Listen Openly to Signals

Dagny Scott, Director of Cultural and Business Insights, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky

When I was a young woman taking some time to vagabond around the country after graduate school, I worked as a waitress. Amid the din of the morning rush of a Santa Fe café, I would make the rounds refilling coffee cups, a pot in each hand, asking “regular or decaf?” It was the simplest of questions, begging the simplest of answers. Yet I realized instantly on many occasions after the customer had answered that I had no idea which pot to pour from. Because the question had become robotic—asked dozens of times over the course of the morning—I simply didn't hear the answer. In short, I was no longer listening.

That is a scenario to which many of us can relate. And here's another one: Who hasn't been speaking with a partner or colleague when conversation gets heated? You may be acting like you're listening, but you're simply using the time to rehearse in your mind exactly what you are going to say the moment he or she finishes. Any listening that's being done at that point is an act of gymnastics, in which you twist and turn the incoming words to confirm or deny your own worldview.

Most of us tend to think of listening as a passive activity. However, it is not. We also tend to think that listening occurs without judgment; that it is an objective, factual reception of information. On this count, too, we often fool ourselves. Our ears are not receptacles, and words are not facts. Listening, in fact, takes work.

What does all this have to do with our industry? Everything. While listening now refers to something specific in terms of brand conversations and communications, it must be rooted in the very human principle from which the word originated for it to function meaningfully. And frankly, we're pretty lousy at that. So it stands to reason that we might not be as great at the advertising application of listening, either.

This is not a new problem by any means. A century ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair wrote about the difficulty of getting a man to see truth when his salary relies upon his not seeing it. Likewise, today, it is difficult for corporate players to truly listen when their business model relies on legacy practices, their performance is measured by old metrics, and their bonuses are predicated upon short-term gain that discourages making course changes.

We see what passes for listening all the time, but it's a thin brew, watered down with preconceived notions, previously whittled-down questions, a narrowly construed set of concepts, and an outcome in which the interest is already vested. Discovery—true discovery, borne of open-ended listening—is rare indeed. That's because the upshot is often hard work, work that might overturn those notions, upset those plans, and force a recasting of goals.

On the other side of the equation is the environment in which we attempt to listen. With chatter and noise growing ever louder, it's hard to recognize the core of what's being said. We live amid a relentless torrent of headlines—no longer printed, of course, and generated by everyone. Gravitas and goofiness alike are mashed and flattened into one indiscriminate ticker tape of bits: An earthquake devastates Haiti. A boy floats away in a balloon. The markets are up. A video goes viral. Jobs are lost. An affair is revealed. The markets are down. The images and headlines beget the next moment's images and headlines. The news of the day, large and small, comes and goes; it's always something else tomorrow, though it's always somewhat the same, too. Each screen flickers and dies, flickers and dies, one spot in the great pointillism that is culture today. New networks form, the swarm moves. You must get in. You must be big. You must know what's happening. You can't miss this wave. Wait, never mind; it's something else already.

The headlines, the fragments, and the connections combine, filling our world, becoming our world itself. The noise grows louder. But we confuse the rise of Twitter and the fall of Hummer with the real news. So we race to “get in” on Twitter, not realizing that by the time we do, something else will have taken its place. We fail to see that Twitter is a symptom, an advantageous play at the intersection of larger forces—instead of the force itself. Not realizing that we have confused listening with reacting.

To truly listen implies no presumption, nor any judgment. However, it is not an empty act. To truly listen is the hard, Zen work of actively creating and maintaining a beginner's mind. To listen, one should be prepared to do something that does not come naturally: Be open to feeling uncomfortable. Try as you might to remember this when you claim to be “listening” to the consumer and to culture. Remember the lessons you have learned, from your partner, your child, your friends, your life. Remember what it means to listen first as a human being.

Biometrics: Source for Listening Insights

Carl D. Marci, MD, Co-founder, CEO, and Chief Science Officer, Innerscope Research, Inc.

There is an interesting dichotomy around using biometric tools for listening in the market research industry right now. Some brands and companies consider this kind of research to be a future tool for tomorrow, while others view it as a reality occurring today. The latter group is collaborating with companies like Innerscope Research to listen to unconscious emotional responses in order to brand messages across a variety of stimuli.

Most Fortune 100 companies have adopted biometric research to some degree, and are testing throughout the world. Since these study results are regarded as a competitive advantage, many have opted not to publicize their findings yet. However, the power of this listening approach should be accessible to all researchers. My views on the role of neuroscience-based tools for listening are grounded in my experience leading Innerscope, an active and growing company with over five years working in the market with many large businesses and brands.

Innerscope listens to the biologically based signals of the unconscious in order to gain a better understanding of consumer engagement with brands and marketing messages on any platform. These signals are the embodiment of emotional response, generating signature responses that are direct outputs from the brain.

