Psychology shows up more and more in business

Last week’s NYTimes Sunday Business section featured two articles on consumer irrationality (“Is There A Method In Cellphone Madness?”) and (“Paying A Price For the Thrill of the Hunt“) .
As a firm that studies consumer psychology, and specifically the psychology of decision making, it’s interesting to see these topics making headlines. Part of our mission is to narrow the gap between academic research in consumer psychology and decision making and business, and to bring brands closer to their consumers, and we appreciate the movement in that direction. The more experts bring academic research on consumer decision making to the business world, the more efficient the business world will become.
We see it happening every day. Smart companies – progressive companies – understand that consumer answers to surveys are tinged with self presentation bias, recall errors, and a number of other barriers to accurate information. Creative exercise focus groups and ethnographic studies start to uncover driving attitudes and behaviors, but then need to be projected to the larger population. Methodologies that measure the consumer unconscious (such as Sentient’s ABA methodology) deliver information that is 2-3 times more predictive than traditional market research methods! And by conducting them online, they can be delivered quickly and cost effectively.
Our prediction for 2010? More companies will venture into this new territory, allocating research dollars to methods like ABA and brainscan (fMRI) technologies; they’ll realize significant returns on their investment, and they’ll continue to allocate larger portions of budget to these advanced methodologies. Let the groundswell begin!