Ethical Issues Surrounding Neuromarketing Sub Topics: Brief Introduction, Brief History, MRI, Functional MRI (fMRI), Ethical Issues and Ethical Comebacks.

Essay by mez321University, Bachelor'sA-, October 2009

download word file, 9 pages 5.0

The marketing field of neuromarketing can be considered as a relatively new marketing research discipline where science and marketing meet, which many consumers and the general public would be unaware of. Neuromarketing delves beyond the traditional marketing tools of qualitative and quantitative research and is now taking advantage of advances in technology. Instead of the traditional research methods, neuroscientists and marketers are now turning their focus on what is actually happening inside consumer's brains when they receive marketing messages or use products or services.

Neuromarketing can be defined as the study of how consumer's brains respond to advertising messages and measuring these responses. Typically, neuromarketers use Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as the main tool to view what is happening in the consumers mind.

This of course is very promising for all marketers but these advances have also been met with a great deal of criticism amongst consumers and the general public.

Many questions have been raised about the ethics of neuromarketing and has sparked debate on where as a society, do we draw the line with research methods on the brain, due to the possible implications this could have with marketing and manipulation.

From as early as the renaissance time, the brain has constantly being studied; the problem however is that there were only two ways of studying the brain, the first one is by making a cessation on the brain and watching the change in behavior, the second one is by stimulating certain areas and seeing what happens. For decades scientists assumed that the brain had sections that were responsible for different functions. These functional areas could be fairly broad, dealing for example with rational information processing or subconscious emotions (Grose, 2006), but also fairly precise, dealing with for example vision or motor control (Tiltman, 2005).

Nevertheless although the...