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Siemon Scammel-Katz
Crusader, pioneer and gentlemanly capitalist Siemon is the Founder of TNS Magasin, the international shopper strategy consultancy, and Global Director of TNS Retail and Shopper Area of Expertise.
Read the full biography here. |
TNS Magasin started behavioural research in retail in 1991, were the first in Europe to use video in-store and the first in the world to use eye tracking in-store. They worked with the first interactive virtual store in the world and over the past few years have been broadening out their work in neuroscience out of eye tracking into some of the other biosensory measurement tools.
Neuromarketing Health Warning
By Siemon Scammel-Katz - 22 April, 2010
Over the past 20 years science’s understanding of the functioning of the brain has improved dramatically and we have clear ideas about the roles of various areas of the brain in running the human system. This knowledge has come from the development of new equipment to allow us to scan the brain. Previously, science had to rely on very small samples of brain damaged patients, who through functional testing revealed what impairment was caused by their particular damage, and thus a potential role for that part of the brain.
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But as usual with buzz come cowboys |
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Access to these machines has grown out of medical science and into industry and today there is a huge buzz around neuromarketing and the potential possibilities of understanding response and reaction to brand activity. But as usual with buzz come cowboys. Both in Europe and the US some of the usual suspects and some new entrants are claiming all sorts of capabilities for this nascent science. And the danger with this is that clients will buy from these suppliers believing the claims and come away disappointed, believing that the discipline has nothing to offer.
We have seen it before. Having introduced eye tracking in-store in 1993 around the turn of the century we saw the same sort of buzz for the methodology. In came agencies waving promises of gold who knew nothing about vision processing (so much so, some were offering “eye tracking” without actually monitoring eye movement!) and clients spent and were disappointed with meaningless results.
So may we be so bold as to offer some advice to potential purchasers?
Equipment – there are a number of machines available for brain scanning, the most popular are EEG and fMRI. Both offer great capability but have significant drawbacks. EEG units monitor electrical activity on the outer surface of the brain, the cortex. They offer a real time monitor of activity but give no access to the interior of the brain and thus we are unable, for example, to see what kind of memory is being accessed. fMRI measures blood flow (where there is neural activity, blood is required) and does scan the whole brain, and thus we can monitor activity in the all the regions of the brain. However, the scan is only around every 2 seconds so there is an issue around temporal resolution; it is much harder to identify specific response to stimuli introduced for short periods of time, for example a sequence of scenes in an advertisement. Make sure that the equipment proposed for your research is fit for purpose. What are you measuring?
Analysis – from all the reports that we have reviewed, the most common response is....so what? It is the age old research industry problem of producing data rather than insight. Make sure that whoever is proposing to do your research has the ability both to understand what the data means and to benchmark the output. Is a positive emotional response good? Why does the respondent have a poor cognitive response? Most importantly, what should the client do about it?
We have found most success by combining methodologies, for example EEG with eye tracking followed by a semi-structured interview using the outputs as stimulus for discussion, thus bringing new and older methodologies together.
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...from all the reports that we have reviewed, the most common response is....so what? |
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For example, an interesting insight came from a recent project in the US. Shoppers claimed that price in the test category was very influential on their decision making at the fixture. However, from eye tracking we saw that there were a tiny number of fixations on price labels and generally there was no cognitive response to those fixations. What shoppers were describing as happening and the reality of how they actually shopped and made decisions at the fixture was fundamentally different. Further investigation revealed that the response to pricing activity (the price elasticity of the category) came from a very small proportion of consumers and that the focus of attention in the category on price was only talking to a small (and by the way disloyal) audience. The client can now focus their attention on other more prominent issues to influence shopper choice at the fixture.
Our most important learning is that there is great value in our collaboration with the leading academics in the field. They can help to guide you through the minefield of methodological approaches, help you context your learnings and most importantly identify the cowboys. They are as interested as we are in bringing the academic science into the mainstream business world for our research into issues such as decision making can not only benefit marketing but some of the medical disciplines as well.
There is no doubt that there are some really exciting insights that will come from these techniques and that we will be able to walk a little closer to consumers and shoppers in understanding the true motivations behind exhibited behaviour. But we need to be cautious – this is a science that is still in the discovery phase; there is still a huge amount that we don’t know about the brain. Caveat emptor!
Siemon Scammel-Katz
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