TRC

Well, another conference is over, perhaps our best ever. A great roster of speakers, a room full of engaged attendees and a great location was a terrific formula for a memorable conference. Some highlights from the various sessions:

Lenny Murphy, Editor-in-Chief of the Greenbook blog opened with a wide sweep discussing the waves of changes rocking the market research world. Pulling from the GRIT survey, his discussion with emerging and established players, as well as his itinerant investigation, he was able to convincingly make the case that change in the MR industry is happening. Now. He talked about emerging technologies such as mobile, social media and text analytics and how academic expertise was a key to unlocking a future of new ideas. It was a perfect set-up for the group of academic presentations that were to follow.

Tags: Market Research, Market Research Innovation, Conferences, Behavioral Economics, Neuroscience

The Outside View that Daniel Kahneman talks about in his book Thinking, Fast & Slow, is a specific remedy to a problem known as the planning fallacy (i.e.) the inability of people to make predictions. The planning fallacy is part of a larger problem of optimism bias. What is optimism bias? Simply put, people are generally more optimistic than they should be. For example, it is well known that most people think they are better than average drivers, an impossibility. It stems from a general dose of overconfidence not warranted by the situation on hand.

The best example of overconfidence is a study that Kahneman cites of CFOs of large corporations. They were asked to estimate the returns of the S&P Index over the following year. The data were collected over a number of years and hence there was ample opportunity to correlate it with the actual performance of the Index in the following year. Any guesses as to this correlation, given that the respondents should have been expected to have special insight in this matter? It was almost exactly zero, slightly less, in fact! And they seemed to have no idea their forecast was that bad.

Tags: Psychology

In his opus Thinking, Fast & Slow, Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman (click here for previous post) relates a story from early in his career when he was leading a team to develop a curriculum and write a textbook on judgment and decision-making in high schools. He had assembled a group of experts and after working diligently for a year they had completed an outline of the syllabus and written two chapters. One fine day when discussing procedures for estimating uncertain quantities, it occurred to him that he should get an estimate from everyone on how long he thought this whole project would take. Being the clever psychologist that he was, rather than ask the group to guess publicly, he asked each person to make a confidential prediction. The mean was about two years and the range was about half a year on either side. In other words, the group was very consistent in its prediction.  

Tags: Psychology, Daniel Kahneman, Behavioral Economics, Market Research, Consumer Behavior

The Nobel Prize winner and the intellectual godfather of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, has summarized a lifetime of research in his recent book Thinking, Fast & Slow. In the next few blog posts I will be drawing upon some concepts that he espouses and link them up to research to see what practitioners can take away from his four decades of work.

This post goes directly to the title of the work; fast and slow thinking. This is the foundation of his work. He and his great collaborator Amos Tversky, (who passed away and therefore could not receive the Nobel) see human thinking in two forms that they call System 1 and System 2. More aptly they could be called “automatic” and “effortful” systems, but Fast and Slow is a good shorthand description. According to Kahneman’s description,

“System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control”

“System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations”

Tags: Market Research, Consumer Behavior, Psychology, Behavioral Economics

The Black Swan is a book that was published a few years ago and generated much publicity and at least some controversy. It occurred to me that there are lessons market researchers can learn from that book, particularly about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative data obtained from a survey format. The idea is that the framework used to analyze such data is different from that used for directly obtained qualitative data through methods such as IDIs and focus groups. Understanding the difference between quantitative and qualitative frameworks for data analysis (and in particular, the difference between statistical and managerial outliers) can help derive more value when the qualitative data are collected in a regular survey. But first, let's take a detour.

A Brief Tour of The Black Swan

In his informative (and entertaining) book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that real data are either distributed normally (from "mediocristan") or not (from "extremistan"). The former are characterized by data that follow the traditional normal distribution (or bell curve). The majority of the distribution is near the middle surrounding the average and as we venture further out the number of observations becomes increasingly scarce. It is a distribution that defines many phenomena in the natural world. In fact, basic statistics shows that with a reasonable number of observations most distributions start approximating the normal.

Tags: Quantitative, Qualitative, Market Research

Yes, it is a rather important issue and can be approached in a variety of ways. My purpose with this post is not to provide a comprehensive answer, but look at one specific solution based on what I recently read. The book is Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's excellent summary of a lifetime of research. He is perhaps the most accomplished psychologist around and could (among other things) justifiably be called the intellectual godfather of behavioral economics. It is always worth listening to what he says and in this particular case, it seems to me there is a nugget that applies to making quantitative research more actionable.

