Ads that play eye spy
The world of marketing. It’s definitely a ruthless place to be. See when you’ve got a huge client breathing down your neck, it’s all about doing whatever it takes to get consumers to part with their hard earned cash. So we’re now seeing more and more market researchers upping their game. And in ways you would never have thought possible.
How about a poster that has the intelligence to stare right back at you? Freaky? Maybe. Clever? Oh yes.
By investing in eye tracking techniques researchers can see what’s caught the customer’s eye, in what order and for how long. Once designers are let in on this knowledge they can then rejig their layout to make it more effective.
Stretch this system to things like shop displays, and sporting sponsorship and you’ve got a winner on your hands. No question. There’s a lot more to it here: eyetracking.com
Raising the volume on this subject is fMRI. That’s short for functional magnetic resonance imaging and it’s all about eavesdropping on consumer’s brain activity. So if the consumer’s brain flashes a recognised emotion after seeing an ad, marketing people will be in the know, as soon as: howstuffworks.com
The word limitation doesn’t mean anything to these people.
Read more about how technology could tell researchers about the mind of a consumer:
drdavidlewis.co.uk
If you want to work in this area you could become:
- A market researcher helping to steer a product design, description and brand to make it appeal to the consumer
- An interviewer talking to consumers about products and collecting information
- A marketing manager developing a brand image
- A product designer designing and developing a product and package
- A public relations officer promoting the product to consumers and the people selling it
- A psychologist researching ways to link our responses to our feelings and emotions
- A mathematician devising techniques to analyse consumers responses
- A cognitive scientist developing new techniques to look at a person’s subconscious and interpreting their responses
- An electrical engineer constructing equipment to view and record consumers responses
- A software developer creating software to analyse consumer responses