How does response time testing work? Richard talks to Associate Professor Bart Norre about his experiences utilizing and teaching response time testing as part of his classes on neuromarketing at the School of Management in Fribourg. Professor Norre talks about measuring the time it takes for a subject to answer simple yes-no-maybe questions to set a baseline on their response times before getting into subject matter questions - and how response times can show what are beliefs versus rationalizations. The view into the subconscious can be disturbing at times, but also a powerful tool to help to understand how decisions are made!
Brandon Wehn (00:08):
Welcome to the show. This is Brandon Wehn and you are listening to the Understanding Consumer Neuroscience podcast, brought to you by the folks at CloudArmy. In this episode, Richard talks to Professor Bart Norre about how response time testing can be used to explore people's emotional responses and the role testing tools can play to help reach new audiences.
Richard Campbell (00:37):
Hi, this is Richard Campbell and thanks for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience. And today my guest is Bart Norre, who's an associate professor at the School of Management in Fribourg, which is Switzerland?
Bart Norre (00:48):
Yeah, absolutely, Switzerland.
Richard Campbell (00:50):
Fantastic and a great place. It's mountainous and every city is wildly different from the other. I'm always blown away when I'm in Switzerland, whether you're in Geneva or in Zurich or in Basel, you're in almost a different country each time. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It's exciting to have an academic on board.
Bart Norre (01:09):
Thank you for inviting me.
Richard Campbell (01:10):
You teach neuromarketing?
Bart Norre (01:12):
Yes, I teach neuromarketing since 11 years. I think I'm one of the first ones starting to teach this very exciting material.
Richard Campbell (01:20):
That's awesome. And what are your students, are they marketing professionals? Where do they come from?
Bart Norre (01:25):
Well, we have bachelor students and we have a master curriculum. So in both curriculums, I have been teaching neuromarketing over the past 11 years. They are economists, let's say general economists, we call it enterprise economics, what they study in our school.
Richard Campbell (01:46):
It's exciting to me the idea that there are students coming out with some understanding of the way we can communicate with people and effectively using tools like this.
Bart Norre (01:57):
Yes, exactly. Yes. My class is built on two pillars. One is the one I call neuromarketing fundamentals, where they learn the basic principles and then concepts of the non-conscious mind. And then, the second one is a playground where they learn how to create a brand that makes sense for this non-conscious mind. They learn how to organize a shopping environment so that it works more smoothly and reliably and they learn to work response and testing and how to interpret these data, which are slightly different from the classical data you could get.
Richard Campbell (02:33):
Yeah, I'm fascinated. How do you get an A in a brand simulation with that like that? What is the test to show that they've done a good job?
Bart Norre (02:43):
With the response and testing?
Richard Campbell (02:44):
Yeah.
Bart Norre (02:45):
Well, I let them choose one of the topics they want, and very often they go like if they are boys, sometimes they want to know what is the real difference, what are the brand attributes that are related to BMW, Audi, Mercedes, and all these kinds of fancy things. Where girls are more into, they want to know about the differences in cosmetics and things like that because they of course spend a lot of money in there and they want to know what is really driving my purchase. Behind the fact is what I say why I buy the things, so this is what is this is offering.
Richard Campbell (03:25):
Of course, they're students. So the same way, they take a few psych classes to try and understand themselves. Now, they take a neuromarketing class and realize I am being affected by branding every day.
Bart Norre (03:34):
Yes, absolutely. And I must say that my real fundamental motivation is really to help them to get a better understanding of themselves. So at the end of my class, I give them a response time test. So I want to test with them a couple of statements, which one of them is that because of this class, I understand myself better and I get very good responses on that, but I get even better responses on the question because of this class, I understand other people's behavior better. That's very interesting.
Richard Campbell (04:09):
Of course, you do. What does that test look like as you were measuring their response time? So how do you measure that?
Bart Norre (04:15):
Well, in a response time test, you do not ask open questions. You ask close questions. And in fact, even more specifically, you give them affirmations and you ask them, do you agree with the statement? And they can answer yes or no or they can say hard to tell. So that's the first point. Now, what is interesting, why would you do response time testing is because we all know, and there is a lot of scientific evidence that with classical surveys, there's a lot of data that is biased by-
Richard Campbell (04:48):
How you ask the question.
