PhD defence E. (Esther) Eijlers

The application of neuroscience methods and insights to the field of marketing theory and practice (also known as neuromarketing), has increased in popularity over the past two decades. This dissertation extends existing knowledge by elucidating two proposed aims of neuromarketing, using EEG. The first aim concerns offering additional insight into implicit processes (here, emotions) and the second aim concerns contributing to predicting behavioral, market level, responses or ‘advertising effectiveness’. Emotions are fundamental in guiding our behavior and they have been studied extensively in marketing. However, it has proved difficult to measure emotional experiences unobtrusively, particularly for dynamic stimuli. The first chapter therefore investigates a new method that could provide insight on the moment-by-moment specific emotional effect that a marketing stimulus, such as a TV-commercial, has, on consumers. In the second chapter, the relationship between an a priori identified process (arousal) and external measures of advertising effectiveness in the population at large (as measured by notability, attitude toward the advertisement, and choice), is investigated in one and the same study. The third chapter shows a systematic re-analysis of data from four studies in which neural activity in response to a similar stimulus (here, movie trailers) was investigated using EEG to examine the association with population-wide commercial success of the movies. In addition to the substantive findings, this dissertation also contributes methodologically to the neuromarketing field by investigating novel methods in the current context and by addressing the issue of small samples sizes regarding both participants and stimuli in neuromarketing research.

The public defence will take place at the Senatehall, 1st floor of the Erasmus Building, Campus Woudestein. The ceremony will begin exactly at 13.30 hrs. In light of the solemn nature of the ceremony, we recommend that you do not take children under the age of 6 to the first part of the ceremony.