A conceptual review of neuromarketing research through text-mining techniques: Practical insights for marketing decision makers

Neuromarketing has expanded rapidly over the past two decades as neuroscience tools have become more accessible to marketing practitioners and researchers. Nevertheless, the field still lacks an integrated practice-oriented overview that explains how its main themes have developed. This study addresses that gap by applying a structured text-mining approach to 4,292 scholarly publications drawn from major academic databases. Using natural language processing techniques such as text cleaning, keyword extraction, topic modelling and cluster analysis, the study identifies the main research streams and shows how conclusions were derived from the data. The analysis demonstrates that neuromarketing has evolved into a broad multidisciplinary domain shaped by technologies such as fMRI, EEG, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and wearable sensors. Ethical concerns have also intensified, with growing attention to autonomy, privacy and the responsible use of consumer data. While established theories such as the theory of planned behaviour and dual-process models continue to guide research, new directions focus on technology—consumer interactions, emotional processing and predictive analytics. The findings clarify where the field has generated genuinely new insights, for example through multimodal measurement of consumer emotion, and where it primarily reinforces existing knowledge. Despite significant progress, challenges remain in theoretical integration, methodological consistency and the incorporation of practical neuroethical guidelines. By showing how large-scale text mining can map conceptual evolution and reveal hidden patterns, this paper offers researchers and practitioners a clearer understanding of the field’s trajectory and guidance for developing more coherent, transparent and ethically informed neuromarketing practices. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks.com/business.