). In a review entitled “Branding the Brain”, academics of this
field similarly see a “critical distinction” between “consumer neuroscience” and “neuromarketing” – the
former relating to “academic research” and the latter to “practitioner and commercial interest in
neurophysiological tools” (Plassmann, Ramsøy, & Milosavljevic, 2012, p. 19)1. This perceived disconnect
between the practices of neuromarketing in academia and in the industry is drawn more sharply by the
frequent reminders issued in the academic community that neuroscientists should manifest prudence and
restraint in their relations to the media and private businesses (e.g. The Lancet Neurology, 2004;
Brammer, 2004; Farah, 2009). These relations would carry the risk for researchers to depart from the
rigor, prudence and ingenuity which should characterize scientific investigations, and to be distracted by
the profit motive, tendency to overclaim, and more lax standards of evidence reporting, which can be
found in the media or businesses2.
1 Others offer a much more positive view on the connections between neuromarketing in academia and business,
and suggest an agenda to foster and widen these relations (Lee, Broderick, & Chamberlain, 2007; Senior & Lee,
2008).
2 Critics of the crossing of boundaries between academia and practice are not specific to the case of neuroscience
and marketing, they have also been evidenced in organizational and management research (Caswill & Wesley,
2012).
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Neuromarketing has been examined from the perspective of social studies of science (Schneider &
Woolgar, 2012; Schneider & Woolgar, 2015), based on an exploration of the literature and ethnographical
work. These studies point to how new observations of consumers through imaging techniques actually
shape the very definition of these consumers. In this study, we provide instead a historical perspective to
recount the development of neuromarketing in business and academia and question their interdependence,
through the examination of public documents available in the online record. The methodological
framework we adopt is inscribed in the broader movement of the digital humanities, defined as:
“the research carried out [since the 1950s] in textually focused computing in the humanities […]. It remains
deeply interested in text, but as advances in technology have made it first possible, then trivial to capture,
manipulate, and process other media, the field has redefined itself to embrace the full range of multimedia.
Especially since the 1990s, with the advent of the World Wide Web, digital humanities has broadened its reach,
yet it has remained in touch with the goals that have animated it from the outset: using information technology to
illuminate the human record, and bringing an understanding of the human record to bear on the development and
use of information technology.” Schreibman, Siemens, Unsworth (2004, p. xxiii).
Specifically, the materials used in this study are online media from different sorts (from newspaper articles
to blogs through videos and pages from commercial websites) retrieved by a systematic search on the
keyword “neuromarketing” on the World Wide Web (details below). Focusing on the public
communication surrounding marketing, we depart from well-established practices in history which draws
on primary sources such as archives or oral histories, and this needs a justification.
First, not relying on personal archives or interviews, one remains blind to the logic and motives driving the
behavior and strategies crafted by the stakeholders involved in neuromarketing. Evidence is lacking on the
resources and constraints shaping the horizons of the developers and critics of neuromarketing, and how
these were negotiated, which alternatives were considered and abandoned, to arrive eventually at the
representation of neuromarketing delivered publicly.3
Relying on the systematic harvesting of public documents from the online record does not compensate for
the shortcomings mentioned above. Yet, it provides an alternative viewpoint on the historical development
of neuromarketing, with its own relative advantages:
3 Based on archival research, we contributed elsewhere to fleshing out key episodes in the history of the relations between economics and the life sciences in the post-World War II period. See Levallois (2009, 2010, 2011).
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Collecting a systematic set of public documents relative to neuromarketing, without concentrating on a
limited subset of stakeholders and their relations, can stimulate the exploration of new hypotheses about
the historical lines of development for neuromarketing. While the accounts of neuromarketing cited above
insist on the separation between university and business versions of neuromarketing, an exploration of the
extensive public record can present a richer view, picturing a larger variety of stakeholders and a different
sequence of events.
A second reason for considering neuromarketing through the historical record in online media is the view
it offers on the rhetorical strategies at play. Rhetoric can be considered as a veil hiding the sincere or
“true” motives of the author, yet to a large extent the rhetorical dimension carries a message itself, not just
in public reports but in the scientific discourse as well (Black 1962, McCloskey 1985). The
communication act informs about which audience is targeted by the message, what kind of response the
author of the message expects to elicit from this audience, and what portrait the author of the message
draws of itself. For this reason, we consider public communication not as biased reports to be contrasted
with more objective archival record, but part of the record itself. Considering how media representations
contributed to the construction of neuromarketing requires paying special attention to the rhetorical
devices at work in the corpus, which we do in this study – finding that the type of online media where the
message appears (blog or institutional website, international online newspaper or scientific journal) is
especially important in framing the message.
