The Laws of Choice: Predicting Customer Behavior

By Eric Marder

Book Overview

How do customers decide what products and brands to buy? With the rise of sophisticated advertising and marketing research methods in this century, business leaders have spent billions of dollars attempting to answer this perplexing question. Occasionally, analysts emerge with suggestive trends, but ultimately with little hard evidence to support any definitive "laws" of customer choice. Now, in this much-anticipated major work, Eric Marder reveals how universal patterns in survey responses lead not only to general principles in marketing but to empirically verifiable laws of human nature itself. Drawing on forty years of applying his pioneering experimental design techniques to marketing research surveys, Marder presents a global theory of choice behavior, supported by original data reported here for the first time from thousands of massive real-life experiments based on millions of interviews. His dramatic findings about pricing, optimal marketing tactics, product evaluation, the relative role of product and image, and advertising effectiveness will make this book required reading for the entire marketing community. Of special interest to social scientists and survey research practitioners will be Marder's powerful research designs and techniques, including the unbounded write-in scale for measuring desirability (attitude) and his methodological analyses of the relationships among beliefs (perceptions), desires, choice, and behavior. In the Preface, he writes: "At the core of the theory are three laws of choice behavior the Law of Congruence, the Law of Primacy, and the Law of Persistence. These laws are both general and self-evident. At first glance, they are so self-evident that you might say: 'I have known this all along.' My reply is: 'Of course you have known it all along. But there is a difference between knowing and knowing, between the passive knowing that allows us to persist in actions that are inconsistent with what we know, and the active knowing that helps us change the way we do things.' I believe that knowing the laws of choice behavior-really knowing them -- changes the way we do things. My crass but stringent criterion has been that a good theory should enable someone equipped with it to make more money than someone who isn't. I believe my theory has passed this test."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684835452
• ISBN13: 9780684835457
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Groundbreaking Treatise on Marketing Research

Eric Marder devoted more than four decades to the development and refinement of marketing research theory and practice. Each new study Eric conducted for his clients was a scientific experiment. Many studies led to new ideas and methodology to explore, test and validate. One of the things that makes The Laws of Choice so special is that it is the product of a man and his organization's ongoing quest to learn the truth. It would have been tragic had Mr. Marder not devoted the years of effort necessary to bring us such a rigorous review and analysis of his life's work.

Must Read For New Product Measurement

Mr. Marder and his company have been using this method for a number of years for some of the best know brands and it works. The concept is great although the methods can be expanded upon using advances in technology. If you are trying to find out what people think about product concepts this method provides straight-forward easy to understand direction.

A must read for anyone interested in marketing

THE LAWS OF CHOICE is one of the best books on consumer behavior, marketing and marketing research that I have ever read - and I have read a lot of books on these topics. Reading this book enriched me in four ways. First, it supported and strengthed my conviction that marketing can, and should, be an applied science based on EXPERIMENTAL research. Second, it taught me several valuable research design and measurement techniques - one of which, the unbounded write-in scale, I intend to use in my own academic research. Third, it gave me a lot of marketing research data on topics such as advertising, pricing, product design, and brand positioning. For example, I learned the results of over 100 studies that collectively indicate that consumer price sensititvity is as strong for inexpensive products as it is for expensive ones. Finally, reading this book gave me a new example of intellectual achievement to admire and be inspired by. As you may have surmised by now, this is a book of substance that does not make for light reading. However, the book is not difficult to read either. The arguments and writing are very clear and should be within the ability of any reasonably intelligent and thoughtful reader to understand. In my opinion, this book should be read by anyone with a serious interest in consumer behavior or marketing.