ITS JUST A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION

Interesting I read the article below (see the link) in the last issue of Research News published by the AMSRS. After reading the article I took the opportunity to write a letter to the editor. After the backwards and forwards of the editorial process my article was down the space required and kept most of my concern and opinion in tact - a credit to Kerry the editor.

However, after the editorial advisory board read the article felt it was too denigrating and a public personal attack and name calling and that it demeans us all and will only fuel more furious letter writing. Further, and note it was an opinion piece letter, that all references to individuals should be taken out of the article as well as the denigrating comments.

All that said, I have put the article here for anyone to see and comment. I still stand by my position that it is not, as I personally believe it to be, a denigrating, or a public personal attack rather just a matter of differing opinion and a highlighting of concern over two recent trends.

Letter to the editor:

RE: ‘Does love make the world go around?' see article here http://www.amsrs.com.au/index.cfm?a=detail&id=6632&eid=302

I found the article in the October 2010 edition of Research News titled ‘Does love make the world go around?’ of great interest but unfortunately a bit unnerving because I question the credentials of professionals who work in the area and the portrayal of methods used to measure emotion.

There are multiple comments by Ken Roberts throughout the article, implicating him as a considered expert voice on the subject. At least Ken was accurate to say that the final measure of emotion will not be cognitive, what ever the technology may be.

I am not singling out Ken in particular, as I have great respect for much of what he as accomplished and learned a great deal from him and his senior people early in my market research career. However, there are a couple of trends happening in market research that have really ramped up in the last 18-24 months.

The first of these trends is market research companies and individuals within them are using their academic post nominal titles as an implicit link to an experienced professional expert opinion.

While Forethought may have many staff with doctorates or Phds, are they suitably qualified or experienced to really understand the difference between ‘cognitive drivers’, ‘emotional drivers’, ‘stated emotions’ and ‘emotional activation at the brain level’? From Ken’s example on laddering reliability to anxiety it begs the question.

I think it’s pertinent to add that the new national registration board for psychologists (AHPRA) is finally cracking down on the misuse of the title ‘psychologist. It’s also important to note that there is considerable difference between ‘psychologists’ who are specialised/experienced in one or more of the fields such organisational, educational, sport, clinical, forensic, health or counselling psychology. Misrepresentation of titles is grounds for AHPRA deregistration.

The second trend is the complete misunderstanding by many in the market research profession, and demonstrated in the article, of neuroscience. For example, lumping the measures together as Ken has in the article is like saying cluster analysis, regression analysis, and structural equation modelling have gotten us no closer to understanding predictive models. Galvanic skin response and heart rate are peripheral nervous system measurements whereas, EEG and MRI are central nervous system measurements (and even these two are quite different).

Again, regarding emotion, there is a key difference between articulated emotion and emotional activation in the brain, which are entirely different propositions.

In the end, identifying a specific emotion such as happy, joy, interest, excitement or fear, disgust, anger, sadness is only good for the copywriters who need to potentially wordsmith a printed ad. For any great advertising creative, emotions are conveyed in imagery, sounds, smells against the inability of humans to grasp the complexities of the English language and the breadth of words used to express them. Neuroscience has shown us where to measure for emotional activation and how to capture the intensity of that response and also when it is associated with a motivated approach response (positive emotion) or a motivated withdrawal response (negative emotion) - now that’s what measuring emotion is about.

While there is no panacea for measuring emotions, I strongly disagree that neuroscience and cognitive psychology (i.e. clinical and experimental) is not getting us closer, when indeed it is.

Dr Shane G Moon

Full Member of AMSRS, QPMR

Fully registered psychologist with (in order of receipt seeing how I commented on the need for transparency):

Masters of Business (Strategic Entrepreneurial Management specialisation- major research project: Solving the Entrepreneurial Problem: An Examination of Strategic Choice, Market Orientation and Sales Force Behaviour);

Doctorate in Psychology (Clinical Psychology specialisation- thesis: mood, emotion and personality and their role in psychological well being);

Masters of Psychology (Sport Psychology specialisation- thesis: mood, emotion, perception and the effect on performance);

BA Psychology (Physiological Psychology specialisation- major project: the role of the emotion/mood neurotransmitter serotonin on performance)

NO SPORT BAD DECISION MAKING IN THE FUTURE

Earlier this past week I was viewing the nightly news to hear the recent government announcement of a national policy to link sport participation with school attendance (see http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=7941798). Basically from the reports is that no school no play. This policy is wrapped in nice veil of politicising by targeting indigenous school attendance whilst applying it nationally. Nice work pollies. I think all voters need to take a step back at this move for a second. Ms Gillard and I quote states "that access to sport is a privilege" (see http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/truants-to-be-barred-from-sport-under-attendance-push/story-fn59niix-1225902762791). So essentially, she is implicitly saying the play is a privilege to kids.

