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

Let’s play a game: There are ten coins on the table. The rules of the game are simple. I propose a way we should split the coins; you can either accept or reject my proposal. If you accept my terms, we get the coins according to my proposed split. If you reject them, we both get nothing. That’s it, and no second chances for positive reciprocity. Sound easy? Well, it’s more complicated than you might think.  Let’s play anyway:

I’ve been waiting a while to write this post. Not about Lebron per se, but about this phrase “the real reason” used in describing the motivation behind a decision. It just so happens that Lebron’s “Decision” serves as a perfect illustration of an important human truth of decision-making: the real “reason” behind any preference based decision is not in fact reason-based at all, the real reason is emotion. This is as true for Lebron’s Decision as it is for the decisions you and I make everyday. Let me explain…

Many research studies are designed to have single touches with consumers. Ex: in focus group situations, the moderator typically meets the research participants for the first – and last time – when they enter the focus group room. Think about this concept: we meet them at minute 1, and by minute 15 are asking them to open up and share with us their fears, desires, and perhaps faulty perceptions about ideas we are researching…a risky proposition for them. And at minute 120, we say goodbye forever. In IDIs, cut that time in half, but expect to get to the same level of rapport we do in a two hour session. Our expectation that research participants look at us as trusted confidantes in single-touch qualitative research is irrational at best.

What do you do when you get sad and find yourself in a bad mood? I for one try and reflect on what has happened in that day, that week, that month, and find the root of the issue in the hopes of eradicating it forcibly and without mercy. Naturally, such efforts usually end in failure. Even if I can identify what might be making me feel so down, that knowledge rarely helps me get back on track emotionally. In fact, having that target just gives me a discernible target to which I can direct my brooding until some accidental incident comes along and I find myself feeling better all of a sudden.

In act II of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet first learns that Romeo (her new love) is a Montague, a longstanding familial rival. Overwhelmed by the dismay of her predicament, she famously longs for her lover in harmonious soliloquy: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet,” as if saying, ‘I don’t care what his name is, names are arbitrary; like a rose, I love him for who he is, not his name.’

My mother has always told me that age is a state of mind, and if you wanted to be younger, you can simply “think younger”. Though I’m sure many aging folk would disagree with such maternal wisdom, behavioral researchers John A. Bargh, Mark Chen, and Laura Burrows have evidence that supports my Mom’s thesis! In their 1996 experiment, Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action, these three NYU researches tested whether or not subconscious priming can directly affect behavior.

“In defense of marketing” is an on-going theme here at Sentient. As marketers, we are often put in a position to defend what we do as an ethical and valuable service. When faced with that challenge, our argument runs deeper than the standard “consumers need marketing in order to make informed choices” and puts forth a much stronger statement: Marketing has been ingrained in our species since the advent of sexual selection, we have needed effective subconscious marketing to ensure the survival of our genes, these same marketing tactics are at play in our current consumer culture, and it is therefore the responsibility of market researchers to understand the subconscious influences on behavior in order to provide products and services that are truly valued by consumers.

As a culture (or perhaps just a cold New England culture) we’ve developed stereotypes about some of the warmer states like sunny California (72 and sunny!) or the renowned hospitality of the genteel Southern states. There might be a scientific explanation for this kind of thinking. Research on interpersonal impression shows that warmth in particular can exert considerable power on how we judge people. When given a hot cup of coffee to hold by a stranger in an elevator for just a few moments, people rated this stranger’s personality more warmly. The opposite was true, too: if given a cup of ice coffee in identical circumstances, participants in the experiment rated the personality of the stranger as being colder.