OTOinsights

NECN's Segment on Boston's Leading Neuromarketing Research Firms

For those of you who may have missed the NECN segment on how Innerscope Research and One to One Interactive's Quantemo Lab are using cutting edge Neuromarketing Research techniques to measure human emotional response to media, here it is:

Mass High Tech Highlights Boston's Leading Neuromarketing Research Firms

Today, Mass High Tech featured two of Boston's leading Neuromarketing Research Firm's in an article they published titled "Innerscope Research tests biometric response to Super Bowl Ads".  The article highlights how Innerscope Research and One to One Interactive's Quantemo Lab are using cutting edge Neuromarketing Research techniques to measure human emotional response to media.

NECN plans to review in tonight 6:30pm broadcast here in New England.  For those of you interested, tune in!

Viewer Engagement with Internet Video

OTOinsights  has released its third t=zero report, entitled ‘Emotion, Engagement and Internet Video,’ (available for free download: www.tzero-research.com). Using OTOinsight’s Quantemo™ neuromarketing measurement platform, the goal of the study was to study viewer engagement with internet video.

Analyzing the results from various physiological traces in combination with eye tracking and interview data, the t=zero research team presents a series of three insights with regards to how users engage with internet video. These include:

1. Viewer Responses to Internet Videos are Emotionally Complex.

2. Engagement Scores Substantially Enhance Interpretability of User Ratings.

3. Viewer Engagement and Video Success are Positively Linked.

The full report is available for free download at: http://www.tzero-research.com.

OTOinsight’s t=zero initiative looks to determine useful measures of user engagement and experience with digital and social media. Our third publication, focused on viewer engagement with internet video, is meant to objectively study the ways in which users locate, respond to, and engage with internet video. Our hope is that these findings will help guide future efforts as we see continued innovation in the online video space.

Bio Mapping - Creating Emotional Maps of Cities and Neighborhoods

Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which over the last four years with more than 1500 people have taken part in. In the context of regular, local workshops and consultations, participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighborhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualize points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualize the social space of a community.

Developed by Christian Nold, he aims to study how  perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states. 

NeuroMarketing - New Tools For Engaging Customers

Below is a post that was originally published on Steve Furman's Expedient Means Blog. I am re-publishing with Steve's permission here.   He attended a Forrester Marketing Forum session I spoke at on April 8th titled "Marketing's New Imperative for Success: Engagement".  Steve did a fantastic job covering a number of  presentation that were given over three days in Los Angeles.  Enjoy!

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Fast forward to some time in the future. The marketing game has completely changed, having evolved beyond test and control, research, etc. Imagine you can understand how your customers react to your products. By react I mean physical responses such as eye movements, heart rate, breathing pace, galvanic skin response and body language. You can map these responses to human emotions and cognitive thinking styles. Next you capture how your customers form relationships with your products (abstract, concrete) and how their social preferences interplay with and drive consideration. But wait there’s more. Throw ideolgical values (taste, morals) into the calculus and you will be able to mold a product that satisfies all basic human pleasures and by definition is the most desireable item on the market. You are are flying, and instantly promoted.

Science fiction? Is it even possible? It is possible, and the technology is available now. Welcome to Part III in my weblog series from the Forrester Marketing Forum 2008 (Los Angeles, April 7-9). The Forum’s theme was customer engagement. In this installment I make an attempt to summarize and connect four separate presentations (two breakouts and two keynotes), that starts to show marketers how to create more engaging online experiences by making them more pleasurable and deisrable.

At the heart of this task is a new type of practice called NeuroMarketing. It’s in very early days, having been largely confined to labs using expensive equipment that was uncomfortable for the subjects. As with any technology, it’s getting smaller and cheaper. There is only so far marketers can go with our current practices. In my view it’s critical to employ new tools that can measure human response and desire. Let’s get started.

First - The Four Pleasures Framework by Patrick Jordan. Mr. Jordan is a design, marketing and brand strategist and holds a PhD in psychology. He has worked with major brands to create campaigns and products using his pleasures framework.

