System 1 and System 2 aren’t in competition – they are equal partners

While no one can argue that the market research industry hasn’t been successful using mainstream methods, likewise no one can argue that we haven’t had our fair share of misses when it comes to new products, brand strategy, and predicting consumer behaviour.

Because as we all know, people act differently in the moment than how they say they do or will in the future.

The majority of consumer research, both past and present, heavily leans on direct questioning of respondents in the form of quantitative questionnaires or qualitative interviews. We have learned over the years that in most cases, consumers try to be honest and accurate but also respond with rationalisation, untruths, inaccurate estimations, or, in some cases, can’t explain their behaviours at all.

‘A numbers game’: What does qualitative research look like in 2023?In the last fifteen years, we have had groundbreaking advancements in the neuroscience world around our brain’s two main processing systems: System 1 and System 2. As many of you likely know, System 1 is where the emotional, subconscious part resides, and System 2 houses the cognitive, rational part. Since the direct questioning of consumers was reliant on System 2 responses, so many in the industry thought this separation of Systems 1 and 2 was the silver bullet we desperately needed.

Without a doubt, the discovery of System 1 measurement tools unlocked insights to which we did not previously have access. The excitement swelled to the point that we now have companies and methods completely dedicated to System 1 measurement, so much so that the industry seems to have divided into System 1 and System 2 camps, with the two sides constantly debating which measurement is best.

There are corporate customer intelligence departments, at the behest of the System 1 camp, that are now almost entirely leaning on pure emotional measurement.

But just as the old ways of conducting research exposed flaws in obtaining accurate data and insights, the new ways are also exposing inaccurate, incomplete and unexplainable data. And the more we understand how the brain works, the more it disrupts the clean System 1 or 2 story that’s being told.

Google’s VP of marketing: ‘Qual is more important today than ever’It’s because what many have failed to realise is that the brain is an integrated organ, much like the heart, kidneys, and liver, and you can’t separate it into halves if you are to get an accurate read on how it functions. The integrated brain makes decisions as a complete unit with both systems working together, not separately as some espouse.

With this in mind, the best approach to delivering real solutions to any business problem to solve, questions, and/or objectives should follow these three steps:

1. Articulate the current consumer narrative, underlying emotions, and post-conscious storytelling that fuel the narrative.
2. Identify the breakthrough narrative that’s going to inspire and prompt narrative and behavioural change.
3. Guide the creation of the breakthrough story.

This approach will allow us to ensure that our research has a better opportunity to predict future behaviour because it uses both the conscious and subconscious working together.

Measuring underlying emotions has been a significant missing piece in our industry for decades, and it’s the key to understanding the entire brain. As neurological research has shown, understanding emotions and what they mean is an integral part of our work.

We must determine which things are more emotional connections while understanding where the rationale actually matters. We need to design our studies to measure the emotion but then ask the “why” behind it. Everything we measure is part of a consumer journey, so we have to identify the different steps where emotion has the biggest impact. The key is to measure that emotion while also contextualizing the rationale.

Insights in action

When Brett [the co-author] was head of insights for Electrolux, his team brought this concept to life with major appliances. Admittedly, appliances aren’t the sexiest product category, and the internal feeling was that it was mostly a price-driven category, meaning it was more cognitive than emotional. After all, how emotional can someone get about a rectangular box that keeps your food cold or washes your dishes? But embarking on the research revealed a number of emotional issues that helped drive R&D for the next five years:

1. The emotional, visceral reaction people have when they start to do the dishes.
2. The emotional investment people make with a piece of technology they’ll
hopefully own for ten to fifteen years (which is longer than most people have their cars, mobile phones, and other household electronics).
3. The strong emotions that go into preparing food for your family and friends and the love that’s shown through cooking.
4. The immediate emotion consumers feel and look for when it comes to design.

The way the team solidified their insights around design was a fun exercise. They recruited couples who were in the market for a refrigerator and met them at a major appliance retailer. Once they established the couple’s budget for their new refrigerator, they asked the couple to browse the big selection of refrigerators and find the one within their budget they would purchase. After twenty to thirty minutes, the couple would identify the one they selected. They were then asked the reason for their selection.

Quant research is every bit as powerful as good qualSince all selected a refrigerator that was within their budget, the default cognitive answer of price was off the table. Some would say the size/cubic feet of the refrigerator. The team pointed out that there were other options that had larger capacity than the one they chose. The couple then mentioned a feature or multiple features they liked, to which they were shown other options that had better features than their chosen unit.

Undaunted, the couple went through a couple of cognitive reasons why they chose the refrigerator, and each time they were presented with another better option. Finally, one of them said something like, “I could immediately imagine it in our kitchen” or “I really love the look of it” or “It will look so nice in our kitchen”.

What happened is that every couple made an emotional decision that they tried to explain cognitively. Because they couldn’t immediately tap into that emotional decision is typical. It was the appliance’s design that ultimately drove the purchase decision, which is emotional, but it doesn’t mean we ignored the cognitive appeal of features and size, which were also decision factors.

The cost-benefit calculation all humans do involves the cognitive and emotional integrated brain because we don’t make decisions with just one part of our brain. We have the emotional reaction of System 1, but that doesn’t mean we always make our decision on that alone. System 2 can override a System 1 impulse. So the goal of customer intelligence and marketing is to establish behavioural and purchase habits in the integrated brain so consumers purchase our product over and over and become more price insensitive. So once a consumer establishes that action, they’re not going to change much unless something disruptive happens, like the price increases significantly or the product becomes hard to find.

For instance, a consumer buys their regular brand of soap, cheese, cereal or bread. They don’t even look at the price of the brand; they just buy it because it’s always worked for them. It’s a cognitively simple process because they don’t have to do the metabolically expensive evaluation process; they just buy that same brand. Our goal in customer intelligence is to make our product, service, and/or experience so good that the consumer wants to do it over and over. That’s the key to driving customer lifetime value—helping them establish this repeated behaviour that tells the consumer this is valuable to them.

Four brands on the benefits market research brought to their businessThe reason why it’s important to get to this repeated behaviour is because our brains are lazy. Given the choice, our brains prefer to conserve energy and take the path of least resistance because it’s innately attracted to sedentary behaviour. While the inspirational phrase “I can do hard things” is true, a sister quote to that could be, “Yeah, but I don’t really want to do hard things.”

It explains simple things, like why we habitually purchase the same brands, why we don’t like doing math, or why we prefer to sit on the couch instead of exercise—because it’s easy. Brett’s Electrolux team once measured the effectiveness of promotional ads with the key finding to make promotional offers easy to understand so the consumer wouldn’t have to work hard to understand it. Don’t use “35% off” because consumers don’t want to do the math, but rather advertise the actual dollar amount discount, unless the percentage is close to 50 percent off. Consumers can easily divide by two but won’t do much more than that.

Therefore, we must always remember that asking consumers to change behaviour is a monumental task. We must understand every part of the consumer journey through the integrated brain so we can be narrative-change agents. Our job is to dissect all aspects of the journey to create the narrative that will disrupt the pathway and create a new one.

Brett Townsend is SVP of strategy at Quester Strategy and Insights and has had a successful career of generating sizable revenue on both the corporate and agency sides of consumer insights.

As President of Quester, Tim Hoskins leads a team of award-winning strategists, researchers and developers who leverage consumer narratives as the foundation for developing bold-breakthrough strategies.

They are the co-authors of Insights on the Brink: Revitalizing the Market Research and Analytics Industry. For more information, please visit, www.quester.com.