Ever wondered why research predictions are continually proved wrong? Or put another way, why people tell researchers one thing and then do quite another? Market research agency Conquest is to launch, on 6th November, a brand new research tool called Automatix at the Nonconscious Impact Measurement Forum in NYC.
For the first time, avatar-led online technology is blended with cognitive science, and enhanced implicit testing is fused with innovative metaphoric animation, to reveal the truth about brands, advertising and products.
Automatix is an industry game changer. Recent developments in cognitive science and behavioural economics have forced marketers to admit that the consumer mind, formerly thought to be entirely rational and accessible via direct and laborious questioning, is in fact dominated by implicit processing (i.e. emotional, intuitive, quick). This means that most current techniques lack a vital component to measure our innermost and most powerful driving forces that actually inform our actions, one that can channel our Implicit Mind (aka Kahneman’s System 1).
The method has already been tested with both Heinz and Ebay with extraordinary success, revealing implicit messages from advertising which traditional, explicit testing might easily have missed. Indeed, Conquest believes that as many as 30% of ads fail conventional tests yet should have been progressed.
Automatix builds on Conquest MD, David Penn’s award winning breakthroughs of the last few years which have already garnered the agency 11 award nominations, commendations and prizes. Building on breakthroughs in cognitive sciences, it bypasses clunky verbal questioning, busting open our emotional processing to reveal the genuine and often irrational criteria beneath.
It works in two ways: Conquest’s fast priming methodology uses speed of reaction and accuracy in a word association task to obviate the need for explicit questions, minimising cognitive interference, while Conquest’s gameified and avatar-led animations present the respondent with a series of online visual metaphors to engage with - allowing attitudes to be expressed intuitively without the need for words or numbers. Findings are then merged to construct a more nuanced picture; drilling further into consumers’ minds to expose hidden and overlooked associations.
Source: Conquest
