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Consumer studies & neuroscience: using cutting-edge techniques, PART 2

What neuroscience techniques can be used to improve the efficiency and reliability of consumer studies? In this article I describe two: the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and predictive validity.

In a previous post (see here), I explained how behavioural sciences can improve the efficiency of customer studies. For another one (see here), I introduced the eye-tracking technique and the use of moderating variables as means to reach that aim.

http://cabinet-analytica.fr/en/customer-studies-packaging-neurosciences/

Today I introduce two other techniques: Implicit Association Tests and predictive validity

IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TESTS

Implicit Association Tests (or IAT) is a psychological tool that assesses to which extent two concepts are unconsciously related in our brain.

The basic idea is that consumers’ brains very quickly associate two concepts that are closely related. And less rapidly associate concepts that are not. For instance, words from the concept ‘holidays’ (travel, airport, hotel, beach, restaurant, shopping, hiking) will be more automatically and quickly sorted with words from the concept ‘summer’ (sun, sea, shorts, dress, fruits, light) than from the concept ‘work’.

Implicit association tests assess the extent to which two concepts are unconsciously related within our brain Click To Tweet

On the contrary, words from the concept ‘work’ (taxi, meeting, costume, computer, office, colleagues) will be more automatically and quickly sorted with words from the concept ‘autumn’ (orange, pumpkin, chestnut, advent, cold, rain). Of course, some words from the concepts ‘holidays’ or ‘work’ could equally be sorted with the two concepts ‘summer’ and ‘autumn’.

consumer studies neuroscience

Ultimately, Implicit Association Tests consist of asking people to sort words between combinations of concepts. For instance ‘holidays/summer’ vs ‘work/autumn’, or ‘holidays/autumn’ vs ‘work/summer’. Let us consider that ‘holidays’ and ‘summer’ are more tightly linked in people’s brain than ‘holidays’ and ‘autumn’. We then expect people to sort the aforementioned words (sun, fruit, cold, rain…) more quickly with a combination of concepts (‘holidays/summer’) than with another (‘holidays/autumn’).

Implicit Association Tests are complex, but you can find out more about them on the dedicated Wikipedia page. The most important is to understand that IATs enable to reveal people’s unconscious conceptual associations.

WHICH APPLICATION FOR CONSUMER STUDIES?

Implicit Association Tests can be used for customer studies. For instance, imagine that you would like to assess the opportunity to source coffee from a new Asian provider. Are your customers ready to buy coffee grown in Asia? What about Africa or South America like your current products? An Implicit Association Test will assess customers’ unconscious mental association between the concept ‘coffee’ and an Asian origin.

Two situations can be expected. On one hand, customers show a good association between the concept ‘coffee’ and African and South American origins. But a poor association with Asian origins. It would then be adventurous to try and sell Asian coffee to these customers. On the other hand, unconscious mental associations between the concept ‘coffee’ and African and South American origins are not as high as expected. Then there would exist an opportunity to sell a coffee with an alternative origin, such as Asian.

These results can further be confirmed by testing the predictive validity of alternative packaging.

CONSUMER STUDIES: PREDICTIVE VALIDITY

Neuroscience- and psychology-based consumer studies can assess the predictive validity of packaging’s impact on perceptions. Here we want to understand whether perceptions generated by your packaging can affect people’s intentions and behaviours in real life. That is to say, beyond a simple subjective answer to a survey.

For instance, our last client wished to emphasize the British origin of its pasta. We tested whether new packets would affect the representation of the pasta as a British product in people’s daily behaviour. To this end we provided a list of 6 meals: 3 British ones and 3 Italian ones. Then we asked people to sort these meals as a function of the likelihood that they would use a given product to cook them.

If the results indicate that new packaging generates a powerful identification with British origins, we expect people to prefer to cook British over Italian meals with the product. And these are the results we have obtained. Conversely, old packages were preferentially selected to cook Italian meals.

BACK TO COFFEE

Let us return to our coffee example. We want to determine in which situations (work, restaurant, service area, coffee shop…) customers would like to drink a given type of coffee (Asian, African or South American). Each situation does not lead to the same expectations in terms of service quality or products served. Such a test could assess the relevance of Asian coffee and its appeal to your customers.

To conclude, neuroscience sets up reliable and powerful customer studies thanks to innovating tools. That way you can access relevant data and insights for your marketing strategy. All of this while avoiding the biases of traditional consumer studies.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Morgan DAVID

A former academic and behavioural sciences expert, Dr Morgan David is the founder and director of ANALYTICA, a consultancy agency based in the UK and in France. ANALYTICA uses the way our brain works to design better products and better services in the realm of neuromarketing, webmarketing, customer experience, sales strategy and pricing tactics. ANALYTICA created CogniSales, a neuromarketing sales service, CogniMenu, the first new-generation menu engineering service, Predicta Sports, a science-based talent identification tool for predictive recruitment in sports, and the neuromarketing service applied to packaging CogniPackaging.

Why UX needs neuroscience

24 September 2020/1 Comment/in Blog anglais English pll_5f6ca03a9c9ac /by Morgan David

Businesses rely more and more on experimentation to build their marketing strategies. Experimentation is a powerful way to gather objective and reliable data, and make informed decisions. This can be achieved with UX or A/B tests. In this post we explain why and how neuroscience can boost the efficiency of UX tests.

UX TESTS & EXPERIMENTATION

In his recent book, Thomke explains how businesses that use experimentation procedures for their marketing strategy reach higher levels of efficiency and outperform their competitors.

UX (User eXperience) tests usually look like A/B tests. Typically, after alternative versions (A, B, n…) of a webpage, a product, or a message are designed their impact towards users are measured in normal use conditions. This procedure brings real informational value compared to the subjective verbal statements of traditional user studies.

