Bridging Brains and Brands: An Empirical Study of Neuromarketing Adoption in Indonesia

The combination of neuroscience and marketing has given birth to neuromarketing. This discipline explores consumer decision-making using neuroscientific approaches such as electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and eye-tracking. Though the discipline has grown immensely all over the world, adoption in Indonesia is low because of the high implementation costs, low awareness, and ethical concerns. This study employs a mixed-method using bibliometric analysis and an empirical survey. The bibliometric analysis, based on 181 Scopus-indexed publications from 2007-2025, shows exponential development in neuromarketing, with the top three highest-productive countries being Spain, the USA, and the UK. The four thematic clusters that are leading the discipline are consumer behavior and advertising, consumer psychology and neuroscience, neuroeconomics and decision-making, and biometric tools. The empirical research, consisting of 67 Indonesian participants and examined with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), investigates the effects of innovation, absorptive capacity, and awareness on the use of neuromarketing. It shows that awareness has a significant effect on neuromarketing usage, while innovation and absorptive capacity have no effects. This research highlights that awareness is one of the fundamental requirements for neuromarketing adoption in Indonesia and adds value to the literature by combining bibliometric mapping with empirical analysis, making recommendations to companies and policymakers to boost awareness, training, and ethics.