Where is marketing research headed?
I think we are seeing a more interdisciplinary approach to research. Marketing is a field that has a quantitative side to it—economics, operations research and statistics—and a behavioral side to it, the discipline of psychology. We are seeing a trend of more experimentation in the field by the economists and statisticians. This is a ripe opportunity for interdisciplinary work with psychologists. For example, we have a study now which looks at the impact of disgusting products. Some products evoke feelings of disgust, even on a subconscious level … cat litter, feminine hygiene products, and such. In a study of a very large national chain of small grocery stores, we use a list of the 50 most popular non-food categories in the store, and ask people to rate how disgusting they are. We then look at a sample of more than 10 million transactions from a chain of convenience stores and show that if customers place disgusting items in their shopping baskets, then they tend to buy fewer food ite