UX and A/B tests provide a direct assessment of consumers’ behaviours and decisions. It is then likely that prior knowledge about consumers’ psychology and decision mechanisms can improve UX tests’ performance.

Prior knowledge about consumers’ psychology and decision mechanisms can improve UX tests’ performance Click To Tweet

UX: A STORY OF PEUGEOT AND RENAULT

Let us focus on an example to help you understand. Imagine that you are the head of marketing of a car retail company. You would like to change your website’s landing page as well as the cover page of your brochure. Photos of Renault or Peugeot cars are available. You thus perform A/B consumer tests to determine which photo generates the best impact on your customers. That impact can be measured by the proportion of online visitors entering your website, conversion rate, profits, the proportion of people asking for more information, or customer perception of quality or reliability.

UX neuroscience

Results are there! Your performance reaches 70% when a Peugeot car is displayed vs. 30% for Renault. Conclusion: Peugeot has a better impact on customers than Renault.

But there is something that our head of marketing does not know. A photo of a Mercedes-Benz car would have had an even higher impact on customers. Perception of quality and reliability would have jumped from 70% (for Peugeot) to 85% for Mercedes-Benz when all photos are compared altogether. A benefit of 15%!

Let us sum up. User eXperience (UX) can be considered as the experimental comparison between Peugeot and Renault. The neuroscience touch would be the addition of Mercedes-Benz. Using neuroscience, one can anticipate consumers’ psychology, then add alternative options with a predictable impact to A/B and UX tests. In the case displayed here, Mercedes-Benz is expected to have a higher impact than the two French brands, thus adding value to the UX test.

Neuroscience can help anticipate consumers’ psychology and add alternative options with a predictable impact to A/B and UX tests Click To Tweet

A/B TESTS & PACKAGING

Let us consider as an example a brand of sweets that renews its packaging. Its marketers have performed a consumer test. The effect of several versions of a chocolate bar’s package has been assessed. On some packages, the logo is displayed at the bottom. For others it is on the top. Packages’ backgrounds show different colours. Nutritional specifications are shown on one side or on the back. The ‘Organic’ logo has a small or big size… Consumer tests will undoubtfully identify the more effective package. That is to say, one package that generates stronger preferences and higher purchase intentions than the others.

But neuroscience could boost the efficiency of this test. How? By reducing the number of alternative packages tested to those that are expected to affect consumers the most. Back to the chocolate bars. Scientific studies have shown that a vertical symmetry axis catches people’s attention less than an asymmetric design. An asymmetrical design could thus impact customers more positively.

UX: IDENTIFYING THE CAUSES OF PEOPLE’S BEHAVIOUR

The second benefit of applying neuroscience to UX tests lies in the interpretation of experimentation’s outcomes. Often, the different options assessed in a UX test are created and selected following designers’ intuition. Unfortunately, UX tests rarely enable the identification of what causes the obtained results. This is where neuroscience and consumer psychology bring added value to UX tests.

Neuroscience brings meaning where UX tests highlight simple correlations. Understanding the psychological causes of the higher impact of a given landing page has benefits. Using moderating variables for instance (see the corresponding post here), enables us to develop an evidence- and data-based conceptual framework that is potentially generalizable to other contexts.

Let us return to the chocolate bar example. Unfortunately, after launching the new asymmetric packaging, sales have dropped by 10%. To understand why, neuroscience can be helpful. Asymmetric packages indeed catches people’s attention more. Yet, they are also considered as harder to read by customers. The chocolate bar is also perceived as a low-quality product when inside an asymmetric package. This understanding of customers’ perceptions and what causes purchase behaviours will no doubt help the brand to further adjust its product and marketing strategy.

By anticipating how alternative marketing options affect consumers’ psychology and behaviour, neuroscience brings added value to UX tests. This is a powerful tool to help make informed product and marketing decisions.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Morgan DAVID

CogniPackaging: packaging efficiency boosted by neuroscience

1 September 2020/1 Comment/in Blog anglais English pll_5f4e554fd18c7 /by Morgan David

Logo position, colours, font, shape and symmetry of the package, specification layout… All these packaging details may at first appear as secondary. Yet many studies prove they can impact customers’ unconscious perceptions. As these perceptions are unconscious, customers typically are not capable of expressing them clearly when assessing packages. Professionals are then likely to miss crucial insights with important marketing consequences.

NEUROMARKETING OPTIMISATION OF PACKAGING

cognipackaging packaging

Scientific literature about consumer psychology provides evidence that many features of products’ packaging influence people.

For instance, customers show increased purchase intentions for pasta packaging where their transparent window has a shape of a circle rather than a rectangle. A chocolate bar with a symmetric package design is perceived as more readable. Also a symmetrical product is perceived to be of higher quality than when the package design is asymmetric. Should you want your Champagne to be perceived as modern and authentic? Then create a label with a simple design. You would like it to emphasize cheerfulness and sophistication? Then design a more complex label.

A neuromarketing approach enables to adjust packaging’s features so as to align customer perception with brand values. Customer studies then help to check that people’s perceptions have been properly anticipated.

CUSTOMER STUDIES BOOSTED BY NEUROSCIENCE

In traditional customer studies, people’s statements and intentions often differ from their actual behaviour. Customers tend to provide answers that display their brighter side (aka social desirability bias). The justification they give for their answers is often wrong. This list of traditional customer study biases could go on and on…

Consumers do not say what they do, and do not do what they say... Their unconscious perception of your packaging is unaccessible with traditional consumer tests Click To Tweet

Customer studies based on behavioural science help to avoid the biases of traditional studies. This leaves you with clear answers about how different versions of a product’s packaging are perceived.

