Ideas

I have believed for a long time that asking people what they think is a desperately unreliable way to go about understanding what they really think. Jessica Rabbit, the main love interest in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit famously complained, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”. I feel very similarly about people’s capacity for inaccurate portrayals of themselves, “They’re not bad, their brains are just designed that way”. Of course, accepting that people are poor witnesses to their own thoughts is problematic: It requires us to accept we might be similarly afflicted. It means a lot of what passes for good judgment in terms of understanding consumers is not very good at all. Once you start accepting the role of the unconscious mind in your own behaviour it can be very helpful. There are ways of guarding against making bad decisions (such as by making checklists) and when you’re […]

The effect of advertising is starting to rumble in my house. My children, now aged 9 and 7, have finally been allowed to watch commercial television. It is illuminating to track the “I really want…” in light of this additional influence, the school playground having already nurtured desires of its own. Recently my daughter explained that she ‘really wanted’ to buy some kind of squirting dinosaur toy. They sounded dreadful and I questioned whether they would really live up to her expectations: I also asked whether or not she might have been unduly influenced by the excited children that I assumed had been depicted in the advert. To her credit she took little convincing that she might be wasting her money. Such marketing influences aren’t always bad. Recently a group visited my children’s school to do a demonstration of skipping (or, as I believe American’s call it, jumping rope, which […]

In the past week there has been a fuel shortage in the UK. This wasn’t the result of any change to the supply of fuel, but by dramatically increased demand. That demand was triggered by government advice that people should fill up their cars because a strike by petrol tanker drivers was quite likely. The media, who were of course the ones who were so quick to pass on the views of government ministers and report the threat of strike action from the drivers’ union, were then surprised when consumers started queuing for fuel and stations ran dry. Why, they wondered, were people queuing for fuel when there was no confirmed strike? The answer, from a psychological standpoint, is very simple: loss aversion…. … with a bit of social proof, some availability bias and the influence of authority. But not necessarily in that order. First was the availability bias and influence […]

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 […]