The Creators of Motivation Advancement in the Exploration of Emotions

Whitepaper Executive Summary An effective advertisement prompts branded recall, is persuasive, and/or supports brand equity. Our standardized Next*TV ad test is a validated tool for assessing these key evaluative measures. However, like all current approaches, the challenge is to better explain why an ad is effective, or not. Conventional research struggles to discern consumers' emotional, subconscious responses to advertising and often misses the underlying personal and motivational drivers. To this end, Ipsos-ASI has engaged in research and development to create a research solution that better describes why and how an advertisement works.

Understanding emotion is important for marketers because emotions influence brand perceptions and behavior. In developing a research tool to measure emotions, we generated a list of emotional states and created illustrations that represented each one. After testing the illustrations with consumers, we used multi-dimensional scaling to map the emotions, and created an emotion landscape we call our Emoti*Scape. The application of our Emoti*Scape reveals responses that are more robust, specific, and insightful than open-ended questions.

Although measuring emotions is insightful, emotions alone do not explain behavior. Emotions run through a filter or checklist of the person's values, needs, memories, and aspirations. And the person must also care to do something about it. That is, consumers must become engaged and involved in order for emotions and motivations to evolve into behavior. Thus, measuring emotions is insightful, but we felt we could add to our learning by going beyond emotions to include personal values and motivators.

For personal values, we conducted an extensive review of personality traits (for example, introverted, extroverted, harmonious, independent, etc.), and isolated eleven factors that appear to explain human actions. After more research, we now can ask respondents to identify which traits in our list they associate with different brands or ads. We have discovered good discrimination for our traits between categories, between brands, and between ads.

However, since the influence of personal values increase and decrease depending on one's mood, we also conducted R&D on eleven groups of motivational drivers. These are universal to humankind and, in a general way, explain why we do things (for example, we do things to avoid risk/danger: this is a fundamental motivator for most people). Our R&D with the eleven factors also shows good discrimination between brands, categories, and ads (test versus control).

We see that these emotions, personal values, and motivational drivers interact and influence how a consumer interprets and understands an advertisement, and better describe how or why an ad is effective or not. Decoding this feedback delivers useful insights that can help marketers better understand and better deliver compelling advertising. We are encouraged by our preliminary findings on why and how an advertisement works, and are moving forward with plans to bring our innovative research solutions to market. We are happy to work with others to further our learning into assessing emotions and personal motivations.

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