Responsible Stimulus Selection in Neuromarketing: A Critical Narrative Review and Normative Framework for Ethical, Sustainable, and Replicable Consumer Research

Neuromarketing has emerged as a prominent methodological approach for investigating the implicit cognitive and affective processes underlying consumer decision making. By employing neuroscientific and psychophysiological techniques, it enables researchers to move beyond self-report measures and capture responses that consumers cannot always articulate explicitly. Despite these advances, a fundamental component of experimental design—the selection of affective stimuli—remains conceptually underexamined within neuromarketing research. This article adopts a structured narrative review to examine how affective stimuli are selected, documented, and justified in neuromarketing research. It develops a conceptual and normative framework that reconceptualizes stimulus selection as a decision with ethical, scientific, and sustainability implications rather than a purely technical methodological choice. The review critically examines the widespread reliance on ad hoc stimuli, discusses the potential and limitations of standardized affective databases and related resources, and highlights the need for marketing-specific stimulus repositories. By reframing stimulus selection as a core component of responsible research practice, this study contributes to emerging debates on responsible neuromarketing and provides guidance for more transparent, replicable, ethical, and sustainable neuromarketing research in academic and applied contexts.