Are consumers watching product or celebrity? Birlasoft’s Satinder Juneja on neuromarketing

In a market where brands routinely spend tens of crores signing Bollywood celebrities, a deceptively simple question remains largely unanswered: are consumers actually looking at the product, or are they only looking at the celebrity?

For Satinder Juneja, Global Marketing Head at Birlasoft, the answer may fundamentally reshape how Indian advertising evaluates effectiveness. In a conversation with exchange4media, Juneja made a case for neuromarketing, arguing that traditional consumer research often captures socially acceptable responses rather than genuine human behaviour.

The Katrina Kaif Attention Problem

Consider a hypothetical noodles campaign featuring Katrina Kaif. Ask consumers afterward and many will likely call it entertaining, memorable, and effective. But neuromarketing might tell a far less comfortable story. Eye-tracking tools could show that viewers spent almost the entire duration of the commercial looking at Katrina Kaif rather than the product being advertised. 

He then inverted the example.

"It could also be the other way around. The viewer hates Katrina Kaif. So, he never looked at Katrina Kaif and you are planning to pay her Rs 50 crores."

For advertisers spending massive sums on celebrity partnerships, that creates an uncomfortable possibility: the investment may be generating attention, but not necessarily product association or purchase intent.

That distinction sits at the heart of neuromarketing, an emerging discipline that combines neuroscience, behavioural psychology, biometrics, and attention tracking to understand how consumers subconsciously react to advertising stimuli. While surveys and focus groups ask consumers what they think, neuromarketing attempts to measure what their brains and bodies actually register in real time.

For Juneja, who brings over 25 years of marketing experience across companies including Microsoft, Airtel, and L&T, the gap between those two realities is often enormous.

The Problem with Asking Consumers

Traditional market research assumes consumers can accurately articulate why they feel a certain way about a product or advertisement. Neuromarketing challenges that assumption entirely.

"When you do traditional consumer research, you ask people what they think. But in neuromarketing, you are in a way asking the brain what it actually did. The two answers can be drastically different," Juneja said.

According to him, consumer responses are frequently shaped by social conditioning and the desire to appear agreeable, rational, or culturally appropriate.

"What people tend to answer is what we call socially acceptable. There is this conscious construction of that answer that happens."

That means surveys often become less a measurement of authentic reaction and more an exercise in impression management. Even minor variables, such as the interviewer's gender or the survey environment, can subtly influence responses.

The consequence for marketers is significant. Research designed to reduce uncertainty may instead reinforce misleading assumptions.

Measuring What Consumers Cannot Explain

Neuromarketing's promise lies in its ability to detect subconscious reactions that consumers themselves may never consciously process.

The discipline uses technologies such as EEG (electroencephalography), eye-tracking, facial coding, heart rate monitoring, and galvanic skin response measurement to track attention and emotional arousal.

"You ran me an ad and suddenly some music came, some voice came, and my emotional arousal, my emotional state changed. This will not come out in traditional research," Juneja said.

That capability is especially relevant in India, where music, jingles, voiceovers, and emotional storytelling play an outsized role in advertising recall.

A consumer may not consciously remember when their attention spiked during an ad, but biometric systems can capture the precise second their heartbeat accelerated, pupils dilated, or gaze shifted toward a particular visual cue.

"In neuromarketing, you also pick up signals that I may have missed, or you as the researcher may have missed. At what point did my heartbeat increase when I saw a high-speed race ad? That will not come out in traditional research."

As mobile attention spans continue shrinking, those micro-moments are becoming commercially critical.

A Global Industry Growing Fast

Globally, neuromarketing is rapidly moving from experimental curiosity to mainstream commercial tool.

The global neuromarketing market is estimated at approximately $1.71 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $2.62 billion by 2030, according to industry estimates. Advertising and branding applications account for the largest share of market activity, driven by increasing demand for deeper behavioural insights.

Major global brands including PepsiCo, Unilever, and eBay have publicly experimented with neuroscience-based consumer research. Companies such as Nielsen and Immersion Neuroscience are building specialised capabilities around biometric and attention-based campaign analysis.

North America currently dominates the sector, though Asia-Pacific is emerging as the fastest-growing region. India remains at an early adoption stage, with most experimentation concentrated among multinational FMCG companies and large network agencies.

Yet India's fragmented consumer landscape may actually make neuromarketing more valuable here than in more homogeneous markets.

Traditional surveys struggle to capture emotional nuance across languages, cultures, income groups, and regional identities. Biometric and behavioural measurement potentially offers a more universal layer of understanding.

The Rise of Dark Patterns

Juneja also linked neuromarketing to another area of growing concern: Dark Patterns.

"Dark Pattern is making you do something unintended by leveraging HCI, Human-Computer Interaction," he explained. "It's almost weaponising the human-computer interaction for the seller's benefit."

The term refers to manipulative interface design techniques that nudge users toward actions they may not have intentionally chosen, such as hidden subscriptions, confusing cancellation flows, or deceptive consent mechanisms.

Where neuromarketing seeks to understand subconscious behaviour, dark patterns exploit it.

That overlap introduces difficult ethical questions for the advertising and technology industries. The same scientific understanding that helps brands communicate more effectively can also be used to manipulate decision-making in ways consumers barely recognise.

Juneja's framing is notable because it comes not from an academic observer, but from a senior marketer deeply embedded in the commercial ecosystem itself.

The Industry's Blind Spot

Perhaps Juneja's sharpest observation was not about the technology itself, but about the industry's silence around it.

Neuromarketing, he noted, is still barely discussed in mainstream advertising conversations. Conference agendas remain dominated by influencer marketing, performance metrics, and media optimisation, while consumer neuroscience occupies only a niche corner of industry discourse.

That may partly reflect institutional discomfort.

An industry built around recall scores, approval ratings, and self-reported sentiment has limited incentive to adopt methodologies that might undermine those familiar metrics. Neuromarketing does not always validate what traditional research claims to prove.

Instead, it often exposes the distance between what consumers say and what actually captures their subconscious attention.

For Indian marketers debating whether a ₹50 crore celebrity endorsement is truly driving purchase behaviour, that distinction could become impossible to ignore.

Because while consumers may curate their answers for social acceptability, the brain does not.