Expressions Generated by the Subconscious
Ask a person a question on a subject he cares about, give him enough time to express himself, and you’ll get an answer rich with expressions generated by his subconscious. How can we identify these expressions and use them to discover the forces that produced them?
Consider the following excerpt from a typical interview with a customer. In this interview the questions centered on face washing liquids.
Question: Are colors important to you?
Answer: I was just saying that color … because everything needs to fit in my bathroom. So I'll get the face wash that matches the pink colors in my in bathroom.
Question: What does your face wash look like?
Answer: Green meadows.
Question: You buy for the color or the smell?
Answer: Both. I happen to get both. I don’t like ... I don't know, I always get the … I don't know, because you can see it. Mine is one of those things that, you can see before you squeeze it out. If I see, like if it's clear, like that big green bottle…. This one is just ugly. It reminds me a trash can. The dark one is like … in the clear bottle. I can see it, it’s green, and I'll buy it. I’m not sure why.
According to the phrase “So I'll get the face wash that matches the pink colors in my in bathroom,” it seems that all you need to do to entice this customer to buy your face wash is to put it in a pink bottle. But the pink bottle won’t evoke an impression of “green meadows.” And how is pink related to “trash cans”? And how “seeing it before squeezing it out” relates to “pink,” “green meadow,” and “trash cans”? The subconscious of this individual seem to be a very messy place. However, when you watch this customer in the store you see no hesitations in picking up the face wash of choice. How is this possible?
This segment is not an extreme case. In qualitative data, seemingly unrelated, even inconsistent messages are the norm, not the exception.
This segment includes less than 150 words. Yet, it is very confusing. An in-depth interview usually holds more than 15,000 words. A market research study with 10 in-depth interviews holds 150,000 words. Focus groups hold even more. If 150 words are confusing, how confusing are 150,000 words? How many confusing messages one can find in so many words?
Computer Intuition specializes in using seemingly unrelated, even inconsistent messages to discover the forces in the subconscious that generated these messages.
Our software discovers the forces in the subconscious by mimicking the intuitive process the person himself uses to produce coherent behavior. Since the software mimics human intuition, we call it Computer Intuition.
Computer Intuition performs a psycholinguistic analysis of qualitative data. It identifies all messages in the data, and assigns to them their psychological intensity, or psytensity, the values the subconscious uses to determine the individual’s own behavior. Since Computer Intuition mimics the person’s own consolidating process, it produces the best predictors of his future behavior.
If you are interested in seeing a demonstration of the Computer Intuition psycholinguistic analysis, please call us at 585-507-4902 to set a time with one of our client representatives.
Hints of the Subconscious