Seth Godin, a world-renowned entrepreneur and author, explains what triggers consumers’ buying decisions. He says, “People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic. Likewise, the picture of a young boy wandering around a beautiful landscape followed by a pug is enough for people to recognise the advertisement is about the network Hutch. Years passed, and the ad is still imprinted on our minds, a powerful example of effective brand building. 

Significance of Emotion AI

With the advent of digital technology, marketers are in a rush to find out various tactics from which they can lure their audience by gauging their emotional responses towards each product instead of going for the conventional pattern like surveys and direct interviews. These are the two ways that are often referred to as quantitative and qualitative techniques for a better understanding of customers. The brands consider these responses as insights that can also contain biased inputs. Rarely do people share their sincere reviews, which makes room for analysing a customer from their behaviour rather than what they say. Emotion AI, being the subset of Artificial Intelligence, aids in understanding this behaviour through measuring, simulating and reacting to human emotions. 

Here Entropik had the ultimate comeback by helping businesses understand the pace of consumer preferences and how to drive consumer-centric experiences. 

How Entropik redefines consumer behaviour analysis 

Entropik is a Bengaluru-based market research company founded in February 2016 by Ranjan Kumar (CEO), Lava Kumar (CPO) and Bharat Singh (Head of Engineering). The start-up claims its unique selling point is its AI-powered tools that help them in enabling research, marketing and the product team to organise in-house qualitative and quantitative research. 

While giving an interview for Your Story, Ranjan Kumar shared his realisation that most brands nowadays focus on creating advertisements rather than including consumer feedback or ensuring their marketing content resonates with their customers emotionally. He said, “Forging an emotional connection with consumers or creating emotionally resonating products has been a massive challenge for brands as it requires decoding a consumer’s subconsciousness”. 

The realisation stuck him and led to the development of a research platform that works on emotional intelligence and offers subconscious insights. He opines that conventional methods like surveys and interviews will help understand only the conscious side of a user’s brain, while consumer behaviour research backed by emotion recognition technology will enable marketers to interpret the consumer’s subconscious side.  

Entropik explores aspects such as qualitative, quantitative and behavioural analytics as part of their consumer research. The Entropik platform leverages the power of technologies like: 

• Facial Coding- This helps track real-time emotional responses to advertisements, videos and other content. This predominantly focuses on capturing the facial expressions using a webcam or a mobile cam, later quantifying them into seven emotions and categorising them as positive and negative responses. 
• AI-based Eye Tracking- This helps them track the pupils of the customers. It analyses and tracks certain areas of interest to capture various visual metrics. Tracking users’ eye movements to find out where they are long and how long they are looking while watching the advertisements will help them understand their interests. It then visualises the user’s point of view with heatmaps and gaze plots to optimise their attention and engagement levels.
• Voice AI technology- It concentrates on what a consumer is saying by analysing the voice tonality. It converts speech to text in real-time to transcript qualitative interviews. Besides tonality, it also analyses elements such as acoustics, pauses, pitch and voice to interpret emotions hidden in their speech. It is later quantified and classified into positive, negative and neutral emotions. 

Market research is an integral part of every consumer-facing brand. Hence understanding the emotions of consumers is vital. Traditional methods are getting disrupted by AI-powered techniques nowadays. Like Entropik, many technology firms are developing various AI-powered solutions to analyse consumer behaviour effectively by providing extensive cost savings with better insights into consumer brands. 

• https://yourstory.com/2023/03/bengaluru-based-entropik-ai-startup-helping-brands-tap-into-human-emotion
• https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/emotion-ai-explained
• https://www.bizzbuzz.news/bizz-talk/this-bengaluru-startup-uses-ai-to-read-consumer-minds-1229615?infinitescroll=1
• Photo by Harry Cunningham on Unsplash