New Opportunities for Research

The integrated approach can test a variety of marketing stimuli, beyond static stimuli such as print ads or DVD covers (Ohme, Matukin, and Pacula-Lesniak 2011). For example, it could test advertisements in interactive media such as online advertisements, website architectures, games, or in-game advertisements. When EEG measures are synchronized with eye-tracking measures, they can estimate consumer reactions to different forms of advertising on websites, including links, static banners, dynamic banners, or pop-ups. This tool offers precise estimations and can help improve the efficiency of website messages by revealing their best spatial position, the best timing, and the best creative executions. Advertisers will benefit from such analyses in almost all aspects of online advertising, because they can optimize their messages to ensure emotional reactions, legibility, user-friendliness, and behavioral efficiency. Moreover, the precise identification of the source and effect (i.e., visual element and corresponding emotional reactions) offers specific instructions about how to improve a particular communication element.

The synchronization of EEG and eye tracking also enables an estimation of the unconscious reactions to a website's architecture. These estimated reactions have great value for determining user-friendliness, content, and design, as well as to improve the communication potential of the site by revealing the best main visual, appropriate spatial positions of strategic elements (e.g., logo, headline, pricing, contact information), and strong and weak aspects of a composition. Marketers can take into account not only the overall impression but moment-to-moment attentional and emotional reactions during an interaction-at the beginning, in the middle, and near the end of the interaction.

Another likely usage involves the gaming industry. Game designers can measure both the visibility and emotional reactions to in-game ads and reactions to the game itself. This application appears particularly important because a good integration of game content with in-game advertisements increases both interest in the product and purchase intentions (Chang et al. 2010). It can also make games more realistic and exciting (Wegert 2005). There are many crucial issues for in-game advertising: Do reactions to the ads depend on the player's eventual outcome? Is there any influence of game content on implanted commercials? Are there any differences between the conscious self-reports and unconscious neurophysiological reactions to such commercial messages?

Challenges

To introduce high-tech methods to study interactive advertisement demands that we address some issues that continue to make the application of the integrated approach difficult. First, sample size is critical. Even in analyses of static, non-interactive pictures, we observe significant decrements in the number of valid observations, for several reasons (Ohme, Matukin, and Pacula-Lesniak 2011). In an interactive advertisement setting, this loss could be even greater, because the key influence on information loss is the demand of statistical computations, which require respondents to fit a specific condition. If respondents can move freely across the layouts, they are increasingly likely never to notice some important elements, so the valid sample shrinks. Therefore, we recommend at least 60 respondents per cell.

Second, we need to address the potential movements of respondents during test sessions. In an interactive condition, respondents usually use some devices, such as a mouse, keyboard, joystick, or console. These movements can cause recording errors (e.g., sensors read artifacts, changes alter the activation of the motor cortex). Each respondent also moves according to his or her own individual way and timing, which introduces an additional source of unsystematic error. In an interactive condition, each output is unique, so we would need to prepare them individually, which would make their analyses complex and time consuming. Research being conducted into intelligent software that can recognize a respondent, time, layout, and area of interest at the same moment and synchronize the data with respondents' reactions, as recorded by the biometric sensors, may help address this concern.

Concluding Remarks

The integration of EEG and eye-tracking measures can enrich our understanding of what emotional reactions consumers experience when they see an ad. The integrated approach can identify a causal relationship between a marketing communication and emotions, and do so on an analytical level. We thus can identify which emotional reaction is triggered by each ad element. This ability is new to contemporary marketing research, and we believe it offers immediate advantages to marketers: They can receive practical recommendations on how to design the visual composition of their print and outdoor ads, packages, brochures, and digital media, and they can create user-friendly web pages or other interactive communication forms. Modern marketers thus may learn how to connect with consumers, according to not only their verbally reported conscious feelings but also their unconscious emotions, as identified by high-technological instruments.

The most fruitful scientific progress often occurs at the intersection of diverse scientific fields-as evidenced by the interaction of psychology, neuroanatomy, neurobiology, psychophysiology, and cognitive and computer sciences under the umbrella of neuroscience. The time has come for marketing researchers to venture out from their silos and look to other disciplines for ideas for improvements. Zaltman (2003, p. xii, emphasis in original) hints at this notion by stating that "we must explore many disciplines, since the most promising knowledge frontiers typically exist at the boundaries between fields rather than at the field's respective centers." We believe that the frequency of biometric applications to marketing research will increase; we finally possess technological and computational capabilities sufficient to perform most sophisticated experiments. However, as Kenning, Plassmann, and Ahlert (2007) warn, we must keep in mind that biometric research methods remain in their infancy, and further research is necessary to facilitate their confident application.

Footnotes

Some negative emotional states may evoke approach tendencies, such as anger (Harmon-Jones 2003), yet because mainstream marketing communication consists mostly of positive stimuli, it is unlikely that it would attempt to put consumers in an angry mode.

References

follow the link

http://jiad.org/

About the Authors

Dr. Rafal Ohme is a professor at the Warsaw School of Social Science and Humanities in Poland. His research focuses on conscious versus unconscious information processing, consumer neuroscience, and automatic facial expression. E-mail: ohme@testdifferent.com.

Michal Matukin is a Ph.D. candidate at the Warsaw School of Social Science and Humanities in Poland. His research focuses on affective neuroscience applied to marketing communications, including issues emerging from new technologies such as electroencephalography, electromyography, and galvanic skin response. E-mail: m.matukin@testdifferent.com

Beata Pacula-Lesniak is graduate student at Jagiellonian University in Poland. Her scientific interests include the psychophysiology of attention and working memory. E-mail: b.pacula@testdifferent.com

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 780