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Last week, my wife and I were listening to a story on Marketplace from American Public Media about how women don’t really tell us (marketers) what they want and we, in-turn, don’t really reach out to them. You can get the story here:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/11/24/am-womens-marketing/

For those of us in the market research industry, the name Mary Lou Quinlan is likely familiar. She is the mind behind the consulting group, Just Ask A Woman, who pioneered mock talk shows as a style for qualitative research in the late 90’s (if my memory serves me).

This wasn’t an isolated rant of a market researcher, though.  I’ve seen several articles and books over the past year or two explaining just how bad consumers are at telling us marketers what they want. Last year, Dan Ariely, in his popular book Predictably Irrational, told us that consumers make decisions based on variety of emotional, social, and sometimes faulty factors, which leads to often irrational (though predictable) decision-making.

My wife said of the Quinlan interview, “That’s right, you know.” To which, I thought, “No Duh.”  The idea that women tell us how they view themselves, not necessarily how they will actually behave, or that decisions are not made in a vacuum is something that does not seem particularly revolutionary or surprising to me.

There’s a reason they are not revolutionary – these are not new concepts. Prof. Daniel Kuhneman even won a Nobel Prize in economics for his 1979 Prospect Theory, which is basically a model for decision making with risk. This led to his work in Anchoring:

During normal decision making, individuals anchor, or overly rely, on specific information or a specific value and then adjust to that value to account for other elements of the circumstance.

In other words, individuals pick an attribute or information that appeals to them and whether that’s the logical attribute to use or not, that’s the one they focus on. So, why are we hearing more about all this now than in the past?  My opinion is that it is likely part of an explanation by marketers, managers, and economists as to why, when the economy has tanked, their performance hasn’t bucked the trends better.  The plethora of books and articles are a shot at providing that explanation.  And it makes sense…  Managers are under the gun, consumers are not responding as expected, traditional methods of communicating marketing messages are failing, and we are not hitting the right behavior triggers or messages for consumers.  To confound the problem, in many cases, the triggers are likely changing with economic uncertainty.

The bottom line is, many marketers and managers are not listening carefully enough to be able to read between the lines.

This also helps to explain how branding can so far astray.  If you don’t really understand why consumers do (or don’t) buy from you, then its easier to jump on a bandwagon.

So, are you listening? Really listening?