Marketing research: better understanding of your customers' behavior
At its core, much marketing research focuses on customer behavior. In using marketing research, we measure customer behavior, and the factors that determine this behavior, and we apply marketing research to understand how to influence this behavior to our advantage.
Forum Research has developed innovative marketing research methods that provide better insight into this than traditional methods, such as satisfaction surveys or NPS measurements. We do this by applying knowledge from the field of behavioral economics to our studies. Behavioral economics is part of the study of psychology and focuses on the process of economic choices made by individuals and organizations.
Application of behavioral economics in marketing research
From behavioral economics, we know that, when making economic choices, there are two systems active in our brain: cognition (conscious thought) and intuition (feeling). It has been scientifically shown that intuition is by far the dominant system when making choices. In other words, we choose with our emotions. In doing so, we like to delude ourselves that we are making conscious and deliberate choices.
Traditional marketing research methods often work with numerical questions, propositions, or rating aspects. In answering those questions, the cognitive system is mainly called upon; we think and give a logical answer. The processes that occur in the intuitive system are not addressed in these traditional marketing research methods.
Innovation marketing research by Forum Research
Forum Research has focused on innovating marketing research in recent years, developing neuroresearch methods to measure the processes that take place in the intuitive brain to better understand the factors that truly shape our choices. The challenge here is that intuition is formed in the subconscious. The basis of our marketing research methods is the use of images. This is because our intuitive brain is highly associative. By using images, we gain access to the intuitive brain and can find out which thoughts and emotions influence the choices we make. In doing so, we apply text analysis to discover and quantify the determining factors. We measure the implicit customer experience.