AFECT: Psychological Confidence

As the result of the research that went into my book, Consumer.ology, it was apparent that, much as statistical confidence is mathematically valid and useful, it fails to gauge how meaningful the base data being summarised by those statistics actually is.

For example, if I tell you that 80% of people in a survey of 200 want to give all their money to my charity, statistical theory will tell us that, 95% of the time, assuming it's a random sample of the population, the actual number of people who will want to give all their money to my charity will be between 75% and 86%.

But if I had a gun to their head when I asked those 200 people the question you wouldn't, for a moment, extrapolate the results of my survey more widely.

Unfortunately, as I explain in the book, the problem with most market research techniques is that they are effectively interviewing the wrong part of the respondent's brain: with so much of human behaviour being driven by the unconscious mind, a research process that interrogates the conscious part is only going to get so far.

To help people develop more valid market research techniques, that will be more accurate reflections of actual consumer behaviour, I identified five criteria that should be assessed to gauge the psychological confidence you should have in any so-called 'consumer insight'.

The five elements are:

A: Analysis of behaviour

F: Frame of mind

E: Environment

C: Covert

T: Time

You can read more about using these criteria, see the reasons that they matter so much and discover why most market research techniques are of limited value in Consumer.ology: The Market Research Myth, the Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping.

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