I was fortunate to be allowed to undertake both my placements at the Bureau of Market Research (BMR) at Unisa. I have been involved with the BMR since completing my Honours year three years ago. My supervisor works at the BMR and I have been with the BMR since the inception of its neuroscience lab. During my placements, I was exposed to a wealth of practical information – information that I doubt I would have been able to obtain in a classroom setting. The two placements have been divided into Semester 1 and Semester 2. The neuroscience lab falls under the division “Behavioural and Communication Research” which is headed by Prof. Joubert who is also my supervisor. The description of the research focus areas associated with this division as taken from the Unisa website is as follows:

Behavioural and Communication Research

Research focus areas

• Consumer behaviour research focused on motivational factors in buying behaviour, gender interest, consumer attitudes towards shops and shopping, the influence of household members on purchase decisions and household saving behaviour.
• Business behaviour studies focused on studies on business intelligence, influencer marketing, loyalty-based management, corporate citizenship, E-commerce, brand image building, service quality and customer satisfaction.
• Advertising research focused on interpretation of illustrations in advertisements, accessibility levels of models in advertising, understanding and acceptability of and preference for advertisements in selected languages, the influence of creative factors on the performance of television commercials and factors in advertising effectiveness and advertising testing, the role of execution elements (humour, brand names mentioned, product screen time, gender of characters, use of children, animation, etc) in television advertisement noting and likeability, emotionality in television advertising and the role advertising in people’s lives.
• Youth research focused on the purchase behaviour of South African adolescents, the impact of media communication technology (cellphone, Internet) overuse on the behaviour and development of South African youth, child pornography, compulsive youth behaviour, drug and alcohol use and abuse and adolescent bullying (physical, emotional and cyber bullying).
• Consumer Neuroscience Laboratory focus on consumer neuroscience research using the latest neuroscience technologies (i.e. galvanic skin responses (GSR), heartbeat, pupil dilation, electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)), in combination with traditional survey methods to better understand the impact of marketing stimuli by observing and interpreting human emotions.