What Marketers Should Know About the Nonconscious
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This document provides contact information for the company Tiptap Lab, including their website www.tiptaplab.com, blog URL blog.tiptaplab.com, and email address for feedback feedback@tiptap.com. The document contains contact details for Tiptap Lab in a concise format.
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What Marketers Should Know About the Nonconscious
- 69. www.tiptaplab.com // blog.tiptaplab.com // feedback@tiptap.com
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Hello everyone. We will be getting started in a few minutes. If for some reason you can not hear me clearly or there is a problem viewing the slides please chat us and we will work with you to resolve the issue. Again, we will be getting started promptly in three minutes.Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning to discuss what every marketer should know about nonconscious processes that drive consumer decisions
- My name is Dan Cudgma and I am the President of TipTap Lab, who will be hosting today's webinar. And Thank you again for joining. Our speakers this morning are Kyle Thomas, Vice President of Research at TipTap Lab and acclaimed author of "Spent" and the "mating minds" as well as professor of psychology at NYU’s Stern school of business Geoffrey Miller
- Additionally, Angela Bray our social media manager at tiptap lab is with us and she will be tweeting the webinar, and moderating the questions that come in. If for some reason we can't get to all of them live, we'll post the answers to our blog by the end of the day. You can join the conversation at #psych4marketers and tweet @tiptap
- What we will cover today at its most basic level is that we know motivations and goal pursuit drive consumer decision-making.
- These things happen outside of our awareness by non-conscious processes.
- Our brain is designed to intentionally keep this information from us providing instead the ability to report reasonable and socially acceptable responses when prompted-we refer to this function as the confabulator and its not to be trusted and its very hard to measure.
- However, we have found a way that can be trusted and is easier to measure leveraging psychological traits in a new way to provide a window into our non-conscious processes and understand consumer motivations.
- This needs to say not really. You may have seen or heard this quote before that buyers are liars. It refers to sales situation where people who are buying something tend to mislead those who are trying to sell them something. But, if you understood how consumers make decisions, you would know this couldn’t be true.
- And the reason why is because most consumer decisions are mostly made outside of our awareness by nonconsciousprocessess. As a result, the brain has a mechanism whereby even though we may not be aware of why we are actually making one consumer decision versus another, a plausible and socially responsible answer is provided when prompted. We refer to this system as the confabulator
- Most of the work that we see marketers, agencies and even researchers engaging in to understand consumer behavior places too much emphasis on the conscious part of the brain in searching for answers on why we do what we do. A couple that come to mind are customer surveys and focus groups whereby professionals try to find the answers to questions by explicitly asking people even though we know the answers may not be accurate.
- Well, we think there is a better way! A way in which we can tap into the consumers nonconscious, where many of the answers that we are looking for lie. A better way to allow us…
- to build more desirable and appealing products
- A better way to create marketing that people love to a quote our friends at hubspot who are down the street.
- and a better way to sell more stuff!
- To talk more about non conscious processing and unconscious decision making is Kyle Thomas. Before I turn the mic over to him, I just want to remind everybody that as they have questions please chat us to let us know or join the conversation on twitter at #psych4marketers and tweet @tiptapThanks Dan, and thanks to all of you for joining us. I’m Kyle Thomas, the Vice President of research at TipTap Lab, and I’m going to kick things off by talking about what psychologists have learned about the non-conscious and decision-making, and how this is relevant for understanding consumer behavior.
- It seems to us that we are consciously aware of what's going on inside our head, but decades of psychological research indicates that this is not the case. Like most of our psychological processes, our decision-making processes are largely non-conscious, meaning we simply cannot be consciously aware of why we make many of the decisions that we do. Just as you are not aware of how your brain processes images so you can see, or sentences so you can speak grammatically, you are often only aware of the outcomes of your decision-making processes.
- Consumer decisions, like all decisions, are driven by motivations and goals, which are often unconscious. This suggests that if you can understand someone’s motivations and/or goals, you can get a good sense of what is driving their decisions.
