The mountain and the self
Editor's note: Jim Nowakowski is president of Interline Creative Group, a B2B marketing and research consultancy serving manufacturers in building products, HVAC, plumbing and kitchen and bath for more than 30 years. He also leads AIM (Accountability Information Management), a market research and intelligence firm. He holds an M.A. in English from DePaul University. Find Nowakowski on LinkedIn.
A recent piece in Quirk’s (“More than meets the I: Why marketing research must rethink identity,” May/June 2026) presented an argument that researchers have been quietly making for years: Consumers don’t act from a single, stable identity. They are contextually inconsistent. The self they bring to a political decision is not the self that shows up at the checkout page. The values they claim on a survey aren’t the values that drive the purchase.
The article cited William James, Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman. It invoked the fragmented modern subject. It was well-argued, well-sourced and – as a call to arms for better research design – not as helpful as it could have been.
Not because it’s wrong. But because it stopped exactly where the useful thinking begins.
What the multiplicity argument gets right
The observation that humans contain multitudes is not new. Freud built a career on it. Jung refined it. Every serious novelist from Dostoevsky to Henry James – whose entire body of work is an investigation into the gap between what characters appear to be and what they actually are – understood it at a level that clinical psychology is still catching up to.
People do not present the same self in every context. The person who describes themselves as budget-conscious buys premium. The committed environmentalist wears fast fashion. The skeptic purchases wellness crystals. These are not acts of hypocrisy. They are evidence of a genuine and persistent human complexity, a plurality of selves that coexist within a single character.
So far, so good.
The trouble starts when multiplicity becomes the conclusion rather than the premise.
If the practical takeaway from acknowledging human complexity is simply “design your segmentation frameworks to include situational, emotional and aspirational identities,” you haven’t solved the research problem. You’ve just multiplied it. Now instead of one unstable self to measure, you have six.
More importantly – and this is the argument I want to make – the multiple selves framework, taken to its logical extreme, implies that human behavior is essentially unpredictable. Context-dependent. Situationally determined. And therefore, not really researchable in any robust sense.
That conclusion is wrong. And it misunderstands what actually drives behavior.
The character underneath
Beneath the shifting selves, there is something that doesn’t shift. Call it character. Call it the organizing principle of personality. It is the structure through which all of the situational selves are filtered, the ground that makes the figure possible.
Freud knew this. The ego mediates between the id’s impulse and the superego’s constraint, but it does so according to patterns – defenses, habits, preferences – that are deeply and stubbornly individual. Jung’s concept of individuation was precisely the project of uncovering and integrating that core self.
Trait psychology makes the same claim empirically. The Big Five personality dimensions – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism – are remarkably stable across situations and across the lifespan. They predict behavior in contexts as varied as career success, relationship satisfaction and consumer choice. The situationist critique of personality research, dominant for a period in the 20th century, has largely given way to interactionist models: character and context both matter, but character is the more durable of the two.
What does this mean for market research? It means the goal shouldn’t be to chase the shifting self. It means the goal is to design research that brings the relevant self forward – to construct the conditions under which the character trait you actually care about will show up and speak.
Go to the mountain
There is an old saying: If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.
Market research, for too long, has been trying to get the mountain to come to it. We ask people to introspect on motivations they can’t fully access, to predict behaviors they haven’t yet performed, to describe preferences that only exist in specific contexts that the survey instrument doesn’t recreate.
The better move is to go to the mountain. Design the study to create the conditions under which the relevant self naturally appears.
Take a simple example: red shoes. You could survey consumers about whether they prefer red shoes. You’d get unreliable data, because the self that wants red shoes may not be present during your research window. It might be dormant. It might be suppressed by whatever else is going on in that person’s life that day.
But ask a different question: “Would you wear red shoes to your nephew’s graduation?” or “Would you wear red shoes on a first date?” or “Would you wear red shoes to a job interview at a law firm?” – and now you’ve done something different. You’ve activated a specific self by anchoring it to a specific context. You’ve given the respondent a situation to inhabit rather than a preference to inventory.
The answers you get from those questions are not only more predictive, they are more honest. Because the self that answers “yes, absolutely, to the graduation” and “no, never, to the law firm interview” is not being inconsistent. It is being precise. It knows which version of itself belongs where.
The research design implication
This is not simply a matter of adding scenario-based questions to an existing survey. It is a methodological orientation – one that starts with a different assumption about what research can and cannot uncover.
What it cannot uncover: a single, stable, context-free preference that will predict behavior across all situations. That self does not exist and spending research resources looking for it is why so many studies produce findings that are accurate in aggregate and useless in application.
What it can uncover: the conditions under which a particular behavior is likely to occur. The triggers that bring a specific self forward. The frictions that suppress it. The situations in which stated values and actual choices converge – and the situations in which they diverge.
This requires researchers to think less like surveyors and more like playwrights. A playwright doesn’t ask characters to describe themselves. A playwright puts characters in situations and watches what they do. The situation is the instrument.
A concrete application: The specifier who says no – and signs yes
The principle is abstract enough to require a grounding example. Here is one drawn from professional practice – one that researchers serving B2B manufacturers, architects and specifier communities will recognize immediately.
Many specifiers – architects, engineers, designers – will tell you directly and with conviction that they oppose a particular building material category. They associate it with inferior construction, aesthetic compromise or environmental concern. It sits below their professional standards. Ask them on a survey and they say no. Ask them at a panel discussion and they say no louder.
Then look at their project specifications. It’s there – repeatedly, across project types and client budgets.
This is not hypocrisy. It is the same phenomenon described above: two selves, operating from different logics, arriving at different answers to what appears to be the same question.
