
The neuromarketing controversy
Published on October 26, 2022
There is a lot of controversy around the use of neuromarketing. It is convenient to be able to induce needs but it might not be ethical.
Advertising has existed for hundreds of years, and throughout that time different tools have been created to make its work more effective in terms of sales and conviction. With the advent of modern marketing, the specialization of the advertising regime has been refined in an innovative way, for example in the form of digital marketing, which adds greater depth to the analysis of today’s markets. However, one of the most controversial specialty branches in market analysis today is neuromarketing.
What is neuromarketing
Neuromarketing is that discipline that combines marketing with several others, such as psychology and neuroscience. Each analytical tool, whether theoretical or practical, serves as a basis for elucidating the impulses, decisions and reactions of the public to a product.
The objective of neuromarketing is to anticipate the needs of the consumer when he chooses to make a purchase. To do this, different neuromarketing studies have implemented practices as diverse as electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and Eye Tracking, among others.
It even has an application based on the senses, since there is also visual, auditory and kinesthetic neuromarketing.
The appearance of the term, which appears at the beginning of the year 2000, oscillates between two professionals from the economic sciences and marketing, Ale Smidts and Gerald Zaltman, who contributed in their respective fields to the construction of the concept of neuromarketing.

The controversy
There is a lot of controversy around the application of this discipline in terms of its market intentions, for example, whether it is ethical or not. On the one hand, it is convenient for companies to be able to induce the needs and therefore choices of their target audience.
However, this is not exactly the most ethical, because it is playing with people’s free will, even more than what is already conditioned by social structures.
In this sense, staying with the idea that neuromarketing cares and focuses more on people than on business-markets is a mere mirage. That is why professional ethics plays an important role when deciding whether to implement this type of practice within another mirage called “the free and fair game of the market.”
At X eleva we are always on the side that implies implementing responsible and transparent ethics for our corporate foundation, as well as for our clients, always in a constant dialogue to help them identify what they really need.
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