Scanning Customers’ Emotions While Watching Advertising: Application of Real-Time Automated Facial Recognition in Market Research

Measuring a person’s emotional state is one of the most challenging undertakings in marketing. Using automated systems for scanning respondent’s facial expressions is a novel approach to this challenge. Based on a short overview of existing measures we introduce a new approach for real-time automated facial recognition, which is tested in two studies. Study 1 validates our measurement system under laboratory conditions. Study 2 was applied within an international TV commercial pretest in China, US and Germany. our results underline the validity and functionality of our approach and show that the level of valence is critical to analysis quality.