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Introduction
Recently several studies have shown an increased interest in studying brands using functional magnetic resonance imaging. (fMRI) These studies were focused on detecting the relationship between certain stimuli (i.e. brands) and specific activation regions in the human brain to acquire a better understanding of how individuals perceive, process and make decisions toward assessing brands (Santos et al. , 2011; Yoon et al. , 2006; Paulus and Frank, 2003). Research findings from these studies could have important implications for theory and practice. In particular, the findings will appeal to marketing managers who are concerned with defining the factors that underpin consumer selection of their brands and the optimal marketing strategies that increase consumer retention and encourage new customers to adopt their brands (Venkatraman et al. , 2012; Erk et al. , 2002; Klucharev et al. , 2008).
From a marketing prospective, the issue of customer brand loyalty is crucial for maintaining the long-term success of firms, especially those producing high technology products. Such products are characterized by rapid pace of technological change, which require intensive market research to evaluate consumer preferences (Al-kwifi and McNaughton, 2013) and rapid rate of integrating new features with more capabilities. These characteristics reveal that these products (brands) are usually information intensive and require complex decision-making by consumers during their evaluation (Weiss and Heide, 1993; Al-kwifi and McNaughton, 2011), forcing them to engage in extensive assessment efforts to determine the best brand that fits their needs.
Previous studies investigating issues related to product (i.e. brands) evaluation using fMRI have shown a noticeable advancement, where recent work in cognitive neuroscience proposes certain neural correlation for object processing in specific regions of the brain (Frith and Frith, 2001; Gallagher and Frith, 2003). Paulus and Frank (2003) introduced the initial experiment for selecting an explicit bottled brand (soft drink) compared with bottles filled with water; they demonstrated that a particular region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex vmPFC), is critical for making preference judgments, because it shows increased activation during fMRI experiments, depending on the object being evaluated. Later, Deppe et al. (2005) suggested that vmPFC is central in the processing of emotions during decision-making when comparing brands, whereas brain regions associated with working memory can sustain reasoning at reduced activation levels.
Although many studies have...