Today in Digital Marketing - The Surprising Way Slow Motion Video Changes Brand Perception

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Thursday, March 28th, and today our agency is doing a full-team off-site retreat, so no regular episode, but in its place, some new data from the world of marketing science. There are a lot of things to consider when you make a product video or a promotional video for your company. Do you make it look polished or go with the amateur look popular on TikTok? Do we focus the viewer's attention or employ the one cut every second technique? Well, add one more to the list, whether you should show your products being used in slow motion. Annika Stuppe is an assistant professor of marketing at Tilburg University. She and her colleagues recently published some

Starting point is 00:00:44 research looking at that very question. And she joins me from her office in Dusseldorf, Germany. Dr. Stappi, welcome. Hi, Todd. Thanks for having me. Not at all. You studied how slow motion affects consumer behavior. But what behavior exactly? Purchases? Sharing? A warm, fuzzy feeling? So we look at slow motion as mostly a social media phenomenon. So we're interested really in behaviors related to sharing of videos, number of views, likes, commenting. So that is the predominant group of outcomes that we're looking at.

Starting point is 00:01:23 But we were also interested in how slow motion might work to position products. So in one of us or two in our studies, actually, we also measure how slow motion imagery makes a brand more likable and increases consumers willingness to pay. I was interested in that you had a number of experiments in your study, and one in particular, as you mentioned, tested whether a brand or whether people liked a brand more after seeing videos from that brand in slow motion. I could see how it would be easy to study whether someone likes a product more because you just measure purchases or likes or shares. But can you walk us through how that test worked, of how people liked a brand more after seeing videos from that brand in slow motion and what you learned. Yes. So a really important phenomenon in marketing is that, right, if you use images or music or just anything that creates that positive emotions in people, right, and you put a brand right next to it or a product right next to it these positive emotions kind of rub off on the product or the brand over time as you repeatedly

Starting point is 00:02:32 show brand and the the positive image for instance simultaneously so that is exactly what we did in that study too right so we show the slow motion videos of, this was actually baseball players dunking together with the logo of the sports brand. And over time- Do you mean basketball players? Yes, basketball players dunking, right? So in slow motion or in regular speed. And then after we pair the brand

Starting point is 00:03:02 and these videos for about six times, we then measured liking for the brand. And then we indeed find that brand liking is higher when slow motion videos were shown together with the brand because slow motion is pleasant to watch. And how did you test the connection with the brand in particular? Like how did that experiment work? So participants were seeing on the computer screen the brand logo on one side and the video on the other side, right? And this was either a slow motion

Starting point is 00:03:35 or regular speed video, which we varied from person to person, right? It was randomly assigned in the experiment. And then they had these exposure multiple times. And then at the very end of the study we showed just the brand logo and asked people how much do you like this brand would you be interesting interested in or willing to buy shoes of this brand and those measures showed that the slow motion increased brand liking and also willingness to pay for shoes of that brand.

Starting point is 00:04:06 How did you control for people who may have just not liked that brand to begin with before they even walked into your experiment? So we used very unfamiliar brands to kind of eliminate that problem that people have prior associations with the brand. So these were very underdog European sneaker brands. And we used an American panel to collect the data, which didn't know those. Right. I see. So these are brands that they wouldn't have known ahead of time. That makes sense. Exactly. So that's the connection with brands. Let's talk about sort of the main area of your study, which was when people see a marketing video in slow motion, how did that affect their behavior on social media with that actual piece of content, with that video? Yes.

Starting point is 00:04:52 So the context that we looked at was a GIF sharing platform. I'm saying GIF, not GIF. I know this is a debate, but I prefer GIF. And on this GIF platform, people could upload GIFs and then share them, comment, like the GIF. And each GIF has a tag attached to it, right, which denotes the topic that is shown, but also whether the GIF is in slow motion for instance right and what we could then do is we could basically look at the behavior of people um um the the slow motion gifs right and the behavior that was associated with those and compare it with a number of control gifs that were not in slow motion and that analysis kind of showed what we predicted right right? The slow motion GIFs go more viral on this platform. People watch them more, like them more, comment on them more.

