Conquest

Going beyond the obvious
Conquest is a thought leader in brand and advertising research. We believe that much of contemporary advertising research is based on an outmoded model, in which the consumer always makes considered brand choices, and advertising works through attention and rational persuasion.

So much of consumers’ response to advertising is not thought through: it’s unconscious and intuitive. And so much of what we know about brands is learned implicitly, which means that often we know a lot about brands, but don’t necessarily know how or where we learned it. In fact, most of what we know about brands is not consciously learned, or processed in our working memory: there simply is not the time and, frankly, we have more important things to attend to. That’s why standard pre-testing questions, particularly those based on recall and persuasion, take us only so far in understanding the true impact of advertising – they measure the obvious, rather than what we should be measuring: engagement.

Advertising needs to create brand engagement, which is driven by emotion. Emotions power much of our brand choice and to fully understand the effect of advertising on a brand, pre-testing needs to access the emotional and unconscious aspects of the consumer’s mind – where brand engagement takes place – as well as the conscious and rational. Our pre-testing methodology looks at total response to advertising: conscious and unconscious; rational and emotional.

Our Metaphorix™ approach employs visual representations of primary metaphors to access consumers’ immediate emotional response to advertising – thus avoiding the over-rationalisation inherent in traditional question formats, and providing a more direct route into emotion.


Inference and indirect questioning
Because we are looking for emotional engagement with the brand, we go beyond ‘show and tell’; exposing people to advertising and then asking them what they recall is not a communication test, it’s a memory test.

Communication is often an unconscious (and invisible) mental process, way below the mental radar that we call awareness, and traditional methodologies fail to identify emotional response as accurately as Conquest’s indirect, inferential approach.

Instead of simply asking respondents to describe their feelings about an ad, we concentrate on the effect that advertising has on their feelings towards the brand. The division of the sample into exposed and unexposed cells allows us to infer the effect that the advertising has on emotional engagement, without the respondent having to describe a mental process that they are unaware of.


Metaphorix™
Engagement with brands is mainly emotional. Brand emotions are simple, unconscious impulses towards behaviour and therefore questions about brands and advertising should be designed to encourage an intuitive response. By using visual representations of primary metaphors, our Metaphorix™ approach gets at the intuitive, emotional response to advertising – avoiding overrationalisation and providing a more direct route into emotion.


The most important brand response is emotional
Emotions power much of our brand choice. They are simple, unconscious and nonverbal responses – shortcuts, that help us to make choices in ever more crowded markets. Therefore, to fully understand a brand, tracking needs to access the emotional unconscious, where brand engagement takes place.


Measures:

• Overall impressions/feelings
• Message registration
• Brand beliefs*
• Brand engagement*
• Brand disposition*
• Brand proximity
• Brand disposition*
• Brand feelings
• Ad engagement*
• Ad empathy