James Armstrong: People don’t always mean what they say!

This afternoon we had James Armstrong, Market Intelligence Manager for Philips Consumer Lifestyle, sharing with our students practical tips on how to do market research - it was a really helpful insight into the fuzzy craft of figuring out what people want, which is very different, as James warns, from what they say. When asked why did you buy an iPhone, for instance, most respondents will list attributes they think demonstrate the wisdom of their purchase - “it’s got great functions, it’s fast, it’s reliable” (stated importance) - rather than admit that they bought the iPhone because they think it’s super cool or because their mates have one (derived importance). In market research industry they call this sort of behavior post-rationalisation.

What I found most interesting about the lecture is that it does throw commonly-held beliefs about certain markets out the window - for example, many pundits claim the Chinese market is pragmatic, i.e. it is mainly led by pricing - this is patently untrue; how would you explain the luxury goods boom in China then? A poorly designed piece of research will produce findings to confirm pricing as the number 1 attribute for a product when really, customers often make purchase decisions based on irrational attributes.

Our students are going to be pre-testing their advertising ideas via focus groups or, as James tells us, upstream, concept validation research, in the next couple of weeks and it will be interesting to see how skilled they are in teasing out derived importance rather than post-rationalized responses from their participants. As James said, remember Rudyard Kipling’s poem!