Will My Message Grab the Brain's Subconscious Attention?

Attention recruits brain energy to allow your audience to focus on your message and process its content. A lot of that attention is managed below our level of awareness. Therefore, attention is difficult to measure when you ask your audience to describe how much they focused on your message. Consciousness, our ability to observe and report our immediate experience, is both slow and fragile. Your messages are narrative constructions that affect your audience at a much greater speed than consciousness allows. Consequently, we are incompetent at describing the quality of our immediate attention. Instead, collecting brain data is rather easy because it does not rely on a subject's ability to report. More importantly, it helps measure attention on a millisecond basis, which is a game changer for how you can explain the effect of any marketing stimulus. Stories produce various cycles of attention during which your audience is engaged, moved, or bored, the timeline of which can be captured by different neuromarketing techniques such as reading the conductivity of the skin, decoding facial expressions, tracking eye movements, or monitoring brain waves. A story works in amazing ways. Most of its effect is not accessible to our awareness. Neuromarketing methods are designed to show whether a message has captured any form of attention, conscious or subconscious, automatic or intentional, which makes an enormous difference in your ability to create successful messages.

Case Study #1: Which Animal Images Grab the Most Attention. A prominent nonprofit organization focusing on defending the rights of all animals wanted to find out why some of their ads work better than others to generate donations. They gave SalesBrain three ads that were produced in the past decade: one old and two new. The new ads were not doing better than the old ones, but they could not understand why. We used our NeuroLab to investigate the issue. By doing a complete assessment of the neurophysiological response from a sample of 40 subjects, we discovered that attention was dropping rapidly for any scenes that would fail to show the animals with a salient and clear expression of sadness. Also, a frontal view of the face of the animal was prompting more attention than a side view. This was related to the animal itself, and its capacity to trigger human empathy. However, a lot of the responses appear predicated on the power of the facial expression itself, and whether a scene was showing one or several animals. This hypothesis was confirmed by looking at eye tracking and emotional data on several animals, including cats, dogs, horses, pigs, cows, seals, and even monkeys. After we revealed the persuasion code of their ads, the advertising agency was able to release a new TV spot, which outperformed all the clips they had ever done before. Also, the insights produced by the study guided the photo and video team on how they use images in all their future communications.

Can People Say What They Feel?

We are good at masking and distorting the reporting of our emotions. Recent studies of social media content compared to search questions asked on Google show the extent of our capacity to deceive. Search sentences reveal concerns or interests that do not match what people are willing to disclose openly. Additionally, search data shows that we choose to share what makes us feel good and hide what lowers our self‐esteem. The younger we are, the more unreliable our statements tend to be. I have conducted extensive research on teenagers that helped me realize that collecting their opinions does not begin to explain and predict their behaviors. Fortunately, neuromarketing studies do not depend on what people say, but how their brains respond. When we conduct one, we look at how the participants' neurons fire at millisecond intervals, and what they feel, measured by their brain's response to external stimuli.

The neurons in the brain respond in a fraction of a second, triggering emotional responses before the conscious mind even processes the information. Therefore, a subject may have a subconscious reaction, but once it becomes conscious, he may not feel comfortable sharing it with a researcher. Perhaps he may not feel it is appropriate or wants to be perceived favorably by the researcher. Either way, in psychology, this is referred to as the social desirability bias. Furthermore, even if the subject believes that he is reporting true feelings in response to an advertisement, the brain data may show otherwise. Neuromarketing findings help identify the distance, if not the distortions, between what people say they feel and how they truly feel while measuring the influence of our emotions on our behavior.

Case Study #2: Understanding How Consumers Feel About Banks in Morocco. Wafacash is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Attijariwafa banking group, which is the largest bank in North Africa and the sixth largest on the African continent. Over the past 20 years, Wafacash has enjoyed a dominant market share in the cash transfer and payment banking business in Morocco. The business of cash handling appeals to a majority of Moroccans who do not trust traditional banks: they value the privacy of saving and paying using cash without the requirement of owning a bank account. At the end of 2012, although Wafacash had done its share of consumer studies, the management believed that continuing to conduct focus groups or traditional one‐on‐one interviews would fail to generate innovative consumer insights. Wafacash commissioned SalesBrain to explore how neuromarketing methods could yield innovative consumer insights to develop and quickly deploy a more effective advertising and communication strategy. We recommended performing a study using voice analysis.

