The Laws of Choice: Predicting Customer Behavior

How do customers decide what products and brands to buy? With the rise of sophisticated advertising and marketing research methods in this century, business leaders have spent billions of dollars attempting to answer this perplexing question. Occasionally, analysts emerge with suggestive trends, but ultimately with little hard evidence to support any definitive "laws" of customer choice.
Now, in this much-anticipated major work, Eric Marder reveals how universal patterns in survey responses lead not only to general principles in marketing but to empirically verifiable laws of human nature itself. Drawing on forty years of applying his pioneering experimental design techniques to marketing research surveys, Marder presents a global theory of choice behavior, supported by original data reported here for the first time from thousands of massive real-life experiments based on millions of interviews. His dramatic findings about pricing, optimal marketing tactics, product evaluation, the relative role of product and image, and advertising effectiveness will make this book required reading for the entire marketing community. Of special interest to social scientists and survey research practitioners will be Marder's powerful research designs and techniques, including the unbounded write-in scale for measuring desirability (attitude) and his methodological analyses of the relationships among beliefs (perceptions), desires, choice, and behavior.
In the Preface, he writes: "At the core of the theory are three laws of choice behavior the Law of Congruence, the Law of Primacy, and the Law of Persistence. These laws are both general and self-evident. At first glance, they are so self-evident that you might say: 'I have known this all along.' My reply is: 'Of course you have known it all along. But there is a difference between knowing and knowing, between the passive knowing that allows us to persist in actions that are inconsistent with what we know, and the active knowing that helps us change the way we do things.' I believe that knowing the laws of choice behavior-really knowing them -- changes the way we do things. My crass but stringent criterion has been that a good theory should enable someone equipped with it to make more money than someone who isn't. I believe my theory has passed this test."

Eric Marder is Chairman of Eric Marder Associates, Inc., a marketing research and consulting firm he founded in 1960. The company specializes in "Choice Research," a term Marder uses to distinguish the discipline presented in this book from traditional marketing research. His client list through the years has included American Home Products, AT&T, Campbell Soup, CBS, General Foods, General Mills, GTE, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Scott Paper, Xerox, and others. He is married and lives in Manhattan.