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

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.

The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) held its 12th annual meeting on January 27-29, 2011 in San Antonio, TX. The meeting highlighted the cutting-edge of social psychological research as well as charted a course for future research in the field. The conference included many symposia across a wide range of topic areas. One particularly informative talk on the subconscious and emotion was by Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University on the psychological construction of emotion.

Imagine the following scenario, you are choosing between the following two high end toasters: Toaster A has two slots, both wide enough for bagels, and costs $49. Toaster B has four slots, all wide enough for bagels and costs $89. Assume these toasters are equal on every other dimension. Which would you choose?

The staff here at Sentient Decision Science, Inc. comes from disparate backgrounds and skill sets, and we are often able to achieve unique insights for our clients that lead to business-changing ideas because of our strong belief in the importance of integration – and not just in terms of integrating marketing research methodologies, but also in terms of team communication and knowledge-sharing. “Integration,” then, has at least two important meanings for marketing research.

In our recent paper on Hot State Decision-Making we discussed the perfect storm of providing consumers with immediate visceral delight while simultaneously providing emotional benefits relevant to long-term goals. This formula provides both short-term and long term benefit thereby maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for your customer base. A recent article by Khan & Dhar (2010) in the Journal of Marketing Research shows an innovative method of delivering this perfect storm for your customers through careful framing of the discount on your bundled offerings (a bundle is an offer of a second item with the purchase of first item; usually a discount is offered when purchased together – think Amazon’s “better together” discounts).

Sentient Decision Science has predicted the 2011 trends that will continue to transform the research industry and help shape the customer agenda for Global 2000 brands: Behavioral science will supplant traditional market research: Traditional market research is very good at describing what people have done, but has lacked insight into the true drivers of behavior. Plucking principles from psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience and behavioral economics has proven to provide an immediate boost to the bottom line by revealing specific methods for influencing customer behavior.

The ESOMAR Qual 2010 held in Barcelona – City of Inspiration – challenged us to re-think how we deliver qualitative research findings. Jackie Hughes’s (Kellogg) keynote speech on opening day urged us not to deliver insights, which can be here-and-gone in a flash. Instead she suggested the notion of “continuous, daily enlightened thinking,” which is sustainable and can be built upon, as the way to lead our client teams toward real ‘game-changing ideas’.

I took a break from some pretty intensive fieldwork this week to attend the evening event at the QRCA annual conference in Philadelphia. Because of my schedule I was sadly unable to attend the conference, but with some advance planning and the traffic working in my favor on rte. 95 I was able to make time for the event (I have my priorities after all). The QRCA evening event is always a great opportunity to meet new people and share ideas. Over cocktails I met some colleges I’d met at AQR/QRCA in Prague earlier this year and we had a lively discussion about the differences between online focus groups and online bulletin boards. I’m thankful I ran into them because they gave me a very helpful perspective based on their experience with these approaches.

Some choices are hard to make, especially when the options we are faced with are nearly equivalent. Nevertheless we manage to make decisions every day and, buyer’s remorse notwithstanding, we frequently feel satisfied with our choices. And those previously attractive alternatives? Well, we tell ourselves, they were somehow lacking anyway.  But have we arrived at that conclusion through rational consideration of each alternative’s objective value, or do we subjectively—and retroactively—adjust the value we place on rejected options in order to feel better about the choice we made?