The biggest complaint I hear about marketing research from companies I contact is that they seldom get anything “new.” The insights they get are ones they could have predicted before they ever did the research.

The problem is not just in the questions being asked, but it is also in the model your market researcher uses when accepting or analyzing the answers they receive. You would think that someone in behavioral sciences would understand that people don’t want to reveal core motivations… either to themselves or to others.  Most people are embarrassed to admit that they make their decisions based upon emotion more than upon logic.

It’s also a lot easier to avoid an argument about whether their final decision was the right one, when they can list several rational reasons for choosing what they did.  For instance, I caught myself doing this not long ago.  I had to choose between two suppliers for a business project.  One just made me trust him more.  When I told the other potential supplier that he did not get the business, he asked why.  Instead of going through all the reasons why the supplier I had chosen made me feel more “comfortable,” I told him that it was an issue of price.  The salesman readily accepted that answer, and I was off the phone and on to something important.

Market researchers run into the same thing.  Customers will give a list of rational reasons why they purchased something, but hidden near the end of the list (or waiting for a good researcher to pull it out of them) is the real core reason.  And it is always an emotional one.

I was at a group gathering a couple weeks ago, and a discussion started about baby carriers.  We were talking about how difficult it is to get past the obvious, superficial responses customers give for their answers, and one of the guys in the group said that he and his wife had just gone through the buying process for this kind of baby carrier.  We called her over and asked her why she chose the one she did after comparing several other products.  She gave a list of four or five reasons, including features, sturdiness, and a Consumer Reports article that recommended it.  She stopped, but we did not let her get away with just that.  She finally admitted that her sister had told her that this was the one to get.  She was far more influenced by the relationship she had with her sister and how going against her advice might affect that relationship than anything she saw in the product.  All the reasons she had listed were nothing but the “rationalizers” to make her emotional decision acceptable to other people.

In Alpha analysis, we delve far beyond the superficial, rational reasons consumers and customers give for their buying decisions.  In fact, we always have at least three different ways of testing whether they are telling us the truth built right into every questionnaire.  That’s the only way you can get to the real core decision factors that are being used.

And, since our goal is always to discover ways to change decision factors to be more in favor of our clients’ products or brands, it is critical that we not waste our clients’ time worrying about superficial things that really are not at the core of decisions.

I always believe that, if the research doesn’t give you something “new,” then it was probably a waste of money.

Would you agree?