Inside The Consumer Mind
By WENDY MELILLO
Monday, January 16 2006
Monday, January 16 2006
Published on AllBusiness.com
As Coca-Cola's famous "Mean Joe Green" ad unfolded frame by frame, a magnetic resonance imaging machine recorded what was going on inside the viewer's brain. When oxygen carried by blood pooled in the medial pre-frontal cortex, an area just behind the forehead, Jon Morris, a market researcher and communications professor at the University of Florida, knew he had scientific proof that the ad elicited emotion.
Science's study of the brain has yielded some tantalizing clues about how the mind works. Neuroscientists say people actually feel more than they think, and that emotion plays a crucial role in all decision-making. Although science has been uncovering the brain's secrets, especially over the last decade, the advertising industry has been slow to leverage the possibilities, industry advocates say. Traditional questionnaires and focus groups, they say, have been considered a simpler and less expensive route than high-tech machines to gauge consumer response to ads.
That is now changing. Concern that focus groups and copy-testing methods can result in bland and predictable ads is prompting agencies and advertisers to consider using physiological measures to analyze consumer reactions to products and to develop new ones. At this point, industry associations are testing these measures to not only see how people respond to ads, but are using the data to create them. Beyond putting people in MRI machines to see which parts of their brain light up, consumers are also being hooked up to electrodes to measure skin changes and heart rates. Even the movement of a person's facial muscles, imperceptible to the human eye, is being analyzed.
One big spark for agency interest in the value of such methods came when Ken Kaess, CEO of DDB Worldwide, argued in a speech at the 4A's Management Conference in April 2004 that traditional testing methods were contributing to the growing mediocrity in advertising. Later that year, a task force called "Emotional Response to Advertising" was created by the Advertising Research Foundation and the 4A's. Over the past year, the task force has conducted studies of ads using biological measurements. The preliminary results show why agencies need to put more emphasis on consumers when creating and testing ads, proponents say.
Account planners like Alice Sylvester, a task force co-chair and account planning director at Foote Cone & Belding in Chicago, who advocate these new methods, argue that emotion, not reason, is the prominent factor in making buying decisions. Bombarding consumers with the same commercial message over and over again isn't enough. Creating ads based on the old AIDA model—building awareness, interest, desire and action—is obsolete. Traditional copy-testing methods are not enough to unlock the buying secrets buried in the unconscious mind.
This
Science's study of the brain has yielded some tantalizing clues about how the mind works. Neuroscientists say people actually feel more than they think, and that emotion plays a crucial role in all decision-making. Although science has been uncovering the brain's secrets, especially over the last decade, the advertising industry has been slow to leverage the possibilities, industry advocates say. Traditional questionnaires and focus groups, they say, have been considered a simpler and less expensive route than high-tech machines to gauge consumer response to ads.
That is now changing. Concern that focus groups and copy-testing methods can result in bland and predictable ads is prompting agencies and advertisers to consider using physiological measures to analyze consumer reactions to products and to develop new ones. At this point, industry associations are testing these measures to not only see how people respond to ads, but are using the data to create them. Beyond putting people in MRI machines to see which parts of their brain light up, consumers are also being hooked up to electrodes to measure skin changes and heart rates. Even the movement of a person's facial muscles, imperceptible to the human eye, is being analyzed.
One big spark for agency interest in the value of such methods came when Ken Kaess, CEO of DDB Worldwide, argued in a speech at the 4A's Management Conference in April 2004 that traditional testing methods were contributing to the growing mediocrity in advertising. Later that year, a task force called "Emotional Response to Advertising" was created by the Advertising Research Foundation and the 4A's. Over the past year, the task force has conducted studies of ads using biological measurements. The preliminary results show why agencies need to put more emphasis on consumers when creating and testing ads, proponents say.
Account planners like Alice Sylvester, a task force co-chair and account planning director at Foote Cone & Belding in Chicago, who advocate these new methods, argue that emotion, not reason, is the prominent factor in making buying decisions. Bombarding consumers with the same commercial message over and over again isn't enough. Creating ads based on the old AIDA model—building awareness, interest, desire and action—is obsolete. Traditional copy-testing methods are not enough to unlock the buying secrets buried in the unconscious mind.
This