Sentient Insight: the business blog for consumer psychology and consumer marketing

All social psychologists must deal with a conundrum implicit in all human behavior: the problem of self-reporting. Self-reporting is exactly what it sounds like: it’s what people say about themselves – their emotions, motivations, and feelings. If you ask someone to rate their emotional stability, or if you elicit an opinion about a new product, you’re relying on that person’s ability to properly asses how he’s feeling, why he’s feeling that way, and what his behavior is as a result of that feeling. Researchers take this for granted all the time. The plain truth is unfortunate; we aren’t good observers of our own emotions and we are worse at explaining our own behavior.

Admitting that a brand is part of your self-identity is difficult to do. Can you imagine admitting to the following “Pepsi is part of who I am.”? Or this: “Starbucks represents how I want to present myself as a person.”? Those are easy to dismiss off the cuff, yet years of research tells us that we do connect personally with the brands that we buy, and that we use “brand badges” to reflect aspects our personality to the world. The trouble with traditional research methods is that consumers often can’t or won’t admit to that reality.

  In this video, hosted the Pulse’s Ed Gaskin, Dr. Aaron Reid and Julie Hall (Schneider PR) discuss successful product launches from 2010. Reid and Hall explain how particular marketing and social campaigns contribute a product’s popularity, using the top ten product launches of 2010 as a benchmark. These strategies, Reid explains, are ubiquitous and can be utilized in any part of a productpositioning campaign.