Bart Norre (04:50):
Yes, biased by the fact what I think I should answer, what I think that would be normally the right response and this kind of biases that come into your data, which you will not be able to have if you have a response time testing. Because with response time testing, you clean the data from all this noise, I would call it, the noise that you get through to these biases.
Richard Campbell (05:16):
So is the test done on a computer? Are you measuring the time it takes to click on the yes or the no or the maybe?
Bart Norre (05:22):
Exactly, exactly. I mean, where classical surveys, you could do on paper, you would never be able to do a response time test on paper. I mean, in fact, we are using the abilities that we get from digitalizing a questionnaire on a computer or an iPhone or whatever kind of device, because we can measure something more than just the answer, which is how long do people take to get an answer.
Richard Campbell (05:51):
Now, you're measuring from the moment the question flashes up to the time that they click on one of the buttons?
Bart Norre (05:58):
Yes. But two important things, of course, before you measure speed, speed is like anything else in life. When you want to give you the value, it's relative. So it's relative to what, first of all, we're going to measure how fast do people read. So we give them long and short sentences in the beginning of the test, which can make that some people stop the test because in the beginning you get 20 sentences to read like that, and we just want to find out how fast do you read. So that's one important parameter. The second one is how fast do you interact with your device?
Richard Campbell (06:35):
Right. How quick are you with the mouse?
Bart Norre (06:37):
Yes. So how quickly you are with the mouse, or if you use your phone, you use your thumbs. So this is one important part to get an idea of whether an answer was fast or was slow.
Richard Campbell (06:49):
Right.
Bart Norre (06:49):
Whether-
Richard Campbell (06:50):
Because it's specific to the person.
Bart Norre (06:54):
Yes, exactly. There is no general measure. Of course, there are some measures around that tell you you need 500 milliseconds to produce a thought, but for some people, it might even be 900 and this morning, because I had some whiskey yesterday evening-
Richard Campbell (07:12):
You're a little slower.
Bart Norre (07:13):
It can be. Yeah, right.
Richard Campbell (07:17):
We are talking students, they may have behaved badly the day before.
Bart Norre (07:20):
That can be, yes, absolutely. That can absolutely be true. There is another important issue, of course, if you do response time testing, is that you must be sure that people are really reading the sentence. And how can you do that? Well, if people, for instance, at a certain moment in the questionnaire after 10 questions, think like I had it, it's enough, they might start answering, yes, yes, no, no, just to get it done. And if you have a good quality software, then you will normally also, based on how much time people spend on the previous sentences and words and characters, you can easily find out whether they are faking the answer or whether they are really answering.
Richard Campbell (08:09):
When they got impatient and just tried to race through, it's going to show in the time.
Bart Norre (08:12):
So we try also to capture rhythm and pace in the answering phase, so we have a really quite high quality data set that we can work with.
Richard Campbell (08:23):
I presume when you can see that someone's lost patience like that, it's just clicking away, you have to throw that data away. That's not a usable set of answers.
Bart Norre (08:31):
Exactly, yes. The software just invalidates the answers that are considered to be fake, yes.
Richard Campbell (08:38):
Right.
Bart Norre (08:39):
Based on this criteria.
Richard Campbell (08:41):
But it also means you can't do this in half a dozen questions. You need a bunch of baseline questions that measure this set of things. So you need someone's attention long enough to answer 30, 40 questions.
Bart Norre (08:53):
Yes, yes, yes. Well, but as you don't use open questions and as you use just simple affirmations, a test easily goes below five minutes. So it's not-
Richard Campbell (09:07):
Not that long.
Bart Norre (09:09):
... that long. But as you know, time is an emotion. So even if you have to answer 5 or 10 of these quite stupid questions, let's say, that we use to calibrate, it might be long, and we have dropouts. It's one of the problems we have with this kind of technology.
Richard Campbell (09:28):
Sure. I got to assume these questions that are the calibration questions have obvious answers that where they're not going to be affected by timing that much.
Bart Norre (09:38):
No, no, no. We are not interested in the timing. We are interested in measuring how much time you take, but we do not make an assessment whether this was a system one answer or a system two answer, if you like.
Richard Campbell (09:49):
Sure. But the length of the question varies so that you can get a sense of how fast they read. Do you keep the answer choices consistent? It's always yes, no, maybe?
Bart Norre (09:57):
It's always yes, no, and maybe, or I don't know or hard to tell, whatever.
Richard Campbell (10:03):
Whatever that is with an alternative. So again, it's not too much thinking. You're trying to change as few variables as possible to get a baseline for that person.
