When marketers turn mind-readers

If you ever wanted that magical gift of reading your wife or girlfriend’s mind, your prayers have come close to being answered. A couple of weeks back, Mumbai saw the launch of the first neuro laboratory for delving deeper into the minds of Indian consumers. The spoiler for eager husbands and excited boyfriends: as of now, this facility is available only for marketers.

The motive of this laboratory is to make marketing materials more effective. The kind of work that the facility is expected to do ranges from testing advertising commercials in both print and television, testing the consumer response to packaging, product design or brand research. The only difference with this research and traditional methods is that there will be no questions asked.

As we enter the facility set up by information and consumer insights major Nielsen, we find two assistants applying gel in no small measure to a young man’s hair. The young man is one of the subjects — as market researchers call their respondents — who is being prepared to get his mind read at the neuro laboratory.

The person who will read his mind is no mentalist from Israel or mystic from God’s own country. In fact, it’s an EEG machine – otherwise used by medical professionals — that will, over the next 20 minutes, analyse his brain’s reaction to marketing materials. And for the machine to capture the precise reactions, it has to get as close to his scalp as possible, hence the gel.

Take a few more steps ahead and you find another completely wired up lady subject looking like she’s been held hostage inside a cabin. No one is allowed entry into the cabin. Any communication with her is possible only through a microphone from a cubicle right outside the cabin. The lady in question is looking into a screen mounted on a wall in front of her, blissfully unaware of a crowd of 20 people staring at her from outside the glass cabin. Outside, a computer captures her attention, emotion and memory traces on a second-by-second basis and even her eye movements.

Images of a green frog are being flashed on the screen, interspersed by one image of a blue frog. Outside on the screen, when the green frog flashes, you get a small bump in the brainwaves captured by the EEG.

When the blue frog flashes, there is a more prominent, greater bump. “You get a reaction from the brain when you spot something interesting or different. Get a reaction that brain picked that up,” explains Joe Willke, president, Nielsen NeuroFocus, who was in India for the launch.

The blue frog, green frog story, goes on for about five minutes. When the subject begins to close her eyes, she’s woken up by a voice from the microphone saying, “wake up and pay attention”. There is a reason why every subject needs to be alert. Even an eye-blink can create a lot of noise in the data being captured by the machines.

The blue frog-green frog exercise is core to the research that Nielsen NeuroFocus undertakes. There is a response in every brain that happens around 300 milliseconds after you see something. “It’s kind of a recognition that I see that and I have got it,” adds Willke.

As every human’s brain is different, this ‘blue frog’ exercise helps researchers to normalise the data, as the findings of the logo and messages that are evaluated later in the research are indexed back to blue green frog data for each subject.

As of now, in most parts of the world, neuro-marketing research is still at an early part of the adoption curve. It’s only recently that many large corporations, both in India and abroad, are beginning to say, “I have kicked the tyres on this car enough. It’s time to start driving,” says Willke. He says this emerging confidence will make the practice mainstream in the days to come.

According to him, “Most notions of branding change dramatically after adopting neuro. I always read that you need to mention the brand in the first five seconds of the commercial. The more times you mention the brand, the better. There are all kinds of recipes. It’s so much more complicated than that. What we are finding in this is, brands are a collection of associations.”

India, according to Nielsen executives, is one of the early adopters. For example, in the last year, if the number of subjects used was 30,000, India was 10 per cent of the market. The largest market in US and India may be number two, he adds.

The laboratory proposes to include the usual questions such as “what do consumers think of my brand”. But the answer will come in a different fashion. Earlier, using conventional research, consumers would “tell” what they thought about the brand. “With neuro-marketing, it’s not what they tell me but what they really think about the brand,” says Willke.

Other questions that the lab will apply include this: “did your brand get the boost or did you inadvertently boost the entire category?”

For example, if your analgesic brand claims that it is safe, fast and effective and advertises those benefits, is that your unique attribute? Aren’t all analgesics safe, fast and effective? Or does the analgesic in question own the safe, fast and effective attributes more than the competition?

For example, in automobiles, Volvo owns the safety attribute more than most competitors. So would any competitor advertising safety be indirectly bringing Volvo into the consumer’s mind?

“Marketers always want to believe that when viewers are watching television, they are completely into it. But the truth is, they are not. They are playing with phones, talking to family members. In a low engagement environment a viewer can very easily mistake a commercial for another brand,” says Willke.

The neuro-marketing lab test is set up to be a pure measure of the creative. It measures the brain’s reaction to any creative communication of the brand on a second-to-second basis. It then aligns that reaction with the scenes of a TV commercial. “This helps you to do the diagnosis of the commercial,” says Willke.

In the case of a social advertising commercial to promote the adoption of pets, the protagonist of the commercial, a lovable dog, was getting good reviews.

But there was no significant jump in adoption. When this ad was tested in a Neuro laboratory, particularly in the closing scenes of the commercial where the dog appears alongside the adoption message, the lab found that all eyes were falling on the dog and too little attention was going to the adopt message.

When the dog was removed from the final scenes, the adoption rates increased significantly as the central focus of the closing message was on adoption of pets minus any distraction.

Talk about brand ambassadors sometimes overpowering the brand message. Some EEG out there is soon going to press the red signal to such creatives.