On the frontiers of consumer psychology in Alamo

Elina Halonen

Last month I found myself in sunny San Antonio, Texas, excited about the two-day feast of insights into the human mind about to be laid in front of me – I was in town for the annual conference of the Society for Consumer Psychology, and as a self-confessed psychology geek, I was looking forward to immersing myself in the most up-to-date discoveries in deciphering consumers’ minds. I knew from experience that getting through a conference like this requires a steely mind and lots of strong coffee:  with over 200 papers crammed into two 10-hour days, deciding which ones to see means making tough decisions and an alert mind to discover the gems.

The work consumer psychologists do is highly relevant to us as market researchers as they spend their time answering questions like how people make choices about products and how we can influence consumers’ behaviour – things we usually don’t have time for in within the limits of our fast turn-around project schedules. Given that we couldn’t all be there, I wanted to share some of the highlights from this year’s conference such as new twists on the evolutionary view on consumer behaviour and the surprising effects of identity on consumption. The conference also included some warnings of overgeneralisation from research findings, as well as calls for consumer psychology as a force for good in the world from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who is best known for his work on happiness and creativity. Of course, with over 200 presentations to choose from the task of selecting highlights isn’t easy, so I’ve picked the ones that resonated most strongly with me!

Whenever you see evolutionary psychology brought into a debate about consumer behaviour, it usually gravitates around examples on sexual signalling like sports cars and lipstick. However, Geoffrey Miller from University of New Mexico and author of Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behaviour suggested that we also use the consumption to signal the six main personality traits (intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion) to convey our tastes, and assess them when evaluating potential partners as a means of ‘social screening’. As consumers, we ‘market’ ourselves through specific choices of products, brands and lifestyles and marketing empowers us to construct preferred identities through our choices in order to establish status and attract potential mates.

Additionally, Vlad Grikevicius from University of Minnesota challenged the current views of behavioural economics by suggesting that most debates about whether humans are rational or irrational have ignored a critical fact: humans are a part of the animal kingdom. Instead of seeing biases and heuristics and design flaws, we should start thinking about them as design features that serve evolutionary goals. For example, the overconfidence bias (the tendency to have excessive confidence in our abilities), while irrational from a traditional perspective, can be seen as fitness-enhancing from an evolutionary one as it increases ambition and perseverance which, in turn, has increases ones likelihood of becoming a leader in a group. In short, what appears irrational on the surface is often wise on a deeper level. In addition, he suggested that decision making is designed to achieve several different evolutionary goals and compared the human mind to a stone-age smart phone with different apps for each of these goals. These evolutionary goals determine which ‘app’, such as self-protection (safety) or mate acquisition (dating) is activated, and in turn determine for example what kind of persuasion strategies are most persuasive in advertising.

The keynote from professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience called out to consumer psychologists to become a force for good in the world. Consumption in itself is inevitable, but having purely material goals in life has been shown to have negative effects on quality of life and physical health, so we should strive to curb excessive consumption as much as possible. In his view, the best way to do this is to expand the benefits derived from consumption from just ourselves to others, and from the purely material (survival, wealth, power) to psychological ones (comfort, safety, self-expression). Eating a good steak mainly benefits the self materially, but eating an organic steak extends the benefits to others (the environment) as well as expanding the psychological benefits with the feel-good from choosing organic products. Expanding the psychological benefits bears no cost to the environment and instead makes people happier, so the more perceived value marketers can create through making the act of consumption as psychologically complex and rewarding as possible the better, and in this consumer psychology can play a crucial role.

Bella Rozenkrantz from Stanford University challenged views that unimodal product ratings (with just one peak at the top scores) are always desirable – in fact, polarising products can be seen as more attractive by consumers. If a product is more self-expressive is in terms of style, polarised ratings can even increase desirability and willingness-to-pay. However, polarised ratings (with a peak at both top and bottom scores) make less of a difference for functional products. So, seems like not all products can be all things to all people, and it all depends on the product attributes. Equally unexpected was the message from Amit Bhattacharjee from Dartmouth College, who presented research on identity marketing. Traditional views among both practitioners suggest that most effective messages explicitly link a consumer’s identity expression to the desired purchase: for example, priming green values linked to consumer’s identity would lead them to prefer environmentally friendly products. However, such explicit messages can easily backfire and lead consumers to avoid products they would otherwise prefer if the message appears to be threatening their sense of autonomy instead of just supporting it. For example, an environmentally friendly product marketed as being ‘a product for those who care about the environment’ would be supportive whereas marketing it as ‘the only product for those who care about the environment’ could risk a negative reaction from consumers. Most importantly, research like this suggests an even more important role for us as market researchers as supporting managerial decision making – experience, intuition and received wisdom is not always to be trusted and the only way to find out is through … research.

However, as alluring as all the exciting new findings are, the president of the Society of Consumer Psychology also reminded us in his address that we must be careful of overgeneralising from our research and always keep an eye out for the details and limitations of individual studies. Striking new findings can quickly become established paradigms that go unquestioned for a long time – especially once they move over to public conversation. Studies that have migrated from the depths of the academic world to everyday conversation, such as Sheena Iyengar’s famous jam experiment, can easily become overgeneralised examples far beyond parameters of the original research findings. That message also resonated with the market researcher in me: even though it is tempting to jump to conclusions after reading a handful of studies in popular science books (or even at conferences!) it is important to remember that the devil is always in the detail of how experiments are set up and how the research is conducted. As the example of identity marketing shows, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of any theory or principles before rushing ahead to use them in real life projects – at the very least we should be prepared to treat theories as lenses through which we interpret things, not as absolute truths, and always test before we apply. Particularly with the ascent of behavioural economics in marketing and market research, that’s a poignant message to keep in mind.

Elina Halonen is a founding partner of the Irrational Agency and editor at InDecision blog.