Towards a better understanding of consumer behaviour: marginal utility as a parameter in neuromarketing research

Understanding consumers’ decision-making process is a recurrent goal in Marketing. However, the traditional tools used in marketing, such as surveys, personal interviews and participant observations are often inadequate to analyze and understand human behavior. Since consumer decisions are often influenced by unconscious mental processes, the consequence is that consumers very often do not want to, or do not know how to, explain their choices. For this reason, Neuromarketing research has grown in popularity. Neuromarketing uses neuroscience techniques in order to determine the neurological causes that explain human decisions and behaviors. Identifying these mechanisms is useful to explain consumers’ responses to marketing stimuli.