Philip Graves Made Me Skeptical Of It's Findings

How Consumer.ology Has Changed The Way I View Market Research & Made Me Skeptical Of It’s Findings

Philip Graves’ Consumer.ology: The Market Research Myth, The Truth About Consumers, and the Psychology of Shopping serves as an excellent guide for understanding how to determine what decisions consumers will and won’t make. The book focuses on the market research industry and it’s accuracy and usefulness, or lack their of, in the process of studying consumer behavior. Graves, a consumer behavioral consultant, spent twenty years observing consumers as a market research manager—leading him to question traditional market research methods and identify discrepancies between the results produced by market research and the decisions consumers actually

Graves discusses how opinion polls have been found to be extremely sensitive of the choice of language used in a survey. An example Graves’ offers refers to public support for the government—that a poll is more likely to show public support for something when it frames the question as the government “not” allowing it, rather than “forbidding it.” This example demonstrates how different responses to opinion polls can be from slightly altering the wording polls use—creating misleading responses that may fail to capture and project the true response results of the polls and ultimately cause market research to be

Graves makes the claim that individuals who have gone to the trouble of purchasing something, tend to value it more highly than people who haven’t. Graves uses the example of men and cars, and their ultimate recommendations when asked which car they would recommend. His conclusion: men are more likely to listen to people who bought the car. This detracts from results attained through market research methods, as reviews are skewed by what is referred to as the endowment effect—from which it only takes a few moments of ownership for someone to value something significantly more highly, ultimately making reviews conducted by individuals who previously purchased an item less credible and thus less valuable to prospective consumers or researchers, and as a result, making certain market research results less credible and