THE HIDDEN DIMENSION OF CONSUMER REACTIONS: NEUROMARKETING EVIDENCE AND ADVERTISING LITERACY

Abstract:
Advertising literacy has long been studied primarily through explicit methods such as questionnaires and interviews, which capture respondents’ self-reported knowledge and attitudes. However, these approaches face serious limitations – they are prone to biases such as social desirability and often fail to capture implicit processes involved in advertising perception that occur outside conscious reflection. Our goal was to analyse the extent to which the neuromarketing research environment reveals a discrepancy between explicit and implicit responses and the significance of this phenomenon for the development of the concept of advertising literacy. The research was based on a series of five exploratory case studies conducted at the Neuromarketing Laboratory of FMK UCM in Trnava, which combined traditional self-report approaches with biometric methods such as eye-tracking, galvanic skin response, and facial expression analysis. The samples consisted of 10 to 30
participants, with the design adapted to the specifics of individual stimuli (video ads, banners, product packaging, branded products). Despite the different research objectives of the individual studies, a consistent pattern repeatedly emerged in the data: the declared attitudes of respondents often differed from their implicit responses. These discrepancies suggest that advertising literacy cannot be understood solely as a set of conscious competencies, but must be complemented by an implicit dimension revealed by consumer neuroscience. The results therefore support the need for a more systematic integration of implicit measures into advertising literacy research and open up space for further development of methodology in this area.