A study on consumers' attitudes towards neuromarketing practices

In today's world where the produced is consumed rapidly, it has become essential to understand the expectations and wishes of the consumer in order to retain them. The change in the consumer profile over time due to various reasons (development of technology, increasing competition, conscious consumer, change in marketing understanding, etc.) has also changed consumer preferences and purchasing habits. Neuromarketing techniques have begun to be used in order to determine the effect of the consumer's logical decisions as well as the emotional reactions on purchasing and the changing preferences of the consumer. Based on the assumption that the statements of individuals can be misleading, neuromarketing, which examines the biological responses of the brain and targets the "buy button of the brain", aims to show the difference between the statements of consumers and what they actually think. Many companies today are engaged in advertising, entertainment, product and packaging design, politics, etc. benefits from neuroscience and neuromarketing techniques in many fields. Neuromarketing is an evolving field where marketing practitioners use neuroscience techniques to better understand consumer wants and behavior. In addition to its benefits, discussions have emerged from an ethical perspective, such as whether neuromarketing is ethically responsible for brain privacy and possible violation of human dignity in terms of the techniques it uses. In the first part of this study, the structure of the brain, decision mechanism, consumer behavior; In the second part, there is a literature review on neuromarketing and neuromarketing studies in Turkey. In the third part, which the study wants to draw attention to, the ethical issues discussed against neuromarketing researches are examined in different dimensions and studies for the protection of stakeholders (neuromarketing participants, industrial customers) are revealed. In the application part of the research, the attitude of the consumer towards neuromarketing practices is measured with a questionnaire consisting of 4 scales and a total of 22 statements in the dimension of danger. In this direction, data were collected from 189 participants selected by convenience sampling with an online survey study between March-April and the data were analyzed with the SPSS 23.0 program. In the study, the effects of consumers' general attitudes towards technology and ethical value and the use of neuromarketing tools on the attitude scale towards neuromarketing dangers were evaluated and it was determined that there were significant effects as a result of the regression analysis. The aim of the study is to contribute to the literature, neuromarketing researchers and practitioners, to give a different perspective to the consumer's attitude towards neuromarketing.