How do customers decide what products and brands to buy? With the rise of sophisticated advertising and marketing research methods in this century, business leaders have spent billions of dollars attempting to answer this perplexing question. Occasionally, analysts emerge with suggestive trends, but ultimately with little hard evidence to support any definitive " laws" of customer choice.
Now, in this much-anticipated major work, Eric Marder reveals how universal patterns in survey responses lead not only to general principles in marketing but to empirically verifiable laws of human nature itself. Drawing on forty years of applying his pioneering experimental design techniques to marketing research surveys, Marder presents a global theory of choice behavior, supported by original data reported here for the first time from thousands of massive real-life experiments based on millions of interviews. His dramatic findings about pricing, optimal marketing tactics, product evaluation, the relative role of product and image, and advertising effectiveness will make this book required reading for the entire marketing community. Of special interest to social scientists and survey research practitioners will be Marder' s powerful research designs and techniques, including the unbounded write-in scale for measuring desirability (attitude) and his methodological analyses of the relationships among beliefs (perceptions), desires, choice, and behavior.
In the Preface, he writes: " At the core of the theory are three laws of choice behavior the Law of Congruence, the Law of Primacy, and the Law of Persistence. These laws are both general and self-evident. At first glance, they are so self-evident that you might say: ' I have known this all along. ' My reply is: ' Of course you have known it all along. But there is a difference between knowing and knowing, between the passive knowing that allows us to persist in actions that are inconsistent with what we know, and the active knowing that helps us change the way we do things. ' I believe that knowing the laws of choice behavior-really knowing them -- changes the way we do things. My crass but stringent criterion has been that a good theory should enable someone equipped with it to make more money than someone who isn' t. I believe my theory has passed this test. "
Inhaltsverzeichnis
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
To the Reader
PART I: THE FOUNDATIONS
Chapter 1: MARKETING AND CHOICE
A Personal Note
Nomenclature
Desires and Beliefs
The Primary Topics
Accessibility
The Choice Process
Marketing Strategy
The Eight Tools of Marketing
Chapter 2: DEFINING CHOICE RESEARCH
Chapter 3: FIRST PRINCIPLES OF CHOICE RESEARCH
Analysis
Interface with the Marketer
Chapter 4: THE FIRST LAW: THE LAW OF CONGRUENCE
Constructing Questions
The Law
PART II: INTEGRATED OFFERS
Chapter 5: MEASURING CHOICE
The Measuring Instrument
STEP Share and Market Share
Aggregate and Individual Data
Individual STEP Scores and Buying
Chapter 6: PRICE TESTING
Some Specific Studies
The STEP Database
The Price-Demand Relationship
Chapter 7: CONCEPT TESTING
Durables
Consumables
Line Extensions and Cannibalization
Chapter 8: PRODUCT TESTING
The Product Testing Grid
Blind and Identified Tests
Chapter 9: PAIRED COMPARISONS
Theoretical Considerations
An Experiment
The Antecedent Effect
Chapter 10: DESERVED SHARE
Product-STEP
Uncoupling
The Case for Blind versus Identified Tests
Two Experiments
Product Differences
What's in a Name
Chapter 11: WHAT STEP MEASURES
Chapter 12: BEYOND PRODUCT CATEGORY BOUNDARIES
VEST for Durables
VEST for Consumables
VEST-STEP
PART III: THE STRUCTURE OF CHOICE
Chapter 13: THE ANATOMY OF QUESTIONS
Beliefs
Desirability
An Interjection About "Improving" Brands
The Numeric Scale
The Unbounded Write-In Scale
Brand Choice
Direct Rank
Chapter 14: THE SECOND LAW: THE LAW OF PRIMACY
Desirability and Choice
The Tie Matrix
Desirability-Rank and Choice
Product Category Differentiation
PART IV: SYNTHESIZED OFFERS
Chapter 15: STRUGGLING TO SEE THE OBVIOUS
The Strategy Planning Program
The Diagnostic Problem
A New Look at An Old Problem
Chapter 16: THE PARTITIONING OF CHOICE
Topics and Attributes
parDesires and Beliefs
An Illustrative Three-Person Market
The SUMM What-If Game
Chapter 17: CONSTRUCTING THE MAP
Levels of Generality
Sequence Analysis
The Attribute-Definition Pretest
The Primary Topics
Chapter 18: TWISTS AND TURNS IN MEASURING THE DESIRABILITY OF ATTRIBUTES
The Top-Attribute Method
The Meaning of Topic Weights
The Multiple-Attribute Method
The Integrated Method
The Absolute Method
Chapter 19: DYNAMIC ASSESSMENTS
The Pricing Study
The Spectrum Study
The Fully-Modeled Comparison
Conclusions About the Integrated and Absolute Methods
Variants of SUMM
Chapter 20: THE SYNTHESIS OF STEP AND SUMM
Tie-SUMM
The Tie Interval
Empirical Consequences of Tie Scoring
Chapter 21: BRAND POSITIONING
Positioning a New Brand
Repositioning an Established Brand
Customer Satisfaction
PART V: MESSAGE DELIVERY
Chapter 22: MEASURING ADVERTISING
Chapter 23: MEASURING PRINT ADS
The POST Program
The Environment
The Effect of a Single Ad
A Factorial Design
Negative Effects
Color versus Black and White
Ad-STEP
The Universal Ad
Chapter 24: MEASURING TELEVISION COMMERCIALS
Conscious Persuasion
TV-STEP
The Criss-Cross Design
Chapter 25: MEASURING TELEVISION CAMPAIGNS
Defining the Problem
The Ad-Weight Design
Some Case Histories
The Cumulative Results
Implications
The Generic Advertising-Response Curve
Advertising-Response Curves With Dips
Flighting
Chapter 26: THE THIRD LAW: THE LAW OF PERSISTENCE
Nonadvertising Periods
Decay and Persistence
Chapter 27: BUDGET ALLOCATION ACROSS BRANDS
SUMMING UP
The Problems
The Core Variables
The Principles
The Laws
A Closing Comment
APPENDIX
A: Computation of VEST Penetration
B: The Variance and Sensitivity of STEP and First-Choice Share
C: The Tie-Share Vector and the Frequency Vector
D: Implications of the STEP-SUMM Slope
E: The Sensitivity of the Integrated and Absolute Methods
F: Variants of SUMM
G: Competitive Frame Reduction
H: Share and Countershare Partition
I: The Television Version of the Universal Ad
J: The Contaminated Criss-Cross Tests
K: The Collection and Analysis of Ad-Weight Data
Index
