You’re getting sleepy
I just saw an advertisement for using hypnosis to quit smoking (or I suppose, to lose weight, become more confident, or any other self improvement need). This got me thinking again about some recent posts (here and here) I read about hypnosis and research.
There has definitely been a shift to methodologies that take you deeper into the psyche of your market. This is the same reason observational and ethnographic research have continued to grow in popularity. But unlike observational and ethnographic research, is hypnosis here to stay, or just a passing trend? Doing a quick search I found this article discussing the “new” market research of hypnosis ten years ago, but it doesn’t seem to be any more prevalent today.
I agree with Tom in the first article; Does hypnosis really get at deeper, subconscious thoughts that can’t be obtained through other ways? If their subconscious thoughts are really driving purchase behavior, they are probably showing those thoughts in other ways as well. And one other thought: how willing are people to participate? After all, don’t most of us think of all the embarrassing acts we’ve witnessed people do while hypnotized?
What do you think? Has the time for hypnosis just not come yet, or is it already a passing fad?
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:33 am
These posts and the article are really intriguing. I’d never heard of hypnosis being used in marketing research before. I’m thinking of laddering as one method of revealing subconscious thoughts/motivations, given a skilled interviewer…is this commonly used in market research?
June 5th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
While I can’t say how common laddering techniques are overall, certainly techniques in that spirit of probing the “why” behind people’s responses are a cornerstone of our qualitative research methods. Whether or not they get at truly “subsconscious” thoughts or motivations is arguable – you’re asking a conscious mind to generate a reason and lots of research in cognitive and social psychology can attest to the tendency for people to generate a reason when asked – regardless of whether that reason is true. For example, if given a choice among items arranged in a line (where people have no strong preference), right-handers will tend to select objects on the right end – it’s a truly subconscious preference and nobody realizes that they have it, so when you ask them why they selected the item they did, they’ll tell you all kinds of things about the product they selected.
Laddering as a formal interview technique seems to work best with people who are very dedicated to a particular brand or product, so presumably they do have more connections to the brand and more reasons for selecting it. With anybody who isn’t particularly brand loyal, pushing for “whys” might get you a lot of invented reasons that are generated on the fly and may not be very reliable.