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Hello, my name is Catriona Campbell. I’m the founder and director of Foviance. Foviance
is a user experience, research and analytics agency, based in London. We’re very excited
to have just completed the technology which is going to allow us to help brands measure
the emotional engagement a consumer feels with that brand.
It’s really the next evolution in research and behavioural research. It’s exciting
because it allows complete objectivity when it comes to researching collateral for a brand.
So without getting too technical, here’s a bit more about how it works, and what is
does.
My name is Sven Krause, I’m the key account director here at Foviance. We’ve been doing
usability in customer experience research for our customers for the last seven years,
so we’ve done thousands of usability tests here in the labs, with lots of different participants,
trying to optimise the website experience, trying to optimise things like home pages,
product pages, for lots of different industries.
What we’ve found, over the last couple of years is that, we only get from one-on-sessions,
from interviews, what people want to tell us, but we don’t really know what drives
their behaviour unconsciously. We looked into the market, and we partnered about two years
ago with a university, and looked into EEG research, which is brainwave measurements,
which is one way to look into emotional responses. That’s when we found this here, which is
a wireless EEG headset. It’s wirelessly connected to the computer, and it’s got
software built in that translates brainwaves into emotional states. This actually gives
you something like a level of excitement, or boredom or frustration. So when we bought
this device, we thought we really need to link it up to something like the eye tracker,
to understand in real time, where do the eyes go, where’s the visual attention? And then,
in response to that, how does the emotional state change?
So last year, we spent quite a bit of time on making these two technologies connect,
so we went to the eye tracking provider, SMI, we work with, and they built an interface
with us to get these two technologies to speak to each other basically, and that’s where
it becomes really exciting. We have one database where we can see the eye tracking data coming
through, so you know what happened on the screen, you know what page they looked at.
You know exactly where the eyes went, in real time, and you see the emotional states changing
as well, in the same database. So you can then say, as soon as someone looked at this
dress, you see an increase in excitement, and obviously product images is just one example,
but if you think about home page banners, if you think about advertising, we can also
put a catalogue in front of them, and ask them what they think about the catalogue,
or we can put in someone’s head and ask them to go shopping, in the offline world.
It doesn’t interfere with the participant, what they are sharing with you, which is very
important for us, but it adds for the consultant later on, when we’ve done the analysis of
the data, a whole new way of looking at it. As it’s real time, and it’s coming through
on the screen here, you can see that the person running the session can also see the emotional
states. He can pick up on change in emotional state, and feed them back into the session.
What made you choose that one?
Because it’s big, and I like the colour, and it’s quite simple.
If you look at all the methodologies we can use, I mean there are focus groups, they use
the tests; there are surveys we can run – all that is very much around the information the
participants are happy to share with us, and he’s aware of. So this new technology is
the first time we can tap into this unconscious response, and get a feel for, so what’s
happening below that that drives behaviour and decision processes? For us, it’s a massive
step change, because it opens up these possibilities to understand our customers much better, and
shape much better experiences for them online, and across multiple channels.
The potential of this technology is vast. For the first time, we’ll be able to completely
and objectively measure the emotional engagement a consumer has with a brand. It’s fascinating
stuff, and I think the journey we’re on now is one of the most exciting that I’ve
ever experienced in marketing.