Orlando Wood, the managing director of market research company BrainJuicer, outlined the psychology behind how human beings react to brands at day two of the conference in Brighton.
He said the way that choices are framed has a bearing on the decisions that people make and that insight can be highly valuable for better market research.
Wood said: "We put people under time pressure. We give them five seconds to make a choice. What we found is that this predicts decision making in reality much better than giving people time to think too much."
He said Andrex had "dramatically" increased its sales by applying that technique when asking people to choose between their products.
Traditional opinion polling was also less effective than this technique, he said, as evidenced by the widespread failure of pollsters to predict the result of this year’s General Election.
Wood said: "Instead of asking how likely to buy it we ask what if you owned shares in these brands. By harnessing people’s social sense and getting people to do it quickly we’re better able to predict what’s going on in the market place.,
To predict how effective ads will be marketers should ask people how they feel about them, Wood said.
He explained: "We ask in our brain whether an experience is good bad or indifferent. If those emotional centres are damaged in your brain you’ll find it very difficult to make a decision.
"So we ask people how they feel about an advert. With the IPA’s effectiveness data we’ve shown you can predict the effectiveness of on ad just by asking people how they feel. It’s a better predictor than traditional processes that require people to think too much."
.jpg)
.jpeg)
