From “Where” to “What”: Distributed Representations of Brand Associations in the Human Brain

Abstract

Considerable attention has been given to the notion of a set of humanlike characteristics associated with brands, referred to as “brand personality.” The authors combine newly available machine learning techniques with functional neuroimaging data to characterize the set of processes that give rise to these associations. The authors show that brand personality traits can be captured by the weighted activity across a widely distributed set of brain regions previously implicated in reasoning, imagery, and affective processing. That is, as opposed to being constructed through reflective processes, brand personality traits seem to exist a priori inside consumers’ minds, such that the authors are able to predict what brand a person is thinking about solely on the basis of the relationship between brand personality associations and brain activity. These findings represent an important advance in the application of neuroscientific methods to consumer research, moving from work focused on cataloging brain regions associated with marketing stimuli to testing and refining constructs central to theories of consumer behavior.