Editor's note: Charles Young is founder and CEO of Ameritest, an Albuquerque, N.M., research firm. He can be reached at chuck@ameritest.net. This article appeared in the December 12, 2011, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.
No one still believes in the old model of the consumer as a passive receiver of advertising messages. In the quest for a better model of how advertising works, we understand that for advertising to be effective the mind of the consumer must be engaged. That means that all the faculties of the mind - attention, emotion, memory, imagination - play a role in the complex mental processes by which advertising leads to brand creation.
To guide our thinking forward we need new models. The one that I find particularly useful is to think of the mind of the consumer as a kind of search engine - an ultimate search engine that out-Googles Google in its ability to find order in the chaos of our heavily-advertised world.
And if we think of it as a search engine, the natural question to ask is: What is it searching for?
Meaning. In marketing terms, "meaning" can be defined in two ways. First, a brand must establish positioning so that a customer understands how the brand fits into the multidimensional perceptual framework of its category. This is done by finding answers to questions such as what differentiates the brand from competing alternatives? What are the brand's advantages versus the competition? Or even, who is the competition? Positioning is a semantic - or rational - way of defining meaning.
Second, a brand must create a brand image, which is the set of emotional and experiential associations with the brand that are built over time. It is through emotional imagery that the consumer takes mental ownership of a brand - the basis for brand loyalty. In contrast to a rational framework, imagination or image-making is the key to emotional meaning.
To keep clear focus on the meaning of a brand, brand leaders will usually develop a creative brief when creating new advertising. A good creative brief is a short marketing manifesto that clearly defines the semantic positioning that anchors the brand, usually with one to three carefully-chosen words or values the brand will stand for.
A good brief will also provide some guidance to the creative image makers, based on a consumer insight of what kinds of emotional associations would be particularly resonant with the target customer.
Genuine insights
Because genuine insights are so important for focusing the imaginations of marketers, most marketing research departments have been renamed "consumer insights departments." This underscores the importance of the ongoing search for new insights that can feed the creative development process.
For agency creatives, the first job in designing an ad is to figure out how to communicate the brand's positioning clearly, regardless of what media they are operating in (i.e., television digital or print).
But to keep a brand growing, creatives must also continuously search for new stories and fresh emotional imagery that can be used to add rich layers of meaning to the brand's image.
For advertising researchers, determining whether an ad will be effective in communicating the positioning is a straightforward problem that was solved a couple of generations ago. But predicting the effect an ad will have on the brand's image has not been as easy because it involves measuring the nonverbal image components of advertising.
A three-step process
In order to provide insights into why a particular ad execution is performing well or poorly in terms of communicating the intended meanings for the brand, we've developed a three-step process, using picture-sorting techniques.
The first step, using the Flow of Attention, is to measure the effects of selective perception, a complex mental process involving both attention and memory. Working like a search engine, selective perception is the process whereby the brain filters out sensory-spam so that we can focus the limited workspace of our conscious attention on input from the outside world that's important to us. This process operates automatically, at the level of the unconscious mind and is driven by our unconscious emotions.
The second step, using the Flow of Emotion, is to measure of how consumers feel about what they see in an ad. These conscious emotions can be either positive or negative and the creative tension between the two can be used to describe the dramatic structure of the ad.
Taken together, these first two pictures sorting steps can tell us what images in an ad the consumer pays the most attention to and how highly-charged these images are with consumer feelings.
Identifying the images that the consumer unconsciously filters for - and knowing how the consumer feels about each of these images - will be necessary to help predict which images in the ad will be added to long-term memory to become another layer of the brand's image.
Still missing
But something is still missing from our analysis, of course. We do not yet know whether the images being filtered for are a good fit with the brand, with "fit" referring to the communication strategy set forth in the creative brief. To answer this, we need to measure a third dimension: the meaning of each image.
For this measurement, respondents are asked to sort images from an ad into different categories of meaning, based on the ideas contained in the creative brief. Typically, up to nine categories of meaning are used in the exercise, with an additional "none of these" option for images that do not fit the pre-determined categories. The sort is usually done with a multiple-choice option, reflecting the idea that an image may convey multiple meanings to an individual viewer.