Tags: Psychology, Behavioral Economics, Consumer Behavior

It is that time of year when many people's thoughts turn towards buying gifts for loved ones. More generally it is a time when thoughts related to money and happiness occupy our attention. When thinking of ways to spend money either on oneself, for loved ones or even for complete strangers wouldn't it be nice if there was some actual research to provide data-based guidance on the topic? As it happens, there is. Researchers Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia, Daniel Gilbert of Harvard and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia have identified, through their research, eight principles designed to help consumers get more happiness for their money. Follow them as you will to enhance your life.

Tags: Psychology

I recently came back from the 2011 The Market Research Event (TMRE) conference in Orlando, the biggest marketing research conference of the year. There was plenty to like, not the least of which was the scale of the event. Rarely, if ever, do we get to see an exclusively market research event that is so big. Kudos to IIR for putting it together.

The highlight of the event for me was the Keynotes, of which there were eight. I couldn't catch all of them, but my favorite was Sheena Iyengar from Columbia, author of the best seller The Art of Choosing (and sister-in-law of my friend Raghu Iyengar from Wharton). In a beautifully choreographed and clear presentation, Sheena (who is blind) talked about the problem of plenty in consumer choice and ways to avoid it for both sellers and buyers. The Keynotes were all held in a massive room and very entertainingly emceed by Cayne Collier, an actor and improv artist from Second City Chicago. Discussions with a variety of people indicated that the Keynotes were the favorite part of the conference for many.

Tags: Market Research

As I sat down to write I realized that this is not a simple question. Consider the conventional meaning of necessities (defined as must-haves) and luxuries (defined as nice-to-haves). Which category market research falls into may depend on the eye of the beholder.

Researchers (or more accurately research sellers) may want to think of themselves as producing necessities rather than luxuries. But in the consumer world necessities are also generally commodities and often sold based on price. Researchers of course want to be seen as producing something valuable, something that is worth a premium -- in other words, a luxury.  So, which is it?

Now let's look at it from a research buyer's perspective. The buyer may think of research as a necessity, something that is indispensible for making good business decisions. But in keeping with the popular perception of necessities, perhaps they feel that more than one company can provide it and are hence unwilling to pay much of a premium for it. This view would support the many research sellers who complain about the commoditization of research.

Tags: Market Research, necessity, economy, Luxury

Recently I was invited to attend a neuroscience conference at Temple University in Philadelphia, organized by their Center for Neural Decision Making, along with MIT and the University of Michigan. It turned out to be a very interesting experience with excellent speakers, great interactions and a terrific panel discussion. Some highlights:

• Michael Norton of Harvard spoke with humor about the sensitive topic of racial paralysis. This is the tendency of people to refrain from making any decisions when faced with a situation where they could potentially be perceived as racist. His approach used data from experiments, surveys and neural imaging, a nice way to triangulate the results.

Tags: Neuroscience

You remember the MasterCard "Priceless" ad campaign, don't you? It first ran during the 1997 World Series.

"Two tickets: $28. Two hot dogs, two popcorns, two sodas: $18. One autographed baseball: $45. Real conversation with 11 year old son: Priceless."

It was an ad campaign that was so successful that it helped MasterCard move from a distant second to near parity with Visa. The question is, why? What was it about that ad that was so powerful, asked researchers Jeffrey Loewenstein, Raj Raghunathan and Chip Heath  (who is incidentally a co-author of the best seller Made to Stick ). What they found holds lessons for companies looking to create successful ads.

Tags: Advertising

Companies across a wide range of industries focus on improving customer satisfaction as a way of increasing loyalty. Still, there is evidence to show that increasing customer satisfaction does not always result in increases in repurchase. So if your company happens to be in one of those situations you could be wasting money trying to improve customer satisfaction - money that could be usefully spent on something else. What defines "those situations" where the relationship between customer satisfaction and repurchase is sketchy? In a recent issue of the Journal of Marketing, three academic researchers Glenn Voss, Andrea Godfrey and Kathleen Seiders, propose that the kind of product category (luxury or necessity) plays a crucial role in this relationship along with customer, relationship and market characteristics.

Tags: Customer Satisfaction, Repurchase, Loyalty

A recent Time Magazine article talks about the Optimism Bias -- the phenomenon of people being eternally optimistic about the future. This can be shown in various ways including how people wildly overestimate things like personal life expectancy, marriage solvency, career prospects, etc. In this context "bias" doesn't mean something inherently bad. There is good reason to have an Optimism Bias as it leads to concrete positive outcomes like better health and longer life, not to mention inspiring us and making life generally better.

