LONDON - Emotion Tool, developed by Danish company iMotions, uses cognitive psychology and neuroscience research to measure the reaction of consumers to images. The premise is that the tool can help marketers choose the right adverts and direct marketing images for their audience, based on the assumptions that marketing must affect the consumer on an emotional level to affect behaviour.
User experience consultancy User Vision launched Emotion Tool in the UK in February. It is already sold in the US, Continental Europe, Russia and Mexico. Emma Kirk, strategic director of User Vision, says: "Emotion Tool gives us even richer information to help clients and designers make decisions."
Who's doing it?
IMotions says there are no local case studies for Emotion Tool because the application only launched in the UK two months ago.
Carat Denmark has tested the software on adverts and published the results in Markedsfoering, a Danish marketing journal. In one example, two Garnier hair-product advertisements were tested - one with an anonymous female model and another with well-known local actress Sidse Babett-Knudsen. The anonymous version generated a better emotional response, which the researchers attributed to the fact that Babett-Knudsen was hard to recognise in the ad.
Simon Kershaw, creative director at TDA, agrees that eliciting an emotional response is important for direct marketing, as it is for other forms of advertising.
However, he believes the Emotion Tool is limited by the fact that it focuses on the response of individuals. "There can be no emotional response without a rational response," he says. "Products now are not just chosen by an individual but often by a family or group."
Whether DM clients would pay for this sort of research is a moot point. "It's not easy to get the budgets together to do fundamental research (on DM) and this is a nice-to-have at best," Kershaw adds.
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