Science has made peeping into a potential consumer's brain very simple. While earlier brands used to survey markets manually, now they simply need to apply neuro-scientific techniques to read users' mind, without actually having to talk to them.
Such a first-of-its-kind neuroscience laboratory in Mumbai, which opened recently, is being operated by Nielsen, a market research company.
"Earlier, companies would not be in a position to figure out why a particular brand did not sell well or why consumers did not react favourably to it. However, by mapping brain responses to TV commercials or brand logos, we are being able to draw inferences about what went, or could possibly go, wrong with the brand's positioning," said Joe Willke, president, Nielsen Neurofocus.
The laboratory combines electro encephalography of the brain and eye-tracking technology to measure a subject's response to visuals related to the brand. "In the laboratory, a sample size of 24 subjects is enrolled to study a TV commercial. The brain responds in 300 milliseconds after seeing an image. While the subject is seeing the audio-visuals, we record his/her brain waves. Simultaneously, we record the pupil movement of the subject's eyes to trace where they veer. We juxtapose levels of emotional responses to the images where the eye veered to diagnose if the advertisement appealed to the subject or not," explained Piyush Mathur, president, Nielsen India region.
Recently, the neuroscience lab provided intelligence to an ad agency for a TV commercial for an air freshener brand. The experiment pinpointed that the viewer was repelled when the ad said, "Smells so good you can taste it."
Willke said, "We could not realise why a viewer would get repelled unless we realised that at the time the caption played out, the protagonist of the ad was lifting up a canoe, and the eye-tracker suggested that the viewer was focusing on the protagonist's armpit. We later asked the admakers to alter the visual to suit the caption better."
Neuroscience has been implemented to read a buyer's mind since 2005. Worldwide, 30,000 subjects have been studied till date to help position brands in an appealing way. "Also, Indian brands constitute 10% of our business worldwide," said Willke.
Grey matter
24 subjects are enrolled to study brain responses to a particular TV commercial or any other brand positioning project
Nielsen Neurofocus lab has four pods with EEG machines and eye trackers
Each subject is fixed with probes on the head through EEG and made to look at a series of visuals
Brainwave activity is captured at 500 times per second as the eye tracker provides data on where the visual focus of the subject lies
The experiment measures attention span, emotions evoked and memory retained at a subconscious level of the viewer
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