RESEARCH AT DISTANCE – THE BRAND RESEARCH LAB IS EXCLUSIVELY TESTING THE REMOTE VERSION OF IMOTIONS

The summer semester 2020 presented the Brand University with new challenges in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, not only in teaching – the research department also had to rethink its approach in recent months.

Normally, experimental studies at BU are conducted in the Brand Research Lab, where professors, lecturers and students have the resources for interdisciplinary research at their disposal. But how can projects that examine the design and impact of brands, media and innovative technologies with test persons be continued at a distance?

To ensure that empirical research at universities does not stand still despite the coronavirus, the company iMotions has developed a software solution for data collection where researchers and test persons do not have to be at the same place. The team of the Brand Research Lab was allowed to test it exclusively and to participate in its further development.

The focus is on the face recognition tool “Facial Expression Analysis”. Thanks to remote data collection, researchers can investigate at a distance what emotions a respondent feels while watching stimuli in the form of images and videos. Seven emotions – including, for example, fear, joy and disgust – can be reliably recognized and evaluated by facial expressions alone.

In this way, for example, consumer behavior can be studied and it can be better understood how advertising affects the subconscious. Ads and spots can be optimized based on the results. In combination with eye-tracking technologies, even specific elements of a design can be assigned to emotions.

Would you like to try out the remote tool yourself or use it for a project? Please contact our research associate Lena Lehmann.