Following on from Kiki Koutmeridou, we’ll continue this week with another Outside the Matrix interview: Florian Bauer from Vocatus AG in Germany, who studied psychology and economics at the Technical University in Darmstadt, at MIT, and at Harvard University. He has devoted himself to research into behavioural economics and the psychology of pricing, which were also the subject of his doctorate (“the psychology of price structure”). Starting his career as a strategy consultant at Booz, Allen & Hamilton 1996, he joined with two colleagues in founding Vocatus AG (a full-service market research and consulting company) in Munich in 1999. He’s also a member of the board of the German Market Research Association (BVM), and regularly teaches as a visiting professor at several universities in Germany. In 2005 and 2010 he won the ‘German Market Research Award‘ for the ‘Study of the Year‘ and in 2010 the ‘Best Methodological Paper Award’ at the ESOMAR Congress (global market research conference), and has subsequently won the the ESOMAR “Research Effectiveness Award” both in 2012 and 2013.
Tell us about your work: how does decision making psychology fit in it? Well, all I do is in fact decision making research. I see market research as nothing else than trying to understand the basic building block of an economy – the customers decision making process. And here, there is no better theoretical and methodological basis than behavioral economics even though this is often neglected in classic market research approaches.
Why you decide to go into industry instead of continuing in academia? Well, it was primarily “anticipation of regret”. I had a hard time deciding which path to follow. The reason why I picked business was for one part the idea that I could regret it later not having taken the chance to start my own company. For the other part it was the fact that I really wanted to apply the stuff I was doing and put it to test in the real world. Still today, this a thrill to me.
What do you enjoy the most in your current role? Do you see any challenges to the wider adoption of decision making psychology in your field? I love that I can do what I like most: Focusing on applying behavioral economics in marketing in general and pricing in specific. I love that we were able to attract a team of more than 70 colleagues that share the same interest and want to rock the boat. The only challenge I can see is the reluctance to adopt new approaches when the old ones are still massively promoted by large international research agencies. But quite frankly, the solution to this is to seek for more innovative clients that are willing to switch gears and go beyond the classic market research approaches. And that works quite well.
How do you see the relationship between academic researchers and practitioners? I think the perspectives are extremely different although they could profit much more from each other. While academia is focusing on a specific effect, on a specific theory, and the analysis of different ways of looking at the issue, practitioners are focusing a broader array of different questions. Where in the end they have to make a recommendation fast and still good enough.
What advice would you give to young researchers who might be interested in a career in your field? Test and decide, maybe try to do academic and market research in parallel. In any case, find your own way and do not focus on traditional career paths.
:InDecision: 