Bart Norre (10:14):
Yes, yes, yes.
Richard Campbell (10:15):
So given they can pay attention long enough to do 20 or so of these questions, now you have a sense of their consistency and how long it takes. What does the real question look like?
Bart Norre (10:28):
Oh, it really depends on the subject. If you have a brand questionnaire for instance, then you would say, let's say, "This brand makes me feel happy, or this brand is expressing friendship," things like that.
Richard Campbell (10:52):
Although it's always interesting to ask emotional words around a brand because I don't know that people rationally think about the emotions of a brand. But you are just measuring their hesitation at that point. How long does it take them to click on yes or no?
Bart Norre (11:09):
Exactly, exactly. Here, we are measuring hesitation because people who are not really answering fast below their threshold of system one, we consider it hesitation, which means today they can say yes, and tomorrow they can say no.
Richard Campbell (11:24):
Right, because they're rationalizing.
Bart Norre (11:25):
Yes, that's rationalization. Whereas a system one answer, I consider as a belief, and a belief is something that gives you security, and a belief as it gives you security about how the world is, you're not really ready to change it. And that's also why this technology becomes also very interesting for social studies. We did one social study on conspiracy theories, for instance. It's an extremely interesting technology to do so, but it's also a very nice technology to work in corporate fields to find out what people really think about their company. If you want to know what the culture of the company is, this technology is absolutely brilliant. There is no better.
Richard Campbell (12:09):
Yeah, I think that's fascinating to me. If you're not enamored of a conspiracy theory, often you're thinking people are playing at a conspiracy theory. But by this description, if you've now asked a set of questions that are already belief-based questions and you know the cadence that they would answer them at, and then they answer conspiracy theories positively at the same cadence, you are seeing that they believe them.
Bart Norre (12:32):
Yes. We are seeing that they believe in, and moreover, we're seeing that the probability that if you believe one, that you will believe another one is extremely high, can go up to 98%, and the lowest value we found was 88%.
Richard Campbell (12:49):
Wow.
Bart Norre (12:49):
So it's a bit scary, but it's what I said before, it's about believing and believing is about security. It's not about information, it's not about logic, it's about security, building security, and this is what is very actual today in the United States.
Richard Campbell (13:07):
Well, if you poke into people's subconscious, you get to see things, you're not actually going to be happy about it, but it is, you've now created a baseline so that you can see what they believe and not be made relationship with the brand and relationship with the conspiracy theory. That is shocking, but you've got to treat it accordingly. That's also useful.
Bart Norre (13:27):
Yes.
Richard Campbell (13:27):
So we have real data to work from that. And I mean, I've got to think in the duration of your class, you change people's perceptions on these things. I imagine if you test them at the beginning of the class, test them at the end of the class, you're going to get different results.
Bart Norre (13:41):
Absolutely, absolutely. I have not done that yet because the reason is because the timing between the beginning and the end of the class is only a couple of weeks.
Richard Campbell (13:52):
Oh, wow.
Bart Norre (13:52):
It's very concentrated. So it's quite difficult. I would need a couple of months to have a better, I would, say time difference to make this comparison really powerful and sustainable.
Richard Campbell (14:05):
Yeah, you'd want a whole semester, like two or three months to be able to-
Bart Norre (14:09):
Yes, exactly. I don't have, I don't have. It's not how it's organized in our school. But another interesting study I did and where we published also and presented our results was on colors. As you know in marketing, there's a lot of talk about if you use this color, it's going to mean this, and if you use that color, it's going to mean that. So okay, we said, "Let's test this with response and testing," because if you say this, well, is this really, first of all, is that so general as you say? And secondly, what does that mean if you apply? Because finally, in marketing it is should I have a red color in my brand or a green color or what does it mean?
(14:57):
So we tested red, green, and blue with five attributes we found in the literature as a firm, like this is the quality of this color. And we got some results. And of course, they were far from being so absolute as the literature was presenting us, because what we measure is what comes up automatically. What was more interesting is we took a can and we colored the can in the three colors, and we measured the same attributes we had with the colors. And what did we find out? That all the attributes dropped, the value of the attributes dropped, by which I mean that if even red for somebody means dynamic, let's say, for one attribute, and you apply it to a can, so for maybe 55%, we found out that there were automatic responses for color red dynamic, and on the can it dropped to 35.
Richard Campbell (15:51):
Interesting.
