Feb 4 2011

Top 9 Lame Excuses to Behave Unethically #MRX

I’ve been in many different situations recently wherein market research ethics became the topic of discussion. In my efforts to convince people that there are alternative behaviours which might be better, I heard many arguments trying to convince me otherwise. As you consider the excuses, think about these two questions.
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Does this response make our Market Research industry look good?
Will this response have legislators saying, “you can excuse market researchers from this legislation because they are doing a great job self-governing.”
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What I’m doing is fine because:
1. Hardly anyone was hurt
2. No one was hurt
3. Other people are doing it too
4. The other party involved has ulterior motives
5. It’s not illegal
6. The person I did it to won’t find out
7. No one complained about it
8. They can leave if they don’t like it
9. Everyone knows this is what’s happening

Have I missed any of the important responses? I need to know so that I’ll have them ready when I need a lame excuse.

Nov 6 2010

#MRA_FOC #MRX Emotional Drivers by Edward Chao

What a nice, genuine speaker! Edward Chao was so sweet and genuinely happy to teach us how emotion mining is a great technique for understanding both the conscious and unconscious. Here are some of the tidbits I thought were interesting.

We are all experts in emotions but novices working with emotions
Emotions are always on yet they are mostly subconscious.
There is no such thing as a pure rational decision.
Increasing emotions of an advertising campaign does not mean adding more puppy dogs, babies, and ladies in bikinis
Emotions comes first, behaviour decisions comes next, rationalization comes later. It’s interesting to think about because we always assume we know exactly why we make the decisions we make.
Why do moms buy name brand treats for themselves but private label treats for their kids? Focus groups tell us that moms think kids can’t tell the difference. But, emotion mining tells us there is a lower emotional reward for the mom who is serving a snack brand to their child compared to having the snack herself. He learned that the personal choice was emotional, whereas the choice for the child was economical. Surveys make this really difficult to discover.
You just need to find the top emotion and solve that problem.

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Conversition Strategies Social Media Research: By researchers, For researchers

May 8 2009

The Psychological Theory of Positive Reinforcement

In psychological theory, there are various ways to change, maintain, or create behaviours. There is a two by two chart (!!!! calm down) that illustrates the giving (positive) of treatment to change behaviour, the taking (negative) of treatment to change behaviour, the encouragement (reinforcement) of behaviour, and the discouragement (punishment) of behaviour. Most people are familiar with (negative) punishment to make kids behave better, including taking away privileges.
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However, I just don’t know how this one fits into the scheme of things. When I was in school, we were asked to choose one of our own behaviours, choose a reward or punishment, and record our change (or non-change) in behaviour. Well, I knew that I needed to watch less TV so choosing the behaviour was a done deal. The second part was choosing a reward. THAT, was the tough one. I was dirt poor and so telling myself that I would get myself a magazine or coffee or a movie night as reward was out of the question. I needed a non-financial reward. And I found one. I was FAR more interested in seeing the results of this highly scientific study than anything else. In other words, I want to see a change in the chart that I was going to create from the results. Needless to say, I vastly decreased by television viewing. It was a great chart.
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But I digress. I confess that it has been more than one week since my last blog. My chart of blog views showed a decline over that period, which in itself was fun to see, but now the standard deviation around my average blog views has increased resulting in larger confidence intervals around the mean. I hope you can forgive me. But what a nice chart it is!
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