When did play become a privilege.

In my humble opinion (and I have been studying and working with human behaviour for almost 20 years), KIDS HAVE A RIGHT TO PLAY. Attending school is very important but if there is a truancy issue in a child taking away their RIGHT to play sport has so many potentially disastrous consequences that I struggle to begin. So where do I start. I'll keep it short and start with the headline I chose for this spot NO SPORT BAD DECISION MAKING IN THE FUTURE. Let me first clarify that title is an extreme oversimplification but I hope it got your attention. Here is what I mean.

Decision making is a complex occurrence in humans. There are many factors that are involved when it comes to making decisions in any given context. For example, there is the rational facts we can consider; there is the emotions associated with the circumstances in which we are making decisions and the context itself (e.g. placing a bet in gambling; buying a car; which school to send our children to; swinging or not at the next ball in a game). As I want to be brief, lets take the rational and emotional components of decision making. A lot has been written about this and a good synopsis is Jonah Lehrer's book How we decide or Dan Ariely's book predictably irrational. Some exceptional work in the neuroscience of decision making has been done by Benedetto De Martino, PhD.

(see his web site http://web.me.com/bendemartino/Site/Publications.html)

De martino's work of interest also in Lehrer's book indicates that decision making and emotions is that those individuals who can make better decisions in circumstances where emotions cause people to make bad decisions are the people who have better emotion regulation abilities. Where do people get this ability--well first they have to experience emotions and a wide range of them and then they have to develop appropriate abilities to then regulate this emotions.

How does sport fit into this equation then? My very own research has focused on exactly this proposition. Here is a synopsis of my masters and a section of my doctoral work. Few would deny that when you engage in sporting activity of any kind you experience the full range of the emotional spectrum. And when you experience these emotions you are forced to regulate them when participating in sport. These strategies are learned over time and become perfected such that our emotional profile can be used to our advantage. When I practiced sport psychology I helped athletes at all levels to develop and sharpen their emotion control strategies to enhance performance. What is interesting the longer you play sport the better you become. Does this translate outside sport? Indeed it does. My doctoral studies looked into this overflow of emotional control strategies from sport to real life. People who play sport or engage in physical activity of any kind and experience emotions develop better emotion regulation strategies and the ability to reflect upon their emotions and manage them accordingly. The more they do it and longer they do the better they become. The consequences I found were phenomenal, they developed a range of strategies to cope, the had better health outcomes, managed depression and anxiety better. Now I did not look into decision making abilities, however other studies have shown that people who engage in physical activity have a better mental acuity and perform better at cognitive tasks--as the saying goes an active body an active mind.

So Ms Gillard wants to stop kids from playing sport if they don't attend school. The way I see it, this could potentially lead a disastrous outcome of individuals who can no longer make good decisions because they have no idea how manage their emotions because they are unable to utilise their prefrontal cortices to contemplate their own minds because they have not had enough time to experience and manage their emotions.

A better solution for Gillard and other government policy makers would be to revisit putting sport and physical activity back in schools so it become part of the school way of life. I know from personal and professional experience that playing sport as a part of the school experience is essential; it actually saves lives. And this needs to occur as early as possible so that kids get to experience and manage their emotions to become better decision makers in the future. But the way its going, Gillard has got it wrong, take the money allocated to such this ludicrous scheme, multiply it significantly and look at the child welfare system and all the kids who actually can't make it school because they are taking care of themselves way beyond what they should and can't wait to play on the weekend sport grounds and escape their realities. I hope everyone considers these implications and I have only scratched the surface to this very backward thinking.

NO SPORT BAD DEC

Supermarket Psychology Extra--bring on neuromarket research.

I have been trying to update a second piece on supermarket shopping psychology for some time but it has been very busy in the world of marketing psychology particularly with the rise of neuromarketing research finally getting its dues. More on neuromarketing research much later. But I have been busily doing shopper research in a number of categories and it never ceases to amaze me the spectrum of behaviours we see in the supermarket.

Traditionally, shopper behaviour research has focussed on identifying shopper types, their behaviours, their preferences, their interactions with products, POS (point of sale) marketing collateral etc. The first of these objectives is as outdated as the idea of mutually exclusive personality types. Psychological thinking has moved on from categorical classifications and now predominantly uses a continuum based system of understanding. For example, anxiety is now not just anxiety or not, one can think of it as an arousal continuum with say rest on one end and extreme panic on the other. How does this apply to shopper types? Well it doesn't directly but indirectly it is critically important.

