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

The advent of the digital age and the ease of data storage and collection have been a true blessing for the market research industry. It’s easier than ever to get a glimpse of what consumers are doing simply by looking at web traffic statistics for different sites. The success of an online ad is at least partly visible in the number of clicks it gets. And to answer questions that cannot be resolved by direct observation, online survey distribution has allowed for cheaper and faster data collection than ever before.

“We will extend a hand, if you are willing to unclench your fist.” - Barack Obama, January 20th, 2009. On the day of Obama’s inauguration, the best political team on television largely panned Obama’s speech as being “not great” (notable exceptions were Republican leaning analysts Castellanos and Gerger). The CNN panel saw the speech as containing no great delivered lines like “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” or “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”.

“Economic Unrest is Shifting Electoral Battlegrounds” – front page headline New York Times, Sunday October 5th. The trouble with this headline lies in the meaning of what the word “is” is. “Is” indicates causality in this case, and is clearly spoken out of turn. The article claims that the cause of the recent turn in the electoral map toward Barack Obama is a result of (that is, is caused by) the worsening economic climate over the past month.

If expectational influence on subsequent judgment were ever on public display, we saw it in nearly every analyst on television Thursday evening following the Vice Presidential debate. Sarah Palin’s performance in the debate was much better than what we saw in the clips from the Katie Couric interview. But really, where was there to go, for a Vice Presidential candidate, but up? The leading edge of psychological science tells us that expectations play a strong role in how we perceive the world. Lowering expectations, and subsequently beating those expectations will provide you with more lift in positive experience  perceptions than meeting higher expectations altogether (Kunda, 1999). Still, shouldn’t we expect our best political analysts to get beyond this?

Barack Obama has won 8 straight states since Super Tuesday, including an unexpected sweep of the Chesapeake Primary. Some of these wins have been by 30 points or more. His “yes, we can” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY) video on you tube has more than 4 million hits. There is a tremendous emotional swell behind Barack that has even the Clinton organizational juggernaut trembling. So today’s topic is emotion and politics. We know that emotion moves markets and drives consumer purchases (think about the millions of people who threw down $600 for an iPhone when it came out last June – including myself!), but what about electorates?