Eamon presenting at the in-cosmetics formulation summit, London October 24, 2018

In its fourth year, the in-cosmetics Formulation Summit is an education-focused convention, that captures the strongest trends driving the industry.

This year it included a number of leading international experts for the benefit of R&D professionals, senior formulators, and decision makers from cosmetics brands, manufacturers and ingredient suppliers.

Dr Eamon Fulcher talked about how the brain rapidly evaluates all that we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Faces are a special case, because a significant proportion of the brain is dedicated to face recognition, hence we can recognise faces with incredible accuracy, distinguish between subtle variations in facial expression, and evaluate them very quickly on an array of important attributes. One of these is attractiveness. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that our biological imperative is to protect and propagate our genes. We can do this through reproduction and by searching for a healthy mate. This is important because our genes are more likely to survive if we partner with a healthy mate. Beauty becomes a proxy for health. The use of make-up to try to make oneself look more beautiful has been going on for at least seven thousand years, and can be traced back to the Egyptians and the ancient Greeks.

More recently, psychologists have established that the more beautiful a person is (or appears to be) the more likely they are to be perceived more positively on an array of desirable attributes, such as emotionally secure, sociable, interesting, confident, organised, popular, and intelligent (to name just a few). This is termed the halo effect, and works even when we see the same person with and without make-up. Even though we know they are the same person (and we know that personal attributes are pretty much stable), we can’t help but attribute these positive features to them when they appear more attractive. Even babies have been shown to prefer more attractive faces. It’s not surprising then that most of us would like to be perceived as attractive by most or at least some people! These ideas can help explain why the cosmetics industry is so huge.

One problem for cosmetic scientists is that sooner or later they will need to do some consumer testing on their beauty products. Here they meet the truth gap – people don’t always tell you how they truly feel (they may want just to please you or they may want to hide how they feel), people can’t always say how they feel (they can’t easily put into words how they feel or their feelings may be in their subconscious), and they don’t always do what they say they are going to do (like signing up for the gym on the 1st of January and never going again!). If one’s market research is based only on what consumers verbally tell us (subjective reports), then we are not going to get a true picture of the likely success of our products.

One way to circumvent this problem is to use a more objective method, and one that does not rely on asking questions to obtain explicit responses. Implicit reaction time tests offer a valuable tool to accompany traditional quantitative surveys. Implicit reaction time tests can detect the associations that consumers have with brand names, product endorsers, cosmetics packaging, new formulations, fragrances, and more.

During the talk, Eamon demonstrated how implicit testing, coupled with neural network technology (a form of artificial intelligence or deep learning), can help model consumer perception of the brand or product (or any formula or proposition). Hence one can build a neural network model of the brand or product. A model that represents how consumers perceive and feel. This can yield insights that really help identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for the stimulus being tested, and in relation to other formulations and those of competitors.

Geraldine, Thaigo, and Eamon taking in the views at the Shopper Brain Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2018.

Eamon gave a talk on the use of implicit reaction time testing and pricing, especially consumers’ perception of offers and promotions.

Implicit reaction time tests can be used to understand the effect a promotional mechanism can have on both brand equity and intention to make a purchase. SPlit Second Research has now cnducted many of these kinds of studies and results are nearly always surprising. Although promotions and offers can increase short-term sales, they can have negative long-term effects on the brand, particularly by impacting brand equity. Our studies reveal that brand managers need to know which kind of promotion would work best for its brand because there are no general rules that apply within and between categories.

The slide below, from Eamon’s talk, is from a case study on implicit pricing concerning basic and luxury brands of toilet tissue. We identified Tesco’s best stratgey for pricing its two products in this category.

See an overview of the conference here

For more case studies visit Eamon’s post on Linkedin.

Taking time out for some fun 🙂

What if your decisions to buy something are actually strongly influenced by unconscious biases? Our neuromarketing director Prof Gemma Calvert joins the Money FM studio to tell you more!

Watch the full interview here.

Split Second Research recently teamed up with Edelman Intelligence to conduct a study on what the All American Family means for different sectors of American society. The findings are published here:

Prof Gemma Calvert, co-founder of Split Second Research, gave an insightful and entertaining keynote talk at the World Neuromarketing Forum in Singapore, 2018.

Hosted by the NMSBA, the conference focussed on current thinking and new developments in neuromarketing, bringing together providers and users in a highly interactive forum.

Split Second Research demonstrated it’s integrated IMPRESS platform for the automation of implicit testing. This makes development and analysis happen in a split second! We also gave away 200 Split Second Research aprons with the slogan “KEEP CALM and dinner with be ready in a Split Second”, here modelled by NMSBA chair Caral Nagal:

Our research for ITV revealed how positive younger viewers (Bright Young Things) are to adverts on view-on-demand TV. Ads were perceived as trusted, relevant, and high quality.

Download the pdf from itvmedia.co.uk

https://www.itvmedia.co.uk/index.php/download_file/force/5499/6527/

Featured picture by Jens Kreuter @jenskreuter

We always like to finish a survey by asking respondents their experiences of taking a test. These are the themes that come from their responses.

1. Fun and engaging

“Fun to do”, “send me more”, “loved it”, “excellent”, “entertaining and friendly”, “a good experience”, “cool and enjoyable”, “interactive, “innovative”, “unique”, “a nice twist”, “like playing a game”, “aroused my curiosity”.

When respondents find a survey inetresting and engaging, they are more likely to offer their true feelings.

2. Better than taditional surveys

“Not too wordy”, “less overwhelming and tiring”, “better than most surveys”, “better than multiple-choice questions”, “doesn’t beat about the bush”, “not too long”, “unlike open-ended questions, which are hard”.

