Insurance Comparison Websites Adverts Comparison

Insurance Comparison Websites Adverts Comparison

If you can spare the time please watch both and then watch them for a second time. Do you have a favourite? Clearly they are both out to achieve exactly the same thing. They want to plant their website name in your mind so that, when that occasion arrives each year for your car insurance renewal, you will make an association between their message and the process. It’s a challenging market to influence. Insurance is a low interest category and most people would prefer not to think about it unless they absolutely have to. The GoCompare advert certainly gets its name across. The use of a melody means the mental imprint is much stronger. The tune will bounce around in the mind of many, imprinting itself in the process. This is a good example of a marketing meme. A word, phrase or line that sticks in your mind and you […]

Meeting a Murderer

The man walked onto the station platform very casually.  Most of the other people around me paid him little or no attention at all, but I found my eyes drawn back to him repeatedly.  In fact, I had to work hard to make sure that he didn’t catch me looking his way a little too often. I tried to size up the situation.  The group around him were standing too far away to be friends, but they were close enough to suggest they weren’t strangers either.  I guessed they were fellow commuters, familiar with one another, but not with each others’ lives.  They didn’t know what I knew about him.  Instead they had been taken in like so many others by his relaxed air and general bonhomie. I considered what it was that had first made me recognise him; what unconscious reference had caused me to notice him, fixate my […]

What Consumer Behaviour Reveals about Sexism

When it comes to observing consumer behaviour, or any aspect of human behaviour, there is an important tip you would do well to keep in mind.  The process of observation needs to be as detached and objective as possible. It’s also worth remembering that you will learn the most when your presence as an observer isn’t something the people you’re observing are aware of: “I’ve just come here to watch, you carry on as normal” is not going to work.  You’ve just raised the question of what “normal” is and virtually guaranteed that someone is going to be consciously aware of their own actions. Yesterday I had a fascinating insight into sexist behaviour.  You know the sort of thing, putting women down, not treating them as equals, pushing people into gender stereotypes.  It can get you a little cross can’t it. Who was guilty of this?  Would you be surprised […]

Is There Really No Such Thing as Bad Publicity?

Following on from my post on the unconscious nature of advertising, Duane Cunninghamasked whether it was fair to say that any exposure was good for a brand?  The old chestnut of “there’s no such thing as bad PR”. Unsurprisingly perhaps, when it comes to consumer behaviour and the workings of the consumer mind, there isn’t a clear cut answer in my opinion.  Let me explain… For the most part exposure to a brand works positively.  As I’ve mentioned previously, the unconscious (largely visual) detection of brands builds unconscious familiarity and this alone is preferable to nothing.  When the brand is encountered consciously, it feels slightly familiar, safer and therefore slightly preferable to a previously unencountered rival. Often there will be some associations with that brand.  It might be a high street sign, in which case the associations are with the environment of that high street (perhaps upmarket, perhaps skanky!).  Even […]