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

Please see our 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.

Aaron Reid and Will Leach at "The Market Research Event" 2011   This morning, Sentient Decision Science, with partner PepsiCo, was awarded the 2011 EXPLOR Award. Presented at IIR’s “The Market Research Event”, the EXPLOR Award recognizes the most compelling, high impact example of innovation and technology advancing research. A world-class judging panel – from noteworthy organizations such as General Mills, GfK, NBC Universal and Wharton – selected Sentient Decision Science, with partner PepsiCo, as a finalist out of an elite field of contenders, including finalists Hewlett-Packard/QualVu and Microsoft/Blue Ocean.

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

Please click for Dr. Aaron Reid’s  “True Drivers of Consumer Behavior” at CEO Club Boston 2011 event.

A new article in the journal of Judgment & Decision Making has demonstrated that consumer preference for packaged goods can form in as little as 300 milliseconds. Furthermore, these third-of-a-second preferences correspond with preferences formed through lengthy deliberation up to 95% of the time. These findings have profound implications for the importance of understanding automatic action by shoppers in the aisle, particularly when consumers are in a hot-state (see our talk about automatic action at Future M).

In the mid 1500s the Polish cleric Nicholas Copernicus published a new model of the position of the sun and the planets in our solar system. In his view, the sun was more or less at the center of the solar system and the planets were assumed to orbit in epicycles. His theory was a major breakthrough in changing the Ptolemaic view that placed the earth at the center of the system. However, the view was also a major failure because Copernicus refused to give up the idea that the planets’ orbits were perfect circles. In order to account for the seemingly complex pattern of positions of the planets, Copernicus and his contemporaries had to work with many circular paths.

One of the first things you learn about the value of money as a child is to be careful not to squander it. One of the first things you learn from the behavioral science literature on judgment and decision making is that the value of everything can be arbitrarily established based on anchors. Let me illustrate with an example from the breakfast table. Norma’s on 56th and 6th in New York is one of my favorite places to have breakfast in the city. Typically, we will show up early and put our name in for a table and then we’ll drink our five dollar cups of coffee and tea in the nearby Knave, while we wait for the line to die down and our name to be called. People love this place! It is in high demand, even in this economy, and it’s not because the prices are so reasonable.