Traditional surveys can be very lengthy and demanding, and hence less engaging.

3. I don’t understand how it works

“I didn’t understand the purpose”, “I don’t understand what it does”, “what was the point?”.

When respondents can’t work out exactly what you are asking, they have no incentive or opportunity to fake their responses.

4. It was quick

“It was very fast”, “not too long”, “reasonable length”, “easy to do”, “not difficult”, “short and sweet”, “more like this please”.

Implicit reaction time tests are quick and easy to do. This makes them easier to recruit respondents than lengthier, traditional surveys.

When you ask consumers about your products, make sure you are using the correct research method.

You may have read about the now famous story of Herman Miller’s Aeron office chair. He developed the chair through the cycle of development, market research, more development, more market research, and so on. Finally, deciding on the design we see now. His research focussed on asking consumers two questions (1) please rate the chair on comfort and (2) please rate the chair on aesthetics. His plan was to use the design which received the highest ratings on both. The trouble was that any design he created got very low ratings on both, even though in his mind he thought he had designed the perfect office chair. Notwithstanding this poor consumer feedback, he went to market…and it became the top selling office chair!

The moral of the story? When you ask someone to rate something new, if it is not simple and obvious or they really can’t verbalise how they feel, they will say they don’t like it. Often consumers will choose the least sophisticated option when they are forced to say why they like it.

The psychologist Tim Wilson has carried out a lot of research showing that when people say they actually like something they often make up a story – an explanation that has no resemblance to reality (in a typical experiment it is the manipulation that determined the liking rather than the story the participant made up). Infact, Tim Wilson has shown that people actually have very poor insights into their own inner worlds – he argues that we are strangers to ourselves.

Consumer Insights – Beyond Liking

To yield more effective consumer insights, we need to go beyond what is immediately visible and dig deeper. We need to examine why the consumer is doing what they are doing in their own world. Insights that are fresh, true, targeted and actionable are those we need to develop.

Split Second’s Implicit research methods go beyond liking. They seek to ask why a consumer prefers this brand, product, or packaging rather than that brand, product or packaging. It can tell us why and how one piece of advertising creative will work on one target audience but not another demographic. Split second’s implicit conusmer testing is able to characterise the feelings the consumer has towards the products, going much deeper than simple liking and disliking. The method is very consumer focussed and bypasses those biases that can influence verbal responses. Split second’s implicit tests are very difficult to fake, hence they provide a pure read-out of consumers’ feelings.

New product development should be cyclical: design the concept, test the market, design the prototype, test the market, develop several design options and test the market. Before implicit technology, this was a slow process, but now with the aid of our IMPRESS platform this product development cycle becomes a reality. We can turn around results in 48 hours, so your development team can get on with the business of optimising the product.

Split Second Research announces its new IMPRESS Platform for the creation and instant analysis of implicit reaction time tests.

Ask us to create your test for you OR do it yourself – and get the results of your market research in 48 hours.

The IMPRESS platform is used for creating implicit reaction time tests in market research and for other research areas too, such as voting preferences, and social attitudes like racial bias, gender bias, and so on.  Online, objective and cost-effective, implicit tests capture immediate, and intuitive responses to brands, packaging, product claims, advertising evaluation, brand tracking, brand positioning, new product development, and a vast array of other marketing related outputs.

IMPRESS is a platform for creating an implicit reaction time test quickly and effortlessly.

It is easy to create a test, either from scratch or by duplicating an existing project.

You can also create traditional survey-type questions. This is useful if you want to add your own screener or demographics questions. Choose from a range of question types and capture information about your respondents and their buying habits before they take the test.

Analysis can be carried out instantly.

Split Second Research offers a free training session to a technician or the main admin user at your institution or company.

The system comes with an online user manual and we offer email support with a maximum 48 hour response time.

Get your implicit research done in a split second

Dr Implicit gave a sprightly performance at the Shopper Brain Conference in Amsterdam recently. The focus was on how in-store promotions can often adversely affect a brand, especially in terms of how the brand is perceived. This can have a long-term effect on a brand’s health, especially its brand equity. The research found that for most products, a price promotion can adversely affect the brand’s perception of quality. In other words, it may ‘cheapen’ the brand, which is not good for category leaders and those for whom quality is marketed as a brand value. For other kinds of products, attributes reflecting social influence, such as popular, trendy, modern, were affected negatively, and indeed in some cases ’embarrassed’ was triggered by the promotion. Taken together, these suggest that offers can make a brand lose out on appearing to be the most popular brand; consumers may even feel a sense of embarrassment when buying such products when they are on offer.

For some other types of products brands went unscathed. Indeed, some offers can make consumers feel proud to be loyal to the brand, welcoming the offer as a reward and an opportunity for others to appreciate the brand as they do.  So, the research uncovered mixed findings, and some types of offers, such as strike-though pricing (i.e., £1.50  now £1.00) worked better than others, such as offers based on quantity like BOGOF (buy one get one free).

This research is ongoing and there are many more research questions that need to be addressed, such as, the effects of other types of offers (Special Offer, and Win a prize), a broader range of product verticals, necessities versus luxury items, the colours and fonts associated with different types of offers, seasonal offers, and much more. Keep checking this website for news about this research.

Dr Implicit reveals all !!

Update: January 2018

Further analysis has been carried out. If you want to receive a report of this research please get in touch. The brands we assessed were Activia Yoghurt, Philadelphia Soft Cheese, Tropicana Fruit Juice, Heinz Baked Beans, Fairy Washing Powder, and Tresseme Shampoo.