Universal Journal of Management 3(12): 524-531, 2015 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/ujm.2015.031208 Neuromarketing: The New Science of Advertising Sunita Kumar Department of Management Studies, Christ University, India Copyright©2015 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract Advertisers today spend most of their time in understanding the science to peer into consumers’ minds. Today Neuromarketing has given them the power to delve into our subconscious mind. It is always very difficult for a marketer to understand the customer mind set. How a customer selects a particular product or service, where they look for information and how they search for it. To investigate how attention levels influence users, this conceptual paper makes use of Neuromarketing as a tool to measure the level of attention that results from advertisement exposure and explores how different levels of attention influence users in conscious and unconscious ways. Keyword Advertising, Eye-tracking, Neuromarketing, Influence 1. Introduction As we know Marketing is a:“Social and managerial process by which individuals and organizations obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with each other” Kotler, Armstrong et al. [24]. Earlier the functions of marketing included advertising, selling and distribution but in today’s context, marketing has witnessed tremendous growth. In the current scenario with the emergence and the use of other academic areas like social sciences, psychology, sociology, mathematics, economics and more recently neurosciences, marketing has evolved and is recognized as a more comprehensive science. Contemporary approaches give different dimensions of marketing such as: relationship marketing (where customer has the lead role), business marketing, and social marketing (where society benefits are what matters) as per Adcock, Halborg et al. [2]. With the current decline of the power of advertising and rising competition amongst brands, the new marketing challenge is to create consumer value while receiving value in return according to Engel, Blackwell et al. [8]. According to Philip Kotler [24], “Marketing is a subject that is easy to pretend to understand but difficult to practice ". The objective of all marketing communication is to enhance purchase. Advertising is one of the important components of the promotional mix; billions of dollars are spent every year on advertising. Whether such advertising is effective or not is still a question? At the same time it is difficult to measure actual effectiveness of an advertisement. Advertisers hope that buying will eventually happen as a product of their advertising efforts. Consumers on the other hand may simply think of advertisements as a good source of entertainment. Even before the conceptualization of the advertisement, market research companies conduct relevant activities and based on their findings only do they go ahead with a given piece of an advertisement. However, money spent on design and release of marketing communication, notwithstanding all the preparatory research, may still not ensure the desired results. Charles young in his book “The Advertising Research Handbook says “ This is perhaps the prime reason why the researches , the world over, have started questioning the very premises on which responsible –for-marketing communications-people base their assumptions, judgements and research.” What he is trying to say is that, marketing research has started questioning the premise that a target consumer will reflect his/her true thoughts in response to a questionnaire. Assuming that the consumer does not reflect his/her true feelings regarding a product/service, how can we rely on the derived conclusions? “Respondents may be unwilling because they feel the information is embarrassing or private. For example, they may realize that their reason for using designer jeans is the jeans make them feel socially accepted-in style. They may cope either by not answering (or more frequently) by providing rationalizations that appear logical. They might focus upon quality of workmanship, fit, price and / or style even though such considerations are in fact secondary.” David A. Aaker [1]. All this research reveals that sometimes the consumers themselves may not be aware of what their true feelings are in a given situation. In order to prove this point, we can take the example of Dettol vs Savlon. Savlon was clinically proven to be a better antiseptic than Dettol. Even though it was backed by Johnson &Johnson, for having advantages like better fragrance and non-stinging properties, it miserably failed in the Indian market. In this case the market research had indicated that by incorporating the said