Everything is volatile, everything is mobile, everything is flexible, everything is changing, everything is dynamic, everything is active.
We have gone from more or less simple, tangible, enduring, timeless needs, and mature markets to complex, intangible, unknown needs, with an extraordinary mental evolution, with new markets, and with intelligent forms of relationship.
A consumer who learns on the fly, with an adaptive process that was unthinkable 10 or 15 years ago. The old economy will never return, and as Manuel Castells once commented, "the network society is emerging and expanding as the dominant form of social organization in our time."
The implications of all this are clear, as we enter a new paradigm of relationships between consumers and the products and brands that represent them.
And here comes the crux of the matter and I will use branding genius John Grant to illustrate the thought.
“A brand is a type of mental model, and we humans (consumers) make sense of the world through mental models.” This would be the answer from cognitive science, the branch of psychology linked to linguistics and anthropology that seeks to determine how our minds work.
Learning is when someone changes their mental model. Therefore, those brands or mental models that know how to adapt their offering to a new consumer model in this changing, volatile, dynamic, and flexible environment will be the ones that best survive in the coming years.
Considering brands from the perspective of language, perception, culture, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience will be the future foundation of strategic market research.
Hence the need to link a way of understanding consumers from the perspective of strategic emotional segmentation.
Within the brand value equation, a fundamental point is emotional values, those that provide the consumer's real connection with the brand or with the value proposition employed.
If our value is learning, we must be able to understand that a market is no longer segmented based on static criteria, as the AMA (American Marketing Association) stated literally in English.
"To cope with this ever-changing scenario, marketing segmentation and targeting techniques are rapidly evolving, from traditional, static, demographic-based criteria towards dynamic, mood, lifestyle and psychographic influences. It is no longer a question of identifying your customers by age, geography or income, but looking into how and why they buy, based on their mood, beliefs and the occasion."
The technical approach should be based on the search for the optimal segment solution that explains our market from a relational perspective, which involves information gathering processes that provide us with value on various issues such as the mental framework of the decision-making and purchasing process, desires and frustrations, lived experiences, the adaptation of our offering to their lives, the stories told by brands and consumer categories.
Let's go out, observe, experiment, and draw real conclusions from a world whose mental model has changed and where the narrative that our brand identifies with consumers aged 25 to 45, from upper-middle class backgrounds with a household income of over €100,000 and living in communities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, is no longer valid.
The R-evolution of strategic market research is close to where a concept of cognitive science will gain weight and where ethnographic techniques of behavior analysis, value detection techniques such as Laddering, story recognition techniques and metaphorical elicitation will be key, latent segmentation techniques
But one will stand out above the rest: Neuroscience, as it will allow us to contribute cognitive science to the selection and purchasing processes, to the subconscious thoughts, desires, and feelings of everyday decisions. But be careful, this should be done from a scientific perspective and with the appropriate metrics, not from the amateur freelance work of "pseudo-neurological apprentices" with degrees in economics or business.
Neuromarketing is a quantitative science, not a qualitative one, since established metrics can determine behavioral patterns, mental maps, and, why not, thought segmentations.
Do we dare to imagine a world of advanced research? As Sony would say at the launch of Playstation, "Play?"
Jordi Crespo
Managing Partner Hamilton
