11: Researching the Unconscious
The current methods of market research leave much to be desired. It's long been known that test subjects in a research lab behave differently than they do in real life. They pay more attention and are more self-aware. They say the things they think they ought to say rather than telling what they really think and feel. And for all of this, marketing still uses focus groups and other forms of lab research and uses the artificial results to guide actual decisions - and act surprised when what the research led them to believe does not play out in actual consumer behavior. And more, we keep doing the same kinds of research even though we're aware the results are entirely inaccurate and routinely leads brands to miss the mark on their strategies.
If we accept the premise that people buy a product for functional benefits and a brand for emotional ones, then it follows that people have a difficult time relating their emotions and often flatly deny having them at all. They would have others believe their purchases are entirely rational and based on sound and objective logic - when clearly they are not. Even if they have the humility to admit that they act on gut feeling, they are not experts in psychology and cannot describe where these feelings come from. They simply do not know what causes them to make the choice between two fundamentally identical products at roughly the same price.
The author mentions "neuromarketing," which is a term that is being banded about with little understanding of what it actually means. Legitimate neuromarketing attempts to correlate behavior to brain activity - so if you are not using an MRI or an EEG, you are not doing neuromarketing. Of course, even if you are using those devices and the corresponding techniques, you're likely not learning anything particularly meaningful: neuromarketing is still in its early phases, and even the experts in these techniques are quick to admit their shortcomings and recognize that what they are doing is in the very early stages of development. They can tell you that there is activity in a certain part of the brain when certain stimuli are received, but correlating that activity to emotional states is still highly theoretical.
Ultimately, the only way to know what effect a given stimulates a given behavior in real life is to observe behavior in real life - observation experiments and ethnographies where the subjects are making real decisions and are unaware that they are being observed. This seems unsatisfactory, as one cannot explain why more people purchase a product in a package of a specific color, when a certain song is playing in the background, or when they walked past a specific poster in the lobby of the store. We can observe what they do but any explanation of "why" is theoretical and speculative.
Given that brand exists as associations, the author sees some promise in a technique called the Implicit Associaiton Test, which he doesn't describe particularly well - but it seems the test seeks to identify associations (positive/negative) for words and images, measuring the response time as well as the content of the responses. He also mentions the usefulness of word-association games (the proctor says a word, the respondent says the first word that comes to mind), but the link between this and brand associations also seems unclear and unsatisfactory.
He does give some credit to traditional market research techniques. Ethnography, in-depth interviews, informal group conversations, shop-alongs, and other techniques can provide a deep understanding that is more valid than lab testing, though these are all qualitative methods. He also speaks highly of image sorting, collage building, personification exercises, and the like as ways to get insight into the less rational ways in which people think about a brand.
However, this comes with a word of caution: with qualitative research, there is the tendency to skew results in the interpretation. Even researchers and analysts are prone to having preconceptions and filtering/skewing the results of research to fit what they expected to hear. The use of an objective and well-trained research team is especially important to hear what customers are actually saying as opposed to hearing what we wanted to hear in the first place.
He also speaks to the importance of paying close attention to the respondents' choice of words, their body language and tone, facial expressions and context. There is as much value in discovering why someone says something as there is in considering what they actually said - particularly to detect when a person may be saying something other than what they really think and feel. It is the emotion, rather than the rationale, that matters.