Can We Predict the Consumer's Endgame?

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By: Dwayne W. Waite Jr.

Choice. There is so little we know about choice, yet we constantly aim to persuade it. We arm ourselves with measurements and metrics, and we model mountains of data in order to attempt to predict what the consumer is going to choose, or better yet, determine why they choose what they do. It is a chess match, except when we plan our move we don't know if the consumer will make the "right" move. Before, we mentioned how humans are predictably irrational (based on Dan Ariely's research) and how we can influence consumer behavior by examining the environment around them in which they make decisions and by being selective about the selections we give them.

New research has come out from UC Berkeley that exclaims that our guessing and trite ways of predicting consumer behavior may be over. The new wave of studying consumer behavior, and a supplement to market research, comes from the science world and is being called neuroeconomics. The studying of the brain isn't new, but the process of applying the findings in the marketing world is new for the science community.

Lead researcher Ming Hsu and two other professors from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign published their study in the January 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. The question the study was looking to answer was how their participants made decisions and examining the learning processes they used. The two learning processes are reinforced-based learning (RL) and belief-based learning. RL is more commonly known as trial-and-error learning. The latter learning is more difficult to examine because it happens when people "anticipate and respond to the actions of others."

One can read what the experiment actually was by clicking on the link above, but the conclusion of the study revealed that the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain where humans learn about other's beliefs. It also reveals the chances that the person will engage in one type of learning, or the other.

So how can this help the communications world? Neuroeconomics can help us see how people are taking in the information we provide through ad campaigns, pieces of creative, events, and the like. Seeing how consumers learn can provide better insight on how we can better refine our messages. It adds another weapon to our market research arsenal.

Is this the endgame for the elusive choice? Can we finally have an understanding of consumer behavior? It's hard to say, but the chess board looks sparse.

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About the Author

Dwayne W. Waite Jr. is partner and principal at JDW: The Charlotte Agency, a marketing and advertising shop in Charlotte, NC. He enjoys consumer behavior, economics, and football.

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