Dr. sc. Hedda Martina Šola is a neuromarketing scientist, an internationally recognized expert in consumer behavior and intellectual property valuation, and the director of the Institute for Neuromarketing and Intellectual Property in Zagreb. Thirty years in executive and management positions in leading European, Croatian, and United States companies, from marketing leadership to company direction and procuration, preceded the science, and that sequence defines her work, because the questions come from the market and the answers come from the laboratory.
Her research is driven by a single question, which is how far consumer behavior can be predicted and what that prediction is worth at the moment the consumer decides to buy. Across fifteen years of that work she moved neuromarketing from measuring response to modeling it before a brand, a product or a space exists, using eye tracking, electroencephalography, facial coding and neuroscience-based artificial intelligence models, pre-trained on laboratory recordings of human reactions.
She has published more than 40 scientific and professional papers, which have been read more than 30,000 times on ResearchGate, spanning four domains: online education and cognitive load; publishing; retail and architectural space; and political communication. Her comparative analysis of visual branding in a United States presidential campaign was published in Informatics, a first quartile journal in communication with an impact factor of 5.1 and a CiteScore of 9.1, and was chosen as an Editor’s Choice article, a distinction the editors reserve for the small number of papers they consider most important in the field.
She was appointed guest editor of the special issue Eye Tracking in the Age of AI: Explainability, Prediction, and Applications in the Journal of Eye Movement Research, the international reference journal for eye movement research, indexed in Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed. She is also the author of Marketinška oružarnica, the first neuromarketing book published in Croatia, released internationally as Neuromarketing Armoury: Amazon US, ResearchGate.
More than 500 brands, public institutions and political organizations have worked with her analyses in positioning, in the protection of intellectual property and in valuation. Under her direction at the government agency for the promotion of exports and investment, the agency rose from forty-sixth to thirteenth place in the World Bank’s global benchmarking of investment promotion agencies.
She holds a master’s degree in economic sciences and a doctorate in the same field with a specialization in neuromarketing, alongside additional academic training at Harvard University, the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, and Oxford, among others. For five years, until September 2025, she was Associate Professor and Research Coordinator at the Centre for Applied Research and Entrepreneurship at Oxford Business College, and before that, at other universities and faculties, Assistant Professor and Vice Dean for Business Cooperation and International Relations. She lectures at international conferences, and at CERTAMENTE in Milan in 2025 she introduced the concept of the neuroceiling.
Also, she is a permanent court expert in marketing and in the economic and financial valuation of intellectual property, appointed by the Croatian Ministry of Justice, Public Administration and Digital Transformation, and, in that role, has served for 13 years. She prepares expert opinions in extrajudicial matters throughout the European Union.
Her institute has been named Best Neurobranding and Neuromarketing Research Institution (Acquisition International, London, 2023), Best Neuromarketing and Consumer Behavior Research Institute in Croatia (European Enterprise Awards, 2022) and Most Innovative Organization in Europe (Corporate LiveWire, 2021). She received the Croatian Women of Influence Award in 2019, was a top finalist for the Global Woman Corporate Award in 2021, and holds an MDPI Editor’s Choice selection for 2025.
Her research looks past prediction to how artificial intelligence, by modeling human behavior, is changing the marketing profession and the market around it. Machines can produce endless stimulation, but not attention. That limit has a name, the neuroceiling, and no algorithm moves it.
