• by Karl Greenberg , March 31, 2009

Research is useless. Some of it, anyway -- if it does not reflect real behavior rather than theoretical models.

 

Panelists at The Advertising Research Foundation's 55th anniversary conference in New York agree on this view. The theme for the discussion, "Can Research Catch the Customer," was that current research methods are built largely on a faulty understanding of human psychology.

Nathan Berg, associate professor of economics at the University of Texas, said current market research frequently assumes an impossible degree of analysis by consumers. In addition, people who know less frequently make a better-informed choice. "There is a faulty idea that more information is better. Most people don't consider all options. In fact, being smart means making fast decisions before you consider everything."

The way people actually choose between complex options in an array of consumer products -- cell phones, for instance -- is to quickly eliminate whole swaths of them that don't meet a basic non-negotiable parameter or two. He illustrated the point with a page from www.MyPhoneFinder.com that displayed some 100 cell phones, each with sixteen features. Rather than weighing the incomprehensible variety of features against each other to make the most informed choice, consumers instead eliminate, say, all phones over 10 oz. in weight, and over $200.

"Most statistical models are putting weight on the standard model: what is the 'feasible' set. What we have found in a whole variety of settings is that good consumers know what to ignore, said Berg."

They deal with large-dimensional choice lists by collapsing them to make a choice that "satisfices." He says marketers make a fundamental mistake in assuming that consumers are willing to consider an entire choice set -- the 100 cell phones, say -- and weigh all product attributes among them against each other, rather than using attributes to eliminate choice.

"If you are an advertiser, if your product is thrown out of the choice set right way, you are not even in the game."

Dr. Robert Deutsch, an anthropologist and founder of marketing firm Brain Sells, concurred -- adding that people act rather than think. "Metrics are not life," he said. "How real people act flies in the face of most consumer models we have."

Deutsch said that marketers don't quite understand the essence -- and perhaps essential atavism -- of brands. "The primal mind makes patterns; branding predates marketing by 3.5 million years. What contemporary marketers call 'brand' is actually a primal and primary mechanism of the mind: it is attachment, a metaphoric merging between a person's 'self story' and a person's story of you, the product, the company."

He says the distinction is not academic because marketers that spend millions on branding exercises are probably wasting their time if they superimpose an idealized notion of a consumer's self-image. "There are ways to get at that self story and it's realistic, not 'I want to be like Mike [Jordan].' People have a sense -- perhaps not fully formed -- of who they are and what's latent in them.

Deutsch says branding is a spasm of sentiment that needs no basis in logical fact, and realized when it is familiar ("it's like me"), participatory ("does it like me") and powerful, ("Is it more than me.")

That latter idea -- power -- is a dimension that gives a person a sense that with a particular brand as venue, "I can become more of myself." Deutsch says, in fact, that brand loyalty is self-loyalty. "There is no such thing as product loyalty; that's commodity-based. Attachment leads to self-loyalty. It looks like product loyalty, but it's not; it's 'through you I become more of me."

Marketers should throw out purchase funnel models "and consider brand attachment as the yellow brick road -- "a journey I make with you that fills out what's already latent in me," Deutsch says. Great marketers are therefore shamans."