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Pearle

Happy Eyes Commercial

Core question

How effective is Pearle's latest ad campaign?

Pearle is the leading brand of optician stores in the Netherlands. With the launch of their new Happy Eyes campaign, Pearle completely changed the typical tone that dominates optician commercials.

The Pearle campaign sets itself apart from many category traditions, both in its creative execution and overall visual style. Gone are the typical humoristic vignettes of people who do awkward things because of their bad eyesight. The use of celebrities has vanished as well. Happy Eyes is a campaign that simply celebrates mankind's most complex sensory organ: the eye.

Such a venture into new campaign territory is daunting. Will it delight the target market? Will it pull people into the stores? To answer these questions, Pearle hired neuromarketing agency Unravel to peek into the brains of the bespectacled.

And the results speak for themself. Not only did the neuromarketing research give certainty about their new course, a post-test with the improved commercial scored 64,7% better!

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"The neuro research was extremely valuable. Because our brand movie is all about emotion, we specifically opted for neuro. This ensures we don't get socially desirable answers, but real insights instead."
Ingrid de Jong - Brand Manager Pearle
Screenshot Pearle Happy Eyes commercial

Before the neuro: best practice consult

Unravel joined the creation process early on. This allowed us to consult on the initial concept and storyboard, based on established insights and best practices.

The consultants brought valuable insights to the table, stemming either from academic publications or Unravel's own insights database. These recommendations revolved around elements such as the opening shot, camera movement, editing style, visible emotions and voice-over usage.

With our recommendations, we always stay true to our philosophy that an adjustment should never overthrow a creative concept. Our advice helped to make the ad more attractive, persuasive and memorable – while keeping the core idea vibrant and alive.

Step 1- Predict effectiveness

Overall, 40% of tv commercials does not increase sales. Half of these even cause sales to decline. Our job with neuro is to predict and increase the effectiveness of new campaigns.

During this campaign's neuro study, 20 users of glasses or contact lenses watched the commercial, while EEG and Eye Tracking measured their emotional experience.

Brain activity allows us to predict the direction of sales impact of a commercial by measuring success predictors of approach motivation and cognitive ease. Compared to a benchmark, the commercial scored lightly above average, with an especially strong appeal towards millennial viewers. Great news – sales will increase – but can the commercial get even better? 

Step 2- Increase effectiveness - by a lot

A major advantage of neuro ad tests is that EEG records brain activity many times per second. A scene by scene analysis reveals the performance of each individual shot, allowing for powerful optimization by tweaking the ad's weakpoints. In this case, a specific high-paced sequence of many quickly edited cuts resulted in negative emotion. Also, the introduction of the background music resulted in an averse response.

Based on these clear insights, the final commercial was tweaked on these important details. The editing pace was eased and the background music was changed to a more pleasing tune.

Step 3- Post-test… the verdict

The recommended adjustments to the ad were subtle. Our goal is to tweak the commercial only on those elements that the creative concept allows for. That's what we call data driven creativity. Nonetheless, many times we see that exactly these small adjustments make a big difference in effectiveness. This case is no exception...

In an additional post-test (again with 20 viewers), we saw that the adjustments fulfilled their intended effect. The emotional highlights from the first test remained, while the previous pain points had vanished.

The final commercial scored 64,7% higher on the benchmark than during the pre-test, allowing Pearle to maximize the impact on sales and branding from day one.

Also want to have more impact, certainty and sales with neuromarketing?

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Unravel Research uses EEG and eye tracking to understand what the consumer won't tell you. This way we increase the impact of your ads.

Curious how your brand can profit from neuromarketing research? Tim loves to show you 5 crucial insights that lay the foundation for a perfect - sales increasing - commercial.

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