quantilope Webinar: Understanding Implicit Associations

Benefits of Implicit Research in Understanding Consumers

Editor’s note: Automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. 

During Wisdom Wednesday's December 13, 2023 series, quantilope presented on the benefits of implicit research and how it can help you better understand your buyers' behaviors and their subconscious associations with your brand.

In this session, Tom Fandrich, co-founder of quantilope, covered what implicit association tests are, how to incorporate them into research and how you can set up and run similar studies on quantilope’s Consumer Intelligence Platform.

Watch the full recording of the webinar or read the transcript below. 

Webinar transcript 

Joe Rydholm: 

Hi everybody and welcome to our webinar “Understanding Implicit Associations.”  

I'm Quirk’s Editor, Joe Rydholm, and before we get started, let's quickly go over the ways you can participate in today's discussion. You can use the chat tab to interact with other attendees during the session and you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions during the presenter during the session and we'll answer as many as we have time for during the Q&A portion.  

Our session today is presented by quantilope. Tom, take it away.  

Thomas Fandrich 

Thank you very much for the introduction, Joe. I'm going to share my screen real quick. One second everyone. Great. Everyone should be able to see my screen now. Move my little screen to the top right. Alright. Yeah.  

Hello everyone and thank you for joining. Welcome to today's Quirk’s webinar on how to uncover subconscious associations using implicit research.  

For everyone who has not heard about us before, quantilope is the consumer intelligence platform automating the way market research is done. Clients using our technology are now making 80% more decisions based on consumer data than before. One of the ways we do this is through our automated implicit methodologies, which we are going to talk about today.  

But first I want to start by telling you a little story.  

Normally when I do this with people in a room or at a conference, I'm asking whoever had the fabulous idea of rushing to a supermarket while being extremely hungry. Of course, I did this in the past and then I'm normally asking, who has ended up like me with a cart and a trunk full of stuff that we actually didn't want to buy? Then we can go further and even say, and who doesn’t even remember the majority of the drive back home because our thoughts already went somewhere else.  

I think many of us can relate to these behaviors and I personally find this extremely fascinating and there's something going on in our human brains that none of us has conscious control of.  

Interestingly, this mysterious something drives the vast majority of our daily decisions and for me, this turned everything upside down back in the days when it comes to marketing and marketing research. Since consumers seem to be way less planned, less thoughtful, less reflective, less rational than we sometimes assume with our research. They are actually pretty emotional and impulsive with everything they do.  

My name is Tom, co-founder of quantilope, and I'm here today to shed more light on this phenomenon. How can we better understand what's going on here and how can we account for it in the research we do, but also in the marketing activities we run in order to use this.  

Something that we will learn more about in a few seconds as a competitive advantage out there. All this leads us to the word implicit research or sometimes also called neuromarketing. 

The first step I would like to run a little exercise with you in order to let all of us realize what implicit associations actually are and then of course why implicit research is such an important thing. 

I'm going to show you a few stimuli one after another on the next couple of screens and I want you to immediately think out loud what comes to your mind when you see those stimuli? The more spontaneous, the better, right?  

So, Smirnoff, raspberry, something that comes to my mind immediately is kind of refreshing. College party, fun, hangover. Unfortunately, this is all stuff my brain brings to my attention, conscious attention when I see this bottle.  

Now on the right-hand side, Grey Goose is a little different, but I also have tons of associations with it. A celebration, for example, exclusivity, a bar, cocktails, treating myself. This is all stuff that comes to my mind when I say see Grey Goose. 

I find it absolutely amazing how quickly and easily our brain is able to call those associations that we have with those product or brands here. Let's do another one.  

Apple. Apple is something for me that I connect to durability, it's beautiful to me. It has to do with creativity. It's easy to use. Even Steve Jobs pops up in my mind while on the right-hand side, Android. 

Android for me is good value for money. It's a little bit more customizable than Apple. Sometimes I hear data concerns around the Android world and actually green text messages is what my U.S. friends always connect with Android phones because they are only used to blue messaging on their Apple phones, all this kind of stuff.  

And of course this is not only working for physical products or brands that have physical products, it also works for less tangible products and services. That's the last one here with Ryanair for example, very famous in Europe especially. What I connect to that, thinking out loud, is low-cost travel. Secondly, at airports, you always have to commute a little bit after traveling with Ryanair most of the time. Basic service, very strict policies. This is everything that pops up in my mind when I think about Ryanair. 

While on the other hand when I see Emirates, I think of a modern aesthetic environment and brand, a global network of flights and airports, premium service, great food. That is what I'm hearing when people talk about Emirates.  

