Personal perception for predicting product choice
The project will take a new technique devised in my ERC Advanced Investigator grant that measures implicit social biases in perception and applies it to the fields of sales and marketing. These fields have previously been reliant on paper-and-pencil tests which have a variety of problems including the faking of responses and vulnerability to demand characteristics. I have generated proof-of-principle evidence that my novel, tablet based measures of bias can be adapted to (i) measure product preference, (ii) predict the likelihood of an individual being persuaded to buy a product, and (iii) modify product value through self-association. In my PoC grant I will carry out field testing of the new products to ensure that they are practical in the real-world, do link and predict real-world purchasing behaviour ,and are perceived as useful by users. Commercially viable forms of the tablet-based tests will be developed and evaluated for robust and efficient behavioural measurement and reporting in the field.