Measuring brand awareness is relatively easy but when it comes to measuring how consumers really feel about brands many come unstuck.
However - facial coding, a technique originated by Charles Darwin and refined by Dr. Paul Ekman through his Facial Coding Action System (FACS) - provides part of the answer. For the past decade I have used the analysis of facial muscle activity to gauge objectively people's real-time reactions to branding efforts.
As alluded to in my article for Marketing, corporations and companies using facial coding vary across sectors of the economy. But our results have unearthed a few key points that readers can be on the look-out for in their own branding efforts:
- Authenticity - in a world of spin, consumers are ever more dubious of being sold to rather than choosing to buy. High production values used to be the gateway in to assuring consumers that the brand is high-quality. Now, edgier, more cinema verité production values can serve the reverse purpose of affirming authenticity, ultimately more important in a commercial world where quality is now a presumed "given" that fails to differentiate your brand.
- Humanity - our testing repeatedly finds that the use of big, abstract words, delivered in a generic manner, is the kiss of death. Without a voice that escapes feeling like the equivalent of an answering machine message, companies can't connect with consumers. Unusual word choices, changes in cadence - anything to avoid being merely slick - is vital if consumers are going to feel engaged rather than simply manipulated.
- Organic unity - remember the old Three Dog Night song, "One," with the refrain: "One is the loneliest number"? Well, in branding it's true. Great branding has unity; it doesn't veer all over the place, piling gimmick upon gimmick. The testing of the TV spots of Geico's car insurance brand shows that it has a much greater impact than those of better-financed rival insurance brands because the overall tonality of the various brand campaigns have an ironic, yet fetching sensibility in common. You can identify them, and with them, immediately. Emotions are highly contagious, and Geico builds its own momentum as we see from a higher degree of emotional engagement than flat-footed, conventional brand advertising.
Dan Hill, is founder and President of Sensory Logic and the author of Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success, published by Kogan Page, www.koganpage.com