Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
In the era of Consumerism, one of the most powerfully emerging Marketing techniques is "Neuromarketing," an approach based on neuroscience. Neuromarketing is the study of the brains responses to advertising, the brands encountered in our daily lives and all the associated messages & images that are strewn throughout the cultural landscape of everyday life. The considerable question arises here is- Has the privacy of Consumer is being affected by these kind of ultra sophisticated tools which not only interfere with the thinking pattern of any Consumer but also are not completely ethical.
The primary purpose is to examine the evolving public policy and marketing domain of consumer privacy as it relates to current and future advertiser strategies and activities. After a brief introduction, the paper discusses major privacy concern identified in the literature, focusing on tensions between advertiser interests and consumer needs. The regulatory environment is chronicled next, emphasizing Federal Trade Commission (FTC) policies and domains representing old practices and new considerations-direct mail, Internet, and neuromarketing. The closing section presents a call for coherent rationale and practical guidelines for consumer self-protection, self-regulation, and legislation involving primary(product) as well as secondary (informational) exchanges.
Keywords: Neuromarketing, Neurosciences, Measuring Customer Preferences, Neuro Imaging, Brain Imaging, ethical issues related to Neuromarketing, advertising and consumer privacy.
INTRODUCTION TO CONSUMER PRIVACY CONCERNS
Consumers have three primary areas of concern: transparency and their levels of awareness when personal data are collected and disseminated; security and the protocols in place to ensure information is protected from outside intruders; liability and available remedies if data are improperly used or errors occur in records. Together, privacy issues require that consumers have some depth of understanding of the collection process and some perceived control over usage of their private. This approach maintains a view of privacy as an individual right that allows consumers to be liberal or conservative as desired regarding personal information acquisition and treatment, with an emphasis on civil liberties over advertiser or marketer preferences and goals.
Several researchers have suggested that this stance is a direct result of natural tensions between corporate interests and consumer rights (see Culnan and Bies 2003; Sheehan and Hoy 1999). According to this perspective, businesses must continuously revise files on current and potential consumers to remain...