FORETHOUGHT GRANTED US PATENT FOR IMPLICIT EMOTIONS MEASUREMENT

Forethought announces it has been granted a US patent for the technology that implicitly measures discrete emotions in brand and communications, equipping Marketers with a powerful lens to affect their consumers’ behaviour.

The US patent confirms that the Forethought invention, Prophecy Feelings®, is state of the art and protects the technology behind this ground breaking method.

Pioneering the implicit measurement of discrete emotions, Prophecy Feelings quantitatively identifies the relative importance of the individual emotions that drive consumer choice at a category, brand and communications level, setting a strategic context for brand and communications planning and providing a platform for their execution and evaluation.

Using its partnering method, Prophecy Thoughts®, emotions are modelled against the rational drivers of consumer choice, forecasting changes in market share with high degrees of predictive validity.

Prophecy Thoughts & Feelings has uniquely placed Forethought’s clients at the leading edge of brand and communications management. Brands such as Hershey’s, Nestle, and Kimberly Clark have already applied the method to understand the emotions driving consumer behavior.

The US patent is the latest addition to Forethought’s growing IP portfolio, which already includes a corresponding Australian patent.

Ken Roberts, Forethought CEO and co-inventor of Prophecy Feelings, said that “Marketing is a relatively young profession, yet the science of marketing is evolving rapidly. Too many marketers are wedded to first generation knowledge and methods from 20 to 40 years ago. But there is an advance guard who are literate in the learnings and innovations marketing is making and they will win the advantage.”

Mr Roberts continued “receiving the US patent is a major milestone” for the company and “an important signal to the marketing industry of advancements in marketing science methods and metrics”.

“The US and Australian patents confirm the uniqueness of our approach and ensure that, across our major markets, only Forethought can offer Marketers the technology underlying Prophecy Feelings,” he said.

The technology covered by the patent measures emotional responses implicitly through a combination of interactive visual imagery and sophisticated statistical analysis techniques that identify and isolate individual emotions aroused by brand and communications.

The metaphor-based visual imagery is in itself a result of extensive original research and refinement by the specialist Advanced Behavioural Analytics team at Forethought, and is designed to maximise the strength of association between the imagery and corresponding discrete emotions.

Prophecy Feelings has been interrogated by world-leading marketing science academics and practitioners in multiple award submissions and lauded for its efficacy. To date Prophecy Feelings has won the Australian Marketing and Social Research Society Award for Innovation and the US based Advertising Research Foundation’s Gold David Ogilvy Award as well as being a runner-up in the prestigious Marketing Science Institute’s Practice Prize.

The methodology is a critical input into the emerging practice of emotions in brand, communications and customer experience strategy – the identification, understanding and activation of emotions to drive consumption behaviour and ultimately market share.

 

This content was originally published by Forethought . Visit their website at www.forethought.com.au.