Market‐Driven Thinking: Achieving Contextual Intelligence

Citation

Goldsmith, R.E. (2007), "Market‐Driven Thinking: Achieving Contextual Intelligence", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 24 No. 7, pp. 443-444. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363760710834852

How do customers think? This is the chief focus of Market‐Driven Thinking: Achieving Contextual Intelligence, Arch Woodside's new book. In it he addresses several issues of concern to both academic researchers and managers. The scope includes B2B as well as B2C contexts, many types of products, different consumption situations, and a variety of research approaches.

Woodside's goal is to introduce new ways of thinking about consumer decision making and new ways to study these cognitive processes. The main themes of the book are that most consumer thinking occurs unconsciously and that current marketing research's reliance on focus groups and surveys is not the best way to understand how consumers think. Instead, Woodside argues that new techniques borrowed from ethnography provide better insights into the unconscious processes and situational contexts of consumer decisions. “This book focuses on descriptive research on thinking for achieving contextual intelligence. It examines the actual thinking and actions by executives and customers that relate to making marketplace decisions” (p. xiii). How Woodside goes about this ambitious task is best conveyed by discussing the individual chapters.

The first chapter seeks a deep understanding of how both executives and customers think. It sets the stage for the subsequent chapters that focus on specific research projects to illustrate its main ideas. The chapter introduces the principles that much of this thinking is unconscious and automatic, relying on “simplifying categorizing rules for defining decision contexts”, and that there are important similarities and differences between executive and customer thinking. The recommended approach is direct research, which “combines the collection of supporting documents, confirmation of thoughts from multiple interviewing of multiple respondents, and direct observation of some interactions of people participating in the processes” (p. 4). From this rich store of information, the researcher seeks to inductively derive the models and processes used by the decision maker. Five formal propositions of similarities and differences are proposed. For example, executives and customers think similarly by applying simplifying categorizing rules for defining decision contexts, but are dissimilar because executives more often formalize categorization rules for repetitive decision‐making contexts than customers do.

Chapter Two focuses on case study research (CSR) as a way to gain “deep understanding” of why decision participants behave the way they do. It broadens CSR to include multiple informants and multiple methods applied multiple times. Of chief importance is the idea of “triangulation”, using multiple sources of information about the same decision to confirm the verity of the conclusions. Survey research is explicitly criticized for missing the mental models of decision makers who cannot (or will not) describe how they think, so it is up to the researcher to describe these processes. Generalization is less important than “thick description”.

The third chapter presents an example of a case study of B2B (office furniture) buying behavior. It illustrates two‐way, multiple party approaches to theory construction for a specific market decision context.

The first three chapters comprise Part I of the book, focused on presenting a new way of looking at marketplace decision making. Part II presents three examples of the new research approaches. Here the focus is on unconscious decision making. The chapter titles convey the flavor of these topics: “A Jewish Couple Buys a German Car”, “Eric Drinks Twelve Cans of Beer and Talks to Girls”, and “Advancing from Subjective to Confirmatory Personal Introspection”. These three chapters feature story telling, laddering (means‐end‐chain analysis), subjective personal introspection, and forced metaphor elicitation to reveal automatic thoughts and attitudes, showing how unconscious mental activity leads to behavior.

Part III contains two chapters that contrast formal, survey, self‐report approaches to measuring consumer and industrial preferences with alternative methods to understand “unconscious thinking as automatic cognitive processing” (p. 130). Chapter Seven models primary store choice and store rejection for individual consumers. Chapter Eight reports a study of how industrial distributors buy maintenance, repair, and operating supplies. Personal interviews (long interviews) were used to assess these routine buying behaviors as automatic thinking. The findings, similar to the store choice behavior in the previous chapter, stress the importance of “first‐supplier‐awareness and also first‐supplier‐advertising awareness” as measures of marketing effectiveness (p. 156).

Part IV contains two examples of using long interviews to compare executive and customer thinking. In both examples, the research revealed important discrepancies and omissions on the part of managers. The first company is a seed catalog company and the second is a tourist destination. As in earlier chapters, the usefulness of qualitative research approaches to provide actionable insights into consumer attitudes is demonstrated.

The final section consists of two chapters that take a different topical and methodological approach. Chapter eleven describes an experimental study of an important question: “Do consumers keep buying the first brand they try?” In traditional packaged goods, according to the study's findings, the answer is “yes”. There is a pronounced tendency for consumers to pick a brand and stick with it. This illustrates a “behavioral primacy effect” (p. 249). The final chapter carries this theme forward by asking: “are high variety seekers more influenced than low variety seekers to buy a brand during short‐term special marketing offers?” The results of a well‐controlled in‐home buying experiment showed that, yes, variety seeking consumers were more likely than their less‐sensation seeking counterparts to take advantage of competitive brand promotional efforts.

Market Driven Thinking can be read with profit by academic researchers seeking to broaden the scope of their research to include the qualitative techniques described therein, although they should consult more technical, detailed instructions for how to perform such studies before attempting them. It is well referenced and indexed. The text is clearly written, although it does not hesitate to tackle difficult concepts and to delve deeply into the details of consumer decision making at the individual level. Indeed, it does illustrate what “thick description” looks like; as many of the figures show. A reader must pay close attention to the acronyms, which abound, lest he or she become lost in a thicket of abbreviations and technical elements. As an introduction to advanced research techniques, Market Driven Thinking could prove useful to graduate students in marketing as well. For executives, it might prove slow going, unless they are seeking an advanced presentation of these aspects of marketing research.