Tags: Consumer Behavior

A few weeks back we decided to get a new TV. As a researcher I started doing my due diligence checking out a variety of sources. Our old TV had been around since the early days of HD and was a CRT to boot (though still HD - c'mon what do you think I am!). So I was really looking forward to buying something that weighed considerably less, took up a lot less space and looked a lot cooler. It was fun going through the various attributes - 760/1080, LCD/Plasma, LED backlighting, HDMI connections, Internet Apps, 3D! It's been a while since my engineering days when I studied the innards of TVs, and the technology has certainly evolved remarkably since then.

Tags: Choice

Researchers are sometimes described as busy bees but I had no idea that the opposite is literally true till I heard this NPR report on honey bees . Apparently they are wonderful market researchers!

Here's the back story. Cornell Professor Thomas Seeley is a biologist who studies swarm intelligence. Effectively he studies the idea that a group can be smarter than the individuals in the group. Replace "group" with "crowd" and of course the idea is familiar to us as the Wisdom of Crowds. But can such behavior really occur among animals too? Professor Seeley has spent 30 years studying bees and he thinks the answer is emphatically yes. That brings us to the bees-as-market-researchers hypothesis.

Tags: Market Research

In his book on the neuroscience of decision making, How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer talks about the case of a patient who has damaged a part of his brain (specifically the orbitofrontal cortex) and is hence terminally unable to make any decisions. Every single decision, no matter how trivial, seems complicated to the point where it cannot be made. This is generally not a problem for most normal people, right? In fact, the accepted wisdom is that people are quite good at taking somewhat complicated decisions and simplifying them (in many cases rather efficiently) and moving on with their life.

Now there is new research from our friend Oded Netzer at Columbia and his colleagues Rom Schrift and Ran Kivetz that shows that not only do people simplify, but sometimes they also complicate the decision-making process unnecessarily. They studied this through a variety of experiments, many designed to rule out competing explanations. Let's talk about one of those to understand what they did.

Tags: Choice

This is my thesis and I don't have quantitative data to support it. I'm going more on experience than anything else, so feel free to disagree with me. The thesis is that the dominance of phone surveys through at least the last two decades of the 20^th century has changed market researchers' thought patterns in ways we are not fully aware of. This has resulted in sub-optimal behavior when it comes to designing research studies. Let me explain a bit more.

The telephone is an aural medium which naturally has restrictions that a visual medium does not have. When you have to ask someone about the two Presidential candidates, aural media work fine. When you ask to rate their satisfaction with a product again it works fine. But what happens when you have to ask about the importance of various features in a new product? Since it is an aural medium, the number of ways of asking the question is very limited. The easiest way to do it is to provide one feature at a time and ask for a rating. But this does not allow any comparison between the features and certainly does not allow trade-off methods to be used.

Tags: Market Research

 

In a very interesting article in The New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer asks the question can truth Wear Off? So, what is “truth” and what is “wearing off”? In this case truth is that which has been proven by the scientific method (i.e.) experimentally. As the psychologist Jonathan Schooler discovered, experimental effects he had shown very clearly started disappearing into the dreaded land of non-significance over time. That is the “wearing off” part. And it wasn’t just Schooler. Others have seen similar phenomena where published studies when replicated over time have effectively lost their potency. This is a particularly troubling problem for medical science and is practically seen in the number of drugs that are retroactively pulled off the market. As the medical researcher John Ioannidis has shown, there can be substantial harm to society from wrong (but well publicized) results living in the memories of doctors who continue prescribing those drugs or treatments (hormone replacement therapy and daily low doses of aspirin) even when they have proven to be ineffective or harmful. So, the question is, how do effects disappear over time?

Tags: Market Research

They look beautiful on screen or on a page. Almost like watching a short, artsy film. But it is an ad and though you know who it is for, it doesn’t say anything about the positive attributes of the product. American Express is particularly good at this. Are such ads useful or a waste of money? Two of our friends at Yale, Dina Mayzlin and Jiwoong Shin investigated this phenomenon and came to some very interesting conclusions.

 

Tags: Advertising

Doesn’t it seem like air travel has become more of a hassle recently compared to a few years (or a decade) back? Even leaving aside stricter security after 9/11 there appears to be more complaints about air travel these days. How much truth is there in these complaints? Let’s look at the possibilities, namely competition among carriers, new TSA rules and weather.

 

Tags: Consumer Behavior