Starting point is 00:05:53 I know you tested GIFs or GIFs and not actual like promotional videos, but do you think that there's a parallel? Do you think that the results would have been the same if your study had studied people's experience with actual slow motion videos as opposed to slow motion GIFs? Yes, absolutely. I think ultimately, right, slow motion is a tool that can make an ad more visually appealing, right, more aesthetically pleasing. So what works for GIFifs should also work for uh for commercials it's just harder to study this topic in the setting of commercials right because they're not that many around that use the slow motion effect and they're like um big other differences between commercials, right? Like which brand is promoted, et cetera. So the GIF context was one where we could study this more easily and more cleanly.

Starting point is 00:06:51 Was there a difference between different types of products being offered? Like I'm thinking, would looking for an exciting ski adventure be different than someone wanting a relaxing spa vacation? Yes, that's a very good point. So if we predict, right, that slow motion creates this positive feeling when we watch it because it's easy to understand the movement, right? The slowed down movements makes it easy for us

Starting point is 00:07:21 to take in all the visual input and we like this easy watching experience. And indeed, this should especially work well for products that are hedonic or that we consume for pleasure, that are actually about these nice emotions that consumers should associate with the brand. Indeed, we show that actually in the setting where looking for vacations that are either relaxing or exciting, slow motion works better for consumers who seek a relaxing vacation because the excitement seeking

Starting point is 00:07:59 is kind of misaligned with slow motion being pleasant to watch. So actually for the exciting, to create excitement and thrill, it's actually recommended to rather speed up movement because that is associated with arousal and creating a sense of thrill and excitement. Right. I guess if someone is interested in playing

Starting point is 00:08:24 a fast-aced game of social racquetball, they're going to want to see it in fast, you know, and so on. What about positive content versus negative content? Like I'm thinking about like an ad about the dangers of drunk driving when someone is shown being tossed around in a car. You know, that's that's a negative promotional advertising did you test the difference between positive content and negative content yes we did and um we found that for uh slow motion has a potential to kind of amplify

Starting point is 00:08:58 um the valence of the content that is shown. So slow motion makes pleasant movements more beautiful because we see all the details of a subtle dance performance, for instance. But when the movements are aversive, the exact opposite happens, right? Now the consumer gets to see aversive, disturbing content in slow motion. So that actually amplifies the negative feelings that such a commercial creates. I think of a drunk driving campaign or a bloody boxing match where people are getting hurt. Slow motion makes that more difficult to watch, which can sometimes align with the intentions of marketers, right? And yet some things that are positive in slow motion didn't

Starting point is 00:09:45 work. I thought it was interesting your paper noted that some slow motion can still hurt a company's marketing, even if it is hedonic, as you would say, used for pleasure. When people saw TV ads, for instance, this is not your research, but some past research, when people saw TV ads with someone eating chocolate in slow motion or shampooing their hair in slow motion. Consumers actually didn't like that. They found it to be fake. Why would that slow motion hurt marketing while slow motion on social media, as opposed to TV commercials in those previous examples, would help?

Starting point is 00:10:18 Yes. So this effect where slow motion makes the ad ad seem fake or posed right that is very specific to commercials in which actors express some kind of um utility right um that they get from the consumption right so the smile after you eat chocolate in slow motion seems more fake because people think when the action is slowed down that you're more um yeah that you're more acting out this enjoyment right and really truly feeling it um the same with the woman shampooing her hair right so she like strokes her hair and is like excited about the softness of the the conditioning right that uh enjoyment right seems fake when the smile is in slow motion so

Starting point is 00:11:07 this is just very specific type of ads um that we all know right from shampoo commercials it does make sense you know i'm thinking like if i was watching an actor eating chocolate and then and then in slow motion he slowly turns his head to the camera and slowly creeps a smile on his face i'm thinking this guy's faking it this is acting that's very interesting yeah exactly exactly um so these are not the settings we look at right we look at natural movements being filmed not people um expressing some kind of enjoyment in slow motion how does the complexity of a video's content change the way consumers react with it on social media? Yeah, excellent point. So the idea we had is slow motion is more enjoyable to watch for people because it really unpacks these movements that we typically don't get to see in real time,

Starting point is 00:11:59 right? The splash of water drop makes when it hits the surface um so it slows down the visual input right and then we can appreciate all the details so a precondition um in order for slow motion to be successful at creating this viewing pleasure is that there's actually something to unpack so if the movement is very simple very basic if you can already see it basically in real time then slowing down actually hurts you um because um the video becomes then boring right if you in the videos that we used that very very um low in complexity right for instance a glass of milk right with like a little drop of milk, like running, running, running down the cup. So there was very little movement in the whole video. And the slow motion version of that scene was just extremely boring, because nothing was happening. Nothing was unpacked for the viewer. Rather, it was annoying to watch because, yeah, the rate of information was too low. Right. So that's something to consider when you're using slow motion, right?

