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

One of the Sentient Applied Choice Architecture principles is anchoring and adjustment –defined as the influence of an arbitrary number on subsequent judgments of quantity or value (Chapman & Johnson, 2002). In this principle, the value (or “anchor”) serves as a reference point for consumers, and they form their subsequent judgments on value based on this anchor. For example, research from Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec (2003) showed that participants who were asked to recall the last two digits of their social security number whose digits were high (e.g., 76) were willing to pay more for a bottle of wine than participants who recalled the last two digits of their social security number whose digits were low (e.g., 12).

First Command Financial Services has won a 2011 Bulldog Award for Excellence in Media and Public Relations for the Financial Behaviors Index®. Created in 2008 by First Command, the Index is a research initiative that provides timely consumer data to journalists and the news media. The Index assesses trends in the American public’s financial behaviors, attitudes and intentions through a monthly survey of approximately 1,000 U.S. consumers aged 25 to 70 with annual household incomes of at least $50,000.

The results of the 2010 Most Memorable New Product Launch study were recently released, with Apple’s iPad claiming the top spot, followed closely by Microsoft’s Windows 7. Sentient collaborated with Schneider Associates and SymphonyIRI to conduct this study. In a new twist to this annual study, Sentient’s advanced methodologies were used to augment traditional survey data and shed light on subconscious emotional associations with new products.

Sentient recently partnered with Schneider Associates and SymphonyIRI Group to conduct the ninth annual Most Memorable New Product Launch Survey. The results of this study were published on Forbes CMO network (http://bit.ly/mmnpl), and can also be accessed at http://www.mmnpl.com/ A few brands stuck out in the mass of new products launched between October 2009 and September 2010. Apple, with its launch of the iPad (No. 1), topped the list as the most memorable product of 2010 with 42 percent of Americans identifying it as one of their most recalled products.

After recently attending the Marketing Research Association’s (MRA) First Outlook Conference in Orlando, FL, I was excited to come back to the office to relay the current happenings of the market research industry and to implement the new techniques I learned. I participated in an insightful and useful course on data visualization by Naomi B. Robbins, PhD. Taking a page from graphing guru Edward Tufte, and perhaps the lesser-known William Cleveland, Robbins put her own spin on graphical presentation of data. Naomi walked us through examples of “bad” charts with a special emphasis on 3-D bar and pie charts.

Frugal behaviors and healthy living go hand and hand, according to the April First Command Financial Behaviors IndexTM and recently reported in The New York Times. The Index, commissioned by First Command and conducted by Sentient, examines financial behaviors, attitudes and intentions among U.S. consumers ongoing since February 2008. While there’s little doubt that the recession has had a negative effect on health by way of increasing stress and anxiety and other such ailments, there is evidence that recessionary behaviors may actually be improving Americans’ health. The April First Command Financial Behaviors IndexTM reports that nearly one-half of Americans (49%) believe that their frugal behaviors are making them healthier, and an additional 45 percent believe that at least some of...

Over the past few months, Toyota has recalled a number of its vehicles. Given all the negative press coverage from announcement after announcement of recalls, it is not a stretch to think that Toyota’s brand has taken a hit. Specifically, one could imagine that the Toyota brand – historically perceived as very reliable – is now suffering in the area of reliability. Assuming Totyota has been tracking consumers’ emotional reactions to the Toyota brand, they probably saw a drop in the Brand’s equity, and in a specific area such as reliability, soonafter its very first falter a few years ago. But how impactful the drop was, may have been colored by tracking consumers’ conscious associations with the brand.

Sentient collaborated with Schneider Associates and Zeo Inc. – purveyors of the first personal sleep coach system – to find out what’s keeping Americans up at night. Not surprisingly, job-related stress is the #1 sleep stealer, followed by nighttime noises (e.g., a snoring spouse) and caffeine. Regionally, just over one-half of Californians (51%) are kept up at night by job-related stress, 43 percent of New Yorkers are kept up at night by nighttime noises and 42 percent of New Englanders blamed caffeine as their sleep stealer. Check out our latest research reported in the Boston Globe: Joe overload a menace to New Englanders

We recently gave a talk at the Boston Product Management Association’s (BPMA) monthly event held at Oracle in Burlington, MA. In the talk we reviewed literature on how humans do not follow the rational economic model of decision making, but rather are heavily influenced by unconscious and emotional factors in day-to-day decision making. We also introduced our advanced unconscious research methods, which utilize implicit measures to understand what consumers can’t – or won’t – tell us about their attitudes toward brands, products and services. The method gets to the heart of emotional decision-making and helps identify the nonconscious consumer emotions that lead to trial and purchase.

Fill in the blanks: Blizzard of ___? ‘78 Sprinkles or Jimmies ___? Jimmies 5 inches of snow ___? Dusting Manhattan chowder ___? Never heard of it If you know the answers to these questions, you’re a “true New Englander” according to McDonald’s in their new ad campaign for their Newman’s Own coffee. Newman’s Own New England Blend Ad #1 Newman’s Own New England Blend Ad #2