INFLUENCING CUSTOMERS

cognipackaging packaging

A neuromarketing approach to packaging is truly innovative as it allows you to increase your product’s perception of quality, or to decrease price perception. In both cases, an increase in purchase intention is not only hoped for, but genuinely predictable.

COGNIPACKAGING

Following the successes of CogniMenu and CogniSales, we created CogniPackaging, the latest neuromarketing service from ANALYTICA. CogniPackaging uses rigorous scientific studies to help you conceive your packaging and then to perform consumer tests about its performance. Our role is to optimise your packaging’s features and influence customers’ perceptions, judgments and intentions. This unique tool is more reliable than using intuition or chance when designing your packaging.

Behavioural sciences applied to packaging is the most efficient means to improve the efficiency of your marketing and product strategy.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Morgan DAVID

études consommateurs neurosciences packaging

Customer studies & neuroscience: using cutting-edge techniques

1 September 2020/1 Comment/in Blog anglais English pll_5f4e52cb4e244 /by Morgan David

What neuroscience techniques should be used to improve the efficiency and reliability of customer studies? I describe two of them in this post: eye-tracking and the use of moderating variables.

In a previous post, I explained why behavioural sciences can improve the efficiency of customer studies. Now that you are convinced of it (if not, read this!), I would like to tell you about the techniques and tools that can be used.

Here I highlight two of them: eye-tracking and moderating variable use.

CUSTOMER STUDIES & NEUROSCIENCE: EYE-TRACKING

Eye-tracking is one of the most famous neuromarketing techniques. Eye-tracking consists of understanding how and where customers pay attention to in a point of sales. This tool helps to determine how the most important information of a communication setup should be displayed.

customer studies eye-tracking

The use of eye-tracking has numerous applications. Restaurant menus, packaging, webpages, advertisements, supermarket shelves… In all these situations, it is crucial to know what draws customers’ attention. One can also assess how much attention specific brand packaging is going to receive. This is done by measuring the so-called ‘fixation time’. In other words, the amount of time a customer will look at the claim.

Here are some application examples. You observe that consumers mostly look at the bottom of a cereal box. That could be the ideal area where to indicate how much of the recommended daily intake of fibre this product provides. Your customers look more attentively at the bottom left-hand corner of the wine menu? That could be the ideal zone to propose high-margin, by the glass, wines.

Eye-tracking helps to determine how the most important information of a communication setup should be displayed Click To Tweet

A QUESTION OF INFORMATION AVAILABILITY

Eye-tracking is particularly relevant for video advertisement. But also for live consumer studies in dummy supermarket shelves. The reason why is simple. In both situations, product specifications and claims are accessible to customers for only a short period of time and in a limited space.

In other words, customers generally do not have enough time to look in detail at all the available information. It is in this context that understanding what draws consumer attention is genuinely relevant.

To conclude, eye-tracking is a useful tool for customer studies. This is mostly true when customers take a limited time to regard product specifications.

CUSTOMER STUDIES & NEUROSCIENCE: THE USE OF MODERATING VARIABLES

Another benefit of behavioural sciences-based customer studies is the use of moderating variables. These variables enable us to identify what causes consumers’ perceptions and judgments. For our last client, for instance, we wished to determine whether new packaging specifying that the product was manufactured in the UK would generate positive judgments. We predicted that individual tendency to favour the purchase of British products could affect judgments. For each participant, we thus used a psychometric scale, called ethnocentrism, to assess individual tendencies to favour the purchase of British food.

This tendency indeed positively affected the new ‘made in the UK’ claim. Unexpectedly, even consumers with a low tendency to favour the purchase of British food rated the new claim positively. Although we did not anticipate this result, it helped our client readjust their marketing strategy.

Moderating variables help to identify alternative customer profiles and persuade each of them differently Click To Tweet

Ethnocentrism measurements allowed us to conclude that the positive effect of the new claim was not only generated by those consumers who usually buy British food. The new claim was relevant for our client’s new marketing strategy.

Moderating variables are a great tool to understand the differences in perception and ratings between people. It is crucial to efficiently identify alternative customer profiles and persuade each of them differently (see the post below).

http://cabinet-analytica.fr/en/psychology-marketing-strategy-sales/

AN EXAMPLE WITH WINE PACKAGING

In the example below, wine bottles displayed in a wooden box with claims and specifications (“explanatory box”) or with a transparent window (“transparent box”) are judged as more attractive by consumers (“product attitude”). Why is this so? To answer this question, scientists have measured peoples’ perceptions of the luxuriousness of packaging (“perceived luxuriousness”). A luxurious aspect indeed generates higher ratings compared to simple boxes (“plain box”). This result can help the brand to optimize future packages more accurately. For instance by playing on customers’ perception of luxuriousness.

Moderating variables are useful to identify what causes consumers’ perceptions and judgments. They allow for a quick assessment of your products and packages’ likely impact. Moderating variables can also be used to segment your target more efficiently. Basically, they help you to make strategic marketing decisions that are more accurate than those based on traditional customer studies.

In our next post, we will introduce two other neuroscience techniques applied to customer studies: implicit association tests and predictive validity.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Morgan DAVID

How to improve customer studies with behavioural sciences?

12 June 2020/1 Comment/in Blog anglais English pll_5ee3951b10bdd /by Morgan David

Customer studies… Let’s face it: customers do not say what they do, and do not do what they say. So how can we really understand how customers perceive and evaluate your products and their packaging?

In his recent book Experimentation works, Stefan Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School, quotes a manager from Booking (booking.com) speaking about customers’ behaviour:

“We see evidence every day that people are terrible at guessing. Our predictions of how customers behave are wrong nine out of ten times.”

