Discovering prominent themes of the application of eye tracking technology in marketing research

Abstract

This study shows the main results of a bibliometric analysis of academic research that has applied eye tracking technology in the marketing discipline, drawing from 923 documents extracted from the WoS bibliographic data-base. The aims of the study are to (i) identify the structure of the relationships between past and current research topics, (ii) provide a longitudinal perspective on eye tracking as a research tool for academics, covering the period 1992-2020, and (iii) identify emerging research trends for the future. Among other results, we find that the eye tracking methodology has been applied in marketing research particularly over the last decade due to scholarly interest in studying the visual attention of consumers and users in behavioral studies. More broadly, over the last 30 years, there are five major thematic areas identified: (a) brand-attention-modeling, (b) eye tracking-movements-communication, (c) web-online, (d) HCI-gaze-perception and (e) choice-labeling. The work is the first to identify the structure of the relationships between past and current research topics, and to predict future research trends in the marketing scholarship applying eye tracking as a research tool. Some limitations and potential future research themes are discussed at the end of the paper.