An analysis of voters' perception of visual advertisements with respect to neuromarketing approach: Eye-tracking study

Researchers have progressively used a multidimensional approach in their methodical development, which has led to new understandings and discoveries. The usage of neuroscientific approaches has gained more prominence in several marketing functions and has contributed to greater understanding of human behavior. Neuromarketing is one of these disciplines that integrate multidimensional fields of scientific research; neurology: a science that concentrates on the study of the human brain; cognitive psychology: focuses on exploring the relationship between mind and human behavior; marketing: the field of research that focuses on developing new, lucrative products and services to meet the needs of consumers. Thus, Neuromarketing focuses on researching and understanding consumer behavior and measuring people's brain responses to marketing stimuli. The development of this field basically is reliant on the progress of several principles of study: neuroscience, applied physics, and computer science. Moreover, Neuromarketing is being used to study consumer behavior and purchase decision processes. Neuromarketing save an opportunity basically to researchers to have a deeper insight of the degree of abstraction present in the minds of customers and the role of feelings in decision- making and intentional behavior. Thus, it allows the development of more operative mechanisms for activating and stimulating these feelings. Conventional methods, such as interviews, surveys, or focus groups assume that customers are able to describe their own mental processes. There are numerous brain regions related to vision. The processing of visual attention begins with eyes gazes. Eye movements can be considered good behavioral signals for evaluating visual attention and information acquisition because they are thoroughly related to cognitive processes. Consequently, accepting and observing eye gazes and other patterns in eye movement is a vital part of neuroscience for Neuromarketing. The ability to track eye activities has existed for over a long period of time though it was limited to academic field because the technology was not validly manageable or flexible. Lately, nevertheless, eye tracking technology has stretched to be feasible in marketable developments. Eye tracking is now flexibly and straightforwardly applied and used in marketing settings, that many unique applications are obtainable, principally those that can study phenomena in ordinary setting rather than a laboratory. In the domain of marketing, eye tracking technology is a novel but recognized field of study identified as visual marketing. Eye tracking measures where the person is gazing, the time that this person gazed at this certain region, the movement of his eyes in relation to his head, and even the number of blinks. In addition to the eye gazes and fixations, the sequence in which his or her eyes shift from one location to another that is known as known as the (saccade) can also be measured. There are different eye tracking technologies to measure eye movement and gaze fixations. The most common xxi are those that inspect the monitoring of controlled stimuli at fixed points in videos, photos, and viewer's interaction with a displayed screen. There are more sophisticated tools that also mechanically track the head position in three-dimensional space in relation to the camera. Advertisements are not only limited for business field. In modern representative democracies, political parties employ their optimum capabilities through a variety of tools i.e. public relations, social media activation and various advertising campaigns. All these tools are used to achieve political success by attempting to affect the voters' attention especially during an election campaign. They tend to maintain their success by choosing and producing the best influential advertisements. Therefore, the primary objective of the study is to analyze the effect of advertisement schematic design on viewers' attention. In other words, it measures how the arrangements and positions of the advertisements' elements such as their claim, photo and logo may alter voter's gaze plots and fixations. The study aims at measuring these differences based on eye-tracking technology not self-reporting or traditional research tools such as questionnaires and focus groups. The eye-tracking technique is unique because it gives precise and abstract findings that are not affected by personal judgement of the subjects of the study. Eventually the results will help campaigners and political parties in Turkey get deeper insight of their voters' preferences and gaze attention so that they can design their advertisements accordingly. The dissertation starts with reviewing the literature of political marketing and advertising. Then previous studies utilizing eye tracking approach were thoroughly reviewed. Based on the literature review, conceptual model and hypotheses are formulated and the rationale is discussed. Then, a brief review of the literature of eye tracking approach and its relations to customers' mental attitude based on their age, gender is presented. Then the rationale for the experimental study of eye tracking is conducted then hypotheses and variables are tested. Finally, discussion, findings and conclusions are presented. It aims to offer gaze plots' measurement and eye-tracking techniques as novel methods in political marketing. The contribution is expected to generate a change tendencies in the advertising field mainly when designing the logo, text and pictures of printed advertisements. It aims at investigating both 'focus selection', what the voter chooses to gaze at- and 'focus engagement', the time a voter spends gazing at the components of the advertisement. Both focus selection and focus engagement are offered as indicators of voters' tendencies. A sample of 80 participants were recruited to measure their eye gazes on 32 visual political advertising materials. The findings highlight that voters have variances with various proportions in their visual attention on areas of interests (AOI) as claim, logo, and photo of the printed political advertisements based on their gender, age, partisan affiliation and their level of likeability to the advertisements.