HCD Research Inc.’s newest division, HCD Neuro-Cognitive Financial Insights, joins other branches of the company in uniquely combining traditional research with applied consumer neuroscience, gaining more information about the consumer experience in a way that is new to these markets. Through the division’s efforts, clients are able to gain a better understanding of the consumer decision-making process across the spectrum of financial and insurance offerings.
This approach gains more meaningful insight into the entire journey from your customers’ eyes, helping you to understand not only how they interact with you today, but also identify improvement opportunities in areas that drive choice, loyalty, satisfaction, retention, communication, and the positive or negative impact of corporate branding – all in the support of product and service optimization to drive sales.
The customer experience, which details all aspects from customer service to product development to communication and messaging, is the key to greater customer loyalty and is primarily responsible for competitive differentiation and growth. Thanks to the division’s services, businesses and companies will be able to reach and understand their customers in new and engaging ways, allowing them to tailor their offerings to successfully target specific customer demographics.
For any business, understanding and evaluating how their consumers think, feel, and ultimately make decisions, is of the upmost importance. Knowing what drives consumers through the decision-making process is pivotal to every enterprise, and market researchers have strived to come up with the most effective research practices to deliver the best results for their clients. For years, market research companies have relied upon traditional research methods, known as the cognitive or conscious approach, to test consumer behavior and offer clients predictive results. This cognitive approach is incredibly effective as it taps directly into the consumer’s conscious response. It can involve conducting focus groups, interviews, and distributing and analyzing surveys, where the researcher asks a question and the subject answers. So, for example, if the subject were to smile during questioning, the researcher could easily conclude that the subject is happy.
By examining the subconscious response of consumers, market research companies are able to gain greater insight into the reasons behind the conscious response. The combination and interpretation of the conscious and subconscious responses provide businesses with more valuable information upon which to make decisions about their product and service offerings. Research methods that utilize psychophysiological measures to examine the mechanisms and reasons for consumer behavior and which tap directly into the consumer’s subconscious can be best described as applied consumer neuroscience. With applied consumer neuroscience, market researchers can take their studies one step further and gain a more in-depth analysis of the consumer. If researchers were to apply consumer neuroscience to the example of the subject smiling during questioning, they might be able to conclude that the subject was not smiling out of happiness as one would assume, but rather they might be smiling out of embarrassment or unease. Just like traditional research, applied consumer neuroscience possesses multiple advantages and yields significant results. While some market research companies select one method over the other, HCD Research integrates both methods to provide clients with the most beneficial analysis of their customers.