Whatever comes to your mind spontaneously when you saw those images, those brands or products, all those associations will definitely, subconsciously impact your behavior when you decide to buy one or another brand or use one or another service. And at the same time, unfortunately this is still very much a black box for many companies.  

Now what can we do or what we know is that all these marketing signals and brand codes that we see on the left-hand side here, all the stuff that we are sending through our marketing activities, impact people's everyday behavior. But what we usually don't know and don't fully understand is what's going on in the human brain in the middle of this process when it takes these decisions that lead to behavior on the right-hand side. And that makes it pretty tough for our marketing and marketing research teams because there's a lack of an objective basis for marketing decision-making if we do not understand what happens in the middle here, in the middle where the brain sits.

Now the good news is that there is a way to shed more light into this black box by understanding how the human brain actually works. And we won't have time to go into too much detail today, but I definitely want to touch on the general idea. 

And the general idea is actually proposed by Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kaman back in the days. And he proposes that our brain actually operates in two different modes – System one and system two.  

System one on the left-hand side here is very fast automated, impulsive, effortless, subconscious. It's associated like a supercomputer. This part of the brain takes over when we ride a bike or when we shop at the supermarket or when we speak our mother tongue, it's very effortless. We just do it. We don't even notice that we use our brain for it.  

While on the right-hand side, system two is very slow, it's very calculating, reflecting, exhausting like this abacus that I put on the slide here. And that part of the brain takes over when something rather unusual happens or something that's very effortful for us, like planning a new kitchen or the first driving lesson we had or talking in your second language. This is all very effortful, not super automated when system two takes over.  

Now as you can imagine, our brain tries to operate as efficiently and as energy saving as possible and therefore tries to maximize the time on the left-hand side, tries to maximize the time using system one instead of system two. 

This happens in particular situations where there is kind of, for example, either low involvement or high time pressure or high complexity and high information overload and stuff like this. All those situations, our brain tends to switch into the system one mode very quickly to come up with effortless and fast decisions.  

This leads to the fact that at the end of the day, 90%, about 90% of the daily decisions that we are taking are taken or inspired, informed by the system one on the left-hand side only. Under very rare circumstances, our deeply thinking system two comes into play.  So now we know who has actually taken over when filling my trunk at the beginning and with all the food that I actually didn't want to buy and I also drove me home in the car. It was my system one who has taken over without letting me know that it has taken over.  

Now that means that we definitely can't ignore this super important part of consumer decision making when doing our research and planning our marketing activities. We definitely need to further understand what's going on in our consumer's subconsciousness in terms of implicit associations they have with our category, brand, competition, our products and services, communication and with actually everything, all these different inputs definitely trigger associations in our consumer's brain that we need to better understand to do the right things in our marketing decisions, but also run the research the right way.  

Now how do we do this? How do we apply implicit and practice?  

Let's have a quick look at how we can put this into practice to understand what's going on in our consumer system one, when they receive our marketing signals.  

There are actually two different approaches that we offer our clients here on our platform that is the single implicit association test calls called the SIAT and the multiple implicit association test, the MIAT.  

Let's first talk about the SIAT here, what people see here and you see the smartphone here, of course it also works on tablet and desktop devices, completely device agnostic. The test is a stimulus on top of the screen.  

Here it is the airline industry, the category, but it can also be a brand, of course, it can be packaging, it can be an advertisement, it can be anything. It's a pretty flexible approach. 

Then underneath you see one association at a time. In this case it's reliability and you're going to be asked to select if this fits together, if you associate those two things together or not, right? Very simple question.  

What we track here is the choice of course, obviously, but we also track the time in milliseconds that it took the person to make this decision. And the idea here is that the faster we react our consumers react, the less we think.

So, to say the deeper this association is tied to the stimulus, the deeper reliability is anchored in the airline industry category. That's the idea here. That is why we measure choice and response time because we weight the choice by the response time in a nonlinear way to weight faster choices, higher and slower choices where we need to think a lot, we weight them lower, let them have less of an impact on the implicit association strengths that we measure here at the end.  

Of course, we also account for different length and complexity of associations here. We normalize that across all the associations that we measure. We also normalize it across people because my 80-year-old grandma might be little slower than me on average in her decisions. So, we need to normalize that while my 12-year-old niece might be much faster than I, therefore we also normalize along the participants here. 

Now that's the SIAT. The other concept is the MIAT. Very similar idea in terms of measuring choice and response time, but here in a competitive setting, right, the idea is the winner takes it all. 