Bart Norre (15:51):
More interesting, it's getting more interesting. I was so surprised. I have an international research group with people from Lebanon and India and Poland, and we reproduce the test in these different cultures and we find out the same thing.
Richard Campbell (16:09):
Interesting. So it's almost like applying the red to the can was inappropriate. They don't actually associate red with cans.
Bart Norre (16:18):
No, no, no. To me, it's an illustration how mental models work. Are you familiar with Gestalt theory?
Richard Campbell (16:26):
Sure.
Bart Norre (16:27):
Yeah. Well, when we see a can, we know that it is a can because we have a mental model of a can in our hands.
Richard Campbell (16:34):
You're not actually seeing a can, you're seeing a picture of a can, but your mind is able to recognize it as a can and give you attributes to it.
Bart Norre (16:41):
And when you recognize a can, a lot of associations come with it, most of them, you're not even aware of it. Now, if you see red and a can, you have the mental model of red. You have the mental model of the can, and all this thing comes together and has to find their way. So I guess that the brain, and this seems our data seem to illustrate this, I guess, that the brain has to make choices and it cannot take everything of both models and has to mix what it gets from the red and what it gets from the can and make one out of it.
Richard Campbell (17:17):
And only when you get that intersecting diagram are they going to have a similar response and that's going to be a smaller number.
Bart Norre (17:23):
Yes, exactly.
Richard Campbell (17:25):
Because I do think color association, in my experience, has been very cultural. The Chinese culture perceives red differently than a North American culture perceives.
Bart Norre (17:36):
Well, absolutely. But that was not what we were measuring. We were measuring-
Richard Campbell (17:41):
No, but the can association to me is fascinating just because that's a whole other level.
Bart Norre (17:47):
Yes, yes. Exactly, exactly.
Richard Campbell (17:50):
And you're poking on this idea that we have a set of preconceived motions, and as soon as we start combining those things in marketing materials, we are narrowing the set. Fewer people are going to respond the same way.
Bart Norre (18:04):
Yes. And you could even say it even more strongly as we are seeing reality through our memories of our experiences. In fact, high is the probability that nobody sees the same thing the same way. That's a very provocative idea I launch here. But if you accept that what we see is built by the memories of our experiences, it cannot be the same. You don't have the same experiences as I do.
Richard Campbell (18:35):
No. We always look through the lens of our memories.
Bart Norre (18:38):
Yes. And we have a paper that will be published soon and which was absolutely, for us, a groundbreaking paper on that level. What we did is we took explicit data from one of our service during the COVID it was, explicit data, which means how many people said yes and how many people said no. And we took the implicit data, how many people said with high conviction yes, how many people said with high conviction no. And we use social network architecture statistics by which we built networks of similarities. What does that mean? We looked at are there people that are having the same ideas, have the same responses to the variables that we submitted to them? And what did we find is that in the explicit data, so you know whether you say yes or no, the group social network was much more homogeneous than in the implicit data, in the response time data.
Richard Campbell (19:44):
Interesting. It's almost counterintuitive.
Bart Norre (19:46):
Yes and no. No, it illustrates what I told you before is that this implicit data are the ones that are built by our experiences and are automatic answers that come up spontaneously. We do not control them. They're built by our experiences and our data shown that these experiences are different from one people to the other. And that's why the network is not so much similar as when you have explicit data where I know what I say, and that [inaudible 00:20:17] so we're very, very happy. It was a tough battle to get this paper published. We're very happy that it is going to be published in the coming weeks because it is a breakthrough for people in social science to stop using classical service and to start using response time testing.
Richard Campbell (20:35):
Right, because the data quality is clearly better.
Bart Norre (20:39):
Absolutely.
Richard Campbell (20:40):
If you just want to reinforce a viewpoint, go ahead, use your explicit data if you actually want to know how people think, you need that implicit data. And we happen to be recording this around the time of the American election, and we were talking about disinformation and conspiracy theory and so forth. We talk about reinforcement, repeated reinforcement of these distortions, of these lies, and whether or not it's actually affecting people. At some point, that social construct that we explicitly measure does press on the subconscious as well, that I have to wonder, when those things are repeated over and over again, they become truth, then the implicit starts to line up with the explicit.
