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The Future of Advertising and Marketing Research

The Future of Advertising and Marketing Research

 BLOGGER:  ROBERT F. BORNSTEIN, PHD

Will research as we know it really be dead (or at best on life support) by 2012?  Many of us are familiar with Kim Dedeker’s now-famous quote, but it’s hard to envision how such a massive paradigm shift could occur so quickly, or what form it might take.

Most marketing experts see the future in terms of a movement toward more ecologically valid measures of marketing impact–measures that reflect how people really behave.  We’re talking about real-time readings of online chatter, twitters, and so forth….that sort of thing.  Clearly we’re moving away from the traditional questionnaires, surveys and focus groups.  The flaws in these methods are too glaring to ignore.

But let’s look below the surface and see what’s behind this shift.  The limitations of traditional marketing research methods are clear: They provide an incomplete picture of people’s true attitudes, and a biased one as well.  Many people respond to questionnaires as they think they’re supposed to answer (not saying how they really feel).  Even worse, people–all of us–have only partial and limited access to our underlying, unconscious attitudes and preferences.  Psychologists have known this for years: Study after study shows that verbal self reports are stunningly poor predictors of behavior.

So how do we shift from research to insight–from mindless data-crunching to thoughtful analysis?

Moving beyond questionnaires will help, but even ecologically based measures (like chat tracking) rely on self-report–what people say, not how they really feel.  We need different data.  Better data.  More direct measures of underlying attitudes and preferences.

I’m not talking about neuroimaging here…fMRIs are (in the words of one neuroscientist widely published in this area) still too primitive–more like a sledgehammer than a scalpel.  It will be years until EEGs and neuroscans are sensitive enough to provide the kinds of answers we need.

To get beneath the surface, beyond self-report to implicit data that taps people’s unconscious reactions and reflexive gut-level responses, we need to lean more heavily on cutting-edge work in cognitive science and neuroscience.

Consider:

Mere repeated exposure to a product or image increases people’s positive reactions to that product–a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect.  There have been more than 300 published studies of the exposure effect, and here’s the kicker: When product images are presented subliminally (so people are not aware they’ve seen them) the exposure effect is far stronger than when the image is consciously perceived.  And the positive attitudes “spill over” to other, related images.

Can you get subliminal mere exposure effects in the real world?  In the words of a former Vice Presidential candidate, You Betcha!  In the mid-90s, an experiment was conducted over British TV airwaves by the BBC.  During an election cycle they showed subliminal images of candidates–different candidates in different parts of the UK–and the expected results occurred: People tended to prefer the candidate they’d seen subliminally even without knowing they’d seen him.  Thinkscan.com founder Joel Weinberger consulted on this study, as did I.  The results were eventually published in Science, academia’s most prestigious journal (see “Subliminal Perception on TV”, Science, Volume 370, page 103, July 14, 1994).

So Kim Dedeker was right….sort of.  Research as we know it will be dead by 2012, but the future doesn’t lie in chatter or twitter.  It lies in the unconscious. 

Thinkscan, Advertising, Marketing, Subliminal, Unconscious

To find out about Dr. Bornstein, click here to read his bio.

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Tags: advertising, marketing, marketing research, research, thinkscan