Finally, using media sources to shed light on the emergence of neuromarketing is advantageous given the
young and relatively controversial history of this field. Archives are not yet available, and many key
informants on the origins of the field are still active in it, which compounds the difficulty to weave their
views into a coherent narrative. In contrast, as is detailed below, the online record of publication
communication on neuromarketing is already rich and the historical perspective – even if modest –
provides an interesting value to these documents.
Hence, we consider that the public record available on neuromarketing is a worthy material to address the
question of the joint or separate production of neuromarketing by academic and business communities.
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This research is different from, and does not replace an archive-based study, but provides an interesting
layer of interpretation nonetheless.
Created in the late 1980s and registering a staggering growth in the late 1990s, the World Wide Web
presents an interesting opportunity to query large and diverse sets of documents. It has not yet been
routinely used as a repository of primary sources for historical studies (Brügger, 2013; Golder & Macy,
2014; Tsatsou, 2014); however, with years passing its relevance and “historicity” grows (Allen, 2012). In
the first decade of the 21th century, access to Internet by the general public has increased dramatically:
from an estimated 29% of the population of developed countries in 2001 to 81% in 2018 (International
Telecommunications Union, n.d.). Content available on Internet has also increased to reach towering
figures: Technorati (a search engine for blogs) indexed 200,000 blogs in early 2003, 8 million in early
2005, and 72 million in 20074. In the same period, companies also developed their presence on the Web.
While studies of international scope remain sparse, it is found that as early as 1998, 218 commercial
domain names (www.example.com is a domain name) were registered per 1,000 companies in the United
States (Zook, 2000). From 1998 to 2016, the number of domain names registered as “dot coms”
(worldwide) moved from less than 2 million to 126 million. The traces of the online publishing activity of
businesses – from corporate websites to online advertising – is a valuable source to exploit for historical
studies. A major obstacle to this endeavor is the transient nature of part of the Web: pages can be deleted,
whole domains did disappear and cannot be retrieved directly anymore via a regular search engine. This
can be mitigated by the existence of the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, a nonprofit digital library
which saved snapshots of web pages since 1996 – harvesting 484 billion pages by 2016
(http://archive.org). While this archive is not directly searchable by keywords, it can be used to retrieve so
called “dead links” (urls pointing to deleted pages).
4 More recent data is not available through a credible source, as Technorati stopped indexing blogs.
This documented overview of the development of neuromarketing stops six years after the first occurrence
of the term appeared online. Fast forward to 2012, Richard Silberstein, Gemma Calvert and Rafal Ohme
became three of the board members of the newly founded “Neuromarketing Science and Business
Association” (NMSBA) with headquarters in the Netherlands, which held its first “Neuromarketing World
Forum” in February 2012 in Amsterdam30 with subsequent conferences in Sao Paulo (2013), New York
(2014), Barcelona (2015), Dubai (2016), London (2017) and Singapore (2018) indicating that the
neuromarketing field has organized itself successfully. In an effort to promote what Ale Smidts denoted as
‘evidence-based neuromarketing’ at the NMSBA conference in February 201231, the Advertising Research
Foundation (an organization gathering companies, media, agencies and universities with an interest in
marketing research) released in 2011 a report of its “Neurostandard working group”, which consulted with
a panel of scientific experts to evaluate eight neuromarketing companies which accepted to share the
details of their procedures.32 This initiative was paralleled by ESOMAR, a global association of marketing
research professionals which consulted widely since June 2011 and released in February 2012 a guide of
“36 Questions to Help Commission Neuroscience Research” (ESOMAR, 2012), in a sign that the
advertising industry and marketing research in general have developed a long term interest for
neuromarketing. This is taken to the next level by the NMSBA which indicated in 2016 to start an
30 http://www.neuromarketingworldforum.com/. Martin de Munnik, Partner and CMO of Neurensics (specializing
in fMRI neuromarketing) took the initiative to found the NMSBA.
31 A statement reiterated in an interview preparing the International Conference on Neuromarketing on May 31, 2012 at Erasmus University Rotterdam: https://vimeo.com/40278247 32 The report was not released publicly but a draft is made available by the ARF: https://thearf-org-aux-
neuromarketing, and who are teaching the topic to business students and business executives34.