TRADITIONAL VS NEUROSCIENCE-BASED CUSTOMER STUDIES

Traditional customer studies are beneficial to understand people’s preferences and habits. They are a strategic phase of the development of products and packaging. Once strategic decisions have been made, how can we be sure that creations and messages are perceived as expected by customers?

customer studies packaging neurosciences

Are the colours and texture of a new mobile phone congruent with the claim that it is the lightest phone on the market? Is a Union Jack sufficient for a product to be perceived as made in the UK? Does the font type reflect a product of quality and authenticity? Should the teaspoon on the cereal packet be placed on the bowl’s left or right? Shall the advertisement’s background be the same colour as the displayed product? Should the triangular shape of the pasta packet’s transparent window be pointing downwards or upwards?

Customer studies based on psychology enable us to objectively assess people's perceptions and judgments Click To Tweet

Such questions about the impact and efficacy of products and packaging can hardly be answered with traditional customer studies. Conversely, all of them have been answered thanks to behavioural science. Customer studies based on psychology enable us to objectively assess people’s perceptions and judgments. They are also useful to understand your clients’ unconscious judgments; the very judgments that they cannot express because customers’ answers are usually biased and influenced by many factors! Eventually, you will obtain accurate information about the psychological impact of your product and its packaging on consumers (e.g. font, colours, claims, weight, size, texture, etc.).

EXAMPLES OF CUSTOMER STUDIES

For these products, the darker version was judged by consumers as heavier and more durable than the lighter version, but also less user-friendly.

In this example, biscuit and fruit juice manufacturers wondered whether person-like drawings could improve purchase intentions. Customer studies have shown that the impact of person-like drawings depends on the type of product sold. It improves purchase intentions for “hedonic” and calorific products (biscuits = vice product). However, it decreases purchase intentions for healthy products (fruit juice = virtue product).

customer studies packaging neurosciences

“Vice product” corresponds to biscuits, and “Virtue product” corresponds to fruit juice

See these packaging infographics about Campbell’s soup. Each improvement has been tested and validated through studies about customers’ perceptions and judgments. Traditional customer studies could not have found that the logo placed on top attracted too much attention. Or that the spoon triggered a minimal emotional reaction.

The benefit of using neurosciences and psychology for customer studies is thus manifold:

AVOID INFLUENCING CUSTOMERS’ ANSWERS

It is easy to influence people’s answers to a survey. One just has to ask questions in a way that encourages a particular answer.

Often, the survey designer is not aware of that influence. As a consequence, collected data turn out to be useless and of poor quality. But these data will still be used to make strategic decisions. For instance, Steve Jobs, the iconic but this time misled Apple CEO, said in 2003:

“People have told us over and over and over again, they don’t want to rent their music… they don’t want subscriptions.”

Conversely, customer studies based on social psychology principles enable us to assess people’s perceptions and judgments objectively, including unconscious representations and judgments that customers do not verbally express.

DETERMINING CUSTOMERS’ PERCEPTIONS & JUDGMENTS BEYOND VERBAL STATEMENTS

If you think that customer studies are only about assessing your target’s preference for a given product or packaging, then neurosciences won’t help you. Ordinary surveys are sufficient to understand such preferences. Conversely, behavioural sciences allow for more innovative customer studies to be conducted. Collected data about the impact of a product or a packaging are virtually limitless!

Every detail of a product or its packaging can have a tremendous impact on consumer perception Click To Tweet

Customer studies based on neuroscience help to confirm whether new products and packaging trigger the expected perception. They enable us to understand customers’ unconscious judgments. Genuine judgments that your customers cannot properly express. Every detail of a product or its packaging can have a tremendous impact on consumer perception. This is why behavioural sciences have become essential for customer studies.

In this example, the labels of Champagne bottles vary in complexity. Do you wish to communicate a ‘feminine’ feeling? The label on the right should rather be used. Do you wish to communicate a sensation of ‘modernity’ and ‘authenticity’? The label on the left is more likely to generate them. Would these conclusions have been reached following traditional customer studies and creators’ mere intuitions? No.

IN SUMMARY

Behavioural sciences enable us to access significantly more data that traditional customer studies. Perceptions, representations, judgments, intentions… Neurosciences, along with social psychology, possess technical tools to accurately assess the objective impact of a new product or its packaging on consumers. And these tools go beyond simple statements that often turn out to be biased and subjective. Your customers show unconscious judgments and representations that traditional customer studies cannot identify. Because each and every conception detail can have an unexpected but substantial influence on consumers’ perceptions and intentions, neurosciences provide more reliable and more objective methods than intuition or chance.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Morgan DAVID

Using neuromarketing & customer psychology to improve selling processes

10 March 2020/1 Comment/in Blog anglais English pll_5e6777ee684bd /by Morgan David

In a former blog post, we explained how neuromarketing and customer psychology can improve product design and packaging. But once your product has been designed and is ready to be sold, how to promote it and sell it efficiently? To this end, neuromarketing and customer psychology bring efficient evidence-based solutions.

1) SEGMENTING CUSTOMERS BASED ON THEIR PSYCHOLOGY

In order to promote products on a large scale, marketing segments based on customers’ psychology is a powerful and revolutionary technique. Psychological segments deconstruct traditional segments, like age, gender, socioeconomic status, salary or living area.

Traditional segments are less accurate than psychological segments to initiate marketing or selling actions Click To Tweet

Let’s imagine each traditional segment contains a cluster of persons who fit into it. Some segments will merge with one another and define personas: for instance Clare, 38yo, married, 2 kids, living in a suburban area, a qualified worker in a public company. Research in social psychology shows that psychological dimensions like openness to experience, extraversion or need for cognition, blend traditional segments. That means that these aforementioned psychological dimensions gather people from distinct traditional segments.