The research question is not “Why do specifiers say one thing and do another?” The research question is “Which self is actually in charge when the specification gets written – and what does the other self tell itself to make peace with that decision?”
Designing the study
The appropriate method is qualitative – specifically, a series of in-depth interviews (IDIs) with specifiers who meet a dual-screen criterion: they have publicly expressed skepticism or opposition toward the material category AND their project record includes specifications of that material within the past 24 months.
The dual screen is essential. You are not studying specifiers who oppose the material and avoid it. You are studying the ones who live in the contradiction. That is where the character is visible.
Phase one: Establish the professional self
Open without any mention of the material in question. Allow the specifier to construct their professional identity on their own terms. Explore:
How do they describe their design or specification philosophy? What words do they reach for?
What materials do they associate with quality, integrity and long-term performance?
What does a specification decision look like from the inside – who is in the room, what are the pressures, what is the sequence?
How do they think about the relationship between their professional values and their clients’ practical constraints?
At this stage the researcher is not looking for answers about the material. They are establishing the baseline self – the professional identity the specifier presents and believes in. This is the self that says no.
Phase two: Introduce the situation
Now introduce specific project scenarios – not the material directly but the conditions under which difficult specification decisions typically occur. Present each as a realistic project brief:
A public sector renovation. Demanding performance requirements. A compressed budget. An immovable completion deadline. What does the specification look like and how do you get there?
A mid-market commercial project. The developer has value-engineered three line items. You are protecting the primary client-facing spaces. What decisions do you make elsewhere?
A corporate interior. The client wants a premium aesthetic throughout. The timeline is tight. Where do you hold the line and where do you find room to move?
These scenarios are not traps. They are mountain-building – constructing the specific situational conditions under which the practical self typically takes over. The researcher watches which self shows up and how the handoff happens. The key question is not what they specify. It is the moment of decision – and the language they use to navigate it internally.
Phase three: Surface the rationalization
After the respondent has worked through one or more scenarios – and, ideally, arrived at a specification they would not have volunteered as a preference – the researcher introduces the reconciliation probe:
“You mentioned earlier that you tend to avoid certain material categories when you can. Walk me through how you think about that in a situation like this one.”
“What would you say to a client who asked why you made this call?”
“What would you say to a colleague who saw the spec sheet?”
“Is there a version of this project where you decide differently? What changes?”
The gap between the answer to question two and question three is often where the most useful data lives. The client answer tends to be practical and confident. The colleague answer tends to reveal the underlying value tension – and the terms on which the practical self has negotiated a settlement with the professional self.
Phase four: The direct probe
Late in the interview, after trust is established and the respondent has already demonstrated the contradiction in action, introduce the material category by name:
“When you think about this material category generally – not in a specific project context, just as a category – what comes to mind first?”
“Has that picture changed at all over the course of your career?”
“Are there conditions under which it is actually the right answer – not the compromise answer, but the right one?”
“What would it have to do – or stop doing – to feel like a first-choice material to you?”
This sequence matters because it comes after the respondent has already, in the scenario phase, effectively answered yes to the last question through their behavior. The direct probe now asks them to catch up to themselves – to articulate what the practical self already knows.
What the analysis is looking for
The unit of analysis is not the specification decision. It is the character trait that makes the decision possible – the underlying disposition that allows the professional self and the practical self to coexist without permanent conflict.
Across interviews, you are looking for patterns in how that negotiation happens. The likely character types that will emerge:
The Pragmatist. Holds aesthetic or values-based positions genuinely but subordinates them to client service without significant internal conflict. The material is a tool. The right tool for the right job. Professional identity is rooted in problem-solving, not material loyalty.
The Compartmentalizer. Keeps the stated opposition intact by quarantining the specification decision. “That project was different.” “That client didn’t give me a choice.” The professional self is preserved by being insulated from the practical decision. The material never becomes acceptable in principle – it just keeps being excused in practice.
The Quiet Convert. Has privately revised their view – driven by product improvement, performance data or evolving standards – but has not updated their public position because the peer community hasn’t moved. The stated opposition is increasingly performative. This is the most valuable segment for any category marketer trying to shift professional perception.
The Threshold Specifier. Has an internal calculus – project type, budget tier, client sophistication, visibility of the application – below which the material becomes acceptable and above which it doesn’t. Not a values conflict so much as a tiering system. The material belongs in some contexts and not others and that boundary is negotiable.
The strategic payoff
Each of these character types implies a different communication strategy. The Pragmatist responds to performance data and specification support tools. The Compartmentalizer needs permission language – ways to make the practical decision without threatening the professional identity. The Quiet Convert needs social proof that the peer community is already moving. The Threshold Specifier needs product differentiation that allows the material to cross their internal line.
None of those strategies are available if you start with the survey finding that specifiers oppose the material. That finding is true – and completely useless.
The research design described here doesn’t try to resolve the contradiction. It goes to the mountain. It constructs the situation in which the specifying self shows up, watches how the negotiation between selves happens and maps the character underneath.
That character is the audience. Not the stated position.
A note on humility
There is one more thing worth saying and it applies to the original article as much as it applies here.
The character that underlies the multiple selves – the organizing principle that Freud and Jung spent careers trying to describe – is not easily accessible to research instruments of any kind. It is not something people can reliably self-report. It is not something that emerges cleanly from behavioral data. It is glimpsed more than measured. It reveals itself over time, in repeated choices, under pressure, in contradiction.
Which means that anyone who tells you their research design can reliably predict individual consumer behavior – across contexts, across time, across the full range of human situational variability – is overselling. The goal of good research is not omniscience. It is better-than-chance prediction in defined conditions.
Acknowledging that the self is complex is the beginning of better research design. Treating complexity as the final answer is where the work stops.
Go to the mountain. Build the situation. Let the self show up.