BrainTrust Query: Can Marketing Research Borrow from Behavioral Economics?
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt of a current article from the Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research blog.
It is important that we marketing researchers become like behavioral economists and study how people make choices, not just the choices they make.
Choices often have three dimensions: what media to seek out for advice, what to buy, and what retailer to buy from. Each choice has its own path that is intertwined and critical to understand.
The fourth dimension — one we researchers think of too infrequently — is the choice of the answer respondents give to a survey question. Survey-taking is chock full of decision-making because people are not opening their brain like it's "a container" and just letting truthful answers pour out of their heads. They are reconstructing memories and opinions in the context of their current mental state, how the question is framed and asked, and how the preceding parts of the survey have brought a respondent to the next question.
Here are three smart steps to put a little behavioral economics into the process:
1. Nudge the Respondent
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008), by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, is all about the idea that there is no neutral way to frame choices: "simply by rearranging the cafeteria, Carolyn was able to increase or decrease the consumption of many food items by as much as 25 percent."
Take it to the next step: We need to nudge respondents to get the most accurate self-reporting when compared to known behavioral data, like brand penetration levels.
2. Heat Up the Respondent
We tend to study preferences at times that are divorced from a respondent being in a need state. Noted behavioral economist George Loewenstein describes his research on cold-hot empathy gaps as follows (Loewenstein, Read and Baumeister; 2003): "when people are in a cold state — i.e., not hungry, sexually aroused, in pain, angry, etc. — they underestimate the impact of such 'visceral' (hot) states on their own future behavior."
Current concept testing does not do enough to "put people in the mood," especially if the idea is innovative and might create its own category.
3. Create Social Contracts
Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2009) raises an important insight about social vs. monetary contracts:
"... they studied a day care center in Israel to determine whether imposing a fine on parents who arrived late to pick up their children was a useful deterrent. ... [They]concluded that the fine didn't work well. ... Why? Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late ... their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future. But once the fine was imposed ... they frequently chose to be late."
The ARF Foundations of Quality Research program I helped to direct proved that those who are motivated by a social contract (i.e., "Giving my opinion is the right thing to do") rather than receiving cash incentives led to more diligent survey taking behavior.