Neuromarketing as an emotional connection tool between organizations and audiences in social networks. A theoretical review

Abstract

Currently, there is an important debate on how social networks have affected relations between organizations and their audiences: originally complementary –since organizations had full control over the messages that they sent to users, who were mere consumers of information–, they are now symmetric –since users produce and disseminate information about organizations on a global scale through social media–. Therefore, one of the main concerns of organizations when investing in social networks is to connect with their target audience, to have virality, greater visibility and scope. Likewise, neuromarketing is gaining significant importance when it comes to predicting user behavior through biometric measurements, so it can be an essential tool for developing content that engages organizations and their audiences. The main objective of this work is to conduct a theoretical review of the main scientific research on the effectiveness of neuromarketing as a tool to improve the emotional connection between organizations and users in social networks. Thus, the scientific literature on the object under study available on the Web Of Science has been extensively reviewed. The results of the analysis of the main researches in this field reveal the importance of neuromarketing: some of them agree that the communicative effectiveness between organizations and audiences in social networks depends more on sociology and psychology than on technology itself. Neuromarketing has also allowed to demonstrate the relevance of the so-called social influence in social networks: users tend to imitate the behaviors of others, under the premise that these actions reflect the appropriate procedure. That is, when a user sees that others in their environment comment or share a post, they tend to replicate that action in order to avoid the fear of being the only one who behaves differently.