Our senses (touch, smell, hearing, taste and vision) trigger emotions; they activate memories that, on their turn, orient behaviors.
How to measure a subjective reaction to sensory stimuli, establishing a metric that can be applied to different people?
Let’s think on the following experiment: We present a fragrance to 2 people. Individual A and Individual B And we ask them: which score would you give to such fragrance? Both individuals answer score 10.
But if we wanted to go deeper in our research and asked the same individuals exposed to the same fragrance: What emotion did this fragrance provoke in you?
That’s where neuroscience enters: Studies that identify subjective reactions that, associated to the traditional sensory study, potentialize the understanding of the consumers’ emotions. We measure variables and obtain details on the sensory impressions that are hardly exposed through words.
The body talks and neuroscience understands and translates this language with a great differential: the body doesn’t lie.
Consciously, we may try, through words, to manifest “politically correct” opinions, but it’s not possible to control responses such as the level of sweating, pupil dilatation, cardiac rhythm or electric frequencies and chemical reactions of the brain.
A person is capable of reporting the olfactory experience with a lot of confidence after having smelled a bottle, but will have a hard time reporting what happens with his cognitive system while he smells the bottle. This because the brain needs a certain time to establish connections, to perform processing, and to configure a final response.
With neuroscience, the scientists are capable of identifying a response more quickly and with more precision in relation to the emotions than the verbalization of the emotion itself.
It’s important that we continue questioning the consumers on their opinions. But it’s equally important to understand their involuntary reactions!