Tag Archives: Heat Map

Is Market Research Precisely Wrong?

Posted on by
Reply
Share

There is a fundamental problem with most market research. David Ogilvy, the ‘Father of Advertising’, recognised it:

 

“People don’t do what they say, don’t say what they think, and don’t think how they feel.”

Traditional methods of market research focus on what can be gleaned from the conscious mind largely because until recently the tools to investigate the subconscious mind were not readily available.

THiNK Eyetracking has recently completed a comparison study of an award wining national advertising campaign that clearly shows the difference in conscious and unconscious responses to advertising. Continue reading →

Visual Saliency Vs Eye tracking Heatmaps

Posted on by
Reply
Share

Visual saliency programs exist that are intended to be a cheap alternative, or preliminary step to eyetracking. The basic premise is that our visual attention is drawn to areas of high visual salience, so without testing actual people, we can figure out what people are going to look at in a visual display.

A free version of this software is Fen Gui. On their website they have a very clear explanation of the different visual elements such as contrast, colour, intensity etc. that contribute to visual saliency. Also presented is a comparison with actual eye tracking data. The similarity shown is fairly compelling, but we decided to conduct our own tests… after all if this gives the same results as eye tracking, why would anyone pay the time and expense for eye tracking?

We compared saliency heatmaps with eyetracking heatmaps across a broad range of mediums, webpages, emails, print advertising, packaging, and outdoor scenes. Not surprisingly, the mediums with text were extremely different as the saliency heatmaps do not take into account people’s motivations, but focuses just on potential visual engagement. This isn’t particularly interesting, what is more interesting is how the saliency heatmaps compare to the eyetracking heatmaps for more purely visual mediums such as packaging and outdoor scenes.

Why task is important in eye tracking research

Posted on by
3
Share

This is something that is very familiar at academic eye tracking conferences in fact every other paper refers to it, but I don’t ever recall seeing it in the commercial sector.

In 1967 Yarbus eye tracked people viewing the painting “They did not expect him” by Repin. The instructions given to the participants varied from, among other, free examination, to the people’s ages, and how long the visitor had been away.

In the gaze plots below, you will see significant differences depending on the instruction given.

At this point, probably needless to say, when using eye tracking in market research, it is very important to give appropriate instructions to the participants, and when analysing heatmaps to know what instruction was given.

In our ThinkPack eyetracking  test for the FMCG and CPM market, we show participants two planograms, but give them different tasks with each one as we are investigating two different shopping experiences and elements of the pack performance. With the first planogram we are interested in the customer’s free shopping behaviour to see how well the product stands out on the shelf: Do people notice the product? With the second planogram we are interested in how easy it is to find the specific product: Do people confuse the product with another one? Does the product branding stand out?

In the first heatmap below, participants were asked to shop for deodorant. They were to take a look at the shelf and click on the product they would choose to purchase.

In the second heatmap, participant were again asked to shop for deodorant, but to buy “Formula 1 Performance” deodorant as their friend had recommended it. You can see two very different heatmaps are produced.

Just to reiterate the message here; when designing eye tracking research be careful what task you give to the participants, and when drawing conclusions from eye tracking outputs be aware of the task given. It is not easy to control your eyes, but it is actually fairly easy to control what people look at during an eye tracking exercise simply by giving particular tasks. That said, you need to be careful that the outputs are not a result of inappropriate tasks.

Cuing customers to look at your key messages

Posted on by
3
Share

This is an example we have used for several years and came out of some very early research we did with JCDecaux, but we have never put it into a blog, so I thought I’d revisit it here.

In the research, one of the questions we were exploring was how visual attention can be directed through elements of an advertisement. One such cuing element we investigated was the models visual attention. Most beauty and hair care advertisements follow a basic template of the model looking out engaging with the viewer and a pack shot sharing a significant amount of the ad real estate also. An example of this is the Sunsilk advertisement below, along with a heatmap of 200 people viewing it.

Note that there is very little attention on the pack shot and brand logo. In fact just 6% of the people looked at the pack!

What happens if the model is engaging with the product rather than the viewer? We photoshopped the ad and turned the models eye to the pack shot. See the results below:

This tiny change had a profound effect. 84% of the viewers now looked at the pack! This is 14 times more people looking at the pack. You can also see that there is overall greater engagement with the ad, including more attention to the brand logo at the bottom.

I‘m not suggesting that every ad should have the model looking at the product or key message, but using the model’s gaze can be a very effective way of guiding the viewers gaze and communicating key messages.