It was Henry Ford, founder and visionary of the Ford Motor Company who said,

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’’.

In the face of changing times, Ford managed to uphold his own vision and grow the conglomerate of his own business by upholding his own certainty.

However, Ford was also the one who attributed his ‘one secret of success’ to “the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own”.

As simple as this rule is, how is it that Ford balanced so many perspectives without devaluing himself?

As marketing executives have grown to rely on their intuition and develop an eye for detecting value in different products and services, they may also become susceptible to projecting their own personal preferences as the preferences of consumers. Known as the False Consensus Effect, the egocentric tendency to project personal preferences onto consumers is an unconscious bias that could affect marketers and consumers.

 Through a variety of different studies, researchers Walter Herzog, Johannes D. Hattula, and Darren W. Dahl have investigated the influence of preference certainty on the false consensus effect as well as the ability of marketers to suppress their own personal preferences.

Pilot Studies: Identifying the False Consensus Bias

 Using 100 marketing managers from European business schools, the researchers began with two pilot studies to measure the presence of the false consensus effect among marketers as well as their own intuitive knowledge of their projection of personal preferences. Additionally, in a second pilot study, they then had these marketing executives evaluate the value of the different traits of Moorman’s nine most notable skills of managers, with the ability to separate personal preferences from target audience preferences as an additional skill.

As hypothesized, over 90% of marketing managers witnessed the false consensus effect among marketers they have worked with and 86.6% recognized themselves as victims of the false consensus bias as well. Even more impressive though, was that marketers overwhelmingly agreed that the ability to separate personal preferences from the preferences of their target audience was the most important skill a marketer could possess.

Methodology: Suppressing Personal Preferences

In a series of 4 studies involving over 80 participants from the European Marketing Association, researchers delved deeper into the results of suppressing personal preferences. They were curious to learn how the deliberate attempt to suppress personal preferences could influence the false consensus effect overall.

With different levels of preference certainty about different products, researchers demonstrated advertisements for Reality Headset products and asked marketing managers to give objective opinions about its applicability to university students- the predetermined target audience. However, to determine the actual certainty markets had, they not only had to numerically indicate their certainty but in certain trials actually received false feedback intervention in which fake customers listed alternative viewpoints to make marketers question their judgment.

The Results of Balancing Preference Certainty

The final results of the experiment indicated two very significant results. In cases of high preference certainty, marketers attempt to suppress their personal preferences led to much lower chances of the false consensus bias. Those with high amounts of certainty were most likely to have biases but can easily be corrected when made aware of their bias. On the other hand, those with low amounts of certainty became more likely to become victims to the false consensus effect as questioning their decisions caused them to have counterintuitive, ‘ironic’ effects on their decisions made.

Regardless of certainty level, one manner that proved to avoid the false consensus effects was asking marketers to present the “voice of the customer” in the company and provide opinions with a customer-oriented point of view. In this approach, all marketing managers effectively mitigated their own biases while also remaining intuitively true to their own experience and expertise.

Your Consumer Behavior Insights

• The False Consensus Effect is not a desirable tendency and leads to prediction errors

• The ability to differentiate between personal preferences and preferences of consumers is one of the most important abilities of a marketer

• Higher amounts of certainty lead to more susceptibility to the false consensus effect

• Low amounts of certainty are not very susceptible to the false consensus effect

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References

Herzog, Walter & Hattula, Johannes & Dahl, Darren. (2021). EXPRESS: Marketers Project Their Personal Preferences onto Consumers: Overcoming the Threat of Egocentric Decision Making. Journal of Marketing Research. 002224372199837. 10.1177/0022243721998378.

10 Marketing Quotes by Henry Ford. (2017, November 01). Retrieved from https://www.briansorce.com/10-marketing-quotes-henry-ford/