An Investigation of a Frontal Negative Slow Wave in a Virtual Hedonic Purchase Task

Abstract

There is a connection between the frontal negative slow wave (FNSW) and the arousal inhibition in the hedonic purchase context. To calculate the FNSW (400–800 ms), event-related potentials (ERPs) method was applied to depict the neural substrates on prudent and impulsive consumers’ behaviors within various states of promotion. Promotion types include the pure price promotion and the mixed promotion (a mixture of a charitable donation and a discount). Behaviorally, consumers response more quickly in the pure price promotion condition and they express a preference for the mixed promotion. More importantly, a larger FNSW emerged in the impulsive consumers than the prudent, suggesting that the former might tend to control their eagerness to consume hedonic items. Compared with the price promotion as the worse option, the mixed promotion as the better option caused more perceptual conflict, leading to an increase in N2 amplitude. It suggests that consumers incline to reject the worse offers. These results also reveal that people primarily have to search negative promotion information by their insight and subsequently impulsive consumers inhibit the responses to the promotion information. The method of ERPs and FNSW should be helpful for marketing researchers and professionals on hedonic consumption and sales promotion.

The Effectiveness of Price Promotions in Purchasing Affordable Luxury Products: An Event-Related Potential Study

“…Regarding the ERP component, the amplitude of N2 may be indicative of cognitive conflict ( Folstein and Van Petten, 2008 ). The conflict will emerge when expectation stimuli are not presented to participants in a body of consumer neuroscience research (e.g., Mei et al, 2021 ). In the current study, we obtained a marginally significant interaction effect between the original price and the price promotion, and the N2 amplitude was less negative in the high-priced affordable luxury item with a price promotion than in the high-priced affordable luxury item without a price promotion, but it is not the case in the low original price condition.…”

“…When the no-go stimulus is presented, this produces conflict between go response and no-go response and leads to an increase in N2 amplitude ( Bruin and Wijers, 2002 ). More recent work about consumer neuroscience showed that although consumers show a preference for hedonic products with mixed promotion (a combination of price discount and donation to charity), they anticipate more negative pure price promotion to reject purchases ( Mei et al, 2021 ). Thus, when the positive promotion information is presented, conflict and a higher N2 amplitude emerge.…”

“…Subjects tended to purchase high-quality products, leading to conflict for the product information with risk of low quality ( Wang et al, 2016 ; Jin et al, 2017 ). Participants wanted to reject purchases, producing anticipation conflict in the more positive mixed promotion ( Mei et al, 2021 ). In the go/no-go paradigm, subjects wanted to make a manual response, and thus, a higher N2 amplitude was elicited in the no-go condition ( Bruin and Wijers, 2002 ).…”

Neuromarketing as a scale validation tool: Understanding individual differences based on the style of processing scale in affective judgements

“…We speculate that verbalizers may, by virtue of their preferred processing style, be especially adept at categorizing affective processes as a verbal kind, and thereby elicit rapid and pronounced ELAN as compared to visualizers when making such judgments. In studies with marketing stimuli, negative frontal ERP components like ELAN have been linked to inhibition of aroused prepotent responses such as consumer impulsivity (Mei et al, 2021) or conflict as when a consumer is making a choice based on differing expert and consumer reviews (Guo et al, 2022). Theoretical accounts suggest that emotion, in particular negative affect, affects the brain as a regulator of the right anterior hemisphere (Kuhl et al, 2021), in concert with a wide body of literature demonstrating hemispheric specialization as shown by ERPs (cf.…”