Emotion research is a growing trend in the market research industry – a simple Google search for the term reveals thousands of hits, all extolling the virtues of emotion analysis, so it can be overwhelming trying to decide which direction to take your market research and who to entrust with the process. Although there are many articles on why emotion research is important and how it is being used to direct marketing and advertising efforts, there’s nothing to tell you how to narrow down the list of potential candidates to conduct emotion research studies for your company. As market researchers ourselves, we understand how confusing the different options can be.
So then how do you choose which company to trust your emotion research process with? With so many options, you need some practical criteria for determining which solution is right for you. There are four important aspects to consider when selecting a market research firm that focuses on emotion research. The company you choose should have a solution that is:
1. Scientific
2. Seamless
3. Scalable
4. Simple
Scientific
The first aspect of emotion research is the science behind it. We could debate how people conduct market research on emotions and which technique is best, but that would be missing the point. Companies are using all kinds of techniques to study emotions – qualitative and quantitative; physiological and psychological; image-based and linguistic, and more. The problem is, many of them are approaching emotion research as neuroscientists doing market research. What you really need is a market research company that uses neuroscience to research emotions. As a fellow market research company, we get it. The point is, the results are more important than the execution.
Seamless
Second is the question of whether the solution is seamless. No matter what kind of research you are doing, the process should be able to integrate smoothly with your existing methodologies. You don’t want to completely change the direction of your research docket – it’s better to have a solution that simply plugs in to the work you’re already doing. Whether your process is qualitative, quantitative, online or in person, don’t replace it, supplement your market research by studying emotion.
Scalable
Next, is the solution they provide scalable? This is one of the primary disqualifiers of market research companies studying emotion – their process involves expensive and time-consuming techniques that don’t fit well with all companies. When emotion research is approached from a neuroscience angle, it often involves costly machines and other time-consuming elements that make the process challenging to scale up to reach a larger quantity of subjects. If the research process for one subject costs $2,000, the cost of reaching hundreds or thousands for a large-scale study is crippling. Unless you have an unlimited budget, you should think carefully about whether the solution a company proposes can be scaled up at a manageable cost.
Simple
Finally, is the solution simple? The simpler, the better when it comes to emotion research. You need a way to study emotions in customers that is cost-effective and efficient while still being based in sound science and proven market research techniques. Whatever company you choose to do your market research, if their process is complex and requires a lot of time, you’ll be left frustrated with a lack of progress and miss out on valuable time to act on the actual findings of the research. You need a solution that doesn’t require a scientist to be in the room just to explain the results of the findings to you. At the Martec Group, we’ve found a way to study emotion through language that involves simple research techniques, simple data collection, and easy to understand results.
So what does the right Emotion Research solution look like?
Well, the solution that fits best with these 4 important pieces is a language-based study of emotions. Basing an emotion study in language allows you to cut out the need for expensive machines and uncomfortable environments, but still gets to the heart of customers’ true feelings.
We have found that a person’s word choice reveals non-conscious emotions that better reflect their true feelings toward a brand. By asking open-ended questions to high-quality subjects, our research studies provide actionable results in a timely and inexpensive process that standard research does not. We use tools such as patented linguistic algorithms and Martec Emotion Score (MES) to uncover these non-conscious emotions and categorize them in a way that is easy to understand and analyze.
To learn more about how we approach the study of emotions, contact us.
