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

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

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.

Before we get into the “business” of this article, if you have 3 minutes and 33 seconds to spare, we invite you to listen to Amy Winehouse’s version of the classic song Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? It’s a great track and we think you’ll enjoy it.  Just click on the picture below.  When you’re finished, return to the article and we’ll explain how it applies.

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

Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of people who drink impulsively? Most recently, research on its neural mechanism presented preliminary evidence of how such behavior is governed by the dynamic interplay between the automatic and the consciously controlled systems. In a study conducted at Claremont Graduate University, researchers including Dr. Susan Ames studied brain responses of heavy drinkers (those who consumed over 15 drinks a week and demonstrated binge drinking) and those of light drinkers, when these drinkers completed an Implicit Association Task involving alcohol related words paired with positive or neutral words.

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.