How does it work?
In a short online survey a series of simple questions about brands, products, commercials, brand ambassadors or concepts is being asked. We know that consumers’ rational (explicit) declarations are important, but assessing those responses in the context of time that consumers’ brains need to produce an answer gives a new perspective, resulting in new insights and creating a competitive edge.
What exactly does the Reaction Time tell us?
Reaction Time reveals automatic, emotional reactions which lead to enhanced understanding of consumers’ behavior. Fast answers indicate strong and easily accessible attitudes that have the highest potential to influence consumers’ behavior. On the other hand, slow answers suggest that on emotional level consumers are not certain about their own attitudes – it is possible that they do not truly believe in what they have declared or they have not made up their minds yet. Slow answers are provided with doubt and uncertainty and are less likely to influence consumers’ behaviour.
How does iCode™ define ‘fast’, ‘slow’ and ‘average’ answers?
iCode™ uses standardized scores for every single respondent, derived thanks to an individual calibration and baseline. There are also other important elements and additional procedures that were incorporated into the method to increase quality and reliability of a whole proces, e.g. attention control screen, warm-ups, and advance button. All these elements are embedded in iCode™ (made under U.S. Method Patent).
Thanks to standardization procedures individual differences are minimized and scores can be presented on universal scale – either INDEX 4.0 or our Level Scoring System (LSS). Thanks to this procedure we are able to establish what fast/average/slow means for every individual. For one respondent 800ms can be the fastest one can provide an answer, while for other respondent the same 800ms can be at the very end of an average Response Time. This is another reason why we do not provide Raw Millisecond Scores.
Our Reaction Time method
Rafal Ohme, NEUROHM founder, started the research in field covering reaction time measurement in 1997. Our team has introduced implicit tests in 2004 and since then has been gaining experiece of commercial practice in this field – that is what let us create a method of noise reduction for Reaction Time measurement. Our unique procedures and algorithms enable us to control the impact of various factors such as: individual differences (age, gender), speed of reading, familiarity with a digital device and its type (PC, laptop or mobile), fatigue, (in)voluntary carelessness and many more on the process. Answers of each respondent are standardized and individual baseline is created to develop an index that allows us to compare between different responses.
It is important to point out that we are not suggesting you to discard traditional, explicit surveys. Reaction Time ‘spices up’ your results and creates an added value that allows your research to stand out. Because we understand that explicit is valuable, what we do is adding a new dimension to the findings. We create additional opportunities, as Reaction Time may lead to further exploration of your research. It helps to identify potential niches by presenting findings that could otherwise disappear in the proces of traditional research. It can also warn you against false friends – values or features that are attributed to a brand, product, or advertisement, but only at the declarative level, with no true emotional background supporting it. As neuroscience and business practice teach us, hardly ever does anything real come out of declarations. Reaction Time will prevent you from following misleading results and guide you towards the most promising routes to navigate your research to a successful outcome.
The neuroscience behind Reaction Time Method
Neuromarketing Science & Business Association (NMSBA) qualifies Reaction Time measurement as one of neuromarketing techniques. It relies on the fact that human brain processes all incoming information in its unique time, which we are not aware of. Reaction Time methods are based on measuring the speed of mental processing by recording the elapsed time between the appearance of sensory stimulus and the subsequent corresponding behavior (e.g. providing an answer). Reaction Time measurement can be used for various purposes and may have different theoretical backgrounds or practical approaches. The most popular method based on Reaction Time measurement is Implicit Association Test (IAT) developed by Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji to study racial prejudice and other sensitive social issues (1995). However, it is not the only approach used by scientists and professionals. Many researchers focusing on relationship between attitude and behaviour have been applying a different paradigm. It is also based on Reaction Time method, but it assesses the strength of the attitude and its accessibility rather then pure associations and categorizations of the stimuli, as it is done in IAT test. One of the researchers that has been developing this technique is prof. Russel Fazio, who proved that the correlation between attitude and behaviour is much higher among people with strong attitudes identified as opinions, expressed with fast reaction time (1986). This approach in comparison to IAT is less depended on the relationship between stimuli and the category chosen for the test, is more suitable for marketing purposes and much easier to explain to clients or stakeholders. It allows to assess the certainty of an attitude (defined as a theoretical construct that represents an individual’s predisposition to respond in favorable or unfavorable manner with respect to a given objects) (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), or a network of interrelated beliefs that reside in long-term memory and is activated when the attitude object or issue is encountered (Tourangeau & Rasinksi, 1988). Fazio proved that the strength of an attitude can be indexed using a Reaction Time paradigm (2001). He showed that strong attitudes that are highly accessible from memory are much more likely to guide behavior (1986, 1989) and we can identify them with Reaction Time.
