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

The “Do as I say not as I do” paradigm may work for Moms and their kids, but when it comes to consumers and marketers, the exact opposite holds true.  Marketers should in fact, follow what consumers do rather than what they say.

Please see our Webinar on the Most Memorable New Product Launch 2011.

Please click to see a sneak peek of Thursday’s Webinar on The Most Memorable New Product Launch 2011.

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.

The Association for Psychological Science held its 23rd annual convention from May 26 to May 29 in Washington, DC. This year’s convention featured innovative research at the forefront of psychological science across a wide range of domains, with a strong focus on the neural mechanisms of various social and cognitive processes, including implicit cognition, consciousness, economic decision making, as well as moral reasoning. Many of these topics provide great insight for advancing our understanding of the drivers of human motivation, and are highly relevant to the subconscious consumer research at Sentient Decision Science.

Traditional research is in trouble. It is suffering from what we call the “can’t say/won’t say” problem. With 95 to 99 percent of all cognitive processes occurring below conscious awareness, consumers often can’t or won’t tell us the real reasons behind their preferences and behaviors. This is troubling for the multi-billion dollar market research industry which still largely relies on self-reported data to figure out the “whens” and “whys” behind consumer decision-making.

A compelling out-group can be one of the most galvanizing forces of in-group loyalty. This is as true for playground cliques as it is for presidential candidates. This human truth applies to brands as well, and you can use it to your advantage in the way you communicate with your customers. Whether you use inspirational positive emotion or shameful negative emotion to motivate in-group loyalty is up to you and your brand’s values.

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.