We put a set of brands for example, here together that operate in the same category and we put the association on top of the screen and then we let the people decide which of the brands comes to mind first when thinking about excitement and then they select the brand. We measure choice and response time, same idea. The faster they choose, the higher the weight that this choice at the end gate gets now.  

Then after one decision is made, of course the next association appears and then the next one, next one. You can do this with the dozens of associations very quickly on the smartphone, it's obvious that both approaches SIAT and MIT are super effortless and also fun for participants. 

That's what we get as feedback here, which at the end is also super beneficial for the data quality and respondent fatigue. And actually, what's happening there is what we want. We activate our respondent's system one while they are on this survey. 

The survey is designed so that it triggers and serves system one because it's so fast, it's so quick, it's so spontaneous and so effortless. We activate the brain, the part of brain that we want to activate here with this kind of survey, which is beneficial on all the different ends that I just mentioned.  

Now what we'll learn from this in terms of insights is the following. On the left-hand side, you will see the SIET. On the right-hand side, you'll see the MIT and we will jump onto the platform. 

Just a few seconds, I just want to give you a kind of first high level idea what we learned from those implicit association tests here. Let's look at the left-hand side first. 

What we'll get is the implicit association strengths for motives, features, benefits, occasions, whatever you tested, all the category entry points, the category cues you could think of. In this way, we do understand what is going on in people's subconscious system. 

One, when buying in a certain category, and here it was the airline industry. And what we see here, for example, is that it skews towards, this is just an example, curiosity and freedom. Here we will look into the actual results for the airline industry in any a second. 

This is just an example. This category, for example here, scores high on curiosity, on freedom and less on status. And then on the right-hand side we see, or we will learn how certain brands in a category including our own brand of course deliver on those motives, features, benefits, occasions, etc. that consumers are trying to fulfill.  

That's the brand audit here as an example on the right-hand side. And yeah, here we see for example that brand B or Brown scores at the high-end curiosity while brand A is much strong on associations around status and trust.  

We also see how the category operates here. And of course the general idea is that if I understood how the category operates in terms of associations that are relevant in the category, I should of course try to align my brand with the category or at least find a niche of category associations that I can own and defend that nobody else in the category owns and tries to stand for.  

First step, first reason, the step is always in SIET to have an overarching idea of the category and then follow up with MITs for brands or communications or advertisements, etc.  

OK, before we jump into the platform, one last slide here from my end of course this is not only working for understanding the associations that are relevant in a category or the associations that we as consumers have for certain brands, it also works for everything around communication. 

We can also test advertisements with that. Does our advertisement actually communicate the associations that we want our consumers, that we want them to think of when our brand comes to mind or when they shop in our category.  

So, we need to make sure that our advertising pays into the associations that we want to trigger with our brand packaging. So, what do people associate with our packaging? There's super interesting stuff that you will find out there.  

For example, a nice story from the past. I always love to tell is, frozen fish packaging should not have sharp edges because people associate fish with round edges. So, they liked packaging with round edges better for frozen fish than packaging with sharp edges and they also had nice associations and liked it or kind of associated transparency like the ocean, like water transparency with the packaging of fish. 

So, wherever you have a transparent element in your frozen fish packaging that was kind of the right associations that you triggered with what people wanted to see in the frozen fish category or competition. 

You of course understand how your competitors are positioned in the category with their associations. You can use it for designing your products. For example, when a Volkswagen or a Porsche, they design the headlamps in a certain way that it triggers associations around, I don't know, masculinity or sportiness or friendliness, whatever you want to communicate there with a certain face of your car.  

You can use implicit association test very well to do that as a support for product designers. Then understanding trends like veganism or plant-based meat, right?

What is it that our consumers have in mind when they think about veganism or plant-based meat? Is it more the “safe the planet” route or is it more live healthier, which is more about me as an individual or is it an animal’s wellbeing? 

All these are valid arguments and goals that someone could have when following a certain trend, but we don't actually know what happens when consumers make a certain decision following a trend. And implicit methods can help us shed more light on what's going on there. 

Name and claim testing of course, logo, what transports communicates our logo to consumers and does this actually fit to where we want our brand to be? 

Super helpful there to look at implicit association tests for that as well. And there's much more, these are just nine very prominent use cases that I'm seeing on the platform quite often. 

Alright, with that I said it already, we have a little demo case here about the airline industry and associations in the airline industry space to demonstrate to you how this would look like in practice. 

We found out that the screen sharing for the platform is a little blurry here. I hope that you can see at least a little bit of what I'm showing on the platform now. I will walk you through it and talk a lot about it. So hopefully that helps you to better understand what you should actually be able to see on those screens that I'm showing you. 

