A Big Fat Crisis (14 page)

Increasingly, marketers develop advertisements that can get under our skins by capitalizing on noncognitive, automatic processing. One way they can learn how to do this is by using advanced technology—like eye-tracking equipment. As a website from a company that offers eye-tracking services claims,

    
When the consumer is ready to buy, it is the package that sells the product, setting it apart from the competition. Our company offers testing of live package and shelf displays or simulations. Proprietary software developed by our company allows users to view a simulated shelf display, select a package off the shelf and rotate it to view all sides. Analyses
include how the consumer scans the shelf, what packages are noticed, when and for how long, and how the target package is viewed.

Eye tracking is a particularly useful tool when it comes to developing ads, logos, packaging, and other aspects of presentation, such as the color and designs on a can of soda or a package of chips—products that often depend on consumers’ impulsive responses. Eye tracking enables advertisers to see exactly how consumers view a particular advertisement or product, whether it’s a new bar of antibacterial soap, a caffeine-laden energy drink, or a gluten-free frozen pizza. Market researchers will have hundreds of consumers view products or ads to be sure that they will get a positive response before they recommend that a company invest a lot in production or promotions.

Here’s how it works: market researchers hire consumers to be their test subjects. Participants are asked either to wear a special pair of eyeglasses on which a tiny camera is mounted or to look at a computer screen that precisely measures where they are looking. Participants are then shown images of new products, packaging, logos, or ads. They don’t have to answer any questions as they gaze at the images on the screen, because the eye-tracking equipment objectively documents where they are looking and how long their gaze stays fixed on something. (Incidentally, even if you did ask consumers what they were looking at, their reports would be of little use—people often have no idea what their eyeballs are doing at any given moment. This is because eye gaze is not fully controllable, and we consciously perceive only a fraction of the world around us.)

The researchers will manipulate the position, color, and size of fonts and images, and then study how people view the objects. By playing around with placement, they can optimize attention. For example, just switching elements of an advertisement from the right side to the left or from the top to the bottom can make a substantial difference in how long people fixate on the brand name, the text, and the pictures.

Although eye movements have been studied for more than a hundred years, only since the 1970s has the technology become sufficiently sophisticated for scientists to study how eye movements predict behaviors. Eye tracking has revealed an important finding: the more
attention people pay to a particular product, the more likely they are to buy it.
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That minor pictorial changes can have major effects is not unusual. Eye tracking reveals, for example, that font size can affect sales. In one study, researchers measured the amount of time consumers focused on different sections of a supermarket advertising circular. People looked at larger fonts longer, such that a 1 percent increase in font size was associated with a 0.9 percent increase in duration of attention. Attention, in turn, was directly associated with increased sales of the products described in larger fonts. Appealing to reason is not necessary to influence what we choose and consume—we may only need to supersize the font.
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But it’s not just the font size that matters—style also counts. When the color and typeface of a product logo are congruent with the product, people can more easily recognize and recall the product.
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For example, the font
Palatino Italic
is often judged as feminine, bright, quiet, and light, while
is judged as masculine, rough, and strong. Somehow, the angle of the lines, their delicacy or thickness, suggests different qualities that can influence our opinions of a product.
for instance, is associated with being slow.

British researchers John Doyle and Paul Bottomley conducted several studies to demonstrate that typeface styles enhance advertising messages. In one study, they created two brands of chocolate truffles (the candies were the same) and called them either Temptation or Indulgence.
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Study participants were simply asked to choose between two candy boxes with different names and fonts: for example, between
(Salem font) and
(Signet font) or between
(Signet font) and
(Salem font).