Occasionally though, neuromarketing as practiced in business still raises major outcry and discomfort by
academics. It was most evidently illustrated by the letter to the editor of the New York Times signed by
leading neuroscientists in response to unjustified claims made by Lindstrom in an Op-Ed on ‘being in love
with one’s Iphone’ (Lindstrom, 2011; Poldrack, 2011). The opacity of industry practices also continues to
raise ethical concerns (Stanton et al., 2017). On the other hand, while difficult to document empirically, it
also seems that the general public has become more accustomed to fMRI and brain studies and how they
are applied outside the medical field. In this respect, the take-off of neuromarketing is in phase with the
larger movement of the increasing importance of neuroscience and the brain in contemporary culture (Abi-
Rached & Rose, 2010; Thornton, 2011).
Reflecting on this decade, we can re-examine the question stated in the introduction of this study. Is the
record showing a relationship between the emergence of neuromarketing in academia and in the industry –
or have the two unfolded independently? We show that each key episode in the first years of
neuromarketing reveals a tight integration: scientists intervene as co-creator, employees, advisors to, or
petitioners against neuromarketing firms; in turn, neuromarketing entrepreneurs actively sought to enlist
academics in their commercial activities. The first occurrence of the term, in relation to the creation of the
BrightHouse Institute, is illustrative: this neuromarketing company was created by an entrepreneur hiring
neuroscientists and businessmen with academic credentials, and providing commercial services while
using brain scanners located in a university hospital.
This alliance of scientists and private entrepreneurs proved at first unstable: the credibility of
neuromarketing as a legitimate site for knowledge production was regularly questioned by academics,
private businesses and consumer representatives. This deficit in credibility was caused by the relative
weakness of the scientific body of knowledge in neuromarketing at this time and by an intense presence in
34 Neuromarketing is taught in marketing departments at Erasmus University, Berkeley, INSEAD, U of Michigan, Wharton School, Stanford, Temple University, Kellogg, University of Minnesota, and Tel Aviv University.
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the media about the promises and threats of this new field, contributing to inflate expectations but also
doubts about the capacity for the field to deliver (Borup et al, 2006). From 2007 onwards, key scientific
publications in neuromarketing and a less over-claiming media coverage assuaged tensions in the field.
Academics and business persons launched studies and created companies at a faster pace, eventually
developing neuromarketing into an organized, global branch of marketing studies.
Historians have provided a detailed narrative on the transformations of the role of a scientist in
contemporary societies, from the emergence of the “industrial scientist” in the twentieth century
(Liebenau, 1984) to the development of a political economy of scientific entrepreneurship since the 1970s
(Shapin, 2008), which is today in full bloom – especially in biotechnologies (Kleinman, 2003; Mirowski,
2011). This literature points to the fact that scientific knowledge is increasingly produced outside of
traditional academic structures, by stakeholders who identify themselves as entrepreneurs or private
knowledge workers, not primarily as academic scientists anymore. These actors have partly taken the
place of R&D departments of large corporations which tend to outsource a larger share of their R&D
effort, a least in the pharma industry (Rafols et al, 2014). The traces of this knowledge creation activity are
likely to be found in scientific news coverage in the print media (Hicks & Wang, 2013), but also in
patents, industry reports, promotional materials, consultancy presentations, and the reactions they elicit in
the form of consumer group statements, TV shows and other forms of social commentaries (Allgaier et al.,
2013). Since the 1990s and 2000’s, these documents take increasingly a digital form, challenging our
historiographical practices (Jensen, 2015) with the development of new datasets, methods of query and
analysis of large corpora. Business history will benefit from integrating new types of archival sources,
originating from different fields of practice and reflecting different methodological approaches to business
history (Walton, 2010; Kobrak & Schneider, 2011). In future work, it remains to explore how “offline”
archival and unpublished material can be articulated with these digital documents – we suspect that the
mere reconciliation of offline and large volumes of online sources will be a methodological challenge.
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In substantive terms, it can be expected that primary sources such as archives and interviews on the one
hand, and digital traces deriving from the acts of publication communication on the other hand, will play
complementary roles in the writing of rich historical narratives. While digital traces can help ascertain
topics, a list of stakeholders and their relations, a chronology of events and a map of the sites of
knowledge production (as was attempted here), primary sources bring light on the motives of the agents
involved in the field under consideration, help find explanations and a causal order: transforming a
sequence of events into a rich history. For the present this study, beyond tracing the public exchanges
surrounding this emerging field, offers a reconsideration of the modes of knowledge (co-)production in
academia and business, and a methodological contribution to defining the role of digital artifacts in
historical research.
Acknowledgements: We thank Nicoline Beun for assistance in data collection and anonymous reviewers
for their helpful comments. Funding for this research comes from the Erasmus Research Institute of
Management, the Virtual Knowledge Studio, and the Open Research Area programme from the
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) (NESSHI 464‑10‑029). All remaining errors are
ours.
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