Our brains are the ultimate multitaskers; they're constantly doing multiple things at the same time. The explosion of knowledge that has recently emerged from multiple scientific fields—especially affective neuroscience—is more than relevant to how business can listen even more closely to emotional experience. The lessons we've learned form the foundation of new approaches to measuring the unconscious. Some key tenets include:

• Emotions are the primary drivers of human behavior. This is due in large part to the fact that the brain's emotional centers process information before it reaches cognitive areas. As a result, unconscious emotional responses significantly influence conscious thinking.
• Emotions efficiently tell us which bits of information to engage and which to ignore. The bits we emotionally engage are the most relevant on an unconscious level. Emotional processing directs attention, enhances learning, and influences memory.
• There are no direct connections between the emotional centers and the language centers of the brain, so it is difficult for people to accurately report their emotional experiences consciously. By listening to unconscious emotional engagement through biological responses, we eliminate conscious biases from the research process altogether.

Using our biometric technology platform in combination with eye tracking, Innerscope measures these subtle, unconscious responses as they occur, by processing signals of heart rate, respiration, skin sweat, motion, and visual attention.

However, you also need to understand what you hear, and put that listening effort to work. Every Innerscope study has yielded new insight for us, and actionable direction for the businesses listening with us. Some of my personal favorites include our Super Bowl studies and our work with the Campbell Soup Company.

An earlier reference in Chapter 18 to the results of our 2008 Super Bowl study mentioned one of our findings: that the greater the emotional engagement, the more downloads and comments an ad contributed to online share of voice. We have run the study each year since, in an effort to keep the research fresh.

A unique finding from the 2009 Super Bowl centered on the economy. Historically, ads using economic themes had never scored particularly high in emotional engagement across our ad database. Yet during the very early stages of the great recession in February 2009, people were already showing signs of sensitivity to the economy in their unconscious emotional responses. Our top Super Bowl ads were Careerbuilder.com (need a new job?) and Cash4gold.com (need to liquidate some assets?). While people were not able to verbalize the anxiety that the burgeoning economic situation caused, their biometric responses were communicating it clearly. This adds to the considerable scientific literature supporting how the unconscious subtly affects behavior long before we are able to consciously identify that an effect occurs or express why it is taking place.

For the Super Bowl in 2010, Innerscope partnered with Wired magazine for an “ultra geeky Super Bowl party” that married studying the ads with a party for loyal readers. Listening to this specific audience segment was not going to provide a representation of the general public; however, it would tell us what was most relevant to the trendy, tech-savvy, digitally conscious millennial generation. Our Top Ten list did not look anything like the other lists in circulation. Wired readers were most engaged with ads for video games, gadgets, free food, and Google, findings that make sense in the context of listening to this target audience.

More specifically, our top-performing ad for Electronic Art's video game Dante's Inferno was listed as one of the “weakest ads” in rankings from other measurement services. Importantly, the game itself had received weak reviews from other gamers at the time of its initial release. After the Super Bowl ad aired, the game became the top-selling original-title video game for the first quarter of 2010. Again, it makes sense that Wired's readership would respond emotionally to an ad that was relevant to them, and that this group represents a sample of the population that propelled game sales early in the year.

Another example of how listening to biometric signals translates into actionable insights for businesses can be seen in our recent work with the Campbell Soup Company. The company embarked on a multiyear research exploration of consumer experiences of Campbell's products, both in the home and the grocery store soup aisle. By listening to how the customer interacts with the soup aisle from a biometric and eye-tracking perspective, Innerscope helped Campbell Soup determine new ways to organize the category and shelves for easier navigation of core products. New ideas about clustering product options around benefits leverage the way people are naturally inclined to search for soup. Given that a lot of shoppers make grocery store purchases on impulse, this is a critical area for insights into what is going on unconsciously during those moments.

One of the greatest advantages of biometric research and listening to unconscious signals is that business is able to anticipate what consumers are going to think and do based on how they feel—even though customers are not able to consciously express it. This applies to questions at any level, from basic decisions of “go or no go” for ad creative to the complexities of “where do we go from here” marketing strategy. By drawing on a variety of lessons and best practices on unconscious responses to television, print, radio, online, and out-of-home, Innerscope is developing models of advertising effectiveness that are relevant for the ever-evolving media landscape.

The future of biometric research itself is all about listening to the consumer's unconscious, and connecting the dots to business decision making. Studies in both market research and academia have shown that emotional responses have a stronger relationship to brand attitudes and purchase intent than other more cognitively based measures of advertising effectiveness. Innerscope's own work with clients has also provided examples of our unconscious emotional engagement metric clearly linked to all stages of the path to purchase, from attracting attention to seeking new information to purchase behavior. Market and media research is truly on the front lines of discovery and has just started work to uncover the relationships between biometrics and other critical business metrics.

The lesson here? Make listening on multiple levels the core of what you do. With each opportunity to listen to what consumers feel and engage in, use the evolving conscious measurement tools and the new tools of unconscious biometric measurement to become savvier marketers with a greater appreciation for the true consumer experience.