Neuromarketing and consumer free will.

This article examines the impact of discoveries and methods of neuroscience on marketing practices as they relate to the exercise of individual free will. Thus, our focus centers on ethical questions involving consumers' awareness, consent, and understanding to what may be viewed as invasion of their privacy rights. After a brief introduction, the article turns to scientific literature on the brain, followed by discussion of marketing persuasion models. Ethical dilemmas within the free will paradigm and Rawlsian justice developed in moral philosophy are delineated next. The article closes with policy implications and a revised consideration of consumer privacy.

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Marketers seek to influence the intricate processes of evaluation and selection by consumers, sometimes reverting to tactics and technologies that redirect decision makers without their explicit permission. Examples include product placements in videogames, movies, and television programs (see LeGresley, Muggli, and Hurt 2006). Others make use of interpersonal influences in the marketplace (McGrath and Otnes 1995; Pechmann et al. 2005). For example, marketing professionals may pay females to order specific liquors in bars or have neighbors praise particular brands of condiments or sneakers at parties (Heilbrunn 2005).

Relevant issues for our discussion are whether and to what extent marketers are willing to engage in activities that lack transparency. Few academic studies have tackled this difficult subject, providing only anecdotal evidence that the practice is more widespread than one might suspect. To address this deficit, Zinkhan, Bisessi, and Saxton (1989) asked a sample of MBA students about their willingness to deceive in a number of marketing contexts and found a broad readiness to do so in order to ensure cooperation by consumers. While the generalizability of their findings is limited, such behaviors suggest that some marketers seek to limit our understanding of their true intentions (Jeurissen and van de Ven 2006).

For better or for worse, opportunities to influence consumers without their full awareness may increase significantly as a result of research on brain activity. Almost twenty years ago, consumer scholars recommended using brain wave measures to study the impact of promotions on buyer behavior (see Young 2002). This perspective was controversial, especially given limitations and difficulties interpreting data from electroencephalograms (Stewart 1984, 1985). However, over this period, the disciplines of neuroscience and cognitive psychology advanced and joined forces to provide an entirely new paradigm for understanding ways consumers develop, store, retrieve, and use information (Gordon 2002). Neuroscience methodologies, especially noninvasive neuroimaging technology, now enable researchers to probe brain activity at the basic neural level of functioning (Shiv et al. 2005).