The eyes have it

Heat maps are a useful tool to determine what parts of a plant display attract the most attention.

The eyes are the gateway to the wallet, and recent eye-tracking research has unveiled new insight into customer’s purchase behaviors. The project used cutting-edge eye-tracking devices to determine what attracts customer attention in retail garden center displays.

Bridget Behe, professor of horticultural marketing with Michigan State University, led a team of researchers in collecting data and gathering results. The goal of the project was to gain a greater understanding of what customers look for in a plant display, and use that knowledge to improve the experience for consumers and increase sales.

“Measuring eye movement can be a way of measuring attention. As we think about what captures interest, what people think about, what is getting them to look at something; we can measure their eye movement with eye-tracking devices,” Behe said.

The project was funded through a USDA Federal-State Marketing Improvement Program (FSMIP) Grant, Project GREEEN, Metro-Detroit Flower Growers and the Western Michigan Floriculture Growers Council.

The tools and the study
Eye movement is the fastest movement the human body can make. Our eyes move as a series of stops and starts. The movements are called saccades and the stops are called fixations. When our eye movement stops, it focuses our attention. When our attention is focused, that is when we are mentally processing what we are seeing. So the longer someone’s eyes fixate on a spot, the more that person is thinking about it.

Behe has performed studies using special glasses that measure eye movement, but prefers the versatility and replicability of the Tobii X1 Lite eye-tracking device and a large color monitor. The device is a small, thin bar that can be attached to the bottom of a computer screen. Tobii, the device’s manufacturer, is a Swedish company that is at the forefront of eye-tracking research.

Participants in the study were asked to look at displays and answer the question “How likely would you be to purchase an item from this display?” Their response was given using a 10 point Likert scale, and given verbally so as to not divert their attention from the display. The data comes from five universities and one research facility in Canada, and a total of 300 consumers who looked at 32 different plant displays.

Measuring thought
Many interesting things can be done with this technology. One way Behe and her researchers used the technology was to show the path of the eye’s movement through the display. It records what the customers looked at first, with a number listed on a circle located in each visual focus spot. The size of the circle is an indication of how long they looked at each of those points in the display – larger circles are placed in spots that were focused on for longer amounts of time.

As might be expected, the price got a lot of visual activity. But so did the plant material.

Using the eye-tracking tools, Behe was able to generate heat maps to summarize the data. The heat maps show visual saturation where a number of people looked during the few seconds they viewed the slide. Areas with high visual activity will be shown as red. As activity cools off, the heat map portrays areas of medium activity as yellow. Areas that received only low visual activity appear pale green.

Another piece of information that the computer generates is a cluster map. This shows where many people looked versus where few of the people looked.

The computer program takes five measures from the eye-tracking devices: fixations and total visit (sum of looks multiplied by time in particular area); time to first fixation (how long does it take them to look at the price or an object); first fixation duration (how long does that first attention-grabbing item hold attention); fixation count (how many looks does it get?); and total visit duration (fixations multiplied by fixation duration). In essence, it is the number of glances times the length of the glance, which provides one single measure to use. Total visit duration essentially measures the consumer’s thought. It finds out what holds the eye’s attention the longest.

The importance of price
A related eye-tracking study focused on Valentines’s Day merchandise. The 70 participating consumers were shown four types of typical Valentine’s Day gifts at four different price points. The consumers’ eyes were tracked as they viewed four different flowering plants, chocolate gifts, cut flowers and bottles of wine. The price points were the same for each of the four product categories, with an item in each category costing $10, $25, $40 and $65. The researchers compared the visual activity for one very small area, price, with visual activity of a larger area: plant material.

The time to first fixation on the item was less than 0.15 seconds before they looked at the gift, whether it was the flower, wine or chocolate. It took them 1.77 seconds to get to the price.

“That’s not surprising because when you think about how big the item is in regard to the price,” Behe said. “That is what stands out. But I was surprised to see that their first gaze was held almost as long for the item, only .04 hundredths of a second longer than for the price. What this tells me is they are getting the same kind of first glance from price and product almost equally.”

Next, Behe looked at fixation count. How many glances did the items get? The average was 12 looks at the item versus 0.5 looks at the price. Then Behe’s ‘measure of thought’ — fixation count times fixation duration — looking at this four seconds and price almost a 10th of a second (4.02, 0.11).

“I’m wondering if this almost 40 to one ratio is going to hold up for different product categories because none of this has been reported in the literature with regard to any type of product,” Behe said.

What’s next?
In what Behe calls the piece de resistance of the study, the participants were asked how likely they would be to buy the particular product.

“We saw that if they hated it and said they were not going to buy it at all, or if they loved it, that when we correlated that with the fixation count, we saw a very nice relationship,” Behe said. “If they hated it or loved it they spent very little time thinking about it, whereas if they were indecisive, they had a higher fixation count.”

The research team was excited to see this, because they consider this a pilot study. They don’t have a whole lot of conclusions here that they are going to stand on firmly.

“We know items are more complex than prices, and they do get more attention,” Behe said. “So we are interested to see if we get similar visual interest across products. We need to see if this holds across other studies.”

Behe’s group is currently dissecting the eye-tracking findings by age and gender. There will be much more to come on this topic as researchers determine the best way to make use of the data from these eye-tracking studies.

- Matt McClellan