IAT® – Implicit Association Testing
Validated Quantitative method to test subconscious strengths of association (SOAs) of brand with image attributes, product features with emotional space elements, communication with image elements, etc!
Stemming from social research on subconscious social and prejudicial perceptions, IAT is increasingly applied in our quantitative consumer research:
- Effectively applied in quantified consumer research, to measure powerful subconscious emotions and associations with a marketing stimulus, making the prediction of consumer behavior much more accurate than traditional direct questioning and ratings/consumers' self-reported data!
- To measure them quantitatively and thus validate important elements of subconscious emotional spaces!
- To effectively validate the subconscious links between functional features and corresponding emotional attributes and deep motivations!
To gain a scientifically much more reliable measure than conventional self-reported data on, for example:
- Brand Associations/Brand Equity Elements/Brand Image Tracking
- Food and Beverage NPD & Innovation – link of product functional features with emotionally motivating elements
- Quantified/validated subconscious associations with any kind of message or communication (TVC, print, etc)
- Packaging Design Association elements
The psychological perspective:
Consumers' have existing biases that live in the neural connections in their brains (see example – and test yourself! – at www.implicit.harvard.edu) but it is only possible using "response latencies" (reaction times which are the key measuring mode of IAT) to measure these biases in the Implicit Association Test because consumers are not fully aware of them, and definitely cannot verbalize them!
How it works (in practice):
 1. The Priming of the Mind: Consumers are exposed to a prime on a screen – a stimulus such as a picture of the brand or product – which immediately activates both subconscious and conscious thoughts and feelings associated with the prime.
The prime can be an image, a physical object, the taste or smell of a product, a TVC, etc.
2. Subconsciously activated associations respond faster to a lexical test: Consumers are instructed to use a touch pad to conduct a lexical test – a simple word recognition test, or a categorization test.
  
• Word recognition response time: 694 milliseconds
• Word recognition response time: 389 milliseconds
3. Strength of Association (SOA) measured against scientific Mind Time Norms: Our professional IAT software/hardware measures in milliseconds the ability of a consumer to recognize/classify the word – for example, a statistically sensitive cell of consumers who can classify the word "Rebel" faster when primed by Pepsi than when primed by Coke will indicate to Pepsi that their mental brand equity owns the feeling of being a Rebel more strongly. Our Internal IAT Norms assist in the Analysis of Significant Differences in Mind Time – and thus genuine associative links.
Please contact us for an IAT demonstration, and how we can integrate it into regular quantitative tests as well as other advanced mind research methodologies!
TMRC Mind Research Division
Tel: +86-21-62183377 (main)
Shirley Hao: Extension 2222
Guo Xiao-Rong: Extension 2258
Holger E. Metzger: Extension 2211
research@tmrcresearch.com
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