Bart Norre (21:26):
Yes. And we did not need to wait for neuromarketing or neuroscience to notice as a junk in the '60s. Famous Stanford professor of social psychology already explained with the mere exposure effect that the frequency of exposure is a reliable indicator of getting liking and positive feelings towards something. So the more you're exposed to it, the more it is. And we are getting back to something very primitive. I mean, it's about your security. I know that it is like that, even if I don't like it.
Richard Campbell (22:04):
Yes. But I know it.
Bart Norre (22:05):
So I know that it is like that. And that's maybe how we can explain that even people might not one of these candidates that are running in the US and they still vote for them because-
Richard Campbell (22:17):
They're familiar.
Bart Norre (22:18):
Yeah. And the other one is less familiar.
Richard Campbell (22:20):
That's why the new song is played everywhere because you will inevitably like it if I play it enough.
Bart Norre (22:25):
Yes, exactly. And that's why you sometimes might, if you have the period, you had small children, you might find yourself humming children songs during day, which you don't like.
Richard Campbell (22:39):
No, but they are familiar. And I would argue it's certainly been my experience with that, they're also a connection to a positive time with my kid, which is another reason to like it.
Bart Norre (22:52):
Yeah, of course, of course, of course.
Richard Campbell (22:54):
But again, reminder once again that we're always looking through the filter of our own memories and immediately biased because of those other associations. And in that sense, it makes it very challenging to market because the demographic matters less than what were the experiences.
Bart Norre (23:15):
Exactly.
Richard Campbell (23:15):
Okay. I don't know how diverse your student base is, because Switzerland is that multinational place. I'm mentioning it, students from all over, so often looking at data like this, you're going to say, "This person's had a different cultural experience. They grew up in a different place." They're going to respond differently to the same sets of task.
Bart Norre (23:35):
I have no data to measure this. We have some, of course, first of all, Swiss population, one-third of Swiss population has an immigration background. But then let's say a large majority from the old continent, so merely Western European countries like Italy, France and things like that. And of course, I have every year students, we have students from Brazil, from India coming to our school. But I have no test data, really reliable test data on that. But I have done, like I said, this research on color and other research also in higher education. We did a study compared between Lebanon, India, Switzerland, and Poland. And that was also very, very interesting to see how cultural influences make people more resilient to these situations. Or I would even say if your daily life, I mean if you live in Lebanon, you didn't need to wait for COVID to know what is a crisis.
Richard Campbell (24:34):
You know your way around it.
Bart Norre (24:37):
This is just one more.
Richard Campbell (24:40):
Just to add to the equation.
Bart Norre (24:42):
Unfortunately.
Richard Campbell (24:42):
But it's even more exciting as you got results around the can experiment to say, even with that diversity of culture, this was common across everyone.
Bart Norre (24:53):
Yes, that was absolutely amazing.
Richard Campbell (24:55):
It's very powerful.
Bart Norre (24:59):
It's very amazing. Yes, yes, yes. And this just came by random like most of the interesting things. I mean, this was just a basic study. We didn't know that we thought we would find something really logically like you applied red so you would find it back, but we didn't. Yeah.
Richard Campbell (25:12):
And I come away with this as a marketer thinking about, I think I would need, I can't just test a logo. I need to test it on every package I might run the logo on. Because the package shape and how that stimulates that potential customer's mind matters.
Bart Norre (25:30):
Matters all. It matters all because the packaging, if you work in consumer goods, of course, the packaging is the 3D of your brand. That's the only way we can have a 3D.
Richard Campbell (25:41):
Right. And because you're still showing it in a flat form, it's on a screen or on a piece of paper, or anything like that, you are counting on that person's mind to create that 3D narrative themselves. So of course they're going to view it through their memories.
Bart Norre (25:54):
Yes, absolutely.
Richard Campbell (25:55):
If you're going to show packaging in marketing materials, you need to test each package because it's a different stimulus.
Bart Norre (26:03):
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And here we go again in our mental model concept, of course.
Richard Campbell (26:10):
Yeah. I also wonder if you're not going to have a standout package, that one of those packages might definitely work better that people have more powerful responses to it.
Bart Norre (26:20):
Yes, it is. And if it isn't, then your job will be to create a lot of primes to get to this packaging, the right responses you really want to have. It's all a question about what are you storing? What are you stimulating to get activated in your memory? What do you want to add to these memorized associations? That is what marketing is all about. Marketing is about memory management. If people don't remember, why would you do something?
Richard Campbell (26:53):
And this is where a good jingle or a good tagline or things that are brain worms that stick around become the anchor for a memory of your brand.
