Broadening the range of applications of eye-tracking in business research

Abstract

Analyzing eye movements has had a long tradition in various scientific disciplines, serving different purposes. In psychology, observations of the eye movements in reading date back to the end of the 19th century. In business research, applications are a more recent phenomenon and mostly confined to studies in marketing. Tracking the eye movement is particularly well suited for investigating the consumers' attention to advertisements. Assessing the usability of websites represents another classic application. Notwithstanding occasional use of eye-tracking in brand and product management, eye movement data are scarcely used in business research. Given the successful examples of eye-tracking applications in various scientific disciplines, this is both surprising and unfortunate. Eye-tracking also has a great, but vastly underutilized, potential as a complementary tool in research in marketing. It offers, for example, objective insight into the perception of questionnaires or stimuli in experimental settings. Thus, we propose two specific areas in which eye-tracking can inform the researcher: (1) eye-tracking in the pre-testing of questionnaires, and (2) eye-tracking as a control tool for manipulations in experimental settings. These new applications are exemplars of how eye-tracking could be used more intensely in business research.