Sentient Insight: the business blog for consumer behavior, brand tracking, and subconscious marketing

If you’re interested in establishing and maintaining your brand as your targeted customers’ preferred choice (and why wouldn’t you be?), understanding and applying Predecisional Distortion – a behavioral economics irrationality – could be your answer.  In this article, we define Predecisional Distortion and describe how you can apply it to establish and maintain your brand’s preference and choice.

Complete the sentence. Every kiss begins with ____. If you consider yourself a marketing buff or a jewelry aficionado, you probably recognize the Kay Jewelers tagline: Every kiss begins with Kay™. Read that again and you might experience one of two reactions. Either you’re Mapquesting the nearest jewelry store, or you’re thinking, “Nonsense — I don’t need to show my love by buying diamonds for my significant other.” Advertisers are banking on the former, but they should expect the latter, according to the consumer behavior literature. Recent studies indicate that certain marketing tactics can produce a behavioral backlash, known to psychologists as a reverse prime.

The future of marketing can be found today in the behavioral science literature. As an industry, it is our job to reveal the whys behind consumer behavior, and the disciplines of Psychology, Neuroscience, Sociology, Behavioral Economics, and Cultural Anthropology, all provide advanced understanding and insights on consumer behavior that have yet to be applied on a large scale. This is why we believe this enduring truth: as long as the behavioral sciences continue to advance human understanding of the fundamental drivers of consumer behavior, the future of marketing will be found in those insights.

Sentient Decision Science, Inc. received the 2011 EXPLOR Award.  Please click to watch the 2011 EXPLOR Awards video.

How behavioral science could have turned a multi-million dollar mistake into a multi-million dollar topline growth. When Netflix imposed a 60% increase in the prices consumers paid for their movie rental and streaming subscription service, naturally, consumers were not happy. Netflix did the rational math to determine price per subscriber and the percentage of subscribers per distribution channel etc., etc.  The logical math would have shown that only a small percentage of their consumers would be impacted and that they should press on with the increase.  However, underestimating the impact of consumer emotions and not factoring in the degree of those consumers around their willingness to pay more proved to be a critical misstep.

There is so much that we can see in this world, yet did you know what we can’t see can in fact be perceived by the brain? It sounds pretty scary when our behavior is influenced by factors that we can’t see or explain, but it is so true. This actually happened at the 23rd Annual Convention of Association of Psychological Science where a group of psychologists sitting in the same room were presented an invisible target prime by a French psychologist named Stanislas Dehaene. Dr. Dehaene has dedicated most of his research career to the study of consciousness using priming methods.

A world-class judging team has selected Sentient Decision Science, with partner PepsiCo, as a finalist for the most compelling, high impact example of innovation and technology advancing research in 2011. Sentient and PepsiCo are joined by an elite field of finalists including Hewlett-Packard, QualVu, Microsoft, and Blue Ocean.

Since the news came out on Wednesday, I’ve been pouring over video of Steve Jobs’ interviews, talks, pitches – anything I’ve been able to find really – to see if I can glean any last insights. It feels like an urgency to learn, an urgency to understand every last morsel of marketing genius I can from one of the greatest marketers in business. I could pick a hundred clips, but I want to take a moment here to share and comment on just one of my favorite Steve Jobs pitches and how it is relevant to the work we do at Sentient Decision Science and the future of marketing in general. The clip you’ll see