Bart Norre (27:04):
Under condition that you repeat them enough.
Richard Campbell (27:06):
Right.
Bart Norre (27:06):
Because you might ask yourself the question, why I'm still seeing a publicity for brand names like Coca-Cola or Ikea, these guys there, they're well known.
Richard Campbell (27:16):
They're the biggest in the world.
Bart Norre (27:17):
Why do they still need it? But they still need it because it's like you need to continue to stimulate this memorization on a permanent basis, otherwise it will be less for the brain will start to think this is less important. So it starts to forget it.
Richard Campbell (27:34):
Even the biggest brands fade without the constant stimulation.
Bart Norre (27:37):
Yes, yes.
Richard Campbell (27:39):
The challenge is the over-stimulation. Well, and you would hope that it's a good stimulation too, that I think these big brands have also done a good job of having an association that people are comfortable with. And for any of us trying to do the same, it's a challenge to at least be on the positive side.
Bart Norre (27:55):
And if this is well installed, and I saw once a study that was done in, I think I was in the Netherlands after the 2008 financial collapse, how they find out that one of the banks that was really involved in, let's say, hazardous management of customer accounts, putting them into danger, let's say like that. So you would think that after all the trouble that these banks been through, that the trust level would have been lower into the brand and what they measured that it was absolutely unchanged. So it means that if over years you hammer on this automatic response, this memorization, even if there might be a quack some moment, I mean, VW is still selling cars in the US.
Richard Campbell (28:52):
Yes, even after diesel gate. Well, we've been told the takes a lifetime to build a trust and a moment to lose it. But the data shows that isn't true, that once build the trust, they can tolerate it.
Bart Norre (29:06):
At least that data, at least that data. I'm not going to put my hand into the fire, that fire.
Richard Campbell (29:11):
No.
Bart Norre (29:11):
But these data show that... Yeah?
Richard Campbell (29:14):
The banks were forgiven, Volkswagen has been forgiven, that there is a gravity to that and that you can... Well, I also wonder if you're pressing on the idea that all press is good press. It doesn't matter how negative the press is.
Bart Norre (29:29):
I wouldn't-
Richard Campbell (29:31):
If it puts them into the gestalt, it's worthwhile.
Bart Norre (29:33):
Yes, on the level of, again, building security, mere exposure effects or repetition and telling this is how it is, and this is your stability is maybe something you don't like, but it is stability and it is security. If you can manage that, yes, then your statement has certainly a foundation of truth.
Richard Campbell (29:55):
But at the same time, it's like it's useful to poke on positive things and to-
Bart Norre (30:00):
I would prefer to, yeah.
Richard Campbell (30:01):
Hopefully actually be doing some good in the world too.
Bart Norre (30:03):
Yes. That's hoped for.
Richard Campbell (30:07):
Well, I struggle with Coca-Cola as one of the biggest brands in the world and makes something that's largely not good for people, but has also traveled around the world and created market opportunities everywhere, created a lot of jobs and makes other products as well. But their flagship product is sugary water with phosphoric acid in it, and yet here we are. I could point to more concerning brands, but certainly we look at this exemplar of the greatest branding exercise in sugar water.
Bart Norre (30:44):
Yes. But sugar water, and there's an interesting experience I did with my students. I did blind testing between Coke and Pepsi. So I asked them before they did the test, what are you buying, Coke or Pepsi? All of them said Coke. Why? Because taste is better. Fine, now show it. And it came out 75% preferred the taste of Pepsi in my small test.
Richard Campbell (31:12):
Wasn't that a campaign that Pepsi did back in the day?
Bart Norre (31:16):
Yes, yes, yes. So that's why I did it with my students to see what could we find out. And the interesting thing is at the end, you ask them, would you now buy Pepsi? They say, no, they will buy Coke. And then, I go back to the study that was done in Germany where they showed that Coke has a much more higher response on happiness than any other brand. So you probably buy the Coke much more for emotional reasons than for any reasons of taste or whatever you might tell yourself why you buy this.
Richard Campbell (31:53):
Well, if it's anything this neuroscience series has taught me, it's that almost all of our purchases are emotional.
Bart Norre (31:58):
Yes. No emotional decision.
Richard Campbell (32:01):
Yeah, no decision. And you're exactly right that the paradox of choice kind of problem. The more likely outcome if you haven't had a positive emotional response is you don't buy anything.