The objective is to help people feel good about your product, your brand/company and about themselves. The four pleasures are:

1. Physio - Physiological, the body and its senses
2. Psycho - Psychological, the mind, emotions, cognition and interests
3. Socio - Relationships, social connections in the abstract and concrete
4. Ideo - Ideological, the values, taste and morals

During his talk Mr. Jordan cited real-life examples for each of the pleasures. To illustrate physio, he spoke about how the car maker Fiat has an entire lab and team devoted to only three parts of a car. The steering wheel, gear shift and inside door handles. Through research and observation, Fiat discovered that these were the first three things a customer actually touched when in a car showroom. The salesman would usually open the door, the customer would step in, put her hands on the wheel, then on the gear shift. When she wanted to exit she would have to touch the door handle. If the designers could elevate the sensory experience of these physical parts to one of pleasure, product consideratin is off to a flying start.

He provided examples for each pleasure, but I won’t go into them here. For those explorers that want to give it a try, he offered this brief summary.

• Create robust personas
• Conduct indepth ethnographic research
• Immerse yourself in your customers
• Look at what’s going on in the media

Second - Amplifying Engagement: Measuring Customer’s Emotional Reaction to an Experience, was given by Jeremi Karnell, President, One-to-One Interactive. His company(s) are working in the NeuroMarketing space, and he defines it this way.

NeuroMarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.

He discussed what he calls the mind-body nexus of engagement, consisting of perception, attention, brain function and behavior. His firm developed the Quantemo Engagement Index, a scientific approach to measuring a target audience’s emotional reactions to digital media. In short, they put sensors on subjects (simple things like bands, nothing sticks to the skin) show them web sites, ads, emails, then report on heart rate, galvanic skin response and breathing. The sensors can also detect eye tracking and body movement. Are the subjects leaning in (interested), or sitting back (bored). These measurements are graphed and presented alongside the usability testing video and reports to give designers more data points to validate or refine designs or marketing messages. Can be employed against your competitors sites as well.

Third - Creating Personas that Support Engagement was given jointly by Neil Clemmons of Critical Mass and Mike Madaio from QVC. I won’t go into defining personas or how to use them in this post. You can easily find that through a simple search. The value in this talk was how Critical Mass extended the Forrester useful, usable, desireable usability model by adding sustainable and social to the persona matrix.

I have been doing a lot of thinking along these lines lately, and this really made it clear. The more offline experiences migrate to the online world, the more tools designers and marketers will need to be effective. The rapid growth of social computing is being accelerated by technology advances. This will require new ways to think about how to create online experiences that will keep up. Expanding the persona/user-centered design paradigm is a natural next step. Mastering these techniques will be critical to engaging users in your online properties.

Fourth - Designing for Engagement by Forrester Principal Analyst, Kerry Bodine. Her talk orbited around desirability. She didn’t offer a textbook definition, but instead quoted Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) as he attempted to define obscenity.

I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…

I know it when I see it. Clearly desirability is a subjective call and as unique as humans. But like so many other things the mind processes, it’s real. That’s why NeuroMarketing is going to be important. It pulls the subjective, which is very difficult for marketers to deal with, into focus using something more concrete than a gut feeling.

Kerry Bodine - Photo: Steve A. Furman

Ms. Bodine showed the standard usability strata Forrester has been promoting for years, and suggested it should look more like a point to point map, increasing the role desirability should play when designing. This is a subtle change, but one that challenges designers and web architects to think about desirability along side the other dimensions at the outset, vs. something to aspire to after launch. Makes more sense.

I would love to see Forrester refine, actually update, their persona framework to address the rise in social computing and match what they have done with this change. Since 2002, I have worked with Cooper to create the personas we use today. Their persona philosophy and methodology was a natural fit with how we think about segmentation.

Ms. Bodine used a number of personal and observed examples of desirable experiences. One as mundane as ordering room service in a hotel. Her summary and advice to marketers was as follows.

• Learn to recognize desirability when you see it
• Give desirability the recognition it deserves
• Find a way to create desirable experiences

My take on what it means

Online marketers (DM guys and product managers) need to get much closer to interactive design than they are today. The pure plays are way ahead of the analog legacy firms (less baggage). Traditional direct marketers have the luxury of creating dozens (sometimes hundreds) of test cells and corresponding creatives. But they do this, for the most part, not so much through observing human responses, but by mechanical test and control (trial and error). I’m not suggesting that this is not a valid science, but it leaves out the human emotional reactions that are hallmark to the web’s interactivity.