- For example, research has demonstrated that people are more likely to buy a drink that is offered to them by someone that mimics them. It is believed that this occurs because mimicry activates a non-conscious motivation for social affiliation, with the goal of creating or strengthening a relationship, and the decision to buy the drink is driven by this motivation, and is made to help fulfill this goal. The psychology literature is full of these examples, where some goal or motivation is activated non-consciously, and people make decisions for reasons they are completely unaware of.
- To cite a couple more classic examples, when a poster with images of eyes is put next to a tip jar, tips increase substantially, because psychological mechanisms for reputation management are activated non-consciously, driving people to tip more.
- When images of attractive women are visible, men will spend more and take greater risks, as non-conscious mating motivations are activated.
- People all carry around latent motivations and goals, and these motivations and goals can be triggered by cues from the environment. Often, if a cue connects with a goal or motivation in the right context, say the right kind of packaging on a product in the store, a specific goal or motivation is turned on, leading to behaviors that accomplish that goal. This suggests that understanding these cues and how they connect to different motivations can provide a window into understanding consumer decision-making and behavior. The problem is, these things can be very hard to measure and assess.
- To make things worse, the psychological system that generates explicit self-reports often has no direct access to the decision-making processes. This system is known as the confabulator, the interpreter, or the press secretary. This system immediately and confidently spins a story for why we just did what we did, even though there’s no way the system can be certain if the story is actually true. For example, under certain conditions researchers can give subjects specific subliminal instructions, such as “go to the kitchen and open the fridge”. People will do exactly what the researchers tell them to, but when asked why, they come up with a believable lie on the spot, “well I was thirsty so I thought I’d get up and grab a Coke.” What this means is that despite the fact that people often have no conscious awareness of their decision-making processes, they still confidently report plausible reasons for their decisions. There's often no way to tell whether these reasons are true or false, because the system that gives the response does not actually have access into the decision-making processes, and instead simply constructs explanations that seem plausible.
- All of this has been known by psychologists for decades: People often don’t know why they do what they do, but when asked, they will confidently report some plausible reason as though they are certain this is why they did what they did. This is simply how our human brains are designed, and can result even when someone is trying to be as honest as possible.
- So, here’s the picture we’re left with. People have unconscious motivations and goals that drive unconscious decision making.
- These motivations are carried around and switched on in different ways and combinations in different contexts, in which they guide things like consumer decisions and behavior.
- People have no conscious access to most of this, but they have a weird psychological system that will confidently report stories as though they knew exactly why they did what they did. Thus, explicit reports of consumer behaviors are unreliable and cannot be trusted, and the only way to get reliable information about consumer behavior is to figure out how to tap into the decision-making processes or the motivations directly. The rest of this webinar will be about a novel approach for doing just that.
- Thank you Kyle for revealing why we don’t have conscious access to our decisions and why self reports cant be trusted. Next up, is Geoffrey Miller who is going to discuss how psychological traits are signaled through consumer behavior. Reminder – Join the conversation on twitter and chat us any questions you have.
- Thanks Geoffrey for that enlightening view of consumer behavior as trait signaling. Now I am going to expand on how traits can be used to understand true consumer motivations.
- Hopefully at this point it's clear that decisions are made largely by nonconscious processes, and that people's explicit reports about why they do what they do should not be trusted.
- There currently exist many solutions to this problem, from focus groups to neuromarketing approaches. However, all of the present approaches have a few shortcomings...
- First off, they tend to be unreliable, producing results that are often not replicable, or verifiable in any way.
- Second, these solutions also tend to be very time and effort intensive as well as very costly.
- Furthermore, these solutions tend to be fairly limited. Many people have tried to apply various psychological research methods to get around self report measures, but these neuromarketing solutions tend to be gimmicky, and generally stray far from what a given methodology was designed to measure and/or is capable of actually measuring.
