Emotional response (or lack thereof) impacts all aspects of purchasing. Emotions affect where consumers look on the shelf, how deeply they engage with a product category or brand, whether price will be a functional or emotional motivator, and—most importantly—how much money they ultimately spend.

Because we fully appreciate the importance of accurately gauging emotional response in consumers, we have recently begun offering a new method of quantifying emotion: facial coding. To understand what’s so revolutionary about this system, let’s first take a look at the pros and cons of the more common methods of tracking emotion.

Older Methods of Measuring Emotional Response

Those who study consumer behavior have long been fascinated by the factor of emotional response, but until recently the ways to measure it have lacked precision and reliable extrapolation. Some of the older methods of emotional response measurement include:

• EEGs: Consumers are outfitted with headsets containing multiple EEG sensors to read electrical activity in the brain. EEGs measure immediate response to stimuli and differentiate different parts of the brain. Unfortunately, they take a long time to set up, they are hard to use in-store because of movement, and they can be expensive.
• fMRIs: Consumers are placed in an fMRI machine and shown stimuli. This is the most accurate measurement of brainwaves, but the setting is unnatural, the range of stimuli is limited, and the process is expensive.
• Biometric Measurement: As we discussed in a recent post, biometric measurement tracks factors including heart rate, galvanic skin response, motion and breathing. The apparatus can be worn in-store for a more natural experience, and the measurements can identify factors not seen through brainwaves. But the response time to stimuli is not necessarily immediate, and biometric responses are indirect signals of emotions—the results are subject to considerable interpretation.
• Eye Tracking: A variety of devices measure eye movement to see what consumers focus on. Eye tracking research is agile and can be performed online using the participants’ webcams, at a central location using stationary devices, and of course, in stores using mobile eye tracking technology like we use from Applied Science Laboratories. The measurements are extremely reliable and precise and get at the question of who is noticing what and for how long. But while eye tracking can tell what people notice or focus on, it can’t tell whether that attention is positive or negative.

 

The Future of Emotion Measurement Technique: Facial Coding

Facial coding records people’s facial expressions and compares them to an extensive database of human emotion to accurately quantify even the most minute changes. It’s based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed by the psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen of UCSF. FACS catalogues over 3,000 meaningful facial expressions that, in varying combinations, indicate the entire range of human emotion.

“It is a strangely riveting document, full of details like the possible movements of the lips (elongate, de-elongate, narrow, widen, flatten, protrude, tighten and stretch); the four different changes of the skin between the eyes and the cheeks (bulges, bags, pouches, and lines); or the critical distinctions between infraorbital furrows and the nasolabial furrow. Researchers have employed the system to study everything from schizophrenia to heart disease; it has even been put to use by computer animators at Pixar (‘Toy Story’), and at DreamWorks (‘Shrek’),” explains Malcolm Gladwell in “The Naked Face,” a 2002 New Yorker article on reading facial expression.

At the time of Gladwell’s article, FACS was only used manually by specially trained facial-reading experts. But nowadays, the process is entirely computerized, so it’s accurate and cost-effective.

Facial coding can be used in-store or at a central location to measure consumers’ true unconscious response to products. The computer-generated results explain reactions in terms of understandable emotions, and results are tabulated automatically, in a short period of time.

To learn more about facial coding and how it can help you uncover consumers’ emotional reactions to your product, contact us for a consultation.

 

(photo credit: Cafffeine and a little smile.. via photopin (license) )

Tags: Consumer BehaviorData ScienceEmotional ResponseFacial CodingTrends