Leveraging Metaphors for Materializing Emotional Bonds

The Problem: It’s very hard to understand why consumers choose certain brands among others. It’s much harder to understand the underlying emotional reason for industries that practically provide the same value proposition, such as banks, insurance companies, or supermarkets! Our client, a global supermarket chain, would like to understand why a certain group of customers mostly choose competitors instead of their brand. Moreover, they would like to understand solely emotional aspects, instead of concrete differences (such as pricing)

Methodology: As some abstract concepts are very hard for ordinary consumers to depict, we leveraged metaphors to stimulate consumers and help them tell their stories. The methodology has 4 steps:

1) Our psychologists ask consumers to choose three pictures from Uservision’s sensory stimuli library. The library has 600+ pictures, and Uservision picks 150 pictures from this library and shows them to research participants. Research participants are asked to choose pictures that relate to their favorite supermarket chain.

2) The research participants are then asked to define what they see in the picture, unrelated to the research objective.

3) Afterward, they will be asked why they chose that particular picture and its relations with our client.

4) We repeated this process for our brand and analyzed the gap between the participant’s favorite brand and our client.

Results: Uservision accurately categorized 5 different emotional reasons (for different profiles) which made the participants hesitant to visit our client’s brand. Through this understanding, according to their strategy, our client decided to acquire market share from 2 of these profiles, through marketing activities.