Neuromarketing For Dummies

Chapter 15

Traditional Approaches: Why Not Just Ask People?

In This Chapter

Understanding why consumers often don’t know what they think, but believe they do

Asking questions consumers are more likely to answer truthfully and accurately

Identifying the pros and cons of the three workhorses of traditional market research

Appreciating why we need to measure both conscious and nonconscious consumer responses

In this chapter, we review traditional market research approaches, which generally share the same underlying idea: If you want to understand consumers’ attitudes, opinions, preferences, and product choices, just ask them.

Earlier in this book, we show how this self-evident idea is challenged in many ways by recent brain science, and how neuromarketing has risen, at least in part, as an alternative way to deal with the very counterintuitive discovery that human beings actually have very little awareness of why they do the things they do. So, when people are asked what brands they like or what they’ll buy in the future, their answers are often no better than guesses. For the most ...