“Economics is the science of equilibrium, marketing is the science of disequilibrium. Guess where the money is made?”

– my Marketing prof.

I don’t think we will escape priming either Shannon so much as try to attempt to compensate or mitigate those effects.

The Logic of Failure

…interestingly, also by a German. I wonder if this is an area that German universities are particularly concentrating on?

But it is very hard to get even smart people to think abstractly about what attributes drive their purchase decision, so asking about individual attributes one at a time often “primes” their answers – the order of questions often influences responses in a market research interview. For example, if you lead off with price and then introduce a cool new feature, people are often cautious about the new feature and as “what is this going to cost me”. Introducing the feature first in the interview has the opposite effect. Techniques such as conjoint analysis and its cousin discrete choice have been used to get around this. In essence, you show the customer a set of cards with attributes that describe the product ans ask them to rank order them. You mix and match the levels (say different prices within the price attributes), and the responses of the interviewee get at their trade-offs in a way that direct questioning would not.

This is pretty basic stuff in marketing, and I’d like to see Mussweiler’s work and references to see if he’s re-inventing (or taking credit for inventing) the wheel or taking an old concept further.

Thanks for the reference.