Mind Your Avatars
Research agency Conquest has launched ‘Metaphorix’, a new online tool to measure unconscious emotional reactions to brands using online animations and avatars in its research process. Conquest believes this differentiation enables access to consumers’ gut reactions by bypassing the conscious mind.
David Penn Conquest co-founder comments: “Much current research is past its sell-by date. It assumes brand decisions are conscious, explicable and rational. In reality our behaviour and our response to brands is highly emotional. As consumers we say one thing and do another. Our behaviour is not logical, considered, conscious or easily accessed via standard questioning.”
While consumers are constantly bombarded with information, there simply isn’t time to think, says Penn, so emotions power much of our engagement with brands, and we use unconscious shortcuts to help us make decisions.
Metaphorix is designed to plug directly into how good, excited, desirous we really feel towards a brand, rather than rely on how we say we feel. In this way, the tool facilitates measuring the warmth experienced towards a brand, the level of intimacy we feel with it, how empathetic we are towards it and how ‘cool and talked about’ we consider it is.
