Steven Walden
Head of Research, London
Steven Walden is Head of Research at Customer Experience Consultancy, Beyond Philosophy. He has worked in Management Consultancy for the last 14 years including boutique and large strategy houses providing advice and guidance to a cross-industry range of businesses on market planning and consumer behaviour. Within his current role and working closely with leading business schools he has focused on designing measures of emotion and the sub-conscious using techniques from consumer psychology. He is also co-author of a new book coming out in Spring 2010 on Customer Experience Management.
Recent activity
Blog Posts (31)
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Satisfaction or dissatisfaction
Dissatisfaction may be worth measuring
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A Case of Social Desirability Bias in Polling
Cleggmania and the election result perhaps reveals some of the pitfalls in polling
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So how do the candidates make you feel?
Using a measure of emotions, this article delivers an emotional profile of Brown, Cameron and Clegg
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Tweets predict sales – or do they?
Is the power of gossip stronger than the power of surveys?
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Ending the cult of statistical significance
An important book for quantitative research
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Comments (4)
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Comment on: Sub-conscious value or what don’t you know about your experience
Thanks Robert There are some excellent examples of understanding 'what customers don't say' in Why we buy (Paco Underhill). You say "We often make decisions based on the information that we have available at the time we make them", Daniel Kahneman also has a lot to say on heuristics and biases; in this way consumers are not rational alone
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Comment on: Customers have emotions too
Thanks Andre. Interesting points. I think you agree then that rational and emotional are intertwined. In your example, perhaps we go for the fattening cake not because we are less able to control our emotions but because the selection of the cake is in fact goal congruent. So, we have a comparatively heavier task to perform, I say let’s eat it ‘I deserve this cake’ or ‘I need a necessary distraction from a difficult task’. For me however there is a lot to be said for creating the right mood that impacts on how you perceive in the decision-making process. So a nice piece of chocolate cake can affect your mood, delivering a pre-disposition towards one type of ‘rational selection’. There are other experiments, I believe, where complex decision-making actually focuses the mind on the detailed negative things to avoid i.e., need for more detail! How do you leverage emotions to sell products? For me it is a question of understanding what appraisals lead to certain emotional reactions; which requires some research work to understand that emotional environment in the first place! Leveraging emotions for us is not as simple as you suggest. Different emotions are related to different experiences, products and meanings. So to refer to your create clutter comment, the challenge here is, how do you associate the emotions evoked with the appraisals you want (i.e., I want to buy), it is not just about clutter or simplicity per se. For instance, in the work we have done with a healthcare client we found that the emotional environment for a product was about ‘avoiding negative emotions’. The desire was actually to increase information i.e., imparting information that gave consumers confidence in the product. Anyway, just my opinion...
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Comment on: More surveys or more balance!
Hi Brian Thanks for your comment. You are strictly correct of course but i would suggest that most customers do not see it like that. I think they would say 'im on the TPS' so why am i getting this call... the differentiation between sales and research is lost on them, its unsolicited that for them is enough. From an inside-out point of you, you are correct but from an outside-in point of you, a customer viewpoint, they do not see it like that. It is an annoyance.
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Comment on: Ticking outside the box
Absolutely agree. We have given up on tenders and frankly got completely disillushioned with the organisation pitching these documents - mostly from EU and Government organisations I might add. A lot of these questions would fall under none of your business and I certainly would include environment issues within that as well. Tenders should not be poliiticised like this. Intuition and subjectivity are absolutely essential to making good decisions, this supposed empiricism is nonsense and destructive..
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