Disgust in marketing research

I’ve been thinking about how disgust, defined as having a strong aversion or being repelled by something, is a pretty uncontrollable response that could be useful in consumer research.

Having looked up the definition and seen that the antonyms of disgust are just the sorts of things we seek to create from marketing comms I am encouraged; admiration, appeal, desire, esteem, fondness, like, liking, loving, respect, reverence.

The reason I stated thinking about it is that so much marketing research uses groups to discuss what they think about a particular product category, how they choose and use brands and what they do and don’t understand about a category. This has always seemed less than ideal to me as conscious responses are socially mediated; the group affecting the response and the facilitator and analysts laying their interpretation forward as ‘the truth’.

Research is essential to understanding a category, drivers of choice and brand positions but if we are using dodgy research methods then we are fooling ourselves that we really understand. We’ll find out the consequences of this some months or years in future when advertising propositions fail to create the consumer response we seek even though they perform well in research groups.

So how might disgust be used in research? Is it the link between functionality and emotional appeal – a kind of functional emotion and importantly one that can’t be controlled by consumers?

Alas no. It seems the disgust we exhibit is inherited but not genetically rather socially through mothers teaching their offspring expressions of disgust to avoid them eating nasty things. Worse than that (for my idea) it seems this teaching extends to expressions of disgust for certain types of reprehensible behaviour and even classes of people. Oh dear.

So if disgust is in fact an expression of learned social behaviour, then perhaps it’s role in research can’t be as an uncontaminated source of consumer insight about deeper wants and needs? But instead it might be a way of tracking how successfully marketing and communications have managed to create social norms against which consumers can judge the need for a product or decide how to behave in a certain situation? Brands could map themselves against category disgust in some way?

For brandsthis would mean instead of promoting, for example, the positive benefits of giving Ferero Rocher chocolates as an indulgent and special gift to a party/dinner host(actually that’s probably not a good example) but bear with me, and instead focus on the unforgiveable social faux pas of not giving Ferero Rocher or indeed any gift to your host, so the disgust mechanism could be invoked?

Maybe this use of disust is only applicable at the category level? Although a brand could certainly use it as a differentiator making that brand selection the most adequate respone to avoidance of a disgust?

I still like the strength of emotion disgust involves. It’s better than a lot of weak and vague positive comments from a consumer group.

God how it disgusts me when we sit in a qual research debrief and hear a subjective evaluation of a some skimpy and vaguely positive comments, having to come to a consensus of meaning for social/business harmony!

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