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

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.

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.

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.

Take a look at this image. What do you see? You might be saying: “This is a smiling car.” Is this car really smiling?  I don’t think so.  People smile, and maybe animals, but not cars. But if you see a smiling car, you’re not crazy.  You’ve just “anthropomorphized” it. This means that you’ve imagined it as a person.

Our apologies to Bill Shakespeare for destroying his famous quote.  Perhaps we can recover by providing marketers some better-spoken advice related to selling their products and services. Our advice is based upon well-founded research on “construal levels.”  Simply stated, construal levels refer to particular cognitive styles consumers use when they evaluate and decide whether or not to purchase a particular product or service. Basically, two levels of construal are most often distinguished:

Behavioral Science is the future of market research, and the subdiscipline of Neuroscience has a lot to offer that future. Neuroscience is providing new insight on the implicit drivers of behavior by revealing what consumers either can’t or won’t tell us through self-reported methods. Neuromarketing – the application of neuroscience principles and measurement tools to marketing issues – has captured the imagination of the advanced marketing research world.

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.

  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.