Data tracker: Emotional persuasion

Purchase decisions are driven by emotion; especially in India where customers said that they engaged with brands more deeply when they connected with the message around them. Today there is a paucity of studies about the emotional connection between ads, viewers and brands, but companies are increasingly asking for more according to a study by Nielsen Global. 

The impact of ads on sales volumes

Findings from a study of 100 ads across 25 brands in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry demonstrate how ads affect sales. The ads in the study were grouped into three buckets according to how they scored on a metric based on people’s electroencephalogram activity (EEG) while viewing the ad (‘Below Average, ‘Average’ and ‘Above Average’). Using robust marketing mix modelling, each ad’s contribution to sales volume was computed against the average ad for that brand. Ads which generated above-average EEG scores were associated with a 23 per cent increment in sales volume over what an average ad would generate. Similarly, below-average ads were associated with a 16 per cent decline in sales volume. 

Trust and consumption 

TV commercials rank among the most trustworthy sources of advertising among respondents in India 

• Given the prevalence of TV in consumers’ lives, viewers are bombarded with more ads than ever, making it that much more difficult for brands and agencies to create commercials that truly connect with their audiences

• The problem with measuring emotions is that they are intangible. Direct response surveys can be misleading because they presume that respondents can accurately verbalise their emotions

• Verbal responses require respondents to express, and therefore rationalise, their emotions as feelings. Emotions are instinctive reactions to external stimuli, whereas feelings are the mind’s interpretation of those emotions; and are therefore, subject to personal bias, culture, setting, past experiences and ingrained beliefs

• Consumer neuroscience helps measure the impact of emotional advertising by assessing metrics like attention, emotional engagement and memory activation

• Numerous studies show that many purchases are driven by emotion, but most prevalent measurement solutions fail to capture whether an ad creates an emotional connection with viewers

What is consumer neuroscience?

Consumer neuroscience measures two sets of neurometrics. Primary metrics result from real-time activity in the brain. Secondary metrics result from the interplay between two or more primary metrics

Primary

• Attention: A measure of how much brain energy one has to devote to decipher what is being shown to them

• Emotional Engagement: Assessment of whether one is approaching or avoiding what they are seeing

• Memory Activation: Indicates the extent to which new memory connections get formed or past memories are aroused  

Secondary

• Overall Effectiveness: Indicates the holistic appeal that the stimulus is able to generate

• Action Intent: Likelihood of a change in behaviour or intent to act on a message

• Comprehension: Indicates the extent to which the experience is understood or the extent to which it makes sense

• Novelty: Likelihood of the ad standing out and being embedded into memory

Source: Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience internal study – FMCG brands - 2015