The Shopper’s Desired Cosmetic-Counter Experience: A Mind Genomics Cartography of Emotions

Abstract

The study explores the mind of the shopper from the inside out, focusing on motives and interests emerging from the respondent’s own perception of herself with respect to an ideal skincare shopping experience. A Mind Genomics cartography (experiment) investigated the phrases that a female cosmetic shopper would use to describe herself in terms of the ultimate skincare shopping experience. Respondents evaluated sixty-three unique vignettes, created from 35 different phases, vignettes created according to a permuted experimental design. The analysis focused on the discovery of ‘mind-sets’, groups of respondents who showed similar patterns in the element which they felt best escribed them. Three mind-sets emerged: Ebullient, Insecure, and Perfectionist, respectively. A second analysis (scenario analysis) looked at the way five different emotional outcomes (e.g., pleasurable, informative) interacted with the remaining elements. Four of the five emotional outcomes (pleasurable, informative, glamorizing, and therapeutic) interacted with other element, but only among two mind-sets (Ebullient, Perfectionists). There were no interactions for the third mind-set, Insecure, or interactions when the emotional outcome was stated as ‘transformative.’ The paper shows the potential of deep analysis when the data are collected in a systematized fashion, using permutable experimental designs, and individual-level modeling.