Understanding Digital Consumer Behaviour in Micro and Small Businesses: A Neuro-Marketing Perspective for Inclusive Growth

Abstract

Micro and small businesses (MSBs) are increasingly turning to digital platforms to access consumers but the behaviour of digital consumers is not well understood and hampering their capacity to attain inclusive and sustainable growth. The classic analytics will record observed behaviour but never get the cognitive and emotional processes that drive someone to make an online purchase decision. This paper fills this gap by using neuro-marketing approach to comprehend the influence of sub-conscious on digital consumer behaviour in MSBs. MSBs do not have evidence-based information on the cognitive attention, emotional involvement, and decision biases of consumers in online settings and are implementing marketing techniques that are inefficient and ineffective in getting the conversion. This study aims to examine neuro-marketing indicators that dictate consumer behaviour on the internet and to evaluate their effects on engagement, establishing trust and purchase intention towards inclusive business growth. A Neuro-Behavioural Analytics Framework (NBAF) was used, which is an eye tracking proxies, EEG-inspired attention indices, sentiment analysis and clickstream data with machine-learning models. The relationships among neuro-cognitive variables and consumer responses of the various MSB digital platforms were assessed through structural equation modelling and supervised classification. The findings show that the intensity of attention was able to increase engagement by 34.6 percent, emotional resonance by purchase intention by 28.9 percent, trust cues by conversion rates by 22.4 percent as well as personalized stimuli by boosting repeat visits by 31.2 percent over traditional online marketing strategies. The paper finds that digital-based strategies facilitated by neuro-marketing can encourage the competitiveness and inclusion of consumers of MSB considerably. The presented framework provides scalable and cost-efficient advice to policy-makers and entrepreneurs, and the future opportunities to integrate real-time adaptive neuro-AI systems and cultural cross-validation.