Measuring brand association strength with EEG: A single-trial N400 ERP study

PLoS One. 2019 Jun 10;14(6):e0217125. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217125. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Companies need to ensure that customers perceive their brands as intended, with strong and unique associations, when facing a competitive market. Traditionally, brand associations are measured using conventional techniques such as surveys and questionnaires albeit both conscious and unconscious factors can influence the collected data and the outcome of a campaign. Neuromarketing can shed light on how the customer's brain processes marketing stimuli. We report here on an EEG study aimed at gauging mental associations with brands. We focus on the N400 event-related potential, an EEG component most strongly elicited in response to a concept unrelated to a preceding concept. We considered two video on demand brands, Netflix and Rex&Rio, and selected a set of words grouped in 4 categories that were either related (Television, Relaxation, and Price), in varying degrees, or unrelated (Unrelated) to the said brands. The experiment started with both brands' TV commercials, as a common reference for our participants. We then applied a semantic priming paradigm in which a brand logo ("prime") was followed by a word ("target"), and the strength of the N400 response to the word used as an inverted measure of the association strength with the brand logo. We clustered N400 responses to identify, for each brand, natural groups of associated words. As a result, for Netflix the cluster with the smallest N400 responses (i.e., strongest associations) consisted of words related to Television but for Rex&Rio it consisted of words related to Relaxation. We also evaluated the relationship between the two brands and determined which associations they share or which ones not. It turned out that associations related to Relaxation and Television distinguish the two brands. Interestingly, survey data did not show any difference between the two brands as they were equally associated with Television and Relaxation. These findings show that our N400 technique can reveal brand associations, and natural categories thereof, that would otherwise go unnoticed when using conventional surveys.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Electroencephalography*
  • Evoked Potentials*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Marketing*
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

FC is supported by the Hermes Fund of the National Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (IWT.141112). MMVH is supported by research grants received from the Financing program (PFV/10/008), an interdisciplinary research project (IDO/12/007), and an industrial research fund project (IOF/HB/12/021) of the KU Leuven, the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (G088314N, G0A0914N, G0A4118N), the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme – Belgian Science Policy (IUAP P7/11), the Flemish Regional Ministry of Education (Belgium) (GOA 10/019), and the Hercules Foundation (AKUL 043). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.