Implicit Reaction Time testing, often known as reaction time test or IRTs, offer marketers a singular chance to study consumers at a deep emotional level and forecast their behaviour more precisely than with conventional research techniques.

IRTs enable a deeper understanding of consumer responses by removing biases and other influences, resulting in better marketing tactics and decision-making. These experiments tap into unconscious reflexes, exposing secret information that can be used to design successful marketing strategies and new products, ultimately increasing customer pleasure and engagement.

Having worked at the nexus of academia and industry for almost 20 years, I have conducted a sizable number of IRTs to address a sizable number of academic and commercial marketing-related concerns. I'll share some of that knowledge in this essay to enable anyone who want to use these strategies have a basic grasp on the guiding ideas.

IRTs, which fill in the missing implicit piece of the jigsaw puzzle for everyone from SMEs to multinational corporations, are poised to become a standard component of the market research mix. This is especially true when combined with well-established explicit methodologies. With the help of IRTs, marketers may now understand their target market from all angles and combine verbal input with unconscious factors that are hidden from conscious awareness.

Why do we need to measure subconscious responses?

According to neuroscientific research, our behaviour is mostly controlled by unconscious brain functions. A significant number of these processes are nevertheless connected to emotions, memory storage and retrieval, involuntary attention and perception, semantic processing, and decision-making, even though many of them are related to survival mechanisms (such as breathing, motor functions, and homeostatic regulation) and not of primary interest to marketers.

Importantly, it seems evident that marketers need to understand these factors in order to better correctly predict customer behaviour because they all shape our conduct and frequently have an impact on the decisions we make. Focus groups, questionnaires, and other explicit research methods are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the vast array of emotional and motivational processes (the majority of which are subconscious) that eventually shape human conduct.

Anyone who has worked in qualitative and quantitative market research will be familiar with the potential confounds associated with explicit (conscious) consumer responses:

1. people respond even when they don't know what they think
2. people may not tell the truth (e.g. for fear of what others might think)
3. people are bad at predicting their own behaviour    

IRTs belong to a family of neuromarketing tools currently available to marketers today. These include functional MRI, EEG, biometrics, eyetracking, facial decoding, as well as IRTs. Each method has pros and cons. However, IRTs are one of the most (if not the most) rapidly expanding approaches for several reasons:

1. they capture subconscious responses online (or on a mobile device)
2. they do not require equipment (e.g. electrode caps, MRI scanners)
3. they can be turned around quickly
4. they are highly scalable
5. they are cost effective

Added to which, IRTs provide a level of flexibility and granularity that far outstrips other neuro-methods, making it the neuromarketing method of choice across a very wide range of marketing questions.

What is the science behind IRTs?

The history of reaction time testing can be traced back to the 1860s, when the Dutch physiologist, F C Donders, applied an electric shock to the left or right foot of volunteers and found that the time they took to respond by pressing a button using the corresponding left or right hand was measurably faster when they were told in advance which foot would be shocked than when they didn't know.

This showed for the first time that human mental processes (in this case, the decision about which button to press and the will to make that response) could be measured using reaction times.

Donders also devised the subtraction method to calculate the processing speeds of different mental operations. He observed that participants' reaction were very fast when they only had to detect a stimulus compared to when they had to recognise that stimulus. Their reaction times were slower still when they had to make a choice about that same stimulus.

By subtracting the reaction times obtained during these 3 different operations, Donders was able to infer the processing speeds of the different mental operations (react, discriminate, choose).

But it wasn't until the 1970's when the academic discipline of cognitive psychology really started to take off that psychologists realised the importance of reaction time testing and it soon became one of the mainstream methods for studying human cognition and emotion.

There are several factors that should be considered when designing or analyzing implicit data. Different vendors or consultants may have different methods for controlling for handedness, individual differences in response times and inaccurate or repetitive responding. Before the data are analysed, these and other confounds need to be taken into consideration and the data adjusted, trimmed or otherwise cleaned.

As a general rule, all vendors will remove outliers from the data – responses which are too fast or too slow to be a bona fide implicit response.

How do IRTs reveal subconscious thoughts or feelings?

We have now established that implicit responses have to be captured very quickly, in considerably less than a second. But what does that response tell you?

It is not sufficient for respondents to simply detect that they have seen a brand logo or packaging design "flashed up" for a few milliseconds on the computer screen.

Marketers need to understand what each particular image/logo/pack design/campaign automatically triggers in consumers' brains. For example, the memories that are linked to that brand concept, the implicit biases or preferences that are stored about that concept and even the type of emotions it involuntarily evokes. Psychologists refer to this as "priming".

So how is it that the perception of a concept can trigger or "prime" related concepts and how can IRTs reveal what these are?

What does an implicit test look like?

So what does an implicit test actually look like? What does a respondent see or do when they are asked to take part in an implicit survey?

The first point to make is that there is no one implicit task. Rather, there is a family of IRTs. But most vendors tend to converge on two or three key ones in order to measure the strength of association between marketing stimuli (e.g. brand, logo, pack design, ad) and a range of brand related concepts; whereas there are other tests which simply measure which stimuli are most attention grabbing.

You may have heard of the Implicit Association Test or "IAT". This is test used predominantly by academics to uncover individual biases or hidden attitudes (e.g. racial or gender prejudices).

The test is well-suited for this purpose but requires multiple trials of each condition (e.g. pairing of positive or negative words with black/white faces) and therefore the number of words or attributes that can tested in any one IAT test is rather limited.

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