Associated to this new direction in classifying behaviour is also actually bringing to life the old motto 'theres more than one way to skin a cat--sorry animal lovers!'. This concept over rules the antiquated position that we generally behave in a highly systematic unitary fashion. The concept is called modes.... and again it has been borrowed out of the psychological theory, in particular Dr Jeffrey Young from the scheama institute in New York (just search Dr Young you will find it). Applied to consumer behaviour modes is a type of mindset an individual finds themselve in depending on the category--for example driving a car there are several driving modes we can access depending on where we are going, the context, who is with us etc; if your are exercising or walking again a number of modes we engage in whether its after stressful day, the social network upkeep etc. Specific to shopper behaviour there is often typically 4-6 common shopping modes. Often these modes are linked directly to the personal and social contexts the individual is currenlty in and brings to the shopping journey, that is, family, single, living with partner; a dinner party, dinner for the kids, trying a new recipe etc.

Heres some common scenarios: a shopper might be looking for an indulgent escape thus they are kind of in a tense mindset that needs relief but not knowing exactly how to achieve the relief they are shopping in vary open way, looking for just that item, exploring all kinds of foods, shops etc..... until they find that item will provide an indulgent release. Alternatively, another person might be looking for a health kick after a period of unhealthy living--spring cleaning so to speak so they are out there shopping with a plan, know what they are looking for and where they can get....they are direct, short and sharp so they can get what they want and fast.... this way they can start that rebuild with a perceived guarantee for success.

So what? Knowing these types of insights and how they apply to a specific category allows food manufacturers, retailers and distributors organise their categories in multiple fashions depending on the frequency and intensity of modes associated with the products within the category of interest. Further, POS displays, catalogues, all marketing collateral can be organised to appeal to the shopping mindsets of consumers.

Of greater interest is some recent findings by a soon to be neuromarketing competitor of ours (posted on the linked neuromarketing group--thanks Ron) in where they were " able to increase the sales of one of its salsa and chips products by 11 percent by figuring out what part of the chip eating experience showed the highest amoutn of brain activity. Contrary to what one might think, it was neither the flavour nor the texture that made people's mind buzz but rather the precise moment between scooping up the salsa sauce and lifing it to the mouth. By placing a photo of a salsa-dripping chip in the supermarket aisle, the company increased all chip sales by 7% and the brand's sales by 11%"

Just goes to show, understanding the relationship between the product, the consumer usage experience and the consumer mind triangulates into some serious outcomes (at least potential outcomes--caveat is I wonder how much other marketing, communications & sales force activity in the chip results occurred simultaneously to the POS campaign......).

Until next time....

Personality at Work

I came across this very abbreviated article I wrote and was published in the 'letters' section of Business Review Weekly. Here it is again as I think its relevancy is even greater in these economic times.

Two recent articles in BRW (the culture of leaving, March 30, 2006 and half-way to nowhere, April 6, 2006) allude to a common blunder of business - inadequate human capital management. The first highlighted recruitment/people strategy problems and how Coles Myer has frequently struggled to hire "outstanding" people. I have seen created positions for work-life balance, diversity management, culture change ... blah, blah, blah. Yet it is still a culture of leaving. It seems some recruiters and/or executives lack the awareness of who an outstanding person is, but continue to create positions to solve a culture problem without actually getting to the root of the problem, which is probably an ineffective people strategy. People strategy was also part of half- way to nowhere in terms of personality and managers. I am amazed how recruitment agencies make incredulous claims about personality classifications. They are generally based on loose extensions of outdated Jungian typologies. At the very least, these claims are behavioural descriptors, not personality classifications. Three tips for job seekers: (1) get the job description; (2) list the behaviours required to meet the performance criteria; (3) tailor responses to the personality questions accordingly. Simple, but be able to back it up. Mark Busine of DDI, in half-way to nowhere, mentioned 11 personality types; but the Myers-Briggs personality test claims 16 and the NEO Personality Inventory claims 10. Current personality theory after 50 years of research cannot even agree on the number of personality types, yet some HR people and managers are overlooking potential quality individuals, based sometimes on very relaxed ideologies of personality. It is time for some people to realise that humans are multi- determined and greater than the sum of personality parts. At least Busine contends that self- awareness is a key for managers to make sound decisions. That leads into EI (emotional intelligence) ... another time.