The Power of Choice

Did you know that the higher a job pays, the lower likelihood to die from a heart attack? You’re thinking, “Sure! If I was making six figures I would eat better, exercise more, keep up on my health, etc.”  The truth is, those that make the big bucks have greater flexibility in their workday. More freedom to choose leads to lower stress, which translates to lower blood pressure, making heart problems much less likely. Choice is pretty important, yeah?

Choice is important to your customer too! Freedom to choose is an innate human need that is integral to consumer behavior. It turns out when making a choice about a product or service, consumers follow a mental purchase sequence. This involves awareness of products available, perception of the brand, consideration set, the actual purchase, satisfaction, and finally, loyalty and repeat purchase. If you’re not drooling at all potential data, you shouldn’t be in marketing.

The Purchase Sequence

But what do your customers want, and why do they make their choice? The most accurate way to measure and predict consumer choice is by recreating as close as possible their purchase process. It’s a bit unrealistic to build an in-house department store, with cameras in every crevasse and undercover employees that double as researchers. Still, we can get pretty close. Actually, with proper survey design, we can recreate a choice situation that accurately measures the why behind a choice. Here’s how we can do it for your brand too:

• Awareness—Do people know about your brand and remember it at purchase? Test where your brand fits in consumers’ minds with aided and unaided recall tasks.

• Perception—You may have an idea of your brand personality, but the only thing that matters is what your consumers perceive. We can find out the attitudes and the general sentiment of your brand through qualitative text analysis.

• Consideration Set—What job do consumers hire your product for? What other brands besides direct competitors do consumers use as substitutes? We can discover the underlying core value of your product fulfills using a Laddering Model.

• Purchase—What features are most appealing to your customers? We’ll simulate the shopping experience in a conjoint style choice task. Consumers are given a realistic mix of features, brands, and prices which give us the optimal mix to maximize preference share and willingness to pay.

• Satisfaction—Do your customers have buyer’s remorse? Hard for your small business to swallow returns? With a multiple regression model, we can help you learn and implement the key drivers that drive satisfaction.

• Loyalty/Repeat—We’ve all heard it before. “Market to your swing group in the eyes of your love group.” Got it! But wait, who is your love group? How do we get them to come back? Not sure how to answer that? We’ll test your brand KPI’s and gather customer demographics to build a complete buyer persona with opportunity sizing. We can even segment the market with an advanced Q-Sort model.

Strategic Decisions

Ultimately the freedom to choose is an innate human sense that is integral to consumer behavior. Don’t worry about heart problems! It’s our mission to lower the stress in your workday by doing the research for your next strategic decision.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, we sit at the bottom of the pay scale. But don’t worry, our young college student's hearts can take a bit of stress. If you have a strategic decision that’s stressing you out, don’t create heart problems and contact the Marketing Lab today and we will tell you how we can help!

Source: Iyengar, Sheena. (2011), “The Art of Choosing,” New York, NY: Twelve. Hatchette Book Group, 1-21.