Traditional market research relies on measuring consumers’ explicit responses via questionnaires, surveys or focus groups in order to predict how brands, new products or messages will fare in the marketplace. However, with approximately 80% of all new products failing within their first year to market despite millions of dollars spent on explicit pre-testing, companies have been looking into alternative ways to find out with greater accuracy what consumers really want. Enter the rapidly expanding field of “neuromarketing” – the application of state-of-the-art brain imaging tools and methods from psychology and neuroscience to understand consumer behaviour at a much deeper level than has been possible previously. Neuroscientists now agree that a great deal of human behaviour is driven by brain processes that operate below the level of conscious awareness and that emotions rather than rational deliberations are, more often than not, determinants of choices. So market research that relies solely on explicit conscious responses offers only a partial picture of the multitude of brain processes (predominantly subconscious) that shape consumer behaviour. Over the past two decades, neuroscientific methods such as functional MRI and EEG have been used to study and define these explicit and implicit neural mechanisms. Companies too have conducted a substantial amount of research using the full gamut of neuroscientific approaches to understand, and ultimately predict, consumer behaviour with far more accuracy than has been permitted by reliance on spoken feedback. Areas of specific commercial interest include finding out the extent to which marketing messages or campaigns are encoded into long-term memory, whether key frames within a television commercial have been absorbed and whether changing certain parameters of a new product alters the extent to which it stimulates the brain’s reward areas. The range of human emotions that manufacturers are now able to measure is considerable: trust, anticipation of price, brand loyalty and empathy are just a few. For years, manufacturers have sought a closer alliance with their customers, recognising that including them in the design and manufacturing process not only delivers superior products but also enhances the customer experience and builds loyalty to the brand. And while not a panacea – the human brain is an extraordinarily complicated organ and neuroscientists have some way to go before they understand it completely – there is little doubt that neuromarketing offers manufacturers a more objective and scientific framework for the study of consumer behaviour. But should consumers be concerned that the ability to see inside our heads and capture our subconscious responses will allow marketers to manipulate us into making purchasing decisions that we otherwise would not? In this talk, I will examine some of the issues that are at the forefront of the neuromarketing debate including issues of infringement of privacy, scientific integrity and ethical standards. Such factors must be considered in the light of the substantial benefits to global industry and consumers (less wastage and improved product satisfaction through more accurate understanding of what consumers really want) that can be offered by applied neuroscience.