Starting point is 00:13:07 It needs to be a movement that is inherently complex and that we cannot appreciate fully in real time. Then slow motion works. Before we started recording, I asked you to stay away from academic terms like confluence and congruency. And you have done an excellent job of that, Dr. Stuppi. And I'm going to I'm going to take it back briefly because I'm going to ask you to talk about one of those academic terms. In your paper, you talked about processing fluency. Can you explain what that is and then how that affects the appeal of slow motion videos on social media? Processing fluency is basically about presenting information in a way that is easy to take in for consumers.

Starting point is 00:13:52 For instance, if you think of handwriting that is very neat and tidy and easy to read versus handwriting that is very sloppy and hard to read. Processing fluency is higher with the neat handwriting. And the theory basically said when everything's are easy to process for us and make sense of, we attribute that to the stimulus itself.

Starting point is 00:14:18 So in other words, when I read the same text in like sloppy handwriting versus neat handwriting, I like the text more when it's neat and there are other positive effects associated with it. I think it's more truthful. I think it's more honest, etc. So processing fluency is basically about this idea that when things are easy on the mind we like them um processing fluency has been studied a lot with textual stimuli also with images right the resolution of an image makes it more or less

Starting point is 00:14:57 fluent the size of the image makes it more or less fluent but fluency hasn't really looked at how video content dynamic content um can be more easily processed and that is kind of the contribution of our work a bit right if we show okay processing fluency is also important when you show movement when you have dynamic content what surprised you the most about your findings uh actually i was uh really surprised that we found slow motion to amplify the aversive disturbing content because when I started studying this phenomenon I was thinking about you know slow motion scenes and action movies you know people fighting in slow motion bullets flying to the air and in slow motion and I had this hunch that maybe slow motion makes also aversive things beautiful to us in a way, right? Because

Starting point is 00:15:46 they're both, they're beautiful and really horrible at the same time. So my hunch was actually that it would also make horrible things beautiful. So I was surprised that we found the opposite. Yep. All right. bottom line, from a marketing perspective, how can someone listening to this who is a marketing director or a brand manager change the way that they're using slow motion content or how can they use slow motion content to boost consumer engagement? So I think the secret to using slow motion is, right, make sure that the underlying content is high in complexity.

Starting point is 00:16:30 And if not, try to find a way to increase complexity before you then implement the slow motion effect. I would really encourage marketeers to use slow motion as kind of to kind of highlight a peak or an important element within the video. Right. So not the whole video should be in slow motion. It's more effective if you actually mix up regular speed and slow motion within the same scene. That makes the power of the slow motion effect a bit a bit stronger yeah you had co-authors on your paper who were they i co-authored this paper with jan land we have from from guiter university he's an expert on product aesthetics and product design so he's

Starting point is 00:17:17 really excited to work on uh on videos right as something that's also about product design and aesthetics and uh peter And Peter McGraw from University of Colorado Boulder is also on the product. He's really an expert in media entertainment. So yeah, a great team to have for this paper. Indeed. Well, it is very interesting research. I'm delighted that you could share it with us. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me. Annika Stappi is an assistant professor of marketing at Tilburg University.

Starting point is 00:17:48 Her paper is called The Art of Slowness. Slow motion enhances consumer evaluations by increasing processing fluency. Before I leave you, another reminder that we have a writer and production assistant position open. It's for someone with lots of real world marketing experience. Thank you. of digital marketing, and hopefully also a background in journalism or writing for radio, please check out the job. The link is b.link slash writing job. That is b.link slash writing job. It is Easter weekend for those who celebrate that holiday, and we are taking Good Friday off tomorrow and Easter Monday as well. So that will do it for this week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Stunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island.

Starting point is 00:18:51 Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, ad coordination by Red Circle. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a great long weekend, and I will see you on Tuesday. It certainly is a big one. It's a very big one. Big fluffy bun. It's a very big fluffy bun. Where's the beef? It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy.

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Today in Digital Marketing - The Surprising Way Slow Motion Video Changes Brand Perception

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