You must understand what your customers like and dislike, for the success of your business. You can do this by decoding their reaction to what they buy, their experience, or testing ideas, among other methods. This can help you strategize the future direction of your business.
You should find ways to capture and decode customer emotions and feelings at different buying points. This will help you in product development and marketing strategies. It will help improve user experience and thus scale your business.
Facial coding, leveraged by AI technology, provides you with insights into consumers’ expressions and their unbiased feeling. It helps the researchers in making more accurate analyses.
There are many applications for facial coding. They include but are not limited to ad testing, consumer neuroscience, and neuromarketing for product design, both physical and digital.
What is facial coding?
Have you ever considered using facial coding in your market research projects? As you use emojis in text messages. The expression of each emoji helps the reader understand what feeling the sender had while sending the message, without any verbal communication. In the same way, interpreting facial expressions through facial coding helps understand the thoughts of customers about a product or service. This technique has become a popular market research tool.
Human expressions are not as easy to understand as an emoji. Researchers use facial coding tools to decode the signals hidden behind many facial expressions. Facial coding measures emotions by analyzing universal facial expressions. It gives unbiased insights into human emotions.
By doing facial coding research for understanding human behavior and emotions, researchers can find the reactions that show on the faces of the prospects.
How facial coding technology works?
You may now be wondering how facial coding technology works, especially in market research. Most of today’s traditional market research often falls short of capturing emotional responses that are unbiased by self-awareness and social desirability. This is where facial expression analysis highlights the real value.
A good facial coding platform provides several facial expression measures. It should include core emotions, like happiness, anger, fear, disgust, frustration, contempt, sadness, and surprise, to help gain better insight into what a person is feeling.
Facial coding market research helps optimize products, analyze market segments, and identify target audiences and buyer personas. For instance, individual respondents or groups may be asked to watch TV spots while facial coding researchers monitor their facial expressions. Researchers can identify the emotions of the audience through various scenes and interpret the response toward the ad.
Benefits of facial coding market research
The most important question in your mind now is how facial coding research can bring value to market research. One of the core benefits is that it reveals the true, unbiased feelings of a customer toward, say, a new product or a tv ad.
Commonly, people get influenced by people around them or other external factors. This makes their feelings and responses biased to an extent. Facial coding research allows you to overcome such bias.
Let us go over some of the key benefits that facing coding tools bring to market and user research.
Provides quantifiable judgments
Facial coding shows how people’s faces look and how they feel in response to stimulus situations. Suppose a retail store is planning to bring new products to the market. It may show the new designs to shoppers to capture their facial expressions. This will provide facial coding market researchers with the raw data required for facial coding.
Researchers can easily analyze raw data and categorize different emotions. It helps highlight the extent to which the shoppers like or dislike the products they see.
Enhances customer service
Emotion detection with facial coding can help to elevate the user experience for every industry. Retailers can utilize this technology to launch better offers for their customers by analyzing their browsing and buying patterns.
For the healthcare industry, capturing the emotions of respondents can help to design better care plans and offer services at a faster pace.
Makes advertising impactful
Companies are constantly competing to capture the attention of prospects and retain it. With consumers being bombarded with 10,000 ads in a day, drawing their attention to your website or product can be difficult.
By utilizing facial coding technology, you can get a comprehensive idea of how the advertising will perform. For instance, you can use copy testing to know the effectiveness of your ad copy by doing copy testing. You can improve the copy parts that are leading to confusion or low engagement.
Conclusion
Facial coding technology has been around for a while now. The continuous innovation happening in this space because of AI and machine learning is opening new doors for researchers to create better products. A research platform powered by facial coding technology enriches basic research. It does so by decoding human emotions expressed through the face, voices, and eyes of the respondents. It is a highly useful tool for businesses, marketers, market, and user researchers.