Bart Norre (32:10):
Exactly.
Richard Campbell (32:10):
Yeah. So it is ultimately an emotional response and we got to craft accordingly.
Bart Norre (32:14):
Yeah. And emotion is what validates your decision. You never say, "I had a great thought and a great decision and that is satisfying." No, you said, "I'm satisfied with my decision." You want to be satisfied with your decision. Who the hell wants to take a decision who's not satisfied with it? I mean, you have to have this, okay, that comes from emotion, let's do it.
Richard Campbell (32:43):
Yeah, no, it's true enough and we make decisions all of the time. Even those of us that work in this space are subject to these things too regardless of how hard we try not to be.
Bart Norre (32:54):
We just cannot. You have to accept. You have to accept. We just cannot imagine if for everything with our automatic system designs we would like to take over, we wouldn't be able. I mean, there are some figures also about that. You probably know that on a rational conscious level, we have about 40 bits per second as data processing capacity. And on the non-conscious level, this goes up to 11 million bits per second. So who's the boss? I mean, it's absolutely clear. You would not be able to take over even if you would want to. It's just not possible.
Richard Campbell (33:29):
It's out-thinking you every step of the way.
Bart Norre (33:31):
Thinking is an exception in life to a certain extent.
Richard Campbell (33:36):
Most of the time, it's just an automatic response as you don't have time for anything else. It's too much to do. I'm blown away by how effective response time testing is, but at the same time also chilled because we get insight to people we don't expect. I imagine that happens to you all of the time.
Bart Norre (33:54):
Yes. But it also shows something that is also very interesting if you apply this into, for instance, corporate situations where a company wants to know what do my collaborators really believe about this company? And what do they really think about their job and their work and all that? Then, you come to something very interesting also with response time testing. Not only can you find out which of my values are really operational today, because they are automatic responses, and I know my collaborators will have this access to this attitude very easily. But to this part where you get hesitating answers is also very interesting from a cultural perspective, because this shows versatility. This shows people that are hesitating so you can still bring them to the good side.
Richard Campbell (34:55):
You can change their minds.
Bart Norre (34:57):
Yes. But if you have a high opposition, so people who say no, then you know you have a real resistance that's going to be very tough to deal with. So it brings even more insights into this world. And even in marketing, too. I mean, if you are doing a campaign, who would you would like to address your campaign to? To the people who are really having an automatic response to your brand? No, they're already on board.
Richard Campbell (35:27):
They're already on board. You got them. Don't spend time on them.
Bart Norre (35:30):
So you have to look at those who are hesitating. Who are these guys? Where are they? What are the things that we can hook them on?
Richard Campbell (35:38):
How do I have an opportunity to sell them and get new customers?
Bart Norre (35:42):
Yes, yes, yes. This gives you a new way to segment your market. Where are the hesitators?
Richard Campbell (35:48):
Yeah, I'm not after the people who are already on board. We've got them. I'm after the folks who haven't decided.
Bart Norre (35:56):
And if you have some response time data, you might have also some cues how you can get to them.
Richard Campbell (36:02):
And by the same time, it's like why market to people who are adamantly not interested in your product? Market to the ones that are uncertain. They're the ones you have your best chance of persuading.
Bart Norre (36:10):
Yes, exactly.
Richard Campbell (36:12):
Yeah. I think that's very powerful.
Bart Norre (36:14):
And not only happening on those you have already. Of course, you have to continue to cultivate this relationship you have with them.
Richard Campbell (36:22):
But that's a different spend. That's a maintenance spend versus an acquisition spend.
Bart Norre (36:26):
Exactly, yes. And I think that's also very exciting with response time testing. It's not just showing what you have, it's also showing where can you go-
Richard Campbell (36:38):
What could you get?
Bart Norre (36:39):
... to get more customers and where are they?
Richard Campbell (36:42):
I could speak more articulately then about how I'm approaching different audiences. Yes, we have a group of customers, we know where they're from, they're positive, and we should maintain that, stay in their gestalt, keep it to a certain level. But over here with the hesitators is an opportunity to land new customers, and our spend should be different and pressed in a different way to try and swing more of them over to that other pool.
Bart Norre (37:06):
Yeah, exactly.
Richard Campbell (37:09):
It feels like a strategy and a measurable one. That's the thing that excites me is the day I can move a hesitator to a certain is a good day.
