Using “Inception” for Market Research

I recently watched the movie Inception, where the character Domenic Cobb is an expert extractor who steals valuable secrets from deep within the people’s subconscious during their dream state, when their minds are at the most vulnerable. However, his last challenge requires the reverse; he does not have to steal an idea, but has to plant one in someone’s mind. He wants to place an emotional response in someone’s mind that will prompt action and will justify a rational business strategy.

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Inspired by the movie, a blog by Chadwick Martin Bailey, “Mining the Subconscious: How do you translate a business strategy into an emotion?” discusses this relationship between emotions, rational thinking and business strategy and proposes three ways of turning emotional responses into business strategy. This is important for market researchers, as we are often faced with the challenge of gathering emotional information (for instance, how does product X make you feel?) about a client’s brand or product when doing market segmentation, competitive positioning, brand tracking and research.

Psychological studies show that emotions usually come before rational thinking, and rational thinking validates decisions that have been pre-made by emotional responses. Since emotions play such an integral role in people’s decision making, they need to be taken into account when devising customer surveys. The following qualitative techniques can help kick-start this process in a survey:

• Projection exercises: These are ways of helping consumers reveal their hidden motives through the use of analogies, collages, thought bubbles, storytelling and personification that assign certain characteristics of a personality to an image (this, for instance, is widely used in packaging research)
• Laddering techniques: These are used to explore people’s goals and values, and how they relate to product attributes and benefits. An A-C-V (attribute, consequence, value) sequence forms a chain or a ladder that indicates the relationship between a product attribute and a person’s core value. An example of this would be: I like this software because it organizes my email very well (“organization” is an attribute or a feature). It saves me a lot of time and makes my day more efficient (“saving time” and “efficiency” are consequences of the attribute). Being more efficient with time helps me balance my work and personal lives better; in turn making me a better mom (“balancing work and personal life” is a core value of good motherhood for this person). In this way, an attribute has consequences and those consequences are linked to a core value in a person’s life.
• Mind mapping: This is a way of broadening the way the consumer thinks about a product, company or topic, using words, pictures, colors and other visual representations that are in alignment with the brain’s natural way of processing information. In addition to asking why, mind mapping moves a person from a single thought or experience with the company/product/topic to other more creative ways of thinking about it.

By including one or more of the above qualitative influence marketing techniques in our survey, we can get an insight into how people connect with our brand emotionally, and can use it to direct our marketing strategy and campaign and, ultimately, toward creating competitive advantage.