New Consumer Insights Book from MSI

Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, it’s a good time to reflect on how pricing, branding, and other factors influence shopping and buying behavior. Coincidentally, I received an early Christmas present to myself on yesterday’s invented cyber-holiday, one that I can recommend to any marketer looking to make sense of the hyper-promotional frenzy of the past week.

The Marketing Science Institute is a fifty-year-old organization whose mission is to sponsor academic research on marketing-related topics; its membership is comprised of some of the largest corporations in the world. MSI recently released Consumer Insights: Findings from Behavioral Research that serves as something of a field guide for marketers. Each article is brief: two pages explaining the main insights for each topic, their implications for management, and references to selected research.

Here are a few excerpts from the article titled Perceptions of Price Deals:

These insights are then distilled into recommendations, such as:

The slim volume covers 42 topics, in categories that include information search, pricing, consumer decision making, social consumers, and health and well-being. Each contributor is a subject-matter expert in their area, and the research references are a good starting point for someone wanting to explore more.

As we’ve noted elsewhere, behavioral science is vitally important to understanding how customers view and interact with our brands. Yet, it always strikes me how divergent marketers’ views of behavioral drivers are and how selective we sometimes are in interpreting observed behavior through our own biases. Management decisions, marketing analysis, and marketing tactics need to make sense in the context of fundamental behavioral patterns.

Stumped by what appears to be counter-intuitive reaction to a price promotion your company conducted? Faced by an analyst who cannot adequately explain what she’s seeing in the data? There’s probably a good explanation for such quandaries in the research literature, and this book provides a quick reference for understanding such behaviors and for accessing the wider research on your issue.

To get more information or to order, visit MSI’s web site.