For what consequence? Traditional segments are less accurate than psychological segments to initiate marketing or selling actions. It’s useless to communicate with every 30 or 40-year-old in the same way. Age and other traditional segments are not the most relevant and efficient segments to tailor a message to your target. Personality is by far more useful.

For instance, one scientific study has shown that mobile application sales could increase by up to 79% when their promotional message was tailored to the target’s personality (see our former post here for a more detailed description). These findings led ANALYTICA to create a marketing innovation called PsychoSegments (see video with English subtitles below).

2) APPLYING PSYCHOLOGICAL PRICES

prix psychologiques ventes

Psychological prices are one of the most popular customer psychology techniques. Psychological prices consist of setting prices at a given threshold above which products are perceived to be too expensive. We all know the principle of prices ending with nine: a pair of trousers will be perceived as less expensive when priced at £49.99 than if it was sold at £50. Beware though! Nine-ending prices cannot be applied to every product or service. We explained why in a former post here.

3) ENCOURAGING PURCHASE DECISIONS

How to efficiently promote and sell a product? And most of all, how to encourage customers to purchase a product over another? This turns out to be rather simple, mainly because our decisions are predictable! Our brain perceives, analyses information and adjusts our behaviour in a predictable way. This is what we call ‘decision rules’.

it is rather easy to predict customers’ choice for a given product when the conditions favouring this choice are met Click To Tweet

Once these rules are known and understood, it is rather easy for an expert to predict customers’ choice for a given product when the conditions favouring this choice are met. Marketers then need to recreate these conditions to encourage selling the highest-margin products, for instance. Choice environments can consist of a commercial offer, where pricing and offer structure influence customers’ choices.

A very concrete example is CogniMenu, a new generation menu-engineering tool developed by ANALYTICA. CogniMenu improves the selling efficiency of restaurants’ menus. The organisation of the menu, its structure and its pricing are all optimised following customer psychology principles. The ultimate goal is to encourage customers to pick highest-margin meals. This directly translates into an increase in average spending and in restaurants’ profits.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Morgan DAVID

How to use neuromarketing & customer psychology for product design & packages?

10 December 2019/1 Comment/in Blog anglais English pll_5defb95696a0d /by Morgan David

Product designs & packages are often conceived by creative professionals. Whether they are designers, advertisers or communication experts, these specialists are gifted enough to invent elaborate and original creations. However, aesthetic creations do not automatically translate into something meaningful for customers’ perceptions, decisions and behaviour. Then why and how can we create products and packages that trigger a positive impact on customers’ perceptions and purchase intentions?

CREATING EFFICIENT PRODUCTS & PACKAGES

Offering products and packages in line with people’s needs and expectations is crucial for successful customer-experience and sales.

Neuromarketing and customer psychology help to predict which features of a product or a package will have an impact on people Click To Tweet

Neuromarketing and customer psychology help to predict which features of a product or a package will have an impact on people. For instance by determining how their perceptions are going to influence purchase decisions.

SOME APPLICATIONS

Take the example of Champagne bottle labels. It has been proven that labels with complex aesthetics are perceived as more feminine and sophisticated. Conversely, labels with a simpler design are perceived as more modern, successful and authentic.

Another study focused on different products like laptops, suitcases, cars and pens. It has been shown that when these products wore dark colours, they were perceived as heavier, more durable, but also less user-friendly than the same products with lighter colours (see examples below).

Campbell’s soups relied on neuromarketing the last time they revisited their packages.

A final recent study has shown that “cute”, personified food displays, and realistic, neutral ones had a varying impact on purchase intentions depending on the type of food being sold.

“Vice product” corresponds to cookies, and “Virtue product” corresponds to fruit juice

ON THE INFORMED USE OF NEUROMARKETING & PSYCHOLOGY

We do not advocate that businesses should focus on the “superficial” features of their products. If your product is genuinely bad, customer-experience will inevitably be bad and prospects for repeat business should be reduced to null. Neuromarketing and customer psychology are not to help sell products that are insufficiently attractive, or to help make a product better than it actually is.

Neuromarketing and customer psychology are not to help sell products that are insufficiently attractive, or to help make a product better than it actually is Click To Tweet

That said, it is essential to take into account how people’s brains work and run empirical, scientific and objective trials. Without these, interpretations about how customers will perceive and react to your product is nothing but pure speculation. Studies of psychology applied to design and packaging, like the ones shown in this post, are manifold. To beat luck and predict which features will positively impact sales, neuromarketing and customer psychology are undoubtedly the most efficient tools currently available.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Morgan DAVID

9 psychological effects that can ruin your communication campaign

24 April 2019/1 Comment/in Blog anglais English pll_5cc09772e1d29 /by Morgan David

Communicating is not enough to influence people. Many communication campaigns are an objective failure. This is because providing information is insufficient to persuade and convince. It is crucial to take the psychology of any campaigns’ target into account for messages to be influential. Yet this fact is often ignored in favour of aesthetic and artistic concerns. A poorly designed communication campaign can even have detrimental consequences. I provide here a list of these consequences to be avoided when designing a successful communication campaign.

Communication professionals are often misled about which techniques can persuade and convince a given target. This is likely because of a lack of objective knowledge about the way our brain works. Detrimental consequences can be generated by the way our brain treats available information and uses it to make decisions. In a scientific article published in the Journal of Communication in 2007, American researchers Hyunyi Cho and Charles Salmon provided a list of unexpected psychological effects that can ruin communication campaigns¹. Their study originally focused on health communication campaigns, though the consequences they mention (listed below) can be expected in many contexts.

