Jonathan Cook

Researcher, Consultant, and Writer in Ithaca, NY, United States

Jonathan Cook

Researcher, Consultant, and Writer in Ithaca, NY, United States

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The mission of my work is the restoration of a human vision of commerce. I pursue this through thick qualitative research, including immersive interviews and extended ethnography. After work in the field is done, I use techniques of symbolic analysis, ritual design, and emotional synthesis to reveal deeper currents of meaning that typical applied research fails to reach.

I host the Stories of Emotional Granularity podcast as a project to articulate the diversity emotional frames of mind that shape our perceptions and motivate our behavior.

However, three decades of research in consumer motivation have led me to one conclusion: Understanding consumer motivation isn't enough.

Businesses need to understand the qualitative dimensions of their customers' emotional motivations. However, storytelling about models of non-rational motivation remains abstract until these models are linked to concrete consumer behavior.

That's where ritual analysis comes in. Ritual analysis links deep psychological motivators with specific elements of behavior, delivering a ritual marketing plan that is as actionable as it is culturally authentic.

  • Work
    • In-depth consumer research, ritual analysis