Consumer Behaviour

It’s more than a little ironic: as a consultant helping organisations understand the psychology of their customers better, my biggest challenge is navigating my own customers’ psychological heuristics and biases. Sometimes the work is done for me: faced with a market research tracking study that confounds their belief about their brand or the firm’s increasing sales and market share, people can be very receptive to learning why asking questions is frequently a poor route to understanding consumers. However, often there is a fundamental belief that past market research has been helpful and that makes people understandably resistant to taking a different approach: why fix it if it you can’t see that its broken? Part of the problem, and it’s only one part, is that our minds jump to conclusions to protect the sense that we’re smart and in control.  Rather than take a dispassionate, objective view of events and the information that informed […]

Part One Recently I was in heading for a meeting with a company in a part of London I haven’t visited for several years. I arrived by tube and emerged from the station into a shopping centre. Since I had some time to spare I decided to have a wander around and undertake a bit of shopper-watching (something I enjoy a lot more than shopping). What struck me most was the nature of the shops I was seeing: virtually every single store was a food outlet!  Cafes, restaurants, fast food outlets, coffee shops, bakeries… almost nothing but food. That there is a trend favouring this kind of retail doesn’t surprise me: on-line shopping has grown rapidly by virtue of being able to offer more choice, more cheaply and, frequently, more conveniently. Our love of what’s easy extends to food: increasingly, we pick up something that’s been prepared for us rather […]

There is a potential paradox with being powerful: a powerful person is more likely to make a decision, but he or she is also more likely to be wrong! It’s easy to see how, in evolutionary terms, power was helpful: small nomadic groups benefitted from sticking together and without a powerful leader, the group might easily fragment.  Even now, a company that can take action quickly can steal a march on its competitors. Anyone who has ever served on a committee will appreciate, the larger the group of people who feel they have a role in determining the group’s direction, the more tedious and protracted the process of making a decision becomes.  Sometimes it’s a miracle that larger committees achieve anything at all. So, having powerful people is vital for efficient progress but, as we all know, powerful people can become blinkered and make decisions that are questionable.  The problem […]

Psychology is a fundamental part of sport. Yesterday I was at a tennis training session with an astoundingly good tennis coach: he was pointing out the difference in the way most of us higher team players hit our returns of serve and next shots in matches, compared to when we’re hitting consecutive shots in the warm up. In the warm up for a doubles match we will happily drill balls at our opponent as he stands at the net to practice his volleys.  In a match, we hit our returns well and then try and conjure up an entirely different shot when the ball comes back to us.  Burdened by a desire to bring about a particular outcome, we try and force the point and frequently fail to pull it off. Of course, this isn’t the result of a conscious decision to play in a particular way.  Our unconscious minds […]