The Retail News Interview

Humans, Higgins smiles, are “irrational when it comes to money”. But Future Proof Insights allow their clients to create testing experiences that help people to measure the effectiveness of a price promotion, whether that is a BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free), a coupon system or some other promotional campaign.

“We can put quantifiable metrics on irrationality,” he insists, arguing that their system is far more reliable than a survey because human beings, by our nature, realise that they are being evaluated and will try to give the ‘right’ answer or even to ‘game’ the system. “When you measure someone's involuntary response, which can be a more primitive response, versus their stated response, they are often not very congruent. We believe that instantaneous response is more predictive of people's actual behaviour rather than what they say.”

The truth about sustainability?

One area where Future Proof Insights really hit headlines, including here in Retail News, in recent months was their study into sustainability, which found, controversially, that consumers don’t care about sustainability as much as they say they do.

“It's not that sustainability isn't important,” Higgins insists. But what we found was that people are so busy, they’re tired, perhaps they’re coming home from work and you're then looking for consumers to make an in-store evaluation on sustainability. You’re creating extra mental workload whereby consumers have to evaluate is this claim actually valid? Will the product live up to their claim? Who's going to actually benefit from this in the long run? Will it actually meet my need because I've probably never used this variation? There are a lot of steps in that process and to expect it to happen in an instantaneous decision is ambitious.

“People are consciously prosustainability but when it comes to grocery shopping, it's typically not something that factors into the buying process. So why are we actually talking about sustainability in our advertising and promotional material, if it's not a right fit, which we found was the case for commodity goods. Sustainability messaging, however, had a positive impact for more luxury brands: if you’re going to buy a car and you're already spending €2050k, what's an extra €500 on making sure it is more environmentally friendly. It fits more because you allow more time for the context of sustainability in those purchases compared to the split-second decisions that typically happen in a grocery setting.”

Future Proof Insights carried out a month-long study using EEG, Eye Tracking and Facial Expression Analysis to test the impact of 30 messages from 30 brands/ products, categorised into three message types: Traditional Creative & Promotional, Sustainability, and Purpose Driven for both commodity and luxury goods.

Their research found that traditional and creative messaging is over 10 times more effective than sustainability messaging at driving purchase intent; the principle is that we approach what we want and avoid what we find off-putting. While sustainable messages were effective in general at driving approach behaviours, the benefits were marginal and costs too high to justify, relative to traditional creative approaches, when it came to commodity goods.

“The key take-away would be that it's probably better bang for your buck for brands to be looking in the more traditional, creative space for their advertising and perhaps, to look towards supply chain improvements rather than communications aspects to achieve your sustainability goals, as opposed to pushing the messaging, which really expects the consumer to drive the sustainability agenda.”

The impact of tech

For a company using cutting edge technology to measure our bodily responses, Higgins is in a good position to evaluate how emerging technologies and artificial intelligence will change the way we shop and maybe the way we market goods to shoppers.

“We’re already using AI within what we do,” he admits. “It's more of an enabler within the service we offer as opposed to something that is going to fundamentally change our business model. AI can enhance the way we deliver insight and help understand shopper behaviour, including how we analyse our database. Where it really helps is in terms of automating our analysis and interpretation load to report back to clients, so we can give more granular and scalable insights, far beyond what a person could manage.”

He believes that in terms of shoppers, AI-assisted shopping will be where big changes will come in the short to medium-term. “This could be a case of going to a retailer and having personal recommendations provided to you by a Generative-AI personal assistant. For example, if you go to a grocery retailer’s website and rather than it pushing the ‘deals of the week’, it's a more personalised, interactive basis that understands your shopping behaviour and perhaps speaks to you in a in a humanised way. So rather than receiving a dashboard on your spending like you might get from a financial provider, the retailer will provide that information in an AI enabled manner so I see it as being almost like an assistive technology for shoppers. For retailers and brands who go down that route, it's going to basically work alongside the shopper to enhance the experience for your customer. If I want to make Tacos this weekend, but I don’t know the ingredients, I can ask the store’s AI, and get a list. Similarly, if I have specific dietary requirements or macro targets, the AI can help me pick exactly what I want, how much I need to buy and tell me how much it costs. In an era where data privacy is top of mind, I think this more assistive approach will help change the perception around personalisation.”

He warns, however, that monitoring any AI technology will be very important going forward. “AI regulation is so prevalent, and it’s needed because of the power of what AI can do, but I believe that once the appropriate regulation is in place, we will see these sorts of technologies bring genuine value to shoppers, to provide them with what they want and need with the objective of enhancing the shopper experience in a meaningful way. At the moment, there’s a perception that data is being used to push certain products at us, but what if it was used in a more assistive, non-invasive way? The suggestions only come because the consumer requests it, so it seems like a much stronger value exchange. It’s not all that different from what is being done already from a data perspective, so I think the improvements will essentially be an enhancement of where we are as opposed to something completely ground-breaking.”

However, he cites examples from other non-grocery retailers, such as Ikea allowing online customers to virtually place a product in their room, or certain DIY providers who enable customers to virtually change the colours of their walls: “They're all AI- enabled tools so there's a lot of technology already there but I think they're just going to become more mainstream, less cost intensive and more accessible from the brand side and then more assistive from the consumer’s perspective.”