It’s what every marketer would like to know: how do consumers try to find their preferred brands in increasingly overloaded supermarket shelves? Where do they focus their attention?
The use of state-of-the-art technology to study eye movements, combined with recent advances in statistics, seems to be the key to gain a deeper understanding about how consumers’ allocate attention. What is going on in consumers’ minds during this process?
door: Ralf van der Lans, Rik Pieters en Michel Wedel
in: Journal of the American Statistical Association
helemaal lezen: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asa/jasa/2008/00000103/00000482/art00005
dat kost: 23.50 dollar
Recent research used eye movements to get more insights into consumers’ attention allocation. This type of studies is fostering the emergence of a new set of strategies to enrich the marketers’ toolbox - visual marketing – which tries to manipulate consumer attention towards specific pieces of information.
The authors conducted an experiment where 106 consumers had to search for a certain brand of coffee (the target brand) in a computer-simulated supermarket shelf. The search task was designed to be realistic and the consumers eye movements were recorded using a technology called infrared corneal reflection eye tracking.
Their findings suggest that consumers create a mental map of the ’scene’ they are facing to efficiently guide their attention towards the goal of finding the target brand. Thus, by carefully manipulating features of the ’scene’, marketers can influence consumers’ attention processes. Two findings deserve special note.
Blue!
First, colour matters. Only the target brand had blue in its package. Therefore, blue was a more diagnostic colour than the more common red colour, and consumers that focused on blue found the target brand faster and more accurately. Second, luminance also interfered with consumer search. On average, consumers first directed their attention to darker regions but there were large differences between consumers.
In short, current technology (eye tracking and statistical modelling techniques) is facilitating the emergence of visual marketing. Firms can gain important competitive advantages by increasing the attention-grabbing features of their packages, products, ads, stores, websites, etc.
Why did I have to read this?
- Because brand managers might consider investing in packages that differentiate their brand from its closest competitors (e.g. in terms of colour, shape, etc). Distinctive features should be clearly communicated through other marketing actions (e.g. advertising), to motivate consumers to focus their attention on such features in the store.
- Because in the future, when further research clarifies the role of luminance, retailers might consider investing in shelves capable of providing brand-specific illumination levels; retailers can even negotiate such illumination levels with manufacturers in order to offer optimal levels of illumination for certain brands.
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