I was super excited to see this TED talk by Dan Ariely since I just finished his book, “Predictably Irrational”.

The next thing I viewed right after was an e-marketer article on brand appeal. Try watching the TED video and then viewing this article and see if it affects you in the same way.

E-marker article: Brand Appeal Among Young Adults

Looking at the E-marketing article I wondered what drove their answers. I wondered to what degree the respondents chose their answers based on what they really felt and whether their actual actions in the market place told different story about people find truly desirable.

I also wondered what brands came to mind when they were filling in their answers. When Malcolm Gladwell describes the Hushpuppies tipping point in his book, “Tipping Point”. I can’t help but think that “good quality” was not central to driving the trend. I also thought of the different types of shoppers, those who look for the cheapest thing, those who look for products that represent their uniqueness, and those who impulse buy and how that factored into the survey.

Without having access to how the survey was conducted or what the actual questions were, I mulled over what the perceived differences between the trustworthiness of a brand (55%) and brand authenticity (33%). What about “popularity” (46%), “people are talking about it” (32%), and “friends like it” (25%)? And is “it works well” different from “good quality”. Is “it works well” referring to usability where as good quality implies the ability for the brand’s products to hold up to wear and tear?

Sometimes when we fill in a survey we choose what we think or what seems right, but reality those answers do not reflect our decisions and actions that closely.. For example, if a survey asked us if we were more likely to buy a product if that donated to a good cause, one would think we are more likely to say yes. But when we are in the store trying to make a decision, how much does cause marketing actually impact choosing one brand over another?

Making decisions is a challenge for people. Not only because we don’t know what our preference are very well as Dan Ariely states, but also because those preference are continually being influenced and modified by what is happening at any given moment.

Not so long ago I was asked to fill in a survey that would partly determine my communication style and the best way to communicate to me. It asked things like whether I chose to sit at the head of the table, chose to sit beside someone or on my own. But depending on the context I choose to do all those things and it could vary from whether I am leading the meeting, to what the purpose of the meeting is, to who I know and what kinds of people I think they are, to the room set up.

The challenge with surveys is in getting the right kind of information and psychological surveys are often written in a way to try to account for that. But providing solid contest is a challenge unless you engage in a conversation with someone, and even in that case it is a challenge.

Closed-ended questions force people into decisions, which may not accurately reflect what they actually think in a particular situation. But closed-ended question are preferred because the data can be processed and insights can be made from that data, or possible tell us something we didn’t know. It can make us look at things in a different way, see what is working or not working. At a minimum it at least points us in a direction. Open-ended questions can tell us more, or give us answers we may not have thought to ask. But opened-ended questions can be very time consuming to aggregate.

The great thing about the kind of work that Dan Ariely does is that often the experiments involve observing behavior which is definitive. But again, this kind of information is specific and hard to obtain for most of us and not always relevant to helping make marketing decisions.

The value of listening to people participating in social media is that you are more likely to get, or have the opportunity to probe for, the context of a comment. But like open-ended questions, this activity is very time consuming. While marketers are looking at social media as a cheaper more effective way to reach people, the time it takes to engage in the Conversation may not always be accurately estimated.

But surveys, like social or behavioral experiments, are still fascinating. Sometimes the outcome is what we expect. Sometimes not. In this article, what the most interesting to me was the writer’s surprise that “good quality” should top the list as rated by young adults. Given the extent of how marketing savvy this group is, I would expect the “coolness” factor to be viewed more critically than it may have years ago. Or at least, I can imagine that is what they might like to communicate.