Would Dan Ariely Make a Good Market Researcher?
I've just completed the Final Quiz of the 6 week Ariely/ Duke University online course on Behavioural Economics (http://bit.ly/Q3PQwd)
It's been an enriching if a rather exhausing process. I must have spent upwards of 60 hours studying and taking tests, completing writing assignments - of an evening and at weekends. At times, I wondered if the authors chose some of their topics very much tongue-in-cheek: concepts such as procrastination, self-control strategies and "ego-depletion" seemed particularly appropriate in my weaker moments, where resolve to finish the course was faltering.
Having completed the course, I wondered: what were the central take-outs for Market Research, and do we have the tools to deal with the complexities/irrationalities in decision making that BE highlights?
More whimsically: if Dan Ariely were a researcher, would he be a good one? This is no doubt a very theoretical question, as -sadly - there is no mention whatsoever of Market Research in the course. A more sensible question might be: has Dan Ariely even heard of Market Research.....
So, what of BE and MR?
The central goal of the course is to throw light on the notion of how our decisions are often not as rational as we like to think. Chapters on emotions, dishonesty, mental accounting, labour and motivation and self-control looked at this central proposition from different angles.
For me as a Clientside Researcher, one of the stand-out findings relevance for MR is the notion of Instability of Preferences. A paper written jointly by Ariely and Dan Norton from 2008 talks about how actions create - not just reveal - preferences (http://bit.ly/Zo6aGd). It's worth a read: the authors present evidence that our preferences are more unstable than we like to think, can be influenced by situation, emotions or arousal. We are prone to both "coherent arbitrariness" and "self-herding": relatively arbitrary start-points become the anchor which we then refer back to as our preference reference. Oh - almost forgot - our memory plays tricks on us, we forget or discount the arbitrary context of what originally triggered a behaviour.
What are the implications for MR? Here's my take:
1. The current focus on Shopper Insights appears justified
There's been intense interest over the past 18 months in better understanding the consumer at the POS situation - how we react to shelf layouts, packs, placements, gondola end promotions. The BE findings seem to justify this: our preferences are eminently influencable, and often shaped by context.
2. Mobile data collection provides a MR solution to many of the BE challenges.
The key advantages of mobile - capturing a situation and people's reaction with immediacy, wherever that might be, in a visually enriched and possibly location-enhanced manner - seem the perfect answer to the cognitive instabilities Ariely highlights. If for example we have an online community that is tasked to report over time using their smartphones or tablet, we can capture what they say with a degree of contextual insight that wasn't possible with a laptop.
3. Ethnography will fill the Understanding Gaps
Self-reporting only takes us so far. We are poor witnesses - to quote another BE guru - to our own behaviour; we are also very selective in what we choose to share. Ethnography - and netnography - can help fill understanding gaps from a 3rd party standpoint.
There are plenty of other areas where I have less of a sense of whether our tools are adequate. Is conjoint, for example, challenged in any way as a technique by BE findings? What, if anything, does the "assymetrical dominance effect" mean for pricing research? How, if at all, should we attempt to account for different emotional states that participants may be in when they engage with us in a concept test? Would love to hear others' views on this.
Overall, I came out feeling both good and bad about MR after having put my toe in the BE waters.
First the good. The future of Research - in a world where budgetary pressures didn't exist - seems to me hybrid and asynchronous, with the word insight really only applicable if supported by ongoing multiple datastreams. To that extent, the unpredictability that Dan Ariely highlights shouldn't prove a stick with which beat the MR industry with - the tools are there for us to act as insights consultants in a more sophisticated manner.
Now the less good: for whatever reason, MR simply didn't feature whatsoever in the course. This to me suggests that in the larger discussions - certainly in this neck of the academia woods - we have a saliency issue.
Back to the question posed in the title of this blog: would Dan Ariely make a good Market Researcher? I somehow doubt it. Being effective as an MR professional means grasping the Actionability aspect of Insights with both hands; I lacked the sense at the end of the course of how broadly the insights had been applied, particularly in commercial areas. There were simply very few examples given - if any - of how impactful all of the BE insights had been.
And whilst I love being acquainted with concepts such as "hyperbolic discounting", "intra-empathy gap" and above all "hedonic utility", I'm not sure how much I'll bandy them around at work.....
So that's it - I'm suffering from ego-depletion......
Curious, as ever, as to others' views.
PS: Promise my next blog won't focus on BE ;)