1.7 Consumer Behavior Thought Leaders and Companies

In this text, you will apply the T-shaped marketer theory to your professional development. Your newly acquired consumer behavior knowledge will represent the up-and-down stem of your T or your deep experience. This expertise can then be integrated into the side-to-side stem of your T or your overlapping marketing disciplines. As a T-shaped marketer, leveraging consumer behavior as your expertise stem will make you more hirable, increase your understanding of digital channel integration, improve your interpretation of customer audiences, and optimize your strategy implementation.

Launched in 2013, Think with Google gives marketers access to rising trends on Google’s platforms and empowers them with strategies for anticipating consumers’ needs. Think with Google also features Google search topics, industry leader insights, and qualitative audience research data in the forms of articles, webinars, slide decks, newsletters, and data visualizations. More pertinently, Think with Google has a unique section just for consumer insights, which hones in on the customer journey and consumer trends through videos, visual stories, and articles. You can also leverage YouTube’s Find My Audience engine to identify your potential audience’s interests, habits, and purchase intentions.

Through artificial intelligence and machine learning, Kantar provides its clients with data and insights into consumer behavior. Kantar conducts consumer panels to help retailers understand the consumer landscape and optimize purchase journeys. Additionally, Kantar guides companies through maximizing customer value via analytics, strategy development, and consumer feedback programs. Kantar is best known for NeedScope, which takes a “qualitative and quantitative segmentation approach that uncovers the functional, social, and emotional drivers of consumer behavior within a given market.”2 NeedScope centers on six consumer emotional needs: surprise me, help me, reassure me, educate me, impress me, and thrill me. As marketers, we can take advantage of Kantar’s consumer behavior expertise through its free monthly webinars, weekly email newsletters, and TGI Chart of the Week.

McKinsey is best known in the marketing world for its Periscope analytics capabilities and for tracking changing consumer and competitor behavior. Marketers can read the extensive findings in McKinsey Quarterly magazine, featuring consumer behavior articles. Marketers can also review consumer behavior data via articles published through the McKinsey Global Institute, the foremost private think tank in the world, and stratify that data by industry and region. Additionally, McKinsey produces both a blog and a podcast. You can subscribe to all of these media resources through the McKinsey email newsletter.

Qualtrics helps companies improve and design their customer experience in many ways, from identifying consumers’ preferred communication platforms to evaluating businesses’ key consumer touchpoints. Qualtrics develops website resources and articles on important consumer behavior concepts such as Net Promoter Score, which measures customers’ loyalty to a company. On the Qualtrics website, you can view consumer trends webinars on demand, download consumer behavior studies and e-books, participate in the Customer Experience Basecamp program, and become a certified Qualtrics professional.

University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business Professor Jonah Berger is an internationally bestselling author specializing in consumer behavior. On his university website profile page, marketers can access over 50 academic journal articles on how internal and external influences affect consumers’ buying choices. His personal author website features his three books, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior, and The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind. He is best known for his Contagious STEPPS Framework: social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value, and stories. On his author website, marketers can download a free Contagious workbook that outlines how to get an idea or product to take off.

Ravi Dhar is a Yale School of Management Professor of Management and Marketing. He also teaches the Consumer Insights course and leads the Yale Center for Customer Insights. Specializing in consumer information processing and preferences, he consults for Google, IBM, General Mills, and Pepsi. You can subscribe to the newsletter for the Yale Center for Customer Insights to receive the weekly blog and webinar updates. Dhar provides direct access to his articles and research publications on his faculty website page.

Throughout our course, we will use the T-shaped marketer chart to illustrate how your knowledge of consumer behavior concepts feeds into foundational marketing concepts. Let’s start your professional development journey with our next topic: the cognitive consumer.