Rethinking Product Testing with Neuro AI Emotional Analytics

Recently, a leading beverage company in Kenya took a calculated risk to embed emotional tracking during a product test using Neuro AI. This ground breaking research layered a new element of gathering real time consumer emotional reactions to a new product to help the client to make the critical decision of whether to launch or not.

The Business Issue

Actnable Insights helped our client to understand the possibilities around launching a new product in Kenya within the RTD category.

The client sought to understand how sessionable their new product was and unpack what intrinsic and extrinsic factors would drive consumption.

More importantly was the desire to understand what emotions the product elicited on a real time basis during the taste test session for their new product.

Augmenting this new research approach that captures consumer emotional responses with a hybrid methodology helped our client to enhance and provide clarity that helped them to make a precise business decision on whether to launch or not.

A Revolutionary Methodological Approach

To achieve a holistic and unbiased understanding, the Actnable Insights collaborated with another firm and designed a hybrid research study that focused on the groundbreaking emotional tracking technology as described below.

The Hybrid Research Design

• Emotional Video Tracking Session: This first stage captured the real time consumer emotions to the product. Our 2-minute video captured craniofacial reactions to the new product on a real time basis, classifying their implicit emotional responses that helped shape their decision to launch or not.
• Quantitative Online Survey: Captured structured feedback from 75 consumers in Nairobi on metrics like enjoyment, sensory perceptions and purchase intent.
•  Qualitative Focus Groups:  5 FGDs explored the “why” behind consumer attitudes, occasions, brand perceptions and the social context of drinking.

Actnable Neuro AI The Game Changer

This innovative tool was and is critical for uncovering authentic emotional reactions and it is anchored on a scientifically validated foundation that measures facial expressions that reveal genuine consumer feelings that were measured during their interaction with the product, capturing the immediate, in-the-moment reaction that eliminates bias.

How Actnable Neuro AI Works:  It uses a sophisticated three-step process that:

• Detects your face: AI locates the participant’s face within the video frame.
• Models your face: By mapping the consumer’s face using digital landmarks.
• Classifies your face: Our Artificial Neural Network (ANN) that is trained on a dataset of over 10,000 annotated emotion images then analyses the consumers facial model to generate the expressed emotions (Happy, Angry, Surprise etc)

What Actnable Neuro AI Revealed

This layer of objective, emotional data provided clear, powerful insights in real time that augmented other methods to provide our client with clear direction on their product.

Key Finding 1: Most consumers had a positive reaction to the product. The emotional tracking of consumer reactions was aligned to their verbal responses. This breakthrough baseline was used to check on market acceptability and risk levels.

Key Finding 2: Context was the primary driver of emotion. This context was either social/performative or quiet/functional that was influenced by the environment which was tracked alongside consumer perceptions on the intrinsic and extrinsic drivers.

Key Finding 3: Our Neuro AI platform decoded subtle emotional cues associated with product consumption that providing our client with invaluable data for marketing.

Conclusion: The Strategic Value of Neuro AI

The integration of Actnable Neuro AI within the study was the key to unlocking a deep, authentic and actionable understanding of consumer behaviour.

These insights helped our client to discover authentic, unfiltered consumer truth and provided nuance and depth. This helped shaped the client’s strategy and positioning by validating the product’s sensory profile that helped their final decision to launch or not based on real time consumer emotional response.