Get real focus from your customers – try something different from focus groups

How do you choose between different creatives? It helps greatly if you can get answers to the following:

  • Is the creative going to make consumers look at the brand and the product?
  • Which creative will have better brand recall?
  • Which creative has the clearest marketing message?
  • Under realistic circumstances will the key messaging get through at all? Do they get the message from the limited time exposure?

Historically, answers to the above have been difficult (or impossible) to obtain. Account managers and clients have had to rely on their own judgement and results from generally expensive focus groups. Both give limited insight into what customers will really do.

Focus groups can produce some good insight when used in the right circumstances. They give the consumer a voice, but they don’t give insight into the consumer mind or emotional attachment. Unfortunately what the mind thinks, the voice often doesn’t say. Consumers can’t always tell you how they will behave, instead you need an alternative approach to see how consumers actually behave with your product and/or campaign.

A quick example.

Of the two designs below which would you sign off?

And now? – with looking at the eyetracking heatmaps produced by testing with real consumers (the hotter the spot the more the consumers looked in that area).

Changing where the model looks changes consumer behaviour. In the advert where the model looked at the product (instead of out of the page) consumers spent a proportionately longer time looking at the product name than the strap line. For this ‘cued’ advert subsequent recall tests showed that the product name was also more frequently remembered.

Well yes we know its a trivial example – but you get the picture. Subtle changes can change behaviour substantially – and it is only by measuring the real behaviour that we can tell this.

Eyetracking provides a new and sophisticated form of consumer testing that can easily match the cost of your focus groups and provide insight into what your consumers do, think and recall about your product and campaign.

Test real impact

Give us a single or a range of creatives and we can provide you with key insights into what people really pay attention to. You can use this information to choose between a set of competing designs, or to drive improvements in an iterative fashion.

Our tests will show you the effectiveness of the portrayal of your brand and key messages under realistic conditions – we place the designs in the most appropriate setting and test what people actually do.