Neuromarketing: from consumers’ rationality to people’s mind A case study on organic pasta packaging

Abstract

Nowadays, the notion of neuromarketing, which captures the attention during the early 2000s, is still a controversial thematic under many aspects. The first two chapters are useful to describe the background of this science and his application, with particular attention concerning the doubt that researchers emphasised during the last decades. If on one hand, it could perceive as a marketing tool useful to a deep understanding of reasons behind consumer behaviour and, consequently a potential competitive advantage; on the other hand, it has been perceived as a threat to the liberty of choice of consumers. Many critiques highlight the lack of ethic in this approach, that should be able to convey unaware consumers in specific choices. This thesis would like to underline the fact that the decision-making process is affected by some elements, that, first, affect the rationality of the potential customer and secondly, they are not perceived as powerful drivers. In collaboration with TSW, a consulting agency that operates in Treviso, it was possible to analyse how neuromarketing tools could improve the marketing strategy of a company. Into the specific, it was conducted an experiment on organic pasta that, in the first phase, showed difference between a rational choice, so what people identify as determinants for their choice and in the second phase we were able to designate the whole elements that are searched by consumers for that specific product, namely “communicator vector”. Starting from this point of view, the AHP method was applied to those elements to find a correlation between these suggestions and the present offer in the market.