Picture yourself in a supermarket. Why did you pick one of the two shampoos on the shelf? Asked, you’d probably say “it smells nice” or “the price was right”. Yet some of what shaped your choice, the colour of the bottle, a familiar logo, your last experience with the brand, had already done its work before you noticed.
Traditional market research asks people: surveys, focus groups, interviews. These are valuable, but they have a weakness. People can’t always put what they feel into words, and sometimes they’d rather not. Neuromarketing tries to fill that gap by looking at brain and body signals at the moment a decision is made.
What Do We Measure?
- EEG: the brain’s electrical activity, recorded through electrodes on the scalp. It shows how the brain reacts within milliseconds to an advert or a logo.
- Galvanic skin response (GSR): when we get excited, our palms sweat ever so slightly. That tiny change is a marker of emotional arousal.
- Eye tracking: where the eye goes first on a package or a web page, and how long it lingers.
What Can’t We Measure?
Neuromarketing is not mind reading. EEG won’t tell you “this person will buy the product tomorrow”. What it can do, by averaging across many participants, is support comparative findings such as “this package triggers a stronger emotional response than that one”. A good study reads brain signals together with survey answers. Neither replaces the other.
In Our Lab
These are the questions we work on. With EEG, we study how sustainable packaging affects consumer behaviour, how information about preservatives in a drink changes the way it tastes, and what trust in a brand looks like in the brain. We’ll tell the story of each study in upcoming posts.
One last note: these studies run with ethics committee approval and the voluntary consent of every participant. The goal is not to steer people, but to understand what happens while they decide.
References
- Ariely, D., Berns, G. S. (2010). Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of neuroimaging in business. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(4), 284–292. DOI: 10.1038/nrn2795
- Kilic, E. O., Akbuğday, B., Akan, A., Sadıkzade, R. (2026). Investigating the Effect of Sustainable Product Packaging on Consumer Behavior Using EEG Signals. IEEE CoDIT. DOI: 10.1109/codit70676.2026.11630728
- Tunakan, B. İ., Akan, A., Taskin, Y., Turhan, K. N. (2026). Analysis of Human Emotions for Different Taste Stimuli Using EEG Signals. IEEE CoDIT. DOI: 10.1109/codit70676.2026.11630919
- Pehlivan, S., Akbuğday, B., Akan, A., Sadıkzade, R. (2022). Detection of Olfactory Stimulus from EEG Signals for Neuromarketing Applications. IEEE SIU. DOI: 10.1109/siu55565.2022.9864841