Neuromarketing for Design Thinking: The Use of Neuroscientific Tools in the Innovation Process

The growing competitiveness in the current market environment urges companies to innovate not only to succeed but also to survive. Nowadays, a popular methodology of innovation is design thinking, which is in its early stages in both the academic literature and practice. In the past few decades, several marketing researches for both academic and commercial purposes are trying to understand consumers’ responses to marketing stimuli through the use of neuroscience tools. Although neuroscience tools have been used to facilitate product development and testing as well as improve innovation processes and results, this approach is also in its early stages. This chapter brings together the literature on consumer neuroscience and design thinking and suggests that neuroscientific tools used in neuromarketing can be applied in the phases of an innovation process. Therefore, the chapter reviews some of the most commonly used neuroscientific tools in marketing, provides some ideas on how to integrate the use of these tools into the phases of the design thinking methodology and closes with a discussion on ethical issues associated with the use of these tools for innovation.