M.O.M.™'s Approach to Marketing: The Three Key Ingredients to Success
By
Joseph Yeager, Ph.D.

Television entertains us with detectives such as Lt. Columbo and Gus Grissom of CSI. These shows routinely demonstrate a basic fact: No behavior of any kind occurs unless there are three ingredients:

• Motive
• Opportunity
• Means

If detectives have these three sets of facts they catch bad guys. If marketers have these three sets of facts, they catch customers. We call this the M.O.M. Model™. The model helps separate the choices of when to use quantitative versus qualitative tools to develop any marketing campaign.

Customers are definitely subject to this law of behavior: No behavior occurs without all three ingredients of motive, opportunity and means. These three key ingredients of customer behavior apply to any marketing campaign.

That is, opportunity and means provide quantitative group common denominators about who and where the customer is and tells us what they can afford. The qualitative work provides profiles on individual differences in motivation. Individual differences tell us what we have to do to be persuasive. So quantitative and qualitative each has a role to play. They must fit together like hand in glove.

No campaign can be successful without a clear understanding of all three components of behavior. The right tools to profile all three components are crucial to solid decision-making information for the marketing team.

To insure that a marketing effort will succeed, marketing executives must have accurate information about these three determinants of customer behavior in a given market. That means selecting the right kind of quantitative and qualitative tools to generate decision-making information that will lead to success.

Opportunity and means are best defined by familiar quantitative tools such as micro-demographics and demographics. Quantitative findings are then smartly combined with motivational profiles generated by state of the art qualitative methods for profiling customer motives.

Quantitative methods are well established and tend to improve gradually as new methods are developed. Most of us regularly use quantitative packages such as SPSS and its kin. These types of tools give us the big picture of the entire forest. Then we have to turn our attention to the trees, the specifics of customer motives, which show us how to persuade the many individuals that together comprise a market segment.

Most quantitative analysts tend to be confident about defining opportunity and means. So the competitive edge in many campaigns often resides in the ability to read customer motives with a very accurate eye. Qualitative tools have recently made their own innovations as the result of the more sophisticated technology of psycholinguistic analysis of customer motivation.

From the qualitative perspective, innovations in linguistic psychology have discovered that motivation has an inherent architecture that is revealed in hidden language patterns. The trick to finding this hidden key to motivation is revealed as a distant cousin to the grammar we all had to study in grade school.

Linguistic analysis of this kind is based on "transformational grammar." The CIA and the FBI work with law enforcement cousins of marketing's version. The technology comes from the same roots but the engineering varies according to the task at hand. *

Psycholinguistic analysis, based on solid discoveries from the sixties and seventies, obtains more marketing bang for the buck than any other motivational analysis tool to date. Based on obscure work by linguist Noam Chomsky, microscopic analysis of customer motivation is now a routine affair. Derived from the daunting term "transformational grammar," marketers now have a complete set of motivational profiling tools, which have emerged from Chomsky's obscure discoveries.

A powerful line of psycholinguistic tools evolved rapidly during the nineties resulting in comprehensive motivational profiling. These powerful, new motivational profiles document and diagnose customer decision making in terms of imagery, unconscious patterns and rational-emotional elements that drive customer decision-making. The result translates seamlessly into prescriptions for product positioning, ad concepts, messaging, ad copy and sales materials.

The coherent analysis of the inner workings of the customer's mind-set occurs in terms that make the persuasive requirements of the customer crystal clear. Superior motivational profiles can now provide qualitative information that is as hard-copy as marketing's quantitative tools.

This has been a major advance for marketers. The simple reason: high confidence in motivational profiles - when combined with quantitative data - are the catalyst that insures that a market segment will actually pay off to its full potential.

Sommer Consulting has been the leading edge organization in using this extremely effective combination of quantitative and qualitative power tools in marketing. Now marketers have objective, hard-copy findings about both motivation and emotion to combine with quantitative demographic work in one package. That combination is a direct path toward a healthy bottom line.

*Dr. Yeager is on the national board of the American Board of Law Enforcement Experts, where he also holds Diplomate status in the parent organization, the American College of Forensic Examiners International. He holds membership in the American Psychological Association and is a charter member of the American Psychological Society.

Television entertains us with detectives such as Lt. Columbo and Gus Grissom of CSI. These shows routinely demonstrate a basic fact: No behavior of any kind occurs unless there are three ingredients:

• Motive
• Opportunity
• Means

If detectives have these three sets of facts they catch bad guys. If marketers...

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