TRC

The Economist reviewed a study by Dr. Neil Brewer about effective police lineups which I think had implications for Market Research. Like researchers, police typically like to encourage witnesses to take their time to ensure they are making the correct choice. This makes logical sense, more time, means more thinking which naturally should lead to better results. Sadly, Dr. Brewer found otherwise.

He had volunteers view short films which detailed mundane scenes of everyday life and a crime (shoplifting, car theft, etc). Later (some minutes later, some a week), they were asked to identify the criminal from a group of 12 pictures of “suspects”. Half were given 3 seconds to evaluate each picture and asked how confident they were of their choice. The other half were given as much time as they wanted. The results showed that the group that had the limited time was correct 67% of the time. The group with more time was only correct 49% of the time.  

Tags: Gamification, Behavioral Economics, Market Research Innovation

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

3D is all the rage in Hollywood and is coming to a TV set near you if it isn't there already. 3D@Home Consortium lists no fewer than 20 movies planned for theatrical release in 2012 that will be offered up in 3D. These include Men in Black 3, Star Trek 2 and The Ring 3D.

But is Hollywood's push toward 3D the result of consumer demand? Holly McKay reporting for FoxNews.com says that less than 50% of the box office earnings for Kung Fu Panda 2, Pirates of the Caribbean, Green Lantern and Cars 2 in 2011 were from 3D showings.

But how does 3D fit in as a draw relative to the other decisions a potential movie-goer makes? Does 3D motivate an American adult to select a movie to see on a given day?

Apparently not.

Tags: Measuring Importance, New Product Development, Market Research Innovation, Market Research

In a recent post, my colleague Bob Hull reported that many of his clients start talking about segmentation by emphasizing all the data on their customers they already have. Bob pointed out that such demographic and behavioral data can often answer "what" questions, what customers do and what they look like, but to understand "why" customers do what they do, and how apparently similar customers differ from one another, survey research to collect attitudinal and needs-based information is necessary. 

In segmenting business markets, we have found another major advantage of including attitudinal and need-based information in segmentation studies. Very likely, a company's competitors have demographic and behavioral data similar to what the company has.

Tags: segmentation