Frequently, ratings of the brand using the same set of categories are collected to determine the overall impact of the ad, viewed as a gestalt, on perceptions of the brand. By putting these two types of information together, the ad researcher can quickly determine which images in an ad are cueing different ideas and emotions in the total communication of the ad.
An example of the response grid that is used to report results is shown for a McDonald's television commercial in Figure 1. This commercial did a particularly good job of repositioning McDonald's as being a healthy option for kids, as can be seen in brand ratings shown in the bar chart in the lower right-hand corner of the exhibit.
While a number of images in the ad did a good job of cueing the idea of healthy - 100 percent chicken meat, apple dippers, salads - the Flow of Meaning identified the milk shot in frame 17 as the strongest image in the ad conveying this meaning.
Exploring meaning frame-by-frame in a commercial can provide researchers with clear insights pinpointing which images are contributing which ideas and emotions to the total communication of an ad. But the tool is only effective if the list of potential meanings is carefully chosen during the survey design process. The key to success is to study the language of the creative brief.
Brand positioning ideas will, of course, be category-specific. For example, food brands usually try to communicate great taste; toy brands try to communicate fun; and technology brands usually try to communicate innovation.
Look at the storyline
Besides using the creative brief, the research analyst should also look at the storyline of the ad to generate good ideas for categories of emotion to use in a meaning sort. Ask yourself, do the characters experience any personal transformation from the beginning to the end of the ad? What does the relationship between the characters express? What is the role of the brand in the story?
For instance, a simple story about a mom cooking Pillsbury dinner rolls that brings her sons running in to eat them may convey the idea of family togetherness. The iTunes silhouette ads communicate freedom and individuality. Fancy Feast cat food ads communicate indulgence.
Of course, some emotions generated by an ad may not be the ones that were intended. The Flow of Meaning can be a useful tool for identifying these instances. For that reason, negative emotional categories are often included.
For example, if one character in a cereal ad is teasing another, it could be perceived as playful (intended meaning) or mean (unintended meaning). Or, if we see a spike in negative emotions in the Flow of Emotion, we can use the meaning sort to determine if viewers are feeling confused or if they actually dislike what they are seeing.
Brand-building moments
Our views on the consumer's search for meaning arose from a simple analysis of a dozen high-performing commercials we tested this year for a number of packaged-goods brands. In this analysis we took a 3-D look at how consumers processed the content of these commercials moment-by-moment in terms of attention, emotion and meaning.
First, we separated the images we took from these ads - some 300+ pictures - into two groups. The first group was all the images that we identify as the brand-building moments of the ad, which are images that are both peak moments of attention and highly-charged with emotion. The second group was all other visuals from these ads - important parts of the ad in terms of storytelling but not images that represent the essence of the story.
Branding moments are, in short, the parts of an ad that are selected by the search engine of the mind as it unconsciously sorts through the various images in the ad, deciding what's more or less important. From other experiments, we know that these are the best-remembered parts of an ad over long periods of time.
Second, we looked at the meanings the consumer assigned to each of the images from these ads. For these 12 ads, the categories of meanings that we had used included a mix of both brand-positioning meanings and emotional categories, including some negative categories or potential unintended miscues.
When we put these analytics together, we came up with the graph shown in Figure 2. What the graph shows provides new insights into the consumer search process.
The brand-building moments of the ad - the peak images first sorted out by selective perception and highly-charged with conscious consumer emotions - contain significantly more of the intended meaning of the ads than the other parts of the ads (Figure 3).
This is true both for the meanings that pertain to positioning the brand in the marketplace (i.e., brand benefits and values) and to the emotional meanings that contribute to the brand's image. The other visuals are significantly more likely to contain unintended meanings or mean nothing at all in terms of the communications strategy expressed in the creative brief.
Quite obvious
The answer to the questions that I posed earlier now appears quite obvious. If consumers are search engines, what are they searching for? They're searching for what the advertising means to them. While not quite the answer to the meaning of life, I think this does provide important insights into the meaning of advertising.