FUTURE OF UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Consumers are getting exposed to new ideas, new choices, new channels such that we are constantly hitting a new normal. Expanding digital connectivity in large swathes of the world and maturing digital experiences in others, is allowing more and more consumers the opportunity to embrace, voice and practice their core beliefs.

Businesses that want to survive these massive shifts need to move faster and with higher accuracy to understand evolving consumer expectations. This requires unlocking new agile ways of understanding why consumers do what they do; what they want to experience; and how those experiences will drive purchase decisions.

Success lies in digging deeper into consumers’ subconscious realm and discover how their innate core believes function; influences their behavior; impacts their decisions; and how it is shifting.

Going subconscious

This is an emerging trend in the faculty of consumer behavior measurement. We are seeing a rapid proliferation of tools, technology and expertise in the measurement world to go beyond stated consumer responses and into reading their subconscious cues. There is tremendous amount of experimentation happening in the technology driven ecosystem to harness the power of consumer subconscious data. Right methodologies deployed within a trusted environment, can unearth unique insights about consumer behavior.

Some organizations have already tested and launched tools and techniques that are allowing us to go deeper and explore the fascinating world of subconscious behaviors.

Neuroscience

Consumers all wired up and a machine recording every brain activity, and each movement of the eyeball. It’s like a scene from a Star-wars movie or NASA. Its not. In controlled environments and with consumers’ consent, it is possible to get uncluttered data on subconscious consumer responses to visual stimulation. This data is then processed to distill a whole range of insights about the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.

Nielsen has been one of those companies that has worked to develop and deploy this technique into the consumer world for some time now. Over the years they have developed the technology to be nimbler, faster and cost effective to deploy, which were a barrier to a wider adoption in its early stages.

While this is still a relatively new tool for consumer facing businesses, organizations have started to implement it. There are several examples of businesses leveraging neuroscience in the areas of new product launches, communication testing, brand positioning and consumer experience across sectors.

However, there are challenges to its widespread adoption. It’s still not out of the controlled labs. The whole setup environment is quite controlled and that adds bias. Plus, the whole process still takes a fair amount of time to execute and get insights. There is a huge potential to make this technology even smaller and easier to deploy and moving it more and more into natural consumer settings and out of controlled labs.

Emotional Analytics

A great actor is one that conveys her true feelings via her facial expressions; highs and lows of her voice; and the power of words in her dialogues. Even before the ‘talkies’, actors in silent movies expressed themselves only with their actions and facial expressions.

While those are conscious acts performed by trained actors, consumers express what they feel via their facial expressions, tone of voice, and words they use on their social media posts.

Tools are being developed to identify what all these cues tell us about emotions of a consumer at a given point in time and connecting it to a context to understand what may have caused it.

While social media analytics has been around for a while, facial and voice analytics are a very new space. We see organizations specializing in specific areas like facial, voice and text analytics. We are yet to see a tool that consolidates all aspects to provide a comprehensive single point of truth.

Early adoption of video analysis and facial recognition has been in public security related aspects, as the technology can measure units in a large space. More recently, the technology is moving on to ‘at-the-moment’ measurement of consumer experience with images, places and transactions. This is an exciting transition and holds a lot of potential for growth.

Privacy concerns will remain an important barrier for this technology to get over. There have been unsettling instances in the recent past, where some technology companies, who have most of consumer data, have not come out looking good. That being said, we are not seeing a significant consumer pull back from such platforms. There is, however, expectation that market forces like regulatory frameworks and civil actions, will bring more transparency and rigor to protect consumers. Consumers remain open to build a Value Exchange relationship where they get a fair return on their data.

Digital Data

Every time consumers access information from a wide range of devices; consume digital video content; make online purchases; or connect with friends on social media, they leave a massive trove of digital footprint.

Several larger organizations are beginning to use sophisticated big data driven AI tools to analyse this information and glean meaningful and actionable insights about consumers’ subconscious behavior that shows clear pattern of behavior.

It’s not an easy feat. Not only does this requires massive computing and data storage capabilities and sophisticated algorithms, more importantly it requires acute understanding of the human behind the data.

While digital data measurement provides speed and unbiased understanding of consumer behavior, we are some distance from tested tools that could provide seamless and reliable ‘always on’ measurement ecosystem that could connect with existing data environment within organizations.

360° Analytics Framework - Bringing it all Together

At some point in time, it would even be possible to bring all the relevant faculties of measurement and data from various sources to build a comprehensive consumer behavior analytics framework. One that would have metadata from digital, transactional, emotional, neuro and other data sources, incubated in a trusted eco-system. We have got to be excited about what’s ahead.

This ‘Always On’ measurement of consumer behavior will bring faster and deeper insights to decision makers. We need to see an acceleration of tools to be able to achieve this. We also need to see resources as well as organizational structures that could enable measurement as well as seamless execution within an organization.

Way Forward – Trusted Agility

As we get into the 4th industrial revolution and new innovations ignite the customer centricity ecosystem, an organization that wishes to stay relevant, needs to redefine Business as Usual. Sound decision making still requires robust analysis based on trusted data and trusted methods. However, measurement mechanisms need to innovate to keep pace with rapid changes.