Everyone should be able to see my platform, now we are on the platform. Now I'm quickly looking for the airline demo case here, clicking on the project card. That leads me to the project. 

What we can see here, I won't go into any details about how the platform actually works, is I'm just seeing a few high level things that the quantum of platform is an end-to-end platform where you have everything integrated from the project management where you invite your people and give rights and roles to the project team, crafting your survey either from scratch or from a template in your tool store. Then fueling it with any panel out there or even with your own customers if you want that. Analyzing everything in real time and then sharing your report that presents the insights in the story told way to your stakeholders. 

Now let's jump right into the survey part here for our implicit airline association case. And I won't talk about how this kind of questionnaire building tool works here today. I'm scrolling down to our two modules, the SIAT and the MIAT. And let's take a quick look at that.  

What we did here in this module is setting up the category, which is the airline industry that you can see here. And then we uploaded a couple of associations that we wanted to test within this category. And after you have uploaded the inputs here for the different blocks of associations and the category, you could actually start the research.  

The system takes part in the survey design, the survey flow and all this kind of stuff. And of course, also the analytics that we'll see in a second and how it would look for the consumers is like this.

They see the stimuli on top of the screen, the association right underneath, and then they select with the keyboard whether this fits or doesn't fit. And as I said before, this also works for touch devices where you simply touch this screen and then go through the whole test. Same on a smartphone completely in device agnostic, making sure that you also reach target groups like Gen Z and Gen Alpha very seamlessly. 

This is the SIET, the category audit that we set up here. And then right underneath we see the MIAT that looks deeper into the different players within the airline industry here where we tested the same set of associations that we already tested on category level also here on brand level and how that looks like.

Just as an example before we jump into the results, let's look at that real quick here on the smartphone you see the association on top, as we have just seen it in the PowerPoint presentation and you select rationality, whom do you associate with that and let's say United and then individuality comes and then Alaska and so on.  

You can see how quickly and easily this works. And again, everything you need to do is upload your logos, your brands copy, paste your associations and then you are good to go. Everything else is being taken care of by the system here and let's assume we are good to go. Then we would connect things to either a panel, as I said, PayPal panel agnostic, we work with everyone out there or you can even bring your own sample if you wanted that or connect it to your CRM. 

Everything will be fully transparent here in the quality log system. There's no black box around sampling or anything like that. Now as soon as the first completes come in, the analyze part of the platform takes over analyzing everything and visualizing the results.  

We won't go into simple questions like age and gender and all these kinds of simple descriptive analytics. We want to talk about the SIET and MIT results today. So, let's start with the SIET, which was the category audit of the airline industry. And what we see here in this first chart is the motivational map where we have six dimensions of high-level motivations like joy, status, trust, reason, freedom and curiosity. And we have different associations behind each aggregation here and the result of the implicit association test for the category here that the high-level psychological motivations like joy, curiosity, and trust, those are the leading associations that people have when it comes to flying, when it comes to the airline industry, which makes total sense.  

We normally fly when we are, I don't know, on holidays or on an adventure exploring other continents, etc., but we also want to be able to trust the airline, the operator that we fly with. So, this makes total sense.  

Now from here we can of course dive deeper and go into the single dimensions here and into the singular associations that are behind those dimensions.  

Let's do this for just one quick exemplary view here. What we are seeing here now is the much more detailed view of all the single associations that can be aggregated to those six higher-level dimensions.  

And here we see that, for example, stuff like adventure is something that's highly associated with the airline industry here or things like security. Here we have the trust dimension or excitement there we are back on the joy side of things.  

And when you see things kind of lighting up here with red outlines, that is an automatic significance test that is happening while you move your mouse over certain bars. So, you see immediately what is significantly different from this bar and what is not significantly different.  

Now this is the first step, right? And let's assume we got a first good understanding of what's going on in the category here. Now the next reasonable step is understanding what's going on with the brands, and we can jump into the MIT for that.  

Let's go to the motivational map. Again, use the index view and hide a few to make it easier to read here for us. Now what we see in this chart and give me a second to quickly organize that.  

What we see in this chart is actually two groups of brands. I've hidden three brands and let three in the chart for now because this is the first group of brands, American Airline, Delta, and United. And what we see here is that they all score relatively high on status, trust and reason.  

We could call them the rationally based airlines that really deliver on those association dimensions like trust, status and reason. While if we look at Southwest, Alaska and JetBlue, they are delivering much higher on associations like freedom, curiosity and Joy. We could call them the emotionally based airlines with Alaska, JetBlue, and Southwest here.  