We used voice analysis during 24 in‐depth qualitative interviews with customers and noncustomers. The voice analysis software extracted about 20 vocal parameters to identify emotional variables in the interviewee's voice like stress level, cognitive overload, or sadness. Through the use of voice analysis, the bank executive team received a much more objective view on what their customers felt about their services. For instance, the data revealed the presence of many frustrations and annoyances that had been historically misunderstood by Wafacash.

With a better understanding of their customers' feelings, the management was able to quickly create and deploy a new messaging campaign. The campaign was swiftly accepted and successfully launched throughout a network of 600‐plus retail sites.

Which Emotions Trigger Decisions?

We experience thousands of emotions. Therefore, it is impossible to report specific emotions because they flicker, and even when they reach our consciousness, our perception is too slow and not discriminate enough to sort and label each feeling. However, some tools like facial decoding software give us the ability to reveal universal emotional expressions like happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, contempt, and disgust, which are mostly triggered below people's level of awareness. Tiny movements created by our facial muscles produce micro‐expressions that appear for less than 35 milliseconds. Interestingly, only self‐reported negative emotions like disgust or anger tend to correlate with brain data. Negative emotions are felt in our guts and do not require the filter and bias of our cognitive interpretation.

Meanwhile, linking emotions and behavior is tricky. Understanding this critical connection requires that both emotions and behavior be defined and measured properly. Unfortunately, emotions are abstract concepts. There is not a tool ready‐made to measure all emotions. For instance, there is no such thing as “an anger thermometer,” so to assess anger via a questionnaire, psychologists need to develop a special scale. It is very difficult to do because once you start proposing a scale of a psychological construct, people have differing opinions about what the construct means. Fortunately, neuromarketing studies do not depend on scales or the subjective interpretation of psychological states but, rather, on known and accepted neurophysiological metrics.

Think of how we measure the weight of objects today. People do not argue about the definitions of what is light or heavy. We use standards that have been accepted and used for hundreds of years. Such standards do not exist in traditional marketing research to measure mental states like attention, boredom, engagement, comprehension, memorization, and, of course, persuasion. Surveys are entirely dependent on the subjective interpretation people have about the questions. Are you excited by this ad? Are you bored? These are questions that assume all people will understand the same way, leaving no room for the subjective interpretation of a given emotional state. On the other hand, neuromarketing studies scientifically measure emotional states and remove the error provided by the subjective nature of our language and the limiting processing capacity of our consciousness.

Case Study #3: The Effectiveness of Public Health Campaigns. In 2011, I investigated the effectiveness of public service announcements (PSAs) on teenagers and young adults [14]. PSA researchers have mostly relied on subjects' ability to self‐report their feelings to assess a campaign's success, a severe limitation considering how emotional messages are known to produce large subconscious effects. My study tested PSAs that varied by tone. Some were positive, carrying an optimistic and humoristic tone. Others were somber and scary. Because recent neuroscientific discoveries suggest that adolescents use distinct brain circuits when processing subconscious affective responses, I predicted that the persuasive effect of emotional messages would vary between age groups. The findings supported my predictions and demonstrated that neurophysiological methods could predict the effects of public health messages targeting adolescents and young adults. Most notably, I showed that negative emotions generated by threatening fear‐based messages produce more effect than positive emotions regardless of age.

Which of My Messages Work Better on People's Brains and Why?

Research subjects get quickly confused and overwhelmed by too many direct questions on the multiple ads they are asked to evaluate. For instance, the Likert Scale is commonly used in advertising research. Here is an example: To what extent do you like this ad? Use a scale of five options going from “A lot” to “Not at all” to answer. However, assessing to what extent an ad is funny or sad does not begin to represent the subconscious effect of millions of neurons firing within milliseconds in our brain. Furthermore, conventional studies ask people to express why they like or dislike various aspects of an ad. Those questions are very taxing on people's cognitive energy and rarely produce significant differences between subjects or even between stimuli.

