Neuromarketing Fundamentals

Nonconscious, unconscious, or subconscious?Brain versus mind: The word brain tends to be used whenpeople talk about anatomical structures or circuitry in the brain.The term mind tends to be used to refer to the subjectivecognitive states a brain creates. For example, the prefrontalcortex is an anatomical part of the brain, but attention is acognitive "state of mind" produced by activity in the brain.Generally, we use these terms interchangeably. We consider"nonconscious processes in the brain" to be equivalent to "thenonconscious mind." Unconscious, subconscious, preconscious, and nonconscious:There is a lot of intellectual baggage associated with all theterms that can be used to refer to the "not-conscious"processes in the brain. Unconscious has some badconnotations, in terms of both the Freudian unconscious andthe association with anesthetized states. Subconscious, in turn,carries a "secondary" or "subsidiary" connotation, as if it'ssomething below and, therefore, less than the conscious. Asimilar term is preconscious, which often would be perfectlyappropriate, but it implies that conscious always followspreconscious, and this isn't always true. Given all these issues,we use the more neutral term nonconscious in this book. Usingthis term has the benefit of referring neutrally to "everythingother than conscious"; plus, it's the term that's becoming thestandard in the academic literature. Here, we use the term brain science to refer to all thescientific fields that underlie neuromarketing. We do thisbecause we want to emphasize that the one obvious scientificsource for neuromarketing — neuroscience — is not the onlybrain science that underliesneuromarketing. In fact, neuromarketing is built on top of atleast three basic science fields, which, taken together, we referto as the brain sciences, or simply brain science. In recentyears, social psychology has focused on the impact ofnonconscious processeson human actions. It's most relevant to understanding howconscious and nonconscious brain processes work together inconsumer choice and behavior.Because we want this book to be a reference for all aspects ofneuromarketing, our definition of the field is quite broad. Wedefine neuromarketing as any marketing or market researchactivity that uses the methods and techniques of brain scienceor is informed by the findings or insights of brain science. (Formore on brain science, see the next section.)Ultimately, neuromarketing is about solving exactly the sameproblems that all types of market research aim to solve: how acompany should best spend its advertising. If neuromarketing isworth its salt, it has to help marketers solve these problemsbetter than other types of research.