1) CONFUSION

Confusion occurs when a message’s true meaning is misunderstood (see poster on the right). Cho and Salmon give the example of a prevention campaign for breast cancer. If you stress the importance of check-ups for women with breast cancer cases in their family, women who this does not apply to might feel overly safe and not book an examination. The wording of the messages themselves can also lead to confusion. Claiming that ‘The motorway is not a bin’ to promote the use of bins does not propose any clear recommendation in terms of good practice and behaviour.

2) DISSONANCE

Dissonance refers to the anxiety generated by the gap between a promoted message and a person’s situation. For instance, promoting breastfeeding can induce discomfort and anxiety in women who, for whatever reasons (necessary medications, low breast milk supply, etc…), cannot breastfeed their child.

3) BOOMERANG EFFECT

Well known by social psychologists, the ‘boomerang effect’ refers to the adoption of a behaviour that opposes the desired behaviour being promoted by the campaign. As depicted on the poster on the left, showing a cheerful group of friends sharing beers is definitely not the best strategy to prevent binge drinking. Also, insisting on the importance of one group member to stay sober to drive the others home, might encourage the others to drink more than usual. And messages high in emotions, such as ‘fear appeals’, are known for distracting the target from understanding and integrating the core prevention meaning².

4) EPIDEMIC OF APPREHENSION

Apprehension, related to hypochondria, corresponds to an exaggerated concern for health issues due to the pervasiveness of risk messages. For example, a higher sensitivity to thinking one is ill or has the physical symptoms of an illness, in countries where mortality due to infectious diseases remains low.

5) DESENSITIZATION

Desensitization is defined as the public’s diminishing response to repeated exposure to the same messages. In such instances pervasive TV advertisement campaigns can lead to a rejection of the message or the brand.

6) GUILTINESS

Guiltiness is an exaggerated focus on personal causes to explain individual health problems. By ignoring related social and environmental causes, people might experience psychological discomfort, low self-esteem, and interpret their state through the sole lens of individual responsibility: ‘I deserve what happens to me because I made the wrong decisions’.

7) LIMITED ATTENTION/OPPORTUNITY COST

Competition between different communication campaigns to prevent/promote a given behaviour or product tend to make messages less pervasive. This is because people show limited attention, memorization or empathy skills. In a marketing context, people also have limited money and time. Given all the different campaigns targeting people simultaneously, we cannot expect a particular communication campaign to easily reach its target and influence behaviours accordingly.

8) SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

Social reproduction corresponds to reinforcing a message towards a target segment that is already aware of this message. For instance, promoting waste recycling will have more impact with environmentally-friendly targets than with people who do not feel concerned about environmental issues.

9) SOCIAL NORMING

Akin to the common “in-group/out-group” anthropological divide, social norming may isolate and put the blame on a target group depicted in a negative way, and marginalized within a majority. So, the slogan ‘Kissing a smoker is like kissing an ashtray’ is genuinely not the best message to make smokers aware of the individual, collective and health consequences of smoking.

In conclusion, here are 9 reasons to expect a communication campaign to fail. Yet social psychologists have become experts in predicting how successful campaigns can be. The good news is that they have also developed the tools to conceive successful messages and content. Does your communication campaign deserve some brainstorming?

¹Cho & Salmon (2007) Unintended effects of health communication campaigns. J. Com. 57, 293-317.

² Witte (1991) The role of threat and efficacy in AIDS prevention. Int. Quart. Community Health Educ. 12, 225-49.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Morgan DAVID

A former academic and behavioural sciences expert, Dr Morgan David is the founder and director of ANALYTICA, a consultancy agency based in the UK and in France. ANALYTICA uses the way our brain works to design better products and better services in the realm of neuromarketing, webmarketing, customer experience, sales strategy and pricing tactics. ANALYTICA created CogniSales, a neuromarketing sales service, CogniMenu, the first new-generation menu engineering service, and the neuromarketing service applied to packaging CogniPackaging.

Smart City & Behavioural Sciences: two sides of the same coin?

25 March 2019/1 Comment/in Blog anglais English pll_5c990d091e7d6 /by Morgan David

Why and how Smart City and behavioural sciences are meant to collaborate in the close future.

WHAT IS A SMART CITY?

Urbanization has never been spreading so quick. The percentage of people living in cities is increasing every day (50% worldwide and 77% in Europe). An ever-growing population living in reduced spaces becomes a real challenge. A geo-demographic conundrum lies in maintaining people’s life quality, as well as promoting a reasonable, ecological and sustained use of energy. Real-time data collecting, artificial intelligence, big data and connected objects are all technological innovations that bring a new dimension to this challenge: they create an information network from which decisions can eventually be taken.

Twenty-first century’s cities shall be built around their inhabitants’ habits, behaviours and needs Click To Tweet

Adjusting public transport to real-time busy periods, improving waste recycling, centralizing cities’ services for better efficiency, encouraging the production and use of sustainable energy, improving the co-existence of different ways of commuting… these are all issues which a Smart City is eventually supposed to provide adequate solutions.

USERS AT THE HEART OF THE SYSTEM

As Smart City enthusiasts put it, users’ behaviour is at the heart of the system. Smart Cities will be developed through them and for them. Twenty-first century’s cities shall be built around their inhabitants’ habits, behaviours and needs. Smart Cities will be democratic! Beyond the above-mentioned technological improvements, other more down-to-Earth issues are at stake: 1) understand users, their psychology and expectations to adequately answer their needs, and 2) reciprocally, for users to respond to a Smart City’s requirements, guiding them towards new habits.

