Why People Buy: Insights for Your Marketing Strategy

Persuading people to like—and ultimately buy—your brand of product or service is every marketer’s goal.  But how do you discover what your customers will like when they may not even know themselves until it happens?  Can insights from consumer psychology be used to influence people’s perceptions, to create “liking”—and generate sales?

Jonathan will discuss how to:
            · Identify factors that companies can control to influence whether consumers will like their brand
            · Understand what happens when consumers grow tired of making choices
            · Determine the limits of influence that firms have on their customers’ choices

Bio:

Jonathan Levav studies consumer behavior and behavioral decision theory. He combines laboratory and field experiments, as well as secondary data = analysis, in order to study the factors that influence people's choices and judgments. His research on choice focuses on three inter-related areas: 1) understanding the role of product attributes in people’s use of contextual cues; 2) the influence of environmental—social and physical—contextual cues on choices; 3) the contextual variables introduced by previous choices in sequential decisions. His research on judgment focuses on two areas: 1) preference prediction; 2) likelihood judgment. He has published in leading marketing, economics, psychology and general science journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Political Economy, Psychological Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Jonathan Levav is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research is aimed at understanding consumer's judgments and choices by using tools from experimental psychology and behavioral economics. In particular, he studies the contextual factors that influence people's choices and judgments. His research is both basic and applied--from probability judgment to product customization decisions.

Jonathan received his PhD in marketing from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, and his A.B. in public and international affairs from Princeton University. He is the winner of the Hillel Einhorn Young Investigator Award, awarded biennially by the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making. Prior to joining Stanford he was a member of the faculty at the Columbia Business School.