Persuasion master Duane Cunningham was interested to know what causes a customer to choose a product (and dating expert April Brasswell was curious curious too). I suppose, when it comes down to it, this is the most important question for a consumer behaviouralist like me to answer. The difficulty is that it’s a much easier question to ask than to answer – not that that makes it a bad question, I hasten to add. As it happens I’ve been steadily cataloguing (if that’s the right word – which it probably isn’t) the reasons that customers buy something. You may not be surprised to learn that there are quite a lot of factors that can be involved: thus far I’ve detailed 41. When it comes to any single consumer purchase there may be any number of these involved and the purchase is triggered (I suspect) when enough of them exist with sufficient strength to generate the […]
Too Much Choice: Part IV
Christian and Sonya raised an interesting conundrum with their question in reply to my last post. “In a category like breakfast cereal, are the manufacturers hurting themselves by having so many brands and varieties within those brands?” There are two aspects to this from a retail marketing and consumer behaviour perspective. The brands are doing themselves a favour (with an approach that was started by the cigarette manufacturers many decades ago): by proliferating the number of brand options you increase the likelihood that someone will choose one of your brands (and they basically don’t care which the customer takes so long as it’s one of theirs). This makes it much, much harder for a new entrant to take market share away. The retailers however are not helping their cause. It’s been found in one study of European supermarkets, that those who stock a smaller ranges sell more in total than those that stock […]
Too Much Choice: Part III
When faced with a small choice consumers can deploy simple strategies to make a choice and feel better about the option they choose. Three options usually works well because customers can use extremeness aversion. By selecting the middle option they know that they don’t have the worst that they might, but nor have they been indulgent and spent more than they might. The options present frame the choice; put another way, they way in which the decision is made is largely a by-product of what has been presented to the customer at the time he or she is making the choice. We’d all like to believe that what we’re buying is the thing we would want to buy in considering our own “needs” (and indeed marketers often talk about “consumer needs” as if such a thing were tangible and real. It isn’t. The human (and consumer) mind reacts to its […]
Too Much Choice: Part II
Whilst the idea that more choice is a ‘bad thing’ can feel counter-intuitive at times, it’s not hard to demonstrate. Imagine that you had to select a blog from a selection of twenty or so to follow for the next year, but that you could only choose one. You’d better pick well because you’re going to be stuck with it for a while! And don’t dwell too long on what you might be missing out on from the others that you don’t choose! On the other hand, what if there were just three to choose from? The chances are that even if you liked two you would find that selection process far, far easier. The key issues affecting consumers (and anyone else) when making a choice from a number of alternatives are: The absolute number of alternatives: however simple the choice, having to screen and mentally juggle a large number […]
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