Communicating is not influencing, proposing is not persuading Click To Tweet

A CRITICAL ROLE FOR BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCES & NUDGES

Understanding and predicting citizen’s behaviour is one thing. Favouring the adoption of new habits is another. Public projects commonly fail to stimulate citizens’ commitment mainly because communication agencies and public relations experts usually are unable to anticipate users’ psychology and behaviour. This is especially true for projects linked to waste recycling or sustainable energy use. Communicating is not influencing. Proposing is not persuading. Yet communication represents the launching platform for Smart City projects. It is not sufficient to provide recycling bins for citizens to use them. For guidelines to be followed, it is not sufficient to ask people to save water on a drought period, nor to save electricity during times of peak demand. The Smart City can eventually optimise our collective lifestyles if and only if users behave in a way that makes this optimisation possible. Without adherence or commitment from users, Smart Cities will simply fail.

The aim of a Smart City is by definition to promote efficient and sustainable collective interests. The question lies in how to translate these collective interests into individual motivations; without any effort of this sort, new habits promoted by the Smart City simply won’t be added to its citizens’ behavioural repertoires. There is a need for persuading users to modify their habits and adopt new ones. This can be achieved through associating the ergonomy of the Smart City to users’ psychology.

ENCOURAGING USER’S COMMITMENT & ADHERENCE

The good news is that behavioural sciences have uncovered many solutions intended to successfully influence behaviour: nudges, strategical communication, decision architecture or more traditional social psychology interventions all propose efficient techniques to encourage the creation of new norms and habits.

smart city behavioural sciences It does not come as a surprise that currently these disciplines are largely ignored by strategic planners and agencies. Indeed, these groups commonly tend to focus more on the aesthetic aspects of communication campaigns than on core messages and how they are framed. I argue that Smart Cities’ stakes are too high to ignore users’ psychology and not put it at the centre of the thinking process. Encouraging citizens to adopt new habits is a subtle and crucial process. Behavioural sciences genuinely provides necessary and reliable tools to make it a success.

In 2014, the governments of 51 countries worldwide were using or planning to use a range of behavioural science techniques, including nudges, for public innovation projects. In the UK for instance, David Cameron’s government set up a Behavioural Interventions Team from 2010 onwards.

These past initiatives now provide useful feedback about how Smart Cities can benefit from behavioural sciences’ techniques. Cities have a chance to be smart only if the professionals involved in their development rely on rigorous approaches and knowledge about how people think, take decisions and act. This represents a critical turning point for the creation of tomorrow’s user-powered and sustainable urban centres.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Morgan DAVID

A former academic and behavioural sciences expert, Dr Morgan David is the founder and director of ANALYTICA, a consultancy agency based in the UK and in France. ANALYTICA uses the way our brain works to design better products and better services in the realm of neuromarketing, public innovation, communication & customer experience. ANALYTICA is the creator of CogniSales and of CogniMenu, the first neuromarketing service of new-generation menu engineering aimed at improving restaurants’ sales.

Interview about neuromarketing with Morgan David

6 February 2019/3 Comments/in Blog anglais English pll_5c5b1c4459185 /by Morgan David

I have recently been interviewed about neuromarketing by Salomé Ficarelli, a student of the master in Communication & Marketing of ISCOM in Lyon, France. Definition, techniques, examples, strengths, limits… everything you have ever wanted to know about neuromarketing without asking…! I leave you to discover the transcription of this interview and thank Salomé for soliciting me.

Salomé Ficarelli: Morgan David, who are you?

Morgan David: I am a behavioural sciences expert, with a PhD from the University of Burgundy (France) and the University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada). I have worked as an academic in several universities in France, Canada, the UK and Belgium. My research dealt with the factors influencing people’s behaviours and decisions in various contexts. I am the fonder and director of Analytica, a behavioural sciences-grounded consultancy company based in the UK and in France. I help my clients develop their services and products by taking into account how their customers’ brains work, how they make decisions and how they behave. My services rely on neuromarketing techniques, nudges, social psychology and other disciplines related to behavioural sciences.

“Taking customers’ psychology into account is an essential added value for companies to improve their margins and their benefits”

SF: Could you please, in a few sentences, tell us what neuromarketing is?

Morgan David: Not all professionals would give the same definition, depending on their expertise. As far as I am concerned, I consider neuromarketing as a technique used to promote a product or a service’s sales by taking advantage of scientific knowledge about how customers’ brains collect information, process it and take decisions. Neuromarketing sometimes uses advanced technology, like MRI or eye-tracking, mainly for marketing purposes and because clients fantasize quite a bit about those kinds of technique… But I would like to make two statements: 1) these techniques are rather descriptive and their efficiency quite limited. Is it sufficient to know where a customer places their attention to make a sale? The answer is no; and, 2) a vast array of knowledge from consumer psychology, cognitive and social psychology provides efficient techniques to profile customers, anticipate their decisions and their behaviour, so as to develop services and products that match their preferences and expectations. I personally tend to use these latter types of knowledge and techniques because they are based on evidence despite being neglected.

Click on the image to read our article ‘What is neuromarketing?’

SF: On which tools and technology does neuromarketing rely on?

Morgan DAVID: Neuromarketing relies on the direct recording of brain activity (like MRIs), on physiological measures (such as skin conductance or eye tracking), or on techniques based on consumer and cognitive psychology. In this latter case, we adjust the environment and the context in which customers make choices and take decisions to promote specific products or services. Therefore, information about how the brain collects and processes information, and how it takes decisions, is essential to create an efficient sales strategy. Without it, we are just fishing for solutions following uncertain customer stereotypes. This is why it is important, in my opinion, to rely on knowledge and techniques that have been scientifically proven. As far as I am concerned, I only use techniques whose efficiency has been assessed in peer-reviewed articles published in international scientific journals.

SF: What are the benefits and limits of neuromarketing?

