So . . . the other topic I wanted to talk about from my consumer research conference in Jacksonville has to do with the motivation for a lot of the consumer research that's done. Basically, a lot of the academics in the consumer behaviour field, including some of it's most highly regarded members, have chosen to do work with the purpose of making the world a better place. More on how upset this gets me after the jump.
One of the sessions I attended at the conference was a 'roundtable' on what it means to be rational (well, I have to find out from someone . . . on another note, the term 'roundtable' is very loosely used here; it was more like a very structured panel discussion). The session was okay, but where it became very interesting was during the Q&A when some of the luminaries in the field got into a heated discussion regarding how our work should be directed.
Over the past 5-10 years there has been a growing movement in marketing academia to do what is called "transformative consumer research," which is basically a fancy way of saying research that enriches the lives of consumers. To sum it up (and to steal, uh, paraphrase the words of one of the presenters), consumer research has typically focused on two audiences: other academics, and marketing managers. The transformative people think a third audience, consumers, should be added to that list. Furthermore, they believe that this third audience should be the primary one.
To my mind, there are fundamental problems with this. The first is logistics; there are clear avenues to reach the first two audiences (academic and trade journals), but no way to reach the typical consumer. A research implication that is often included in research papers aimed at improving consumers' lives is that of consumer education; if only we could educate the consumer, they would make better choices. While I'm the first to admit that many "managerial implications" included in research articles are a stretch and unlikely to ever actually be implicated, to say we will education consumers requires a way to educate them.
Second, one thing that has been repeatedly shown is our ability to ignore information and advice. I could tell a group of people about a bias (e.g. a bias to anchor price judgments to a random number), and that would change their behaviour today. If I were to then test them tomorrow, most would be back to their old, biased behaviour.
The third problem I see in this type of research is that it requires a value or moral judgment. With a managerial audience, there is a clear metric for success (profit), but with a consumer audience, there is not. Happiness has been proposed as a metric, but no one can agree on what it means or how to measure it. What does "making better decisions" mean? Paying less money? Perhaps, but I am reminded of a talk I attended wherein the speaker said that his research would help people spend less, and I couldn't help but wonder whether the money saved would be spent wisely.
Again I'll draw heavily (read: copy) upon something said by a well-respected academic (and journal editor) at this roundtable session. As researchers, we can describe a phenomenon, and even sometimes come up with an explanation for it. But what we can't do, and shouldn't do, is prescribe moral solutions for it.
In the book Nudge (great read) they describe a tendency to rely on defaults. If the default in a country is organ donation, 95% of people are organ donations. If you must opt-in to donate your organs (i.e. it is not the default), 5% of people donate organs. In other words we're just too apathetic or lazy to change the default. So we can show this tendency and explain it. But we, as consumer researchers, are in no position to tell the world what the default should be.
Anyway, that's it for the conference. Now I can get back to making moral judgments and telling everyone what the defaults should be.
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