Gladwell & The Narratives Behind Brands

Malcolm Gladwell (author of "Blink") recently had a book review in The New Yorker about “Why?” by Charles Tilly (Sociologist and Columbia University scholar). In the book, Tilly attempts to understand how we come up with reasons for everything. His hypothesis is that we rely on 4 general categories of any rationale:

1. Conventions - conventionally accepted explanations (“thou shalt not steal”)
2. Stories - a very specific account of cause and effect (“I was playing with my truck, and then Geoffrey came in . . .”)
3. Codes - which are high-level conventions, social rules and categories (if you're turned down for a mortgage, you’ve shown an inability to conform to a prescribed standard of creditworthiness)
4. Technical Accounts - stories informed by specialized knowledge and authority (giving patient and expert attention to every sort of
nuance and detail)

On Gladwell's blog is a message from Jason Oke, Sr. Planner at Leo Burnett Toronto, which uses this theory to explain the limits of market research:

How we feel about a brand, and which products and services we choose, is usually explained by a fantastically complex set of factors: the brands our parents used, the brands we see people around us use, the image of the brand, our personal experience with it, a sale, a half-remembered ad from 10 years ago, and so on. This is probably best explained as a story - we may both buy Tide, but there's a different narrative that brought each of us to pick it up.

But in market research, the answers people give sound more like conventions: "It's a good value", "my family likes it", "it tastes good." And it seems that because of the artificiality of the situation, the perils of introspection, etc, most market research actually encourages people to answer in conventions, and doesn't encourage the telling of stories. Many of these stories are probably complex and deeply buried such that they are hard to consciously access anyway.