Morgan David: The added value of neuromarketing is high for companies. Take the example of these big American chains, like McDonalds or Starbucks. Whatever we think of them, these ventures have succeded because they have for a long time tried to understand how to attract customers, sell them products and encourage brand loyalty. And they did not do it by flipping a coin. They have asked behavioural experts to carefully think about these issues. Adopting a customer-centric approach by taking customers’ psychology into account is an essential added value for companies to improve their margins, their benefits, customers’ loyalty and to expand their market. Neuromarketing allows them to more accurately target a relevant sales’ strategy, from its conception to its development. I argue in favour of a trial and error framework to determine what works and what does not. Also, knowing how customers think and behave enables to be one jump ahead within this process.

Talking about limits now, a large portion of customers’ behaviour still remains unknown. It is sometimes hard to identify which of several techniques is likely to be the most efficient. Customers are not robots. It is unrealistic, and ethically questionable, to think that people’s decisions and behaviour can be predicted with perfect accuracy. That is simply impossible! Neuromarketers are more successful than the average marketer because they work with large samples of people. Statistically speaking then, the techniques that we use, when grounded in experimental evidence, are likely to be more efficient than others, which then translates into concrete benefits for companies. Neuromarketers are not magicians! They use scientific techniques; that is, the objectively most efficient techniques currently available, to reach precise goals. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Neuromarketing allows companies to more accurately target a relevant sales’ strategy, from its conception to its development”

SF: Could you please provide concrete examples of neuromarketing applications?

Morgan David: As far as I am concerned, I can tell you about some examples related to webmarketing. I work on company websites, and more precisely on their composition, their organisation, the formulation of their offers and on the general website environment (what we usually call ‘atmospherics’) to improve conversion rates. It is highly efficient. The reason is that websites are almost never optimised from a customer-experience point of view. When we know how people’s brains work, it is rather easy to anticipate customer reactions, behaviours and decisions within the “confined” website environment. The way information is laid out and organised is key. I also am experienced in contributing to the development of physical shops. In this case I work on customer experience: people’s buying journey inside the shop, pricing optimisation, lights, music, the layout of products and the whole shopping environment. In consumer psychology, these parameters are known for impacting customers’ satisfaction and loyalty to the brand. I have also created a new-generation menu engineering service called ‘CogniMenu’, which aims to increase restaurants’ benefits by improving their menus and display boards.

SF: To end with, should we fear neuromarketing?

Morgan David: As I said earlier, the media and the general public fantasize quite a lot about neuromarketing. All that neuromarketing can do is to increase a product’s sales by a few percent. This is done by modifying some of its features according to customers’ preferences and expectations. Neuromarketing helps to increase margins, benefits and market shares. That’s all! It translates into lots of benefit for companies that wish to boost sales, but remains virtually impactless for customers. When neuromarketing increases customers’ average spending, it is by a few percent too. Customers cannot be manipulated as one pleases. I am often asked about manpulation: is neuromarketing manipulation? That is a very good question. I have seen TV documentaries in which companies were trying to hide somehow their use of neuromarketing techniques… From a social psychology point of view, any interaction can be manipulative. Manipulation consists of influencing others’ decisions to make them adopt behaviours they would not have adopted otherwise. This interview is a good example. In a sense, you have manipulated me to convince me to answer your questions. Asking your kids to set the table? That is manipulation. Inviting your friends for dinner? That is manipulation. And here comes the link with selling. Selling is manipulation by definition. This is because salespeople try to convince clients to buy their products by emphasizing the benefits of those products. Have you ever found a shop that does not promote its products? It would not last very long on the market. Advertisement is manipulation because it tries to convince customers to purchase a product or to buy a service. In conclusion, manipulation is not a bad thing in itself, as long as it does not harm the person who is being manipulated. If you rip customers off, that is both illegal and morally condemnable. That said, malpractices and dishonest salespeople have always existed, long before neuromarketing showed up. Any attempts to persuade, like advertisement and marketing have always done, can be considered as manipulation. Using knowledge about customers’ behaviour to persuade them better is not, in my opinion, any more morally reprehensible.

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CONSUMER STUDIES: PREDICTIVE VALIDITY

BACK TO COFFEE

UX TESTS & EXPERIMENTATION

UX: A STORY OF PEUGEOT AND RENAULT

A/B TESTS & PACKAGING

UX: IDENTIFYING THE CAUSES OF PEOPLE’S BEHAVIOUR

NEUROMARKETING OPTIMISATION OF PACKAGING

CUSTOMER STUDIES BOOSTED BY NEUROSCIENCE

INFLUENCING CUSTOMERS

COGNIPACKAGING

CUSTOMER STUDIES & NEUROSCIENCE: EYE-TRACKING

A QUESTION OF INFORMATION AVAILABILITY

CUSTOMER STUDIES & NEUROSCIENCE: THE USE OF MODERATING VARIABLES

AN EXAMPLE WITH WINE PACKAGING

TRADITIONAL VS NEUROSCIENCE-BASED CUSTOMER STUDIES

EXAMPLES OF CUSTOMER STUDIES

AVOID INFLUENCING CUSTOMERS’ ANSWERS

DETERMINING CUSTOMERS’ PERCEPTIONS & JUDGMENTS BEYOND VERBAL STATEMENTS

IN SUMMARY

1) SEGMENTING CUSTOMERS BASED ON THEIR PSYCHOLOGY

2) APPLYING PSYCHOLOGICAL PRICES

3) ENCOURAGING PURCHASE DECISIONS

CREATING EFFICIENT PRODUCTS & PACKAGES

SOME APPLICATIONS

ON THE INFORMED USE OF NEUROMARKETING & PSYCHOLOGY

WHAT IS A SMART CITY?

USERS AT THE HEART OF THE SYSTEM

A CRITICAL ROLE FOR BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCES & NUDGES

ENCOURAGING USER’S COMMITMENT & ADHERENCE

Interesting links

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