Unless you’ve been living in a hole for the past few years you’ll be aware that the unconscious mind is crucially important in human (and consumer) behaviour.

The big question that arises from this appreciation is, “So what do I do about that?”

In Consumer.ology I make the point that the first thing you should do is stop focusing all your attention on the conscious mind.  It’s entirely understandable that people don’t embrace this all-important first stage: human beings are, if nothing else, extremely adept at indulging in wishful thinking.

Last night I played a tennis match against another Cambridgeshire team.  One of our opponents was grumpy, rude and unpleasant throughout the entire match: if a child behaved that way he would have been sent to his room until he could ‘play nice’.  The only disputed line call on our side of the net in four sets of tennis was when we didn’t call a second serve out!  After the other pair lost the point they felt this questionable call was grounds for complaint!

Given that I was confident we had done nothing to provoke such rancour, I could only conclude that the anger was misattributed to us, but actually caused by his mistakes in the match (of which there were many).  And that this was, in turn, a reflection of the fact that he firmly believed he was capable of playing considerably better than he was yesterday evening.

To put his tantrum at the end of the second match into context (score-line for the evening 6-4, 6-0; 6-1,6-0) he must have believed his capability was around Roger Federer’s level.

So you may be wondering, given my understanding of the situation, how did I appeal to his unconscious mind?  Well, I didn’t.  I settled for the fact that, in the context of the match, he was out of control and throwing it away.

But if you have products to sell, or if you want to influence people’s choices for health reasons, you will lose out if you don’t intervene in the unconscious processes that are currently causing your target customers to do the ‘wrong’ thing.

Before anything else, before the fact that people will love the taste, or appreciate the value, or dig the groovy ecological standards you adhere to, you must get their attention.

At present a number of schemes have been trialled to encourage healthy food choices that appeal to the conscious mind.  Results are mixed, but generally speaking this doesn’t work.  (It is revealing when confectionary companies happily put calorie information on the front of pack: it’s chocolate!!!)

The reason it doesn’t work is that it requires conscious engagement: IF you notice the calorie information (and you may well not do so), you have to make some kind of sense of it.

Is 187 calories from a pack of Maltesers a lot?  It doesn’t sound like many.  Framed against your recommended daily allowance, if you know it, of 2000 calories (for a woman) that leaves plenty.  And yet, the nature of those calories is that they will probably make you feel hungrier and eat more later on (because of the insulin produced in response to the sugar).

Given that most people prefer to let fast, efficient unconscious processes drive such decisions, this probably ends up as, “I feel OK buying this, and it will be yummy!”

In a US hospital researchers tried a different approach; one that was much more sympathetic to the unconscious mind.  They provided a simple colour coded health label of red, amber and green, to signify which options had the best nutritional value.  They then used signage to explain the labels and to encourage people to choose green-labelled options more often.  Whilst this might appear to be a conscious piece of communication, the likelihood is that the appearance of the distinctive colours on the labels triggered the attention at an unconscious level that caused people to consider their choices.  They also made choosing a healthy option extremely easy (and the unconscious mind likes easy!).

This labelling caused the purchase of red labelled items to drop by 9.2%.

They then went one stage further and made it even easier to choose the healthier options by grouping them together and putting them at eye level.

This caused the sale of red labelled items to drop another 4.9%.

At a conscious level I suspect that most of the customers visiting the cafeteria understood which foods were healthier.  The key was attracting attention to healthiness at the moment of purchase and making it easy to make a healthy choice.

In addition, people will have seen other people making selections and been aware that others may have been judging them on theirs: it’s hard to argue that your size is because you’re ‘big boned’ when you have 4000 calories of sugar on your lunch tray!  This is another reason why unconscious attention is so important: people don’t need to be aware that they’re factoring in what the people around them are doing for it to be exerting an influence on them.

No matter what you have to sell, before you can appeal to someone to make a different choice you need to attract the attention of their unconscious mind.

Source: Anne N. Thorndike, Lillian Sonnenberg, Jason Riis, Susan Barraclough, Douglas E. Levy. A 2-Phase Labeling and Choice Architecture Intervention to Improve Healthy Food and Beverage Choices. American Journal of Public Health, 2012; : e1 DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2011.300391

Image courtesy: Hartwig HKD