I read recently that a study has found that we don’t see things all the time. Brain activity has peaks and troughs (about ten per second) and when it’s in a trough we don’t see. Then there is inattentional blindness. You know, the thing that happens when a man in a monkey suit walks across a two-ball basketball counting game (it happens all the time, but people fail to see monkey-man because they’re so busy counting the number of passes). And then there’s the problem that my wife can’t find her keys or her phone or her address book (often her address book). Because I understand the psychology of looking at stuff I know that her strategy is a reckless one. It’s no good putting stuff down any old place and relying on your eyes to find it when you start looking. You might momentarily have your attention elsewhere, or […]
Technorati
Technorati Profile It turns out that setting up technorati is not as straightforward as it might be with WordPress. This blog is simply to give technorati the code it wants – hopefully I can delete it soon! Philip
Advertising Reviews
Technorati Profile Every so often I take an advertisement, usually from TV, and analyse it from a consumer perspective. What I’m interested in is the way in which the advert is likely to work at an unconscious level, since I’m convinced that this is most important dimension for marketing communication of this kind. Now that presents it’s own particular problem, because it’s generally acknowledged that we have no direct link between our unconscious and conscious minds. The unconscious triggers various feelings, which our conscious mind then receives and attempts to decode into some kind of rational explanation: “I feel bad, I must not like what I’m looking at.” Unfortunately there’s lots of evidence to show that we’re quite bad at evaluating these feelings accurately (which is one of the reasons that consumer research has so much potential to be misleading). By applying models of how people think and developing my […]
New Articles on Consumer Behaviour
I have a couple of new articles on consumer behaviour available on my main site. “How to Make Your Customer Buy” (see the Latest Articles section at the top on the left), reveals what some of the most recent research into what influences consumers has discovered. This is one of those occasions where the information from one of my articles could be used by the unscrupulous to push people into purchases they wouldn’t otherwise make. I hope you won’t misuse this information. “What Other People Think” reviews the implications of some of the latest neuroscience that looks at why people change their opinions when they learn what other people think about something. These are articles that people who have signed up for my E-zine get to know about first, so if you’re interested in the latest consumer behaviour research you can save yourself some time and effort by signing up; […]
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