15 de November de 2017
New technologies have imposed new ways of operating within markets, and adapting to these technological advances has become a key factor for companies to take into consideration. Without a doubt, the digital age has brought with it an endless list of benefits, such as new tools that facilitate the everyday operations of millions of organizations, giving them the opportunity to get to know their consumers better, thereby enabling them to make the right choices.
To lead this new web conference session, EAE Business School welcomed Andreu Oliver, a professor of the psychology of communication and change, and Director of the department of Eye Tracking and Consultancy at Alt64. To begin, the expert analysed the current state of market research innovation in Spain. "The field of market research in our country has traditionally been quite stagnant, due to pressure from brands in general to keep costs low. Innovation has been a major victim of this approach".
Until relatively recently, companies were not aware of the great importance of innovation as a key element to be incorporated in any business strategy. "The tools that we are going to discuss have been on the market for over fifteen years but it is only in the last five years that companies have started to show an interest in them", explained the expert. With respect to sources that foster innovation, he highlighted Big Data analysis and social media as crucial factor. As Dr. Oliver stated, "these twos factors have been adopted by companies through their marketing departments or other sections of the organization in order to gain competitive advantages".
Knowing your consumer has become a vital necessity for brands and, to achieve this, a range of devices have been developed that help to take measurements of the impulses or sensations involved in the choices that consumers make. "The galvanic response or cardiovascular activation enables us, through small variations, to understand how a consumer related to a specific product", he explained in relation to one of these new tools, which measures the emotion triggered in a particular person by an advertising campaign.
Electroencephalogram headsets are another of the new tools used to measure emotional stimuli, "This device enables us to determine an equivalence of the activation generated. In other words, it lets us know is this activation has been positive or negative". E-tracking devices are the perfect combination for this kind of tools, as they "enable us to identify where the person is looking", explained the expert in communication psychology.
The objective of these new tools, designed to measure the sensations produced for consumers when presented with a certain product, is to "try to measure what is happening in the brain and the central nervous system and the relationship between the product and the opinion formed". This data gives us statistics on tastes and opinions.
As a practical example, Andreu Oliver showed us a case that had been carried out for a clothing activation brand that wanted to evaluate the new design of its packaging using these new techniques. The methodology was developed through a test conducted on 30 people, who had to perform five different tasks, including viewing various packs and taking a product evaluation test. Each of these five tasks enables different aspects of the product to be measured, such as "identifying the order in which consumers process the pack and which elements grab their attention".
To conclude, Andreu highlighted the importance of neuromarketing within the market research innovation sector.