Packaging is tangible, quite honestly, to such an extent that words can't readily follow. For example, the typical purchase "decision" takes merely 0.8 seconds at a grocery store. How much can any of us say in such a narrow time frame to explain a given choice? Not much; maybe a syllable or two will pass our lips.
Yet it's that extreme gap between intuitive shelf-set decision and how to cognitively and verbally account for consumer preferences that bedevils companies eager to sell more products.
Verbal input comes from the rational part of the brain. To make matters worse, we live in a post-literate culture in which it has been estimated that 20% of adults in the Western world are functionally illiterate. They are able to use words, but not well enough to really express themselves robustly. So research analysis via the medium of language—questions asked, and answers dutifully studied—is an insufficient approach to enhancing the in-store experience and, more specifically, the packaging because rationality isn't where the decision lives.
People feel in one-fifth the time it takes them to consciously think, and the subconscious sensory response is 99% of the game anyway, because only 25 to 40 of those 11 million bits of information that our senses are estimated to take in every second get consciously processed.
In other words, research that rests on the cognitive, Q-and-A level inhabits Lapland, while the sensory impressions that feed emotional responses are so numerous as to constitute China.
How to adjust to this relatively mind-blowing misdirection play that is standard research then becomes the business issue.
Fortunately, a pair of linked, noninvasive solutions already exists. Eye-tracking, whether done using a stationary machine with built-in cameras to pinpoint eye movement or soon to be in a mobile setup, provides a pathway to reading those 11 million bits of visual input data that humans gather naturally per second. The sequence, duration, and overall pattern of shoppers' gaze activity can be calculated down to one-twenty-fifth of a second to learn people's response to in-store displays and packaging, as depicted by the colored patches in the accompanying photo of the front panel of a cereal carton.
Yet, eye tracking alone isn't enough. Over the past 20 years, the use of brain scans has confirmed what we all know. We're primarily emotional decision-makers, making gut-level verdicts we then justify rationally to be defensively wise and socially acceptable. Verbal input still has a role to play in research. It helps us understand the justifications and thereby assists companies in providing consumers with the "intellectual alibi" that supplements decisions that will spur the truer, sensory-emotional connection with today's hurried, stressed, and generally option-saturated shoppers.
So, what's the noninvasive tool that can tap into the emotional response, a learning that's crucial because business goals like loyalty and recall are emotional rather than rational constructs? The answer is facial coding. What helps each of us can help companies, too, because the facial expressions by which we most reliably express our feelings are so universal that even a blind person does so in the same way. This occurs because emoting is innate and universal, rather than socialized. Moreover, the spontaneity essential to grasping and measuring consumers' fleeting in-store reactions is possible to gauge because the face is the only part of the body where the muscles attach to the skin.
Facial coding can be used to better understand the consumer experience. Read more about it.
To read the entire article, please click here.
By Dan Hill, President, Sensory Logic Inc.