And now what you would also do when comparing those brands here is bring in the category. And that's also something we can easily do to see where the category profile was because we want to check how we deliver on certain aspects of the category, which simply select linked implicit analysis here. 

And now the chart, and I will hide a few things for us because there's a lot going on in this chart. Let's maybe go with Delta and Alaska here. So we have the industry profile here in dark blue. You see that in the chart. We have Delta here in purple and we have Alaska in pink. 

What we see here is that Alaska performs kind of high on joy and curiosity and freedom of course, but joy and curiosity, especially where the two dimensions that were important in the category, while the trust dimension that is also important for the category. We see that here is something that only really Delta scores high on and Alaska scores rather low.  

So that is an easy way to bring the SIT together with the MIT here in our analysis. Now let's move back to all the MIET to our category audit and look at an analysis that goes a little bit deeper, the association map and let's do that for emotional characteristics.  

What we see here is a correspondence analysis of the brands in pink and of certain associations, in this case, the emotional characteristics of the brand in dark blue.  

What we see here is that, for example, on those more emotional characteristics that we are looking at is Alaska is sitting close to cool meaning being strongly associated with cool here while Delta, United and American are the more classic, nostalgic, confident brands. That's it on the right-hand side of the chart here. Southwest is mainly associated with disappointment.  

There's something to do for Southwest here in our analysis and we can also quickly look at more functional characteristics, characteristics where we again have Southwest here as a brand in pink that is closely associated with affordable, right?  

So yes, they are affordable, but there also seems to be something that is disappointing around Southwest airlines. While American, United and Delta, they are more on the pier side regulated dynamic side.  

Customer centric is something that people associate with Delta and American, while Alaska seems to be the most punctual one and JetBlue stands for eco-friendly. 

All right, maybe one last step and you can see that you can go deeper and deeper to really understand what's going on with your brand in the competitive setting and in the category.  

One last step maybe is the comparison mode that we can choose here, and we go with the index view again, and what this chart shows us, I go back to let's say the functional characteristics here. What this chart shows us is the DNA of our brand, right? 

So, if we look at Alaska here for example, it shows us that for our brand we would rather score low on competitiveness and dynamic, while we score high on eco-friendly, pricey and innovative. And also, here for punctual.  

And this way you can really understand where your brand profile stands, how it looks like while you do the index view here for all the single associations within airline brands. 

I know there was a lot of detail already. The message that I wanted to transfer is that you can go deeper and deeper to really understand what people associate with the category, but also with the brands in the category and where you would need to improve and what associations you can already build on and put your advertisement or communication on.  

Alright, now as the last step, this step, you would put this together in a story told way of course in an insights dashboard here on the platform that looks like this.  

Let's have a quick look at what you would get as a deliverable at the end. An insights dashboard where you can put together all the insights in a story told way where you can upload images, text boxes, everything can be arranged in a plug and play way so you can move around these things. Everyone can do this. You don't need to program anything. You upload brands and logos and of course you also upload the charts from the area that we have just seen. 

In the end, everything is always live. That means you could even start with that while you are fielding and waiting for the last couple of participants, you can already put together a preliminary dashboard here and share it with your stakeholders.  

And when they look at it, they always look at live data, one single source of truth across the whole organization and it's in your control, of course as a researcher, what you put together here and with whom, you'll share what.  

Sharing can be done with a shared link that is password protected, so you make sure that nobody else has access to that. And of course, you can also export this dashboard, the PDF or the charts as editable PowerPoints. There is no problem with exporting it outside the platform. 

With that, we are going to close the demo case here and move back to the presentation with my three key takeaways for today. 

First of all, my take is that the only way to understand what's going on in consumer’s system one is by using implicit research. Here we need to do this to understand 90% of consumers' decisions that happen subconsciously.  

Second is this way of research is such a great and effortless experience for our respondents that it leads to less fatigue and better data quality at the end. So, we can test a lot without the annoying experience that, for example, rating grids put on our respondents.  

And then the last one is that it's also a super budget efficient way due to the high degree of automation and that state-of-the-art platforms, like for example, quantilope offer. You have seen it before, right? You just copy and paste your associations and upload your brands and then you're actually ready to go in the same minute and the rest of the stuff is handled by the platform. All the charts, all the calculations that you have seen, this is nothing that's done manually. It happens the second the data comes in. And yeah, you can leverage it yourself. You own the data, you are completely autonomous to work with it at any time if you want.  

Now, if you are an implicit research nerd like me or can't wait to become one, I highly recommend those books here. They are a great foundation for everything I talked about today.  

Thank you all for joining.