Engagement is ubiquitous in the jargon of advertising. Its pursuit has become a kind of Holy Grail. It is said with great certainty that for an ad to be effective it must engage the consumer. This seems self-evident, but is it true? It turns out that engagement is a lot fuzzier of a concept than generally conceded and its effects are by no means proven.
What is engagement and how do we know whether someone is engaged with an ad? How do we measure degree of engagement? Strangely, engagement is not anchored in any metric and has no agreed upon meaning. So the first task is to define the concept. If we look at discussions of engagement, three attributes seem necessary. First, any definition of engagement must include capturing attention; however, the mere act of attending is not sufficient. In addition to capturing one’s attention, the object of attention must incite interaction from the consumer. But this too is not sufficient. This leads us to the third necessary attribute of engagement: The interaction must be positive. This provides us with a working definition: A consumer is engaged when s/he notices and then interacts positively with an ad or brand.
How to Measure Engagement
Now that we know what engagement is, how do we measure it? There are several ways. Often, we rely on self-reporting; in some way, shape or form, we ask the consumer whether he or she recalls and/or felt positively involved with the ad. If we favor behavioral measures, we look at time spent on an ad, click-throughs, etc. This brings up an immediate problem, namely that these measures usually do not correlate with one another. So they may not be measuring the same thing. But even if we assume that these measures overlap, with each assessing some aspect of engagement, does engagement, measured in these ways, matter?
Engagement is only important if it predicts behavior towards the brand or product being advertised. It seems intuitive that engagement be a good thing, but this important question is rarely addressed empirically. And whatever data does exist does not support this intuitively-obvious conclusion. It is not clear that engagement, no matter how assessed, predicts consumer behavior. In fact, it often does not.
So now we have two problems: We are not exactly sure what engagement is or how to best measure it. Additionally, we are not sure that engagement, as traditionally assessed, predicts anything meaningfully-related to consumer behavior. We can begin to address these weaknesses by examining the untested assumptions in our understanding of engagement. The most basic assumption is that engagement must be conscious. After all, how can something be an object of attention if consciousness is not involved? How can something elicit an emotional reaction if we are not aware of it? How can there be an interaction (positive or otherwise) outside of awareness? It turns out that all of these things are not only possible, but they happen all the time.
SEE ALSO: Branding Is Not a Popularity Contest
Cognitive and psychological science has shown that consciousness is not necessary for any of them. It turns out that attention can be unconscious, as can emotional reactions. We can interact with and relate to people and things without knowing how or even that we are doing so.
The Ubiquity of Unconscious Processing
This insight into the ubiquity of unconscious processes means that our definition is incomplete. We need to measure unconscious as well as conscious engagement if we want a true assessment of engagement. While neurophysiological and psychophysiological measures provide one means for getting at attention and emotional reactions, a more practical way to measure the unconscious effects of an ad is through the strengths of the associations it triggers. Knowing the relative strengths of the associations enables us to tell the unconscious story of the ad. It can tell us what characteristics of the ad resonate with the consumer and how strongly he or she is engaged in it.
This kind of test uses reaction time technology to assess what captures attention. The relative reaction times to the different associations tell us how strongly each has captured attention. This method has the advantage of being convenient and scalable. Data can be collected on the Internet, via smartphones or tablets, so that large numbers of individuals can be assessed in an efficient fashion. Populations can be segmented, with the engagement of different sub-populations assessed and compared.
Information obtained through this technique can be an invaluable supplement to conscious understanding. To measure emotional reactions, marketers can take advantage of the finding that emotional processing is more rapid than cognitive processing. Our first reaction to any experience is emotional – cognitive understanding comes later. To assess this, the researcher can present a central aspect of the brand (e.g., the logo) too rapidly for the conscious, cognitive brain to process, but slowly enough for it to be processed emotionally. This yields positive and negative emotional reactions to the product or brand. We now have an unconscious measure of engagement (attention, emotions, interaction) to go along with traditional conscious measures. Combining the results of conscious and unconscious engagement yields a fuller picture of the person’s engagement with an ad and should have better predictive power.
Unconscious Associations
Assessing unconscious engagement is subtle and requires indirect measurement. After all, you cannot ask someone to report on his/her unconscious processes. To look at unconscious associations, experts in unconscious processes must work collaboratively to develop associations to test. A good number is about fifteen because, beyond that, the respondent becomes fatigued and we lose validity. The choices we make are based on what the clients hope their message will communicate and, just as important, what they do not want communicated.
SEE ALSO: 3 Quick Ways to Mitigate Brand Implosion
People are presented with messages to be tested – ads, tag lines, trailers, etc. – and then are presented with each of the associations in one of four colors (Red, Blue, Green and Yellow). The respondent’s task is to ignore the word and click on the correct color. The time it takes to do so is the measure of interest and each association is presented multiple times to allow for reliability. The longer it takes to react, the longer it takes to click on the correct color, the more the person attended to it (and was engaged). This is because they could not help processing the association even though they were told not to. We then measure the power of this involuntary attention through reaction time.
Unconscious Emotional Reactions
To assess automatic unconscious emotional reactions, we can take advantage of the greater speed of emotional versus cognitive responses. We present the object of interest (logo, brand, spokesperson, etc.) at a speed too quick for conscious identification, but slow enough to be processed emotionally. We follow with an image (person, generic product, etc.) that can be consciously identified and processed cognitively. We then ask a series of questions about that image. The person will answer in a way that is biased by the object that was processed emotionally; that is, s/he will evaluate the image in a way that is influenced by the emotional reaction to the object. This will reveal the unconscious evaluation of the object.
Putting It Together
By combining the results of the conscious and unconscious measures, we can determine the engagement value of the message being tested. Some messages will be strong consciously, but weak unconsciously – and vice versa. Some will be weak on both levels, while some will be strong on both levels. The latter is what we usually desire, although there can be instances where we are looking for unconsciously or consciously powerful engagement and do not care about the other process. In any case, by looking at both levels, we maximize consumer engagement and, therefore, the impact of our messages.
So let’s take marketing research to the next level and include both conscious and unconscious mental processes. After all, that’s how the human mind evolved.
Photo: Gorimon / Flickr