Written surveys and focus group interviews are the two dominant methods currently used by most marketers to learn how executives and consumers think. Arch G. Woodside, a professor of marketing at Boston College, draws on an intensive literature review and his own first-hand research experience to argue that surveys and focus groups almost always fail to provide "valid and useful" answers about behavior in specific contexts. Instead, marketers should try to develop the wisdom of Sam Walton. Walton allegedly awoke each morning at 3 a.m. so he could talk with Wal-Mart truck drivers and find out how business was really going. "He did this more than once each week, fifty weeks each year" to achieve what Woodside calls "contextual intelligence."
One of the options Woodside describes is the "direct research" method, which asks the marketer to form observations and ask open-ended questions during a customer's real-life situation. Another is the long interview or forced metaphor elicitation technique (FMET). A marketer using FMET asks a customer what attributes and benefits evoke what brands; the marketer may not mention the brand names first to respondents. (Woodside's advice: "Ask not what your brand evokes; ask what evokes your brand.") This is the best way to learn consumers' genuine beliefs and feelings.
In the concluding section, Woodside describes how initial consumer behavior affects future behavior. "Imprinting in the form of first-brand purchase-use experience by customers has a bigger impact on long-term brand choice than do short-term marketing influences (e.g., coupons and limited-time-period price reductions)."
Market-Driven Thinking is aimed primarily at the academic and marketing research community. Its intensive literature research, which covers over 300 books, and its in-depth and refined theoretical exploration make it a sophisticated, nuanced, and scholarly work. But the many interesting case studies, examples, and stories effectively lessen the burden on a less-sophisticated reader.
In addition to his role at Boston College, Woodside is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Business Research. He was also a co-founder of a symposium on advertising and consumer psychology held annually by the Society of Consumer Psychology.—Poping Lin
Table of Contents:
- Thinking, deciding, and acting by executives and customers
- Case study research methods for learning how executives and customers think, decide, and act
- Mapping contingent thinking by B2B marketers and customers
- Balanced and unbalanced unconscious conscious thinking: A Jewish couple buys a German car and additional transformation stories
- Advancing understanding of customer's means end chains: Eric drinks twelve cans of beer and talks to girls
- Advancing from subjective to confirmatory personal introspection
- Customer automatic thinking and store choice: Why asking customers to think about a named store is a mistake
- Automatic thinking and vendor choices by customers of industrial distributors: Mapping customer's vendor mind positions
- Applying the long interview method for comparing executive and customer thinking
- Holistic case-based modeling of customer's thinking/doing brand experiences
- The influences of brand imprinting and short-term marketing on subsequent customer choices
- Customer variety-seeking influence on subsequent brand choice behavior