Published 19 October 2018
Don’t underestimate the significant role of emotion in advertising. Behavioural Economics (BE) and Biometrics in advertising research has rekindled debate about the role of emotional engagement in effective communication.
It’s good that this discourse is alive and well as we have always known that feelings or System One thinking are inherently important to engagement and involvement. Qualitative researchers have been effectively observing the role of emotion in communication for many years and helping advertisers realise its powerful role.
The question is, can qual researchers actually read the emotional impact of an ad, as well as behavioural or biometric measures?
The answer is ‘yes of course!’ and this is how we’ve been doing it…
Qualitative researchers despite beliefs to the contrary, are lovers of System One thinking. They love observing and sensing all that is unsaid, irrational, subconscious, pre-conscious and contradictory in people – which is why just listening to what a focus group says is not enough to understand why they feel that way.
Qualitative researchers must be extra-intuitive by nature and are experts in unpicking super-complex, multi-faceted data on the go. In fact, in advertising research most of the data lies outside of what is said. We need to rely on brain power and experience to help us analyse and intuitively ‘read’ System 1 and gut reactions.
According to Charles Darwin, for the human being to survive and develop as a social animal on the African Savannah over millions of years, it needed to develop the capacity to intuitively read all emotional states as expressed in the eyes and body language of other people. Some argue we are innately adept at reading approximately 7000 subtle emotions (or variations of emotions) simply through expressions in the eyes and body language. Just from expressions of the eyes, we can read incredibly subtle feelings from disgust, through to fantasizing, contemplation and all those subtle things we express.
Much of what we are listening to in discussions are ‘utterances’ or fragments of language that are not censored or controlled. Language can reveal honest data through subconsciously expressed elements like tone, intonation and emphasis.
And like body language and eye movements, our supercomputer brains can read these sound-symbols that are windows to the subconscious. We often forget that sound is symbolic – just listen one more time to the famous ‘riff’ of Beethoven’s Fifth.
It must mean something for everyone to remember it like power, authority and confidence.
So if someone tries to tell you that people cannot talk about advertising or their feelings, think again. Not everything that comes out of one’s mouth makes sense and is censored. We give our subconscious away verbally all the time.
Whilst some BE theorists might have us believe that we can never accurately report our feelings, this is absolutely not the case. Humans can emote and interpret at the same time – not all decision making is completely irrational!
Sometimes System One and System Two work well to get across the facts as they are and not all reported data about our feelings is wrong.
If Charles Darwin is correct about our innate ability to read each other’s feelings in order to function in groups, we must also be gifted at reading our collective mood. This is also how qualitative researchers understand the emotional qualities of communication in discussions – by intuiting the atmosphere in the room. In group discussions people come together sometimes to collectively ‘tell’ you how they are feeling through degrees of engagement, involvement and interaction between respondents. If they start arguing, refusing to contribute or all nodding at the same time, it can say more than a thousand words about emotions.
To help researchers read 7000 subtle emotions from individual to collective, qualitative researchers have a toolset of projective techniques (such as guided visualisations, analogy and drawings) to help uncover all things System One.
Projective techniques have never gone out of vogue but they are being given a new validity in the BE age. Qual research can get people to do things they are not good at censoring, like drawing and photo-sorting to get to emotions.
Understanding emotion in advertising can be particularly diagnostic and strategic. Saying emotion is complex is an understatement. The exact number of human emotions is contentious but considered large.
We also know that there are many subtle emotions that we don’t even have words for in the English language. The Germans for example have a word for ‘the feeling of being lost in the woods’ and the Scottish have one for ‘the feeling on your upper lip prior to having a scotch’.
Biometric data, EEG and eye tracking might tell us which part of the brain is being stimulated, but can it tell us the precise emotions we are feeling, for example certain special feeling of wanting to cuddle something because it is unbearably cute? Can it tell us what might make or break that special moment?
Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a world that honours the servant and forgotten the gift.” As qualitative researchers we would agree.
We are talented ‘intuitors’ of people, and in the world of human communication, intuition is a legitimate product.
Get in touch with the Ruby Cha Cha team. Email us at info@rubychacha.com.au or contact us here.
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