Guest comment: Winning minds through cutting edge consumer marketing

Very few market research companies working to improve understanding consumer behaviour and buying patterns would immediately think of measuring brainwave activity as a key part of their efforts to gain a clearer, more objective view of reactions to brands and products.  

However, with neuropsychologists now estimating that 85% of human decision making occurs at a subconscious level, a pioneering new method of measuring customer experience called electroencephalography, or EEG, may well provide the best means for unlocking detailed information surrounding consumer perceptions.

Many of our basic purchasing decisions take place in the subconscious. As customers we are frequently motivated by factors that go beyond the surface level of price, colour or fit and will experience a number of emotions ranging from frustration or fear, to embarrassment or elation while visiting a website, shopping in the high street or interacting with brands through different customer service channels.

Recognising these emotions could very well prove to be the key to understanding and developing the effective channels to market. EEG research could help marketers and e-commerce professionals maximise the potential of their sales channels by understanding and improving this optimum ‘customer experience’.

- Why is understanding customer experience of such value to businesses?

Traditionally, usability research, particularly when concerned with online commercial channels, has been primarily concerned with functionality, and understanding how sites perform on a ‘nuts and bolts’ level. This has largely meant determining where the mechanics of sites are not working – for example where the layout of a page is not conducive to eye scanning, when confusing language is used that isn’t intuitive to the end user, the addition of unwieldy registration or checkout processes, and so on.

Over time most online businesses have resolved these issues pretty effectively, and customers no longer experience the type of show stopping issues they did in the past. However, if all sites are performing pretty well in a functional sense, then something is clearly setting the more successful brands apart. This comes down to the fundamental difference between usability and user experience (or customer experience). Usability is concerned with understanding whether people can practically accomplish tasks, whereas user experience incorporates this while also expanding to encompass things like the ‘enjoyability’ of the overall experience.

- What are the ultimate user experience benefits of EEG?

The true value of EEG is that it enables marketers to tap into the subconscious of consumers in order to gain a closer understanding of the drivers behind basic human behaviour.

Consumers on the whole are intelligent, perceptive people. They are becoming more and more sceptical of focus groups, skewing results gained from these methods alone. People can often prove unable or unwilling to say why they prefer, for example, one website over another. This occurs either because the reasons are buried in the subconscious or because of social factors, such as a reticence to appear superficial or materialistic.

Measuring this notion of user experience, however, remains key to understanding why people choose one brand over another and why they stick with those brands in the long term. What we really need is some mechanism to measure people’s emotional engagement with a brand. EEG adds genuine objective measurement of emotional engagement.

- How does EEG work in practice?

Using painless electrodes applied to the head area via a skullcap, EEG research measures electrical brain activity to gain a more precise understanding of how people react emotionally to what they are doing and seeing at a given moment. The subject participating in the research will go through the different stages of playing a game, visiting a website, contacting a call centre, shopping or completing any other measured customer interaction task, and the researcher will be able to collect coloured graphs that visually map levels of activity and reactions in different areas of the brain.

The research combines eye-tracking with further complex neurological data to measure sub-conscious reactions, which are then connected with other cognitive responses. This real-time study of variations in the brain’s electrical activity patterns makes it possible to gain in-depth insights into exactly how a customer is emotionally engaged in the customer experience at any given moment.

When used in conjunction with classic qualitative research methods, EEG helps marketers gain an understanding of previously unknown subconscious states. Many industries such as advertising, film, packaging and design are already successfully using EEG research. Now e-commerce applications of EEG stand to deliver immense benefits to online retailers. The research helps pinpoint exactly how customers respond to site design and online processes, so that retailers can identify where to make changes, adapt the website and where cross-promotions have the most impact.

EEG can be used to assess emotional response to various types of stimuli. For example, it is possible to gauge people’s emotional engagement while on the phone to a call centre. Likewise, by recording reactions at different stages of interaction with a website, measuring emotions ranging from excitement and anticipation through to anxiety and boredom, EEG can provide detailed and specific site design recommendations that improve customer conversion.

Differentiation in user experience for many brands means moving beyond simple efficiency, performance and functionality, towards connecting with consumers emotionally. EEG research can provide the means to gather detailed information on a user’s emotional relationship to a brand or service. Modern EEG techniques measure factors ranging from cognitive and visual attention to emotional attraction and engagement, revealing the pattern of visceral activity during an experience. They implement an Apprehension/Excitement index to reveal precisely how people respond to specific incidents and allows for comparison with other everyday activity benchmarks.

- What impact is EEG already having in the market?

In multi-channel environments, EEG research is helping retailers to understand the effectiveness of individual channels. On the High Street, for example, EEG research has been applied to women shopping for shoes (a real-life study that has captured the public’s imagination, as it has been parodied in a TV advert) and customers have also been tested at home whilst speaking to contact centre agents on the phone.

One industry that is already highly aware of the value of customer experience in gaining and retaining customers is the gaming sector. Immersive environments, such as 3D casinos, or adrenalin-fuelled, strategic and multi-step games providers, such as betting or poker sites, all benefit heavily from understanding how best to navigate and help the player through different stages including sign-up, tutorial, play, negotiation of positive and negative outcomes and interaction with other players, in order to create a fully satisfying online experience.

Online, EEG gives marketers additional tools to measure the impact of individual features, as well as combinations of elements on a website. As well as being able to follow and quantify what customers are doing on a site, through clicks-analysis, EEG provides the crucial insight into how they ‘feel’ while doing it.

In some cases, the outcome of research will even provide the knowledge and tools to disclaim previously held assumptions. In the insurance industry, for example, our work has shown that contrary to popular belief, customers actually prefer a longer and more detailed registration process. There appears to be a trade-off between how much information is disclosed and the perceived security and trust customers have in a brand website.

- Conclusion

For marketers, EEG research is another crucial step towards better understanding of the customer. Investing the time and research into finding out more about customers can pay real dividends in creating the appropriate marketing and business strategy.

The knowledge received from EEG research allows organisations to build better customer profiles, understand what customers expect to see when they interact with a brand or business, identify stress points in their web sites, and provide customers with a seamless experience across sales and communication channels. All this will help organisations identify opportunities to cross-sell, increase customer loyalty and, in turn, customer return.

EEG is certainly worth thinking about.

By Marty Carroll

Consultancy Director

Foviance