- We've spent the past three years doing research on a new way to solve this problem, and figuring out how to understand the true motivations behind consumer decisions. In this research, we have been applying psychometric methods from personality and consumer behavior psychology to create tools for measuring psychological traits, and deploying these tools to understand consumer motivations.
- Along the way, we realized that we were really conceptualizing traits in a completely novel way--a reconceptualization that led to our breakthrough methodology. Now Geoffrey actually previewed this reconceptualization in how he defined traits, but here I want to delve into this a bit deeper, show how this conceptualization is new, and highlight how it can be used to understand consumer behavior and motivations.
- The traditional definition of psychological traits conceptualizes them as patterns of thinking and behaving that are stable across the lifespan and across different situations, and that differ across individuals. Notice that this is a passive descriptive conceptualization of what traits are. They are used as a kind of adjective or noun, simply to describe who people are and what they are like.
- The problem with this conceptualization is that it makes predicting anything with traits logically circular. For example, one might say that Bill Clinton is out schmoozing again because he is an extrovert, but he is said to be an extrovert because he’s always out schmoozing. Notice the circularity here: He is characterized as an extrovert because he is often social, and then his social behavior is explained as the result of him being an extrovert.
- Along with Geoffrey, we realized in our research that traits can be conceptualized in a more active way that breaks out of this circle, as something like “chronic motivations” that drive goal-directed behavior. That is, personality traits are like motivations that people carry around with them, and different motivations are turned on in different circumstances to achieve different goals. People that are high on a trait like extraversion are that way because they are frequently motivated to pursue goals that require them to be social. Can you think of why Bill Clinton might be an extrovert, given his typical goals? Clearly his political goals require him to behave as an extrovert, not to mention some of his other potential goals.Notice that this is an active conceptualization of traits, a view that emphasizes how traits can explain why people do what they do. Indeed it is this active aspect of traits that gives rise to the descriptive aspects captured by the traditional definition.
- This conceptual shift is subtle, but extremely powerful. Conceptualizing psychological traits as motivations makes it clear how they can be used to circumvent the confabulator and understand true consumer motivations.
- I couldn't believe that this was a completely new insight, so I started doing some research into the primary scientific literature and realized that this seems to be where many personality researchers are headed as well. For example, William Fleeson's Whole Trait Theory explicitly looks at the motivational aspects of traits, Sam Gosling's work on how traits manifest themselves in our environments implicitly deals with them as motivations, and work by evolutionary psychologists treats them as evolved strategies.In a recent Psychological Science article Fleeson and his co-author Kira McCabe found that goal-pursuit explains a whopping 74% of the variance in extraversion scores. This is an astronomical number for psychological research, and provides a very strong proof of concept that psychological traits are like chronic motivations that act to achieve specific goals.
- Now, the reason this insight is so important is because it is very hard to measure decisions or motivations directly. Doing so is generally very painstaking and time and resource intensive, and it's generally only possible to focus on one small aspect at a time. Understanding that traits can be viewed as motivations gives us a great tool for measuring motivations and therefore understanding consumer decision-making, because it is well understood how to measure traits in a valid and reliable way. In other words, this reconceptualization shows how one can connect traits--which can be easily measured--with motivations and decision-making--the real topic of interest, but things which are typically extremely difficult to measure.
- The history of hybrid cars provides a great example of how this approach can inform product design and messaging. When hybrid cars first came to market everyone knew that eco-consciousness was a key motivation for purchase. However, no one seemed to understand this motivation well enough, as they might have if they had taken the approach we are advocating here. The first hybrid cars were released as options for existing models of cars, such as Toyota Camrys, that also could be purchased as a standard option. These cars did not sell well.
- Then came the Toyota Prius, which took off. What was the secret to its success? The Prius had a very distinct design, and it was only available as a hybrid. This means anyone in a Prius knew that everyone around them knew that they were driving a hybrid car.It turned out that the motivation for hybrid cars was not simply eco-consciousness, but rather a motivation to display one's eco-conscious credentials to others, in line with the kind of trait signaling that Geoffrey discussed. This could have easily been understood if producers had assessed traits beforehand, because they would have seen traits associated both with eco-consciousness and with signaling--measures such as public consciousness and prestige sensitivity--and realized that simply making the car eco-friendly was insufficient. We have found similarly illuminating clusters of traits in much of our own research, and these clusters allow us to hone in on the specific motivations driving consumer behaviors.
