News

Loiter in the streets of Reading for long and you're likely to be invited to the offices of Think Eye-Tracking where, in return for a fiver, volunteers have their gaze tracked as they stare at images of packaging design and supermarket shelves.

Robert Stevens, ‘chief-executive thinker’, and director of the company, founded Think this year with neuroscientist and childhood friend Jon Dodd after developing techniques under the Bunnyfoot brand for nearly a decade. Procter & Gamble was among the first to challenge the pair to examine how customers look at packaging. Design agencies are also following suit as the technique becomes increasingly influential in packaging design.

Eye-tracking was first invented in the 19th century, when volunteers would wear contact lenses attached to aluminium pointers. Thankfully, things have moved on since the 1800s. The equipment now uses infra-red rays to illuminate the face, causing a red eye effect that can be tracked using the 120Hz camera. This technology allows Think to create gaze plots, heat maps and view orders that show where the eye travels, for how long and in what order.

Stevens and Dodd first became in-volved in eye-tracking in 1999, when they bought the world’s fourth Tobii eye-tracker from its Swedish manufacturer and founded Bunnyfoot. After a year as Tobii’s unpaid Q&A department they became resellers of the Tobii kit. We became experts at fixing it as it wasn’t very reliable back then, laughs Stevens.

A breakthrough came in 2004, when P&G asked the firm to create a software program for packaging testing after seeing a piece of work by another of the company’s clients, Dr Steve Westerman, a prominent packaging expert at Leeds University. The resulting programme was christened SuperVisual.

Design-minded
The largely automated SuperVisual system cues into what it is about design that makes people understand what they are shopping for, explains Stevens. Each test incorporates three stages. First, the user is shown shelves and given a free choice of where to look. Second, the user is forced to pick out a specific brand from a shelf and, third, is asked to comment on that brand.

The technology is based on the psychological theory that people spend their lives in a ‘habitual’ state of mind. This is where the brain stores useful information and filters out things it already has models for. A brand, for example, may wish to change the packaging of a given product if a supermarket were to copy its design. But the redesign would have to be careful not to lose what originally attracted the consumer, so as not to shock him out of the habit of buying
that product.

However, the consumer needs to be in an ‘executive’ state of mind to consider buying a new product, explains Stevens. Ideally the product should pass over into the habitual state of mind as soon as possible so the consumer just buys it without referring to the executive mind to make a considered purchase, he says.

It is Stevens’ belief that this is why 50% of all new products fail. He gives the example of lung cancer victims who return to smoking. As he says: Ask the executive mind if they want to stop and they would say yes, but the habitual mind has a powerful effect.

Think is located on a ground floor office close enough to the station and centre of Reading to fully benefit from the seven million rail commuters that pass through the town every year. It is ideally placed for the Think team to pull people off the street to undertake a five-minute eye-tracking test in return for £5. So far, the company’s services have been enlisted by market research outfits as well as the big brands themselves, who for the cost of running a couple of focus groups can get information on 120 eye-tracked people.

The technology has also been tentatively adopted by design agencies. Creative agencies do not want to be told how to do design and it is not my place to tell them, concedes Stevens. But I can tell them how the human mind works and we can test what they’ve done.

Now Think is pushing further into the packaging arena. It is currently developing a global database of eye-tracked packaging designs that will allow users to test their designs against other tested packs. The company has created the software for a global market research firm, but eventually hopes to license it around the world. As Stevens excitedly exclaims: We’ve an opportunity to define market research.

As more and more companies adopt eye-tracking as their primary means of market research, it looks like focus groups could become a thing of the past in packaging design. Think’s ever-evolving software means that not only can more people be tested than in focus groups, but the results can be judged against your competitors’ designs. Hanging around the streets of Reading has never sounded so exciting.

TRACK RECORD
• Stevens took business studies at Newcastle University
• He worked for KPMG in Leeds and The Snack Factory and Hallmark in management consultant and management accountant roles
• Two weeks into a job at Hyder Consulting, at the age of 28, he was offered the financial director role
and quit
• He was the sixth member of dotcom start-up sales order business Diva as system accountant and account director where he spent six months in Cannes in France and six months in Arizona, US
• In 1999, he returned to the UK to found Bunnyfoot with Jon Dodd
• In 2008, Think Eye-Tracking was formally launched