Consumer Psychology on The Findings Report

The Dark Triad

Fri, 05 May 2023 06:42:00 -0700

First, it’s good to be back. What was supposed to be a hiatus of a few months turned into a few years. I’ve climbed back on the saddle and I’m excited to explore the world of consumer behavior again with you. In addition to restarting the weekly posts, a new season of the podcast is in production.

Now, on to this week’s findings…

This Sunday night, like many of you, I will be watching the next episode of Succession, dreading the fact that we are quickly coming to the end of this Emmy-Award-Winning HBO series (I refuse to call the network Max. More to say on this in a future post.) The saga of the Roy family has become a cult phenomenon, largely due to brilliant storytelling by showrunner Jesse Armstrong and commanding performances by a stellar ensemble cast. But there may be another reason for the show’s success: it is a textbook portrayal of The Dark Triad.

Deactivation

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 19:33:00 -0700

I am neither a trendsetter nor a trend-follower, although I'm fascinated by trends because they are integral to what I do for a living. Trends, and their fickle cousins fads, are portals into the minds of consumer culture. They're worth analyzing; and they are sometimes fuel for innovation. But as a consumer, I'm skeptical and slow to respond to the alluring wave of the latest trend. That characterization might not jive with my latest action.

When Consumers Delegate

Sun, 11 Feb 2018 16:53:00 -0800

When we lived in the same city, my best friend Hap and I made a habit of having breakfast together every Friday. The venue was usually the same, but as we both considered breakfast the most important and underrated meal of the day, we enjoyed trying new restaurants as often as we could. It is in this context that I recall a pet peeve, and also a hook to some new research on consumer behavior.

When Brands Betray Us

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 11:11:00 -0700

Harvey Weinstein dominated the news this week. The revelations of his abusive, predatory behavior set off a firestorm that drove a who’s who list of celebrities and politicians to speak out against him and create distance. Meanwhile, women all over the country shared harrowing stories of their own experiences with men who assume that their advances are always welcome, and that the quid pro quo of access for sex is equitable and part of doing business.

When Donald Met Chuck

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Though it’s growing harder and harder to assess which news was most shocking at the end of each week, President Trump’s deal with Democratic lawmakers caught many on both sides of the aisle off-guard. The media buzzed over the voyeuristic image of the President locked in an embrace with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. While politics is most certainly not the subject matter of The Findings Report, that headline image raises an interesting brand-related question: How much does the deal help or hurt either party’s brand?

When Father Wants To Know Best

Sun, 27 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0700

It's an interesting time to be a parent in America. Last year, the birth rate hit a historic low, at 62 births per 1,000 women. Provisional estimates for August, 2017 indicate the trend is continuing.

While we're having fewer babies, we are also taking a new approach to parenting. Nowhere is this more evident than in two segments of the parenting population: Millennials and dads.

You may be sick of hearing the M-word, but this moment in time is an important inflection point for the generation-that-shall-not-be named (those born in the 1980s and '90s). This year, more than one million of them will become parents for the first time, according to the Pew Research Center. Demographers have been fascinated with Millennials because of their relative size and the circumstances of their coming-of-age. They were raised with a slightly older sibling called The Internet, and nurtured by a protective parenting generation that delighted in warning fellow drivers that there was a "baby on board." One would think that such influences would make them the most confident generation of parents in American history. The early data somewhat confirms this hypothesis, with one notable exception.

Marketing in the Time of Snapchat

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 08:23:00 -0700

Every once in a while, I look back on old research. For fun. Think of it as Friday night for a nerd like me.

Last night, I re-read James B. Twitchell’s excellent and amusing article, “An English Teacher Looks at Branding.” Published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2004, this short read argues that the power of brands exists because of the path that was paved in the late 19th century. Specifically, Twitchell claims that modern brands work because of the advent of the “pathetic fallacy” and Impressionism. The pathetic fallacy is our willingness to believe something we know is not true, like Frankenstein’s monster or an adventure that unfolds “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” Impressionism, as you probably know, was an artistic movement that relied on the viewer’s capacity to connect the dots, and interpret meaning from a sense of light and movement in rough brush strokes of reality.

No Pain. No Gain.

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 16:43:00 -0700

Marketers rely on a lot of conventional wisdom. We “know” that consumers love discounts, convenience, and pleasure. But sometimes this wisdom is wrong. There are, after all, conspicuous consumers who take pride in paying more, do-it-yourselfers who aren’t satisfied unless they did it “the hard way”, and no-frills customer segments who are content to sit in “the middle seat.” Contradictions can be profitable.

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research explores one such contradiction: consumer affinity for pain. Conventional wisdom dictates that consumers want brands that alleviate pain, not cause it. The data reinforce this wisdom. In 2014, Advil earned more than $485 million in US sales alone. Worldwide, “pain relief” is a multibillion category. In this context, study authors Rebecca Scott, Julien Cayla and Bernard Cova wanted to understand why some consumers pay handsomely to hurt. Their research focused on the participants of Tough Mudder events.

Sex and Brands

Sun, 14 May 2017 16:39:00 -0700

Let’s talk about sex.

Actually, let’s talk about the fact that Americans are having less sex. A study reported in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior earlier this year found that Americans who were married or living together had sex 16 fewer times in 2010-2014 vs. the same interval of time in 2000-2004.

The trend is not isolated to those who are partnered. The 2017 edition of the General Social Survey, which is a nationally representative study of 26,707 Americans fielded by San Diego State University, found that young Millennials are considerably less sexually active than their Gen X predecessors. 15% of those age 20-24 reported that they had no sexual partners since the age of 18. Compare that stat to the smaller 6% of Gen Xers who reported the same in previous waves of the study.