So how good or helpful is your study if you find out that all your subjects feel the same and none of the ads appear to produce different states? I have conducted my share of such studies that yield little if any meaningful differences between subjects or worse, between the ads. Why does that happen so often? It is because we cannot begin to report the impact of the excessive amounts of information processed by different layers in our brain. Only the brain itself can do this complicated and tedious task. However, it is done below our level of awareness. By using neuromarketing tools and interpreting the data with a neuromarketing model like NeuroMap, you can assess how persuasion affects different areas of the brain and reveal meaningful differences between subjects and messages.

Case Study #4: Neurobenchmarking Multiple Ads. A large technology company asked SalesBrain to review several ads that had been airing for the past couple of years. The conventional benchmarking data on how well the ads were performing was inconclusive, so the marketing group who commissioned our study was not clear on which direction to go next. In many cases, the number of variables (tone, color, characters, etc.) involved in many advertising messages makes it impossible to isolate and measure the contribution of each variable using traditional methods. However, our neuromarketing study was able to measure the degree to which each ad was able to hold attention, create arousal, move the audience in pleasant or uncomfortable emotional states, and whether the message created any valuable cognitive engagement. The NeuroScoring of each ad did provide an objective way to sort the messages based on how well each activated critical persuasion stages in the audience's brains. As a result, our client was able to gain clarity and confidence on what to do next with the creative direction of a new campaign.

Can Neuromarketing Help Me Better Prove the Unique Value of My Solution?

More and more companies are turning to neuroscience to provide stronger proofs of their value proposition. You too may benefit from using a study that can demonstrate that your product or service produces stronger responses in your customers' brains than your competition does. There are many ways to design experiments that compare how subjects respond to your products, not with words but with brain signals. Consider these situations in which neuroscience can offer valuable proofs to demonstrate the strength of your value proposition.

• A Danish chocolate manufacturer wanted to promote the value of giving chocolates on Valentine's Day. In a creative study, Paul Zak [15] explored the effect of offering chocolate to loved ones while sharing romantic feelings. This experimental condition raised the level of oxytocin of men by nearly 30%.

Similarly, you could also use neuroscience to demonstrate that:

• A brand of spas is more relaxing than another by measuring how specific jets can reduce stress hormones and raise levels of endorphins.
• A noise canceling system can produce more productive office environments by monitoring cognitive effort and distraction while performing various office tasks.
• The design and color of furniture in a store may impact the emotional and cognitive state of shoppers.

Case Study #5: The Impact of Messages Viewed on Mobile. A large technology company whose revenue largely depends on selling ads for mobile platforms wanted to decode the neurophysiological difference between viewing the same ads on a mobile device versus viewing the same content on a TV. The study was focusing on distinct neurophysiological processes that are known to influence overall engagement with any form of content – namely, attention, emotion, and retention. The study objectively measured these neurophysiological states without any conscious reporting from the subjects. It did prove that there were significant differences between the two delivery platforms, some that were favorable to the mobile platform. For more on this study, visit goo.gl/XjXypL.

Can You Get Higher Returns on Advertising Using a Brain‐Based Persuasion Model?

With the benefit of both neurodata and a persuasion model like NeuroMap, SalesBrain's clients can optimize how they market, communicate, and sell their products or solutions. They can also provide better advertising briefs to their agencies. By following a scientific discipline to create all their messages, they remove the risk and uncertainty that so many marketing or advertising campaigns carry. I wish I could share here some of the advertising briefs clients have shared with us. Often, advertisers recommend gigantic creative leaps of faith that put enormous amounts of money at risk. In fact, in my 30 years in marketing research, I have not seen one creative brief supported by a scientific persuasion model! Sadly, some advertising agencies are not motivated to embrace neuromarketing because they perceive that a scientific approach may limit their creative options. But why take so many wild guesses when the discipline and rigor of a tested scientific process can improve the success and ROI of your marketing and advertising dollars? Moreover, this is not dependent on the size of your company's budget. In fact, you can apply the quality and value of NeuroMap before you launched your next campaign or deploy a new website right after you have read this book!