"The eyes are the windows to the brain”: pupillometry and eye fixation patterns in smartphone product communications

Monitoring eye movement has been proven crucial for understanding consumer behaviour, and pupillometry can indicate whether the stimuli cause much confusion in the brain. This research examined the impact that smartphone promotional messages have on the brain’s cognitive demands and analysed the visual attention that those received. In the realm of neuromarketing, this study explored the smartphone industry and its advertising impact on Greek consumers, as well as its effect on their mental workload levels measured through pupil dilation. An eye tracking device with a comparative questionnaire were used to investigate these topics, with their results from a final sample of 31 people (17 female and 14 male) agreeing with a large body of the pre-existing literature, which suggests that, although men and women might have slightly different approaches to this product category, they mostly have similar biometric results. The stimuli included 10 images containing promotional content from five brands (Sony, Apple, Realme, Xiaomi, Samsung). After the detailed analysis of the eyetracking results that included fixation and pupil metrics and their comparison with the correlated literature, the study concluded that the appearance of the smartphone is the element that attracts the customers’ visual attention the most and that the tested material generally did not demand considerably high amounts of mental workload to be processed. Ultimately, it highlighted the importance of implementing a combination of implicit and explicit research methods to gain a comprehensive understanding of the impact of product advertising on visual attention and mental effort, having additional academic and practical implications.