Exploring a marketing concept: Does marketing encourage the filling of the ‘empty self’, ie, is marketing purchase therapy?

The rapidly changing field of marketing communications research raises many challenges and opportunities. This paper demonstrates how neuroscience, traditional marketing communication and brand management can now be combined to provide unique answers to age-old questions. This paper uses neural insights to define a brand and marketing issue among a health-challenged consumer population. We use the automobile category as a study base and employ big data/longitudinal data to provide answers to the brand manager’s questions. It is argued that this approach will likely become the norm for brand and marketing research going forward.