Pathways to Consumers’ Minds: Using Machine Learning and Multiple EEG Metrics to Increase Preference Prediction Above and Beyond Traditional Measurements

A basic aim of marketing research is to predict consumers' preferences and the success of marketing campaigns in the general population. However, traditional behavioral measurements have various limitations, calling for novel measurements to improve predictive power. In this study, we use neural signals measured with electroencephalography (EEG) in order to overcome these limitations. We record the EEG signals of subjects, as they watched commercials of six food products. We introduce a novel approach in which instead of using one type of EEG measure, we combine several measures, and use state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to predict subjects' individual future preferences over the products and the commercials' population success, as measured by their YouTube metrics. As a benchmark, we acquired measurements of the commercials' effectiveness using a standard questionnaire commonly used in marketing research. We reached 68.5% accuracy in predicting between the most and least preferred items and a lower than chance RMSE score for predicting the rank order preferences of all six products. We also predicted the commercials' population success better than chance. Most importantly, we demonstrate for the first time, that for all of our predictions, the EEG measurements increased the prediction power of the questionnaires. Our analyses methods and results show great promise for utilizing EEG measures by managers, marketing practitioners, and researchers, as a valuable tool for predicting subjects' preferences and marketing campaigns' success.