The heart, brain, and body of marketing: Complementary roles of neurophysiological measures in tracking emotions, memory, and ad effectiveness

While neuromarketing research delineates how specific neurophysiological methods offer predictive power beyond traditional survey methods, few studies explore how these methods can be used concurrently to measure outcomes across marketing contexts. We address this gap by simultaneously eliciting multiple neurophysiological measures: inter-beat interval from heart rate, skin conductance response, and frontal alpha asymmetry from electroencephalography (EEG) across multiple stimulus categories, and associating them with distinct psychological (emotional valence and arousal) and marketing (ad recognition and ad effectiveness) outcomes. We found that inter-beat interval was associated with emotional valence while skin conductance response was associated with emotional arousal across all stimulus types. Critically, self-reported arousal and inter-beat interval at both the aggregate and frame level were associated with ad recognition, but self-reported valence was not. Finally, inter-beat interval and frontal alpha asymmetry played complementary roles in predicting out-of-sample ad effectiveness. Specifically, while inter-beat interval was a significant predictor of out-of-sample brand recognition and not purchase intention, frontal alpha asymmetry was associated with purchase intention and not brand recognition components of ad effectiveness. Our results demonstrate distinct and complementary marketing applications for inter-beat interval, skin conductance response, and frontal alpha asymmetry and provide valuable insights to practitioners seeking to incorporate findings from these neurophysiological methodologies into their marketing decisions.