Online testing tools available to raise interactive marketing practice to DM levels are getting better, but most firms don’t have the understanding, budget, expertise or technology infrastructure to acquire, implement and use them. They cannot support a network of sites or instances of sites or even regions on pages necessary to conduct robust DM-like testing. Don’t get me wrong, some firms are doing this well, but they are the exception. In my company we had at one time over 14,000 direct marketing test cells for one product! Nothing even close to that online.

I know it’s counterintuitive, but the online channel in most companies is fairly static because of tracking challenges, staff support, lack of a content management system and the reality of having to integrate with back end databases and systems real time. Content management suites like Interwoven, are helping, but they are big enterprise solutions. Could there be an Interwoven Lite market out there?

NeuroMarketing, is real today and could be baked into the normal project plan without extending the time line or breaking the budget. It can give the online marketer a new and powerful tool that doesn’t result in an extra large IT project.

What do you tell your CMO when asked to explain desirability? “I know it when I see it” is probably not going to do it. Use the mind. Neurons tell the truth.

In Summary

• Create personas now. If you already have them be sure they are up to date.
• Get buy in on personas from your DM marketers and Product Managers.
• Bring them into the design and development process early and keep them there through the validation cycles.
• Integrate NeuroMarketing techniques in your usability testing plan.

Read my other Forrester Marketing Forum 2008 posts here for Part I and here for Part II.

Business Week mentions One to One Interactive in Neuromarketing Article

Business Week published an article today regarding Neuromarketing in their Technology Section titled "What you Really Want to Buy". Although the most of the article is rather light (as is most things coming from traditional reporters covering subject matter they don't have a clue about), it does reference Roger Dooley (blog's neuormarketingscience.com), Emsense (Quantemo competitior), and Jeff Bardzell Ph.D. (IU School of Informatics/Quantemo/T=Zero). All of those above individuals and groups are who we are working with to launch the nations first Neuromarketing Association.

Updated Definition of Neuromarketing on Wikipedia

Late last week I announced that I intended to partially update the definition of Neuromarketing in Wikipedia. Just a couple of minutes ago, I finally made my edits to Wikipedia and I have decided to post about it in order to detail the change and allow for comments, feedback, suggestions, etc.

The old definition, which I found dated and too narrowly focused on cognitive based research methods, was:

"Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing which uses medical technologies such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and Electroencephalography (EEG) to study the brain's responses to marketing stimuli. Researchers use the fMRI to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, or EEG to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it."

The new definition, that I published today I believe represents a broader array of research methods deployed in Neuromarketing today. It reads:

"Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in ones physiological state (Heart Rate, Respiratory Rate, Galvanic Skin Response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it."

There is no doubt that this will continue to evolve as the industry does. In fact One to One Interactive's OTOinsights division is currently working with other leading Neuromarketing research firms in the United States to establish the country's first Neuromarketing Association. I imagine that such effort will yield an even broader and more robust definition of this emerging industry.

Neuromarketing Defined

Below is a partial definition of Neuromarketing that I plan to use to update the current Wikipedia page dedicated to the subject  (which I feel is a bit dated and too narrowly focused):

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Neuromarketing is a new field of research which uses medical technologies and scientific method to study consumers sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.

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Thoughts, feedback, edits?

Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactive

Sociometrics

MIT Media Lab Professor Sandy Pentland discusses his efforts  using voice analysis and human physiology to develop metrics  associated with our body language to provide greater understanding of human interaction.

OTOinsight's t=Zero group to lead Game Expereince Research Workshop at CHI 2008 in Florence, Italy

Yesterday, OTOinsight's t=Zero was informed that it's  paper titled "Making Player Engagement Visible: A Multimodal Strategy for Game Experience Research" was accepted for presentation at the 2008 CHI Conference in Florence, Italy (April 5th-10th).

The workshop that t=Zero will lead will focus on  the relationships among neurological, physiological and cognitive assessments of engagement in ongoing and short duration gaming experiences. It is a centerpiece of an iterative strategy toward understanding and modeling relationships among different engagement measures. The research will lead to design proposals for model-based assessments of engagement calibrated to individuals’ responses. 

You may download and read our entire research proposal here: Making Player Engagement Visible: A Multimodal Strategy for Game Experience Research