- Because many traits can be reliably assessed in a short amount of time, our method can rigorously test a very wide array of motivations quickly and efficiently, meaning we don’t need to know the answers going in, and neither do the people who are involved in our research. If this approach were taken in trying to understand why people buy hybrid cars, such exploratory research would have immediately made it apparent that the motivation for hybrid cars was one for signaling eco-consciousness, even though neither the manufacturers nor the potential consumers at the time may have had any awareness of this.
- Furthermore, our research has shown that when trying to predict consumer behavior, traits are complementary and additive to traditional demographic metrics. This means that they can be used together, and motivational information can be layered on top of existing market research methods, rather than just replacing these methods. Adding trait information to focus groups, surveys, and behavioral techniques like tracking purchases can increase the predictive power of these traditional techniques by providing a new and powerful kind of data.
- Assessing traits to understand motivations involves measuring consumers at an optimal psychological level. Understanding consumer behavior at this optimal level provides a number of additional benefits. First, understanding motivations through traits offers clear, concrete insights into messaging. If you know why people are interested in a brand or product, this insight can help inform how best to communicate to existing customers, and reach out to new ones. In our own research, we have found that people's trait profiles are powerful predictors of what kinds of marketing messages they will find appealing.
- Understanding consumers' true motivations can also help inform decisions about brand image, packaging design, product features, and distribution channels. This approach can help insure that packaging elements and product features tap into the right motivations, and that the distribution channels get the product in front of the right kinds of people. Imagine doing an A/B test and not just knowing what people tend to gravitate towards, but also who each version appeals to and why!
- Finally, trait information can be used for a novel kind of market segmentation. This type of segmentation is very flexible, targeting very specific motivations, and allowing for evolving segments as people and product offerings change. No one buys something because they are female, urban, educated, and upper-middle class; people buy things to fulfill certain goals based on specific motivations. Demographics can at best serve as weak proxies for what leads people to buy, namely motivations and goals. We've done some work on creating motivational segments and our research shows that motivational segmentation is more powerful than demographic segmentation, and can be complementary. For example, in research we did on predicting what TV shows people watch, we found that traits were up to 10X more predictive than traditional demographics. Furthermore, the predictive nature of demographics and traits was almost completely additive, meaning they are complementary predictors, and that combining the two offers more predictive power than using either alone.
- Traditionally marketers have used either demographics for segmentation, or personality types. I’ve already highlighted some of the shortcomings of demographics, and there are many problems with using personality types, including the fact that it limits what one can measure, and makes these measurements discrete rather than continuous, not to mention that there is no empirical support that humans can be classified as different types.What we are suggesting is that modern empirically supported trait variables can provide a powerful new way to create motivational segments, a method of segmentation that targets people at an optimal psychological level—the same level that actually drives their decision-making, rather than some kind of proxy.
- To summarize, an active contemporary view of psychological traits reveals how they can be used to assess the true motivations behind consumer behavior and decision-making. This approach is objective, quantitative, efficient, and the research can be done at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional marketing research.
- In addition, it can be used to inform marketing messaging, decisions on everything from product features, to packaging and brand image, and it can be used to create consumer segments at the optimal psychological level, and to connect these segments to different marketing channels.
- We think this approach offers a revolutionary and extremely powerful way to understand the true motivations behind why people buy, how to tap into these motivations, and where to find the people with the right motivations for any given brand or product.
- Hello everyone. We will be getting started in a few minutes. If for some reason you can not hear me clearly or there is a problem viewing the slides please chat us and we will work with you to resolve the issue. Again, we will be getting started promptly in three minutes.Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning to discuss what every marketer should know about nonconscious processes that drive consumer decisions