Bart Norre (37:17):
Yes, absolutely. And I think also one of the points why I prefer to work with response time testing is because it's easily to understand. I mean, I'm not a neuroscientist basically as a university training. I'm a sociologist, so I would not like to work with EEG and fMRI and all these kind of things, which are to me, Chinese. But we marketers, we know language, we can work with language, we can understand language.
Richard Campbell (37:55):
And these electronic tools allow us to reliably measure something that we can change.
Bart Norre (38:02):
Yes. And this is something you and I, we can do without having need to have a master's degree in neuroscience in five years of laboratory studies.
Richard Campbell (38:12):
And electrodes on people's heads. This is use your phone and I can get meaningful results.
Bart Norre (38:18):
Yes.
Richard Campbell (38:19):
It's very approachable.
Bart Norre (38:20):
Yes. And there's a lot more to say about these methodologies, which is not subject of today, but I think if you're a marketer and you are interested in trying to find out more what people really think about your brand, about your packaging, or about your category of products, then you should really get interested into response time testing because you understand this. You can understand this. I agree that these medical, I call this, this are life science devices that provide information that was meant to understand how I can be healthy. It is a very different perspective than saying, "I take this data to understand how I can sell maybe something unhealthy," to name it.
Richard Campbell (39:07):
But I also appreciate that using people's personal devices like phones and things means they're even more in the autonomous response. I can't imagine anyone wired up to an EEG feels normal. They're in a weird laboratory state where if I've got a group of folks that are just using my software on a phone and I'm collecting response time data, they're in their most natural state they could be in. They're on their phones. So I'm going to get closer to their natural responses.
Bart Norre (39:40):
And one thing is, that's why I personally always speak about the culture of neuromarketing. I personally make a difference between neuromarketing as a technology to measure something and different way to measure something and neuromarketing as a culture, as a way of thinking. And I think companies first should do this first step, think different about people. What is the essential question in marketing is about human beings. You take human beings away, marketing doesn't make any sense anymore. So why would you like to stick with one? I don't know if you're familiar with this German word, but mensch bin, which means with one concept about human beings being very often still in marketing, the homo economicus, people take their decisions rationally, they weight the pro and contrast, and then they take a very balanced decision, and they are able to understand the way they take decisions and all these kind of a prioris that people have in their mind still in marketing.
(40:52):
So I think people should first start to open their mind and see what other sciences, not only neuroscience, but to me, social psychology, behavioral economics, biology, anthropology, they all bring pieces of the cake together. So a little bit better what is human behavior is. And at the same time, you also have to understand that human behavior is so complex that it is still very, very difficult to predict anything with the accuracy.
Richard Campbell (41:21):
Sure. We're at least trying to get some consistency. We're not going to get all of the factors. There's more to know, but these results are powerful.
Bart Norre (41:28):
Yes.
Richard Campbell (41:28):
They are a science. They are repeatable within realms with some error tolerance.
Bart Norre (41:33):
Absolutely. But you also have to be careful with that because there is some humility that is necessary. You're operating in a broader context than what you only measured. The life is broader than what you only measured. So you only have a piece of the whole thing. But the main issue to me is that's why I tell my students, I'm a window builder. Until now, you've been into the Descartes world, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. And the criteria of truth is based on rationality. Fine, good enough, it's nothing wrong with that, but that's not the whole thing. So I say we have to open other windows and have a broader perspective. So neuromarketing, in my opinion, doesn't make it more easy. No, because we bring in more data, so it's going to become even more complex, but at least you have a better chance to have an understanding.
Richard Campbell (42:26):
Yeah, it does, like you said, open a window to seeing things a little different way that once you see it, I don't think you can unsee it anymore.
Bart Norre (42:34):
No. Once you use response time testing, you don't want, I don't want to spend my time looking at data. I know they are spoiled by cognitive biases.
Richard Campbell (42:44):
Right. Well, Bart, I think we should leave it right there because now we've come full circle on this. Once you see this, you'll know it's different and you can take advantage of it. And I really appreciate your insights around this. Response time testing is this great mechanism because we have the technology now to really get insight into the way people are responding to things.
Bart Norre (43:03):
Yeah, absolutely.
Richard Campbell (43:05):
Thank you so much for chatting with us. I really appreciate it.
Bart Norre (43:07):
You're welcome. Thank you very much for inviting me,
Richard Campbell (43:09):
And we'll talk to you next time on Understanding Consumer Neuroscience.