Editorial: Insights and innovations in consumer neuroscience

In an era marked by rapid social, economic, and technological advancement, which has significantly shaped the marketing landscape, neuroscience has emerged as a set of methods capable of generating valuable insights into marketing, consumer behaviour, and advertising. Conceptualized as the application of neuroscientific technologies to the marketing sector (Lee et al., 2007), consumer neuroscience has rapidly gained traction, contributing to multiple areas of inquiry, including the role of emotions in decision-making, socially driven mechanisms, and perceptual influences on behaviour (Casado-Aranda et al., 2023). In business, its application has come to span a broad range of sectors, covering fashion, fast-moving consumer goods, and the automotive industry (Oliveira et al., 2022), while also informing key marketing practices such as influencer marketing, brand development, and advertising (Cenizo, 2025). Although economic and expertise-related barriers initially confined the adoption of these techniques predominantly to leading companies, technological simplification has progressively facilitated their diffusion beyond such firms (Bolls et al., 2025), increasingly extending their use to small businesses seeking to enhance economic performance (Malodia et al., 2022). This expansion is driven by the distinctive advantages of neuroscientific approaches, which can uncover automatic psychological reactions underlying consumer behaviour (Friedmann et al., 2024), mitigate biases inherent in self-reported measures, and enable the continuous assessment of consumers' responses to specific messages (Casado-Aranda et al., 2022).Notwithstanding the potential of these techniques, research into their application remains limited and fragmented, and their use also poses ethical challenges concerning consumer autonomy and privacy. This Research Topic presents four manuscripts that offer an up-to-date overview of consumer neuroscience and psychological approaches, highlighting their potential to inform marketing strategies and their current application across contemporary research contexts. Instead, adoption is driven by perceived ease of use, enjoyment, and interactivity, suggesting that emotional satisfaction and experiential quality outweigh informational value in sports content consumption. The study thus shows that viewers' attachment to OTT platforms is shaped by deeper emotional and experiential processes, often operating below conscious awareness and central to consumer neuroscience. This Research Topic offers an added value for research and applications in consumer neuroscience.Indeed, the contributions show that consumption experiences are shaped by dynamic cognitive, affective, and physiological processes. Treating these internal states as core explanatory mechanisms is essential for advancing consumer behaviour research and for designing empirically grounded, effective consumer experiences.