THE BUYING BRAIN

Description

This book grew out of a simple observation: the consumer behaviour our students were learning about in lecture halls looked increasingly unlike the consumer behaviour actually happening on the platforms they used every day. Classical models of rational choice, useful as a starting point, were never built to explain a scroll-stopping thumbnail, a countdown timer, or a recommendation
engine that seems to know a shopper’s taste better than the shopper does. Neuromarketing, the application of neuroscience and behavioural data to the study of consumer decision-making, has emerged as the field best equipped to close that gap, and this book is our attempt to bring it together in one place for students and practitioners working in the Indian and global digital economy alike.
The book is organised in three broad movements. The opening chapters lay the conceptual foundation: what consumer behaviour is, how it has evolved, and the psychological and cultural forces that shape a purchase decision. The middle section turns to the brain itself and the tools now used to study it, EEG, eye tracking, facial coding, and the growing partnership between neuroscience and artificial intelligence, illustrated throughout with documented case studies from Coca-Cola to Netflix to CRED. The closing chapters move into application and consequence: how these insights get built into digital experiences, advertising, and campaign design, and the ethical and evaluative questions that responsible practice demands.
Readers will notice that Chapter 15 has been left as a placeholder in this edition. This chapter is reserved for material currently in development, and a revised edition will fill it in due course; we have chosen to preserve the book’s original numbering and structure rather than renumber around the gap, so that the volume can be extended cleanly as that material becomes available.
Every chapter closes with review questions, discussion prompts, and references, designed to work equally well in a classroom seminar or as a basis for independent study. Case studies are drawn deliberately from a mix of global platforms and Indian consumer brands, in recognition of the distinctive scale, price sensitivity, and mobile-first behaviour of the Indian digital market alongside
the global platforms most students already know well.
Our thanks go to the contributing authors whose chapters make up this volume, and to the students whose questions, over several years of teaching this material, shaped which questions this book tries hardest to answer.
We are especially grateful to our editorial team, Dr. Pinaki Mandal, Dr. Sanjog Kakade, Dr. Aditi Banerjee, and Dr. Sapna Suri, whose review and coordination work shaped this volume into a single coherent text across its contributing authors.