Integrating neurophysiological and psychological approaches: Towards an advancement of brand insights

In recent years, a synergy has emerged between the social and biological sciences, in efforts to gain a deeper understanding of human cognition and behavior. A longtime common view among social scientists had been that social and behavioral processes could be studied in relative isolation from the brain (and, more generally, the body), and consequently from the evolution or genetics that forged its structures and processes. Similarly, biological scientists investigated internal mechanisms of the brain and body by attempting to control for external, nonphysiological factors that could otherwise complicate analyses. Following some notable calls for cross-level integrations (e.g., Berntson & Cacioppo, 2004; Wilson, 1998), an emerging view is that this strict division of labor is not only unjustified but also an obstacle to fostering major advancements along various fronts of social, behavioral, and biological sciences. The past decade has seen steady progress in the effort to ground the social sciences in neurobiology. Both evolutionary psychology (Kurzban, 2010) and social neuroscience (Cacioppo, 2002) have brought biological findings to bear on the understanding of social phenomena. Neuroeconomics (Camerer, Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2005) and decision neuroscience (Shiv et al., 2005) have provided valuable theoretical insights about decision making that account for both individual choices and the neural mechanisms that generate those choices. Within the marketing discipline, there has been a growing interest in the neurosciences as a means of gaining new theoretical and process-level insights about consumer behavior (Plassmann, Yoon, Feinberg, & Shiv, 2010). It is against this backdrop that this Special Issue seeks to showcase how neurophysiological perspectives, in concert with more traditional psychological approaches, can inform our understanding of brands. Judgments and decisions involving brands comprise an area of study of central interest in consumer behavior. As such, a great deal of theoretical and practical knowledge has accrued about brands, primarily via experiments, surveys, and other qualitative methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups). Adding neurophysiological methods to consumer psychologists' collective research toolkit will inevitably lead to richer insights about brands specifically and other consumer domains more generally. We submit that neuroscience can provide consumer researchers with a number of tangible benefits: