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Insight into consumer behavior often requires nuanced understanding of what drives people’s actions — their expectations, assumptions, hopes and fears. Asking people directly about what motivates them, however, can yield unremarkable results. Not because they are unwilling to share this …MORE…

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We analyze how most shopping behaviors result from a complex set of conscious and subconscious motivations.MORE…

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“Why do millennials have such a bad reputation?” a millennial plaintively asked in a recent mobile ethnography project that we ran on behalf of the Advertising Research Foundation for the Re:think 2013 conference just winding up. “I just read another …MORE…

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Emotions are the central organizing process of our thinking and behavior. What makes this process so messy – so frustratingly and beautifully messy! – is that it is driven less by immediate response to discrete stimuli and more by the ever-changing and ever-unstable tone and tenor of our relationships. What that means for brands is that affinity and loyalty is the result of how we feel about being in a relationship with (i.e. consumers of) those brands. The smart brands are figuring this out and driving the movement toward customer-centricity and conversational marketing.

This insight isn’t wholly new. In 1740, the philosopher David Hume asserted in his Treatise on Human Nature that “Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”MORE…