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The Center for Ageless Marketing

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  espite overwhelming evidence from recent brain and mind research that several fundamental assumptions of customer research are fatally flawed, most researchers still cling to those assumptions. For example, we now know that a person uses different brain sites and mental processes when answering researchers’ hypothetical questions than he or she will likely use in the marketplace. Yet posing “what-if” questions remains a standard practice in customer research.


   Another recent discovery revealed by brain scanning technology is that people are generally unaware of the initial formation of their motivations. Decisions may be made consciously, but motivations to take an action have their roots in the unconscious self.

   In developmental relationship marketing on which the practice of ageless marketing is based, the pursuit of customer intelligence takes into account what customers either unwittingly mislead researchers about or simply can’t tell researchers about that nevertheless play a big part in marketplace and lifestyle behavior. A sampler of customer intelligence services:



Market Reach Assessment – Want to expand your market with little or maybe no added cost? Companies often overlook opportunities to broaden their market reach when they focus on select market segments. The Market Reach Assessment looks for marketing opportunities that may lie just beyond easy sight, and outlines proposed strategies for harvesting those opportunities.

Customer Listening Assessment – Do research results sometimes send you down the wrong road? Everyone knows that consumers often tell researchers things that turn out to be false. Now, thanks to recent discoveries in brain research we now know why that is and have ways of correcting for it. The Customer Listening Assessment gauges the reliability of your present methods of gathering customer intelligence, and probes for ways to enhance future research accuracy, possibly including new ways of gathering customer intelligence.

Market Research Services – The Center will assess your specific objectives and design a research program that best suits those objectives. We work either with your customary research resources or resources retained specifically for a particular project. Research is designed to yield a “whole brain” perspective that yields decisive information on the key value drivers (rational factors) and the key emotional drivers (nonrational factors) that underlie consciously purposeful buying decisions.

Emotional Contract Performance Assessment – Companies spend vast sums fortifying and defending themselves against legal challenges by their customers, but few give much thought to the fact that every company has two contracts with every customer (and every other stakeholder as well):

  • the legal contract (mostly explicit) based on quantitative performance criteria established by law and by a company’s representations on paper, in actions and through oral communications.

  • the emotional contract (mostly implicit) based on qualitative performance criteria established by stakeholders in the form of expectations that reflect their moral and ethical values and their experiential desires – what they want to experience, and want not to experience.

We’ve all heard a lot of noise about how important the customer experience has become. The customer experience is about the emotional contract. The Emotional Contract Performance Assessment not only assesses current performance, but probes for impediments to reaching higher levels of performance that may exist. This assessment is superior to traditional customer satisfaction surveys in predicting future patronage (customer loyalty) because the assessment takes specific readings of the emotional foundations of customer satisfaction that undergird customer loyalty.

Few companies realize that satisfaction of the emotional contract usually goes further to secure stakeholder loyalty than satisfaction of the legal contract. Beyond that, it reduces litigation as the giant lawn mower and snow blower maker Toro has learned. Often faced with personal injury litigation, Toro decided to take a less legalistic approach in responding to personal injury claims. Upon learning of an injury, company representatives make personal contact with the injured party to apologetically extend the company’s sympathy and suggest that arbitration might lead to a remedy more quickly and with less hassle. Since adopting this emotionally sensitive approach, Toro has not been in court in a personal injury case since 1994.