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ABSTRACT
From focus groups to clinical interviews to cognitive, neurological and biological approaches, market research borrows heavily from the behavioural sciences. Borrowing ideas and methods from other disciplines, often with adaptations, while clearly valuable, also brings a significant risk of ‘getting it wrong’. Problems arise when researchers do not follow best practices carefully developed in the originating discipline. To maintain competitive advantage, marketing researchers often ‘black box’ the details of how they apply those procedures of method design and analysis. This lack of transparency provides little evidence that best practices are followed. This, in turn, raises questions about the validity and reliability of the resulting insights and their implications. To illustrate this issue, we examine two domains where there is strong evidence to suggest that current practices are not best (or even good) practices – implicit association testing and neuroscience.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The order of pairings is counterbalanced across participants (e.g. half see Apple + Positive words and Samsung + Negative words paired together first and half see Samsung + Positive words and Apple + Negative words paired together first).
2. Here, mask screens are used to fixate attention to the centre of the screen and to mark the end of a trial.
4. http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2015-reports/nielsen-neuro-report-april-2015.pdf; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i8dpTTge_k; and ‘But our customers said they’d buy it’ by Sentient Decision Sciences at http://iiexforums.insightinnovation.org/page/1281625/2016-presentations
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew Scott Baron
Jerry Olson is the Earl Strong Professor Emeritus in the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University. He holds PhD and MS degrees in psychology from Purdue University. His past and current research interests concern meaning, especially how consumers create meaning (about brands, companies, and their problems) and use it to navigate the marketing world. He has published many articles about those topics as well as several books, including the textbook, Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy. In 1997 he cofounded Olson Zaltman, a consultancy devoted to digging deep into the thoughts and feelings of consumers and helping managers leverage those insights in their marketing programs. He is Managing Partner of Olson Zaltman.
Gerald Zaltman
Gerald Zaltman is the Joseph. C. Wilson Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School. He was a member of Harvard University’s Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative Steering Committee and study group. He has held three U.S. Patents involving research methods rooted in the mind sciences. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from the U. of Chicago. Professor Zaltman's research interests include the dynamics of knowledge use, customer behavior, imagination, and organizational innovation. He has published many books and articles on these topics. He is also the recipient of numerous professional awards and honors including most recently selection by the American Marketing Association as a Legend in Marketing. Professor Zaltman is a founding partner of Olson Zaltman Associates whose work brings advances in the behavioral sciences to leading business and non profit organizations around the globe.
Jerry Olson
Andrew Baron is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and an affiliate at the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD (and MA) in Psychology from Harvard University and his BA in Psychology from the University of Michigan. In 2013 he was selected as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science for his research examining the foundations of implicit associations. His research draws on methods and theories from social, cognitive and developmental psychology to study how implicit associations form and to identify optimal strategies to change unconscious bias. This work focuses on establishing best practices for measuring implicit associations across the lifespan. In 2016 Baron co-edited Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change published by Oxford University Press. Since 2007 Baron has also served as a consumer neuroscience advisor to Olson Zaltman, providing guidance on best practices for measuring implicit associations for marketing applications.