Neuromarketing and consumer behavior: what TSW XP Lab does

“What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”
(Margaret Mead, 2000)

Is it possible to know what people are experiencing and how they feel when they use a product or service, or observe a site, a mobile app, an advertisement or a product package?

The answer is yes, and it is the new frontier we are crossing:

·    Know the emotions associated with brands and affect the zero moment of truth of consumers.

·    Follow theirs behavior even beyond digital places through wearable, with the eye tracking glasses.

Biofeedback and people at the center, with the emotions they express: these are the keywords of the evolution of the Customer Experience and of the whole TSW.

We have extended our ability to understand people’s behavior, and we have also extended physically: after the work of November, we inaugurated the second area used as a User Experience laboratory.

Today we tell you the premises of our new jobs and our new experiences, explaining in detail what we will cover.

The limits of traditional marketing research

Numerous market researches testify that there is often a gap between what consumers say they do and how they actually behave [Martin Lindstrom, Neuromarketing, Maggioli Edizioni, 2013]: what really happens is that often the consumer relies on irrational aspects and is guided automatically, intuitively. [Gladwell, M., Blink, 2005; Unconscious influences on decision making: a critical review, 2014].

These mental, emotional and irrational factors are intrinsically difficult to communicate in words, and yet they are fundamental in the choice of a product or service.

Every year a lot of budget is invested to measure conscious mental contents through traditional investigative methods of marketing, but this information does not define the key elements of actual consumer choices: the search for more conventional marketing is based on what the interviewees they say to do, to think or to feel: it comes simply asked to the potential customer what he likes or needs and very often the same consumer does not know what he needs.

Currently it is this information that drives business decisions.

Neuromarketing: a discipline to understand emotions

In the practice of usability testing with eye tracking that we conduct on TSW, we have already overcome this perspective: people try digital products in the field, in compliance with the following functional design principle:

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”.

In today’s global market, companies require effective methods and simple for access to emotional reactions and feelings of their consumers.

Today it is possible for us to take another big step forward: is it possible to know objectively how people feel, in a way not mediated by people’s verbal communication?

The answer is yes, and requires validated tools from the world of neuroscience.

Within this world, the neuromarketing is an advanced discipline, whose purpose is to investigate and study the mental processes that guide people’s behavior and decisions in the field of traditional marketing: market intelligence, product and service design, branding, positioning, targeting.

These new research methods are able to offer a field of study with many potentials compared to traditional methods, because they can explore the mechanisms of the intuitive, the emotional, the implicit-instinctive reaction and the unconscious.

The role of emotions in purchasing decisions

In recent decades, neuroscientists have studied the role that the emotions and mechanisms of the unconscious brain play in decision-making processes: 85% of our decisions are governed by unconscious factors: intuitions, emotions, desires, impulsive choices, memories and deep values. (Antonio Damasio, 2000. Emotion and conscience, Adelphi, Milan; Descartes’ error. Emotions, reason and human brain [1994], Adelphi, Milan, [1995])

TSW has developed integrated neuromarketing technologies to help companies take better decisions on how to create customer engagement: we can now effectively and efficiently access measurement of their physiological responses and to the emotional understanding of consumers.

Measuring the emotional factor even in the absence of awareness of its implicit reactions provides companies with a huge competitive and revolutionary advantage in marketing.

Using our wealth of experience and of knowledge in Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology, we have developed a wide range of tools and tests to investigate the implicit and emotional responses of users. And so we built a second usability lab to do it.

Neuromarketing and TSW XP Lab: what can we do?

With the technology of neuromarketing and the support of specialists in the field, TSW today can, in a completely non-invasive way:

·    investigate unconscious perceptions and emotions of consumers

·    understand the feelings and the emotional reactions that consumers have towards brands, products, advertising campaigns, so as to be able to offer products and services that stimulate engagement and predict the behavior of people’s choice with accuracy

·    to test in an extremely flexible way real situations on the digital and in the physical world (in-store purchases, shopping).

We specialize in discovering these hidden triggers of consumers’ buying behavior. Our neuromarketing methods are based on reliable technologies, scientifically validated and published in scientific journals, able to give a more accurate reading of how consumers are involved with respect to a brand, product, service or an advertising message.

These implicit research methods help to build a effective communication bridge and engagement between the supplier-company and the consumer-customer:

·    they offer concrete and immediate measures of the user experience

·    identify the fundamental keys for which a brand captures the consumer

·    identify emotions, intuitions and physiological-emotional reactions (which are difficult to express in words)

·    they are easy to use, both online and offline, on any device and anywhere in the world.

TSW is therefore committed in research and analysis of what people live and what they feel when they use a product or service, or observe a site, a mobile app, a video or a packaging. The areas of application are the most varied, and even concern the driving of a motorcycle or a car.

We have therefore decided to show you through this video how – thanks to the flexibility of our dedicated laboratories, the instruments in our possession and the specialists who work with us – it is really possible to perform tests during, for example, the riding a motorcycle.