INVISIBLE GORILLAS – How they thump your ROI

The business environment for manufacturers of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) has never been tougher than it is now.  Brand budgets have declined year after year for the last 20 years to the point of invisibility.  It has been claimed that FMCG brand budgets that used be a 75 – 25 split for above the line advertising (ATL) and below the line advertising/trade promotions (BTL) have significantly changed.  Further suggestions are that ATL budgets have dropped by up 70% while the BTL (trade) has increased tenfold.  This situation is the same for department store retailers and big box retailers; add to that the growing trend of house brands and it is imperative the shopper see your brands, products or point of sale advertising (POS) in store.   Mobile eye tracking research is providing much needed insight to companies to ensure a solid ROI for their in store campaigns.

But that is only part of the story.

Cognitive science tells us that the brain handles a little and a lot of information – around 40 bits of information consciously while unconsciously it’s around 11 million bits per second.  The 40 bits is where shoppers’ behavioural choices can be observed however the 11 million bits of information that drive decisions such as products, brands, pricing and the POS remains below the surface.  Further, this task of sifting through information such as counting, or working out prices, or trying to recall the contents of ones pantry, is effortful and hinders perception and attention thus causing many in store marketing activities to remain unseen.

Psychologists refer to this occurrence as the invisible gorilla effect.   It was named so by Daniel Simons (University of Illinois) & Christopher Charbris (Harvard University) two researches who asked participants to watch a video and count the number of basketball passes made by one of two teams.  The test effect introduced was that during the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks through the middle of the video.  Their initial report indicated that over 50% of participants (others have been higher) cannot accurately report seeing the gorilla.  How this effect occurs is because the conscious thinking brain is hard at work on an effortful mental task being distracted from the unconscious part of the brain thus making us blind – Simon and Charbris coined it inattentional blindness or perceptual blindness.  Understanding this effect and minimising it has many implications for marketers & retailers.

Marketers cannot continue to channel hundreds of thousands of dollars into ad tracking and concept testing while ignoring the new main game and that is what the shopper actually sees in store.  Unless marketers focus on the return on investment in their POS and in store promotions right now their brand ROI will continue to go through the floor.   Within the growing tough retail environments there seems to be few FMCG brands that have substantially increased their ROI and strengthened their consumer franchise in recent times.

POS effectiveness measures must include shopper research beyond the traditional observational studies or assisted shopping studies where the shopper kindly reports to the probes of ‘what were you looking at just then; what about just before’.  This method of study is extremely ineffective in this style of research because it does not actually measure what shoppers are seeing, it only measures what they think they were seeing or what they think they were seeing at the point of hearing the question.

Shopper marketers and insight managers are wise to consider the use of mobile eye tracking technology in their shopper research programs.  Mobile eye tracking has evolved considerably since its first introduction to the marketing community many years ago.  The technological advances have vastly improved the eye tracking glasses which has meant a considerable decrease in the concern about the ‘unnaturalness’ of the study where in most cases less that 5% of participants are actually looked at by other shoppers when wearing the glasses (the exception is children who seem to be intrigued).  The improvements in the analytical software allows 1000’s of data points to be analysed at a greatly reduced and with greater accuracy as the software algorithms do much of the calculations that were once done by hand. 

The benefit of quantifying what shoppers are looking at is that you are now able to confidently identify the perceptual blindness in the retail environment based on objective quantitative data and not subjective qualitative reports.  You are able to quantify what products, brands and POS executions are actually looked at; for how long they are looked at and how they impact the shopper decision making processes.  Further, you are able to understand the brands, products and POS executions that unfortunately are invisible gorillas.

We have conducted multiple in store eye tracking studies to assist retailers and national brands to understand their in store efforts.  In one particular study we were able effectively identify which POS executions were actually looked at by shoppers and ultimately led to their interest and purchase of a products.  Meanwhile, in another study were able to successfully identify that, for over 95% of the shoppers studied, a significant proportion of the in store marketing collateral was not looked at during their shopping journey.  However, even though the collateral was not looked at by shoppers it was very well liked and through detailed analysis of the eye tracking patterns (over 15,000 data points) we were able to identify better locations for the POS so that it would have a higher visibility success rate.  Another study of shelf layout indicated that the time to find a product based on the eye tracking data greatly influenced the number of products purchased highlighting that the product placement was currently ineffective and the better arrangement for the brand would likely increase sales.

Next to actual sales, mobile eye tracking research is the most current method to consistently identify precisely in store effectiveness of POS and promotional material.  Recent university studies have shown how rapidly the use of technology is influencing and changing everything we do; the way we live; it is only a matter of time when eye tracking technologies are an essential part of all shopper studies.

Dr Shane Moon