The trouble with market research
Your conscious brain is an unreliable witness about what you do and why you do it.
“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.”
David Olgivy
One of the deep challenges of conventional market research is that it assumes people are dominantly rational beings – that we know and can articulate why we do what we do. To the contrary, decades of scholarship on neuroscience, cognition, and decision-making have shown that our conscious brains are generally late to the party and arrive more as witness than host.
As marketing maven Rory Sutherland describes the disconnect (2011):
“The conscious rational brain isn’t the Oval Office; it isn’t there making executive decisions in our minds. It’s actually the press office issuing explanations for actions we’ve already taken.”
Since our conscious brain is the dominant frame for our lived experience, it’s natural to assume it is in control. But as psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes it, the primary job of your brain isn’t thinking, it’s keeping you alive (to be fair, thinking helps). Says she (2020):
“Of course, your brain does think and feel and imagine and create hundreds of other experiences…. But all of these mental capacities are consequences of a central mission to keep you alive and well by managing your body budget. Everything your brain creates, from memories to hallucinations, from ecstasy to shame, is part of this mission.”
Your brain is constantly making sense and taking action at levels not available to your conscious attention. So it’s not surprising that your conscious brain is an unreliable witness about why you choose or what you do.
So what’s a poor marketing professional to do if they want to understand and engage their audience? They can certainly ask for rational responses in a survey, intercept interview, or focus group – but they should treat the results as tiny (and suspect) pieces of a larger puzzle.
More useful are techniques that engage and elicit emotional and sensory responses rather than strictly rational ones. Asking for stories, for example, will provide a rational narrative but also metaphor, imagery, emotion, and other indicators that inform unconscious decision-making. The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) is just one example of this approach. Such techniques also often include images, drawings, and playful word associations.
In short, to explore the non-rational or pre-rational cognition and action of your arts audience (or yourself), take a lesson from artistic practice. Art-making and art-sharing have long interrogated the intersection of sense and sensibility.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Marketing
Marketing involves creating, communicating, and reinforcing expected or experienced value.
Insight of the Week: A Brief History of Attention, Perception, and Action
How did we humans come to the attention, perception, and action systems that now shape our entire lived experience? A few scholars have pieced together this 700-million-year story.
Photo by Raquel Martínez on Unsplash
Sources
Barrett, Lisa Feldman. Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.
Sutherland, Rory. “Questioning the Nature of Research.” Research Live, August 31, 2011.