Will they change their behavior?

Ultimately, persuasive messaging is about producing behavior change.

• Will our ad get the consumer to try our new product?
  
• Will our new value proposition increase our market share?
  
• Will our new package design move more product off the shelf?

Problems with traditional approaches

The relationship between expressed intentions and actual behavior has always been relatively weak. Focus groups and survey results may point in a general direction at an aggregate level, but are often wrong, and illuminate little about how and why individuals actually act one way rather than another.

The main reason why self-prediction fails is because people are not consciously aware of many of the forces that influence their behavior. Self-reports thus tend to reflect how people think they should act in a future situation, rather than how they will actually act.

Actionable results with Lucid Neurometrics

In contrast to traditional self-reporting, Lucid Neurometrics utilize implicit, pre-conscious measures of attraction, emotional response, and memorability to predict subsequent behavior. These factors tend to be better predictors because they are not biased by wishful thinking, rationalization or other factors that distort subjective self-reports.

Highly predictive neurometric measures can also be derived from experimental designs in which purchasing decisions are simulated directly. Subjects may shop in a virtual store or select coupons to spend on future purchases. Neural and physiological measures collected while people engage in these tasks are strong predictors of actual buying behavior.