Mouthwateringly Good: Swallowing Frequency As A Proxy For Food Advertisement Efficacy

In the last two decades neuroscience methods have been increasingly used to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising. These include neural responses and arousal responses for example. These types of measures can be expensive and technically challenging to collect as well as hard to interpret. Food advertisement offers the possibility to measure a unique physiological response that directly reflects the subjective value of a food to an individual: if something looks mouth-wateringly good, there will be an increase in spontaneous swallowing frequency. In this proof-of-concept study we measured the frequency of swallowing of 16 participants (9 women) as they watched different types of advertisements. In the product-centered condition the product is visually in the foreground and presented in an appetitizing manner, while in the brand-centered condition the food itself is not shown. Swallowing was measured with electrodes placed on the skin below the jaw, where activity of the submental muscles can be measured. We observed that product-centric advertisements caused more swallowing than brand-centric advertisements, and the average purchase intention is higher. In conclusion, measuring swallowing-related muscle activity is an easy and relatively inexpensive neuromarketing technique that can be used to evaluate effectiveness of food advertisements.