Getting inside the consumer’s headspace?

A Dublin firm is using cutting-edge technology to get inside the shopper journey, measuring responses from the brain, the eyes, the facial expressions and the skin, to ascertain how consumers respond to brands in-store, from packaging to promotion. Seán Higgins, MD of Future Proof Insights, explains the technology behind the insights.

DUBLIN-based Future Proof Insights describe themselves on their website as a “neuromarketing agency” and a “behavioural science consultancy”, which all sounds like something from a sci-fi novel but has very real effects in the world of grocery retailing in particular. Essentially, they utilise cutting edge technology to carry out tailored research studies that reveal the subconscious signals our bodies produce along the path to purchase.

“We're a consumer neuroscience research agency, so if you take the science out of it, what we're interested in doing is looking at the subconscious ‘tells’ that our brains and bodies give to help understand human behaviour and decision making,” explains Seán Higgins, Managing Director, Future Proof Insights. “When you ask people questions, it's not necessarily that they're lying or that they won't tell you the truth. Sometimes, they can't tell the truth; it could be the case that they're having a difficulty in articulating themselves; it might be that you’ve asked them something a little sensitive. It might be the point that as humans we can only aggregate and summarise an experience.”

Essentially, the gap between what people say they do and what they actually do, can sometimes be vast. We all want to be good corporate citizens and do the right thing and we like to think that for the most part, we do. However, our bodies and our brains often tell a different story.

Future Proof Insights looked at all these factors and decided: there has to be a better way to conduct research. Essentially, Higgins points out, the human brain is over-worked and over-stimulated. The brain, he explains, consumes around 20% of our daily energy reserves, so its default position is to seek least-effort solutions to decision making. Additionally, it has been shown that the brain can process roughly 11 million bits of information per second, but our conscious mind can only process 50. “So you've got a serious difference between what’s happening around us, and what we’re consciously aware of happening around us,” he smiles. “Every day we make an average of 30,000 decisions, which range from big, deliberate decisions that you really consciously think about, right down to the next time you press your foot on the accelerator or the next step you take.”

So our brains are over-worked; we don’t have the luxury of being economical about every decision we make, we need a faster way to get things done, and so as part of our evolution, we have developed a subconscious mind which allows us to boil down decisions to the bare minimum: “We have a combination of biases, associations, heuristics and rules that are hard-coded into a subconscious that allows us to just make split-second decisions and move on with our lives.”

Allowing us into the shopper journey

When you move into the retail context, the scale of decision-making really ramps up, Higgins explains, and the work of Future Proof Insights is about understanding how our brains react to various stimuli in-store and all along the shopper journey.

“We use a combination of methods that measure directly from the brain, the eyes, the facial expressions and skin and they all tell very different stories about the lived experience of a consumer, and help quantify the effectiveness of different stimuli on that customer journey,” he explains. “A lot of the measures that are used at the moment are very much focused on the ‘what’ of the customer journey or the ‘what’ of consumer behaviour: What did they buy? What did they put in their basket? Where did they click on the website? But what we're doing is explaining the ‘why’, by reverseengineering that journey and stepping through it with the consumer, going to the shop with the consumer, using eye tracking glasses to understand where they look as they navigate through the aisles or in a digital sense how they navigate through the online store.”

Some of their work has been to evaluate planograms before they go live in-store, so the client gets direct insights into how the consumer interacts with the category: “We're looking to help unpack human behaviour and lay it out in in front of our clients and help them explain how and why a consumer selected their product over another and vice-versa.”

Future Proof Insights have developed five key metrics that help model the brain activity of a consumer:

Eye-tracking glasses allow us to understand where shoppers look as they navigate through the aisles.

• Engagement: the cognitive involvement or attention someone applies to a given task or experience.

• Emotion: a measure of the strength or intensity of emotional arousal that a stimulus or experience creates within a person.

• Desire: quantifies approach and avoidance behaviours - we are drawn to experiences we want and avoid offputting experiences.

• Memorisation: a measure of brain activity linked to the encoding and storing of information within the brain.

• Impact: quantifies the brain activity linked to peaks in emotional intensity and long-term memory encoding, “like how you remember a twist in a movie or the last-minute winner in a game of football,” explains Higgins. “These things stick in your long-term memory because they are so emotionally relevant that your brain says ‘keep this; this is emotionally relevant, so this is important’.”

The MD describes these metrics as “different levers of experience, which all work alongside one another. Something could be emotionally intense and engaging but off-putting. Our work allows us to plot these data points together to understand what's actually going on and how people experience things, to sometimes explain what can be complex emotional states and then put them in the context of a retail setting.”

He cites the example of someone with a specific shopping task versus another shopper who is simply browsing and the differences observed in these shoppers’ behaviour. “Their eyes work in a very different way,” Higgins notes. “Their ‘gaze maps’ look completely different, so the way their brain works is naturally different as well, and that allows us to determine how effective a product is at being located for a casual shopper versus someone who has a very specific need to get a certain product within a category. It's all context dependent, but it enables us to help our clients frame research projects that meet what they're trying to discover.”

Future Proof Insights can tailor their research in other areas, he explains, such as ‘claims testing’, whereby they can measure the emotional response of consumers to on-pack product claims. “We can start to understand how these things actually resonate with the consumer, and what's the right messaging to include on the packaging. Equally as important, what do we need to remove? Is there too much messaging?” Higgins states, stressing that this technology can equally apply to advertising, shelf design, activation materials and PoS materials. “What we offer is very diverse and flexible and can be tailored to meet client needs and answer their questions, as opposed to being fixed to a product and trying to put a square peg in a round hole,” he says.

Incremental improvements at scale

In the grocery sector, margins are notoriously small, and even the slightest change can make a big difference. “Where we work our best is for organisations who are looking to make incremental improvements at scale on really competitive margins. The premise is to help figure out which products grab people’s attention in an involuntary way. Our belief is that if you make something very easy for people, they're going to do it, so you need to ensure a product is easy to find, easy to pick up, and repeat.”