Att scanna eller inte scanna : En studie om neuromarknadsföringens potential som komplement till eller ersättning av enkät, intervju och fokusgrupp.

In order to stay competitive and to be the first choice for customers in a world driven by a high level of competitive advantage, it is important for companies to stay ahead of the competition by conducting thorough market research. Even if this tends to be the case, many products still fail when reaching the market, leaving companies with great losses. The reason for this could be that the development of existing research methods has stagnated, or that they simply lack the ability to find the true answer as to what intentions underlie consumer’s decision making when shopping. Many believe that a new method is desired in order to get a better picture of what customers really think. As a solution to the problem, researchers are using a mix of neuroscience and marketing in order to get into the customers minds. Therefore, this study seeks to create knowledge about the new emerging trend called neuromarketing and its potential as a complement or substitute to surveys, interviews and focus groups. In order to achieve this purpose, relevant theory was collected and compared to the empirical data from focus group studies that were conducted. Findings show that scanning customers’ brains, for now, cannot fully substitute surveys, interviews or focus groups, since each have their own investigational characteristics. This could although change as neuromarketing still is in an early development stage and researchers believe that the method has good future potential. Although neuromarketing cannot be seen as a substitute for now, it still has its advantages compared to surveys, interviews and focus groups. We therefore see that scanning of the brain could be used as a sufficient complement to the other methods through triangulation if companies can afford it