Blog articles by Marcel Slavenburg

Why do people choose one product or service over another? What needs or objectives are tapped into when you consider buying or recommending one brand over another?

Whether your brand targets consumers or professionals, understanding how decision behavior works and systematically applying its principles can help you build more effective strategies to drive customer acquisition, brand loyalty and continued growth.

We recommend you tap into “habitual” behavior to reinforce positive habits or break the ones that don’t benefit your brand and analyze “deliberate” behavior to assess how, where and when your brand can intervene.

Here we explain how decision-making works and the behavioral steps that are involved in making choices. Read on to learn how leveraging these insights to reinforce or disrupt habits can help your brand grow.

Exploring voice analytics in new product development research with Johnson & Johnson

Have you ever conducted early-stage innovation research and found yourself in a situation where you don’t entirely trust what consumer feedback is telling you? Many of us have had to deal with overstated interest and the need to dig deeper into unmet needs.

Uncovering both rational and emotional needs is vital for new product development (NPD) strategies – to accurately size the unmet need or opportunity for innovations. However, what is the best insights approach?

How a new view on the purchase decision spectrum can drive better market research outcomes

I recently got in a taxi cab with a few colleagues and we were so engaged in conversation that we didn’t realize we weren’t moving until the driver asked: “So, where are you headed?” As heavy Uber customers, all of us were in the habit of not specifying a destination verbally since the app conveys all the pertinent details to the driver. We assumed that upon entering the car, the driver should know where to go!

On that taxi ride, we reflected how consumer behavior, and our habits, changed so drastically in a few short years thanks to new technology. Uber disrupted consumers’ traditional routine (hailing a taxi on the street) to form a new habit (grabbing your smartphone to “call” one). What started out as a deliberate new choice to use a rideshare app, quickly turned into an automatic, or habitual, behavior.

This scenario perfectly illustrates our view of the consumer decision behavior spectrum: The Habitual-Deliberate Decision Loop. Disruption of consumer behavior seems to be happening at a faster and more frequent pace than before. We introduce this loop to offer brands a new view on how to analyze, disrupt and reinforce your consumers’ decisions.

Getting Started with AI: Speed + Quality

From Uber’s self-driving cars to Amazon’s warehouse robots, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be reaching human-level dexterity nearly everywhere. You might be wondering like us: how are brands actually taking advantage of next-gen automation innovation in market research today? Can artificial intelligence identify better insights cheaper? Will computers and robots render human researchers useless? As market researchers, who also happen to be human beings, we’ve been exploring many of the same questions!

Danone, one of the world’s leading food companies, recently sought to understand consumer consumption drivers for a new product category.