Recommendation influence: Differential neural responses of consumers during shopping online.

Abstract

In diverse social environments, recommendations from others have the power to change consumer behavior. In this study, we explore the influence of recommendations made by others with whom consumers have different degrees of familiarity on the cognitive processes of online shopping using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixteen healthy university subjects were recruited for 2 experiment tasks. These subjects viewed a stimulus sequence of pictures of certain products that contained either recommendations from individuals with whom they had low familiarity or no recommendation. Several days later, they viewed the other stimulus sequence of the same product pictures but this time with either recommendations from individuals with whom they had high familiarity or no recommendation. Electroencephalogram data were recorded during the experiment. Compared to having no recommendations, the results showed that the ERP components N2 and P3 evoked by recommendations were different: The recommendations from low-familiarity individuals induced the largest average amplitude of N2, and the recommendations from high-familiarity individuals induced the largest average amplitude of P3. The results suggest that N2 reflects the process of identifying the recommendation information, and P3 reflects consumers’ propensity to purchase recommended products, or the cognitive process of selection based on value measurement. These findings indicate that recommendations may impact consumer responses and highlight the importance of careful consideration of social preferences in marketing.

The Role of Event Related Potentials in Pre-Comprehension Processing of Consumers to Marketing Logos

“…Actually, the processing of an unfamiliar brand data takes more time, and during this time, the brain leans towards the familiar brands that has already been exposed to and chooses that [21]. This delay in data processing for an unfamiliar brand can be in agreement with the studies on the effect of the social environment and attributes as well as the reward system in choosing the familiar brands [4,21].…”

“…Actually, it can be said that preference of a familiar brand occurs through social reward [21], as the advertisements for these brands use the people' feelings and lifestyles. This is while an early preference (observed in the N1 component) might be caused by positive and pleasant emotions, and in fact, followed by quick activation of the individual's reward system for repeated and faster choice of the brand [4,21,23].…”

“…ecently, researchers in marketing and advertising have appealed to neuroscience to better comprehend the bases of marketing behavior. Marketing behaviors comprise motivational aspects, social attributes, and decision-making [1][2][3][4]. Similarly, a lot of attention has been paid to psychophysical scaling methods for the quantitative understanding of behaviors related to choices [5].…”

Applying EEG in consumer neuroscience

“…Chen et al (2009), as evidenced by an enhanced prolonged P300, physiologically demonstrated herding behavior observed in online purchases based on consistent book recommendations. An enhanced N200 associated with familiar sources (vs unfamiliar sources), also verified the role of trust in online book recommendations (Guo et al , 2016).…”

Modelling Peri-Perceptual Brain Processes in a Deep Learning Spiking Neural Network Architecture

“…Other studies have investigated the roles of the social environment, social attributes and the reward system in choosing familiar brands 57 , 58 . Thus, future work should investigate brain activation patterns using the SNN model in terms of psychosocial factors, personality variables and inter-individual differences that may affect a person’s cognitive response to familiar logos and, indeed, brand preference.…”