Consumer Behaviour

Judging from the replies yesterday, some of you are certainly familiar with the concept that customer perceptions may not tally with reality.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that there are even a few cliches on the subject. And I’m the sort of person who dislikes cliches and enjoys challenging them whenever possible; they can be an excuse for not bothering to think about something.

For example, take the old chestnut of which came first the chicken or the egg? It seems pretty clear to me that it was the egg, so using this as a phrase to convey the point that the sequencing of events is unclear to you, simply suggests to me that you haven’t thought about it enough! [Where something evolved to a point where whomever decides such things was willing to say, "Yes, what you have there is what I would call a chicken" it must have been a thing that had hatched from an egg, but wasn't totally present in either parent.]

Similarly, when someone’s reply to a question is, “Ah yes, well, how long’s a piece of string, eh?” my answer is , “Around 8.5 inches.” That’s a reasonable average for a piece of string; reflecting the fact that it’s something that was left over from a whole ball of string and was deemed useful enough to keep around the place for possible future use.

However, when it comes to understanding consumers it is true to say that “perception is all”.

To give you an example: a friend of mine is a real fan of Apple stuff. Since he bought his first iPod he’s become a complete Apple bore; forever pointing out how good the techology and service is, and how superior the products are to their competitors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Apple stuff isn’t very good, but that’s not my point.

You see, he’ll repeat this Apple mantra at any reasonable opportunity: the other day when someone was asking around what laptop he should buy everyone who knows him smiled ruefully when they asked my friend; sure enough out came the Apple speech with which we were all familiar.

But later that same day my friend’s Apple iPhone stopped working. He passed it to me and asked if I could reset it for him. It transpired that this wasn’t the first time it had happened. In fact, it had happened quite a lot. And yet, because this experience didn’t fit with his perception of Apple products he divorced it from that part of his brain that retains Apple things.

In psychological terms this is a classic example of confirmation bias. In consumer behaviour terms it’s a classic case of what I would call brand blindness; where an event that doesn’t tally with a consumer’s perception of a brand they are effectively blind to it. I’ve seen it a lot, from manufacturing brands like Apple, car brands like BMW and Mercedes, and even some retailers benefit from this golden halo effect: they can provide lousy service but still be thought of in rosy terms by the people they let down.

Next time I’ll explain why you can’t rely on what consumers tell you about their attitudes to brands.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour articles, consumer behaviour, consumer choice, consumer research, psychology

When it comes to understanding consumer behaviour there’s a tricky conundrum; a consumer’s perception of a brand is far more important than the reality of their experience.

But…

You can’t trust people to account for their perceptions accurately.

So, how can you get any further forward if understanding consumers is important to you?

I’ll leave you to think about it and tell you more next time!

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour consumer behaviour, consumer research

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 be in one of those brain activity dips when you happen to walk past it.

Then you get cross because you can’t find it and, when someone else points out where it is, you get even more cross because you’d looked there.

So I always put the things I might lose in the same place. I always know where they are. [One other option is to attach everything you own to a piece of string; that way you always know where it is... on the string.]

What has all this got to do with consumers? Well, when we do something in our business we see it. We know it’s there because we thought about it.

But that’s no guarantee that your customers will see it.

So one of the most important skills in understanding consumers is to recognise that they don’t see your world and your products in the way you do. If you have a physical shop it is really useful to stand back and watch where they look and, in particular, where there attention lingers.

If you only sell on-line there are only two things you can do:

1. Learn how consumers’ minds work and what influences them (I wrote my EBook The Secret of Selling to help with this).
2. Trial different approaches to how you present your information and measure the response.

Now, if I could only find my keys, I’d go to the bank like I’ve been meaning to for three days.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour analysis, consumer behaviour, influence, marketing communication, psychology, selling, The Secret of Selling

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

Philip Graves Uncategorized

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 own split personality I keep a trained eye on my own unconscious reaction to the adverts I encounter and then set about trying to decode what it is that does or doesn’t work about what I’ve seen.

How effective is this?  Well, you can decide for yourself if you take a quick hop over to my home page and look at one or more of the articles at the top left, headed Advertising Reviews: the most recent is called “A Bad Ad in a Good Cause“.

Please do drop back over here and let me know what you think.  Advertising is a notoriously subjective issue, but I’m working on ways to remove that subjectivity; I’m interested to know if you think I’ve achieved that.

Philip

Philip Graves Advertising Advertising, analysis, consumer behaviour, marketing communication, TV

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; I won’t give out your email address to anyone else, ever, but you will receive my Mindshop! consumer behaviour E-zine every couple of weeks.

Please do come back and let me know what you think …

Philip
Technorati Profile

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, selling articles, consumer behaviour, E-zine, influence, neuroscience

Tinnitus expert Jennifer Battaglino mentioned that she would like some suggestions on how to apply memes in her marketing so I thought I would add to yesterday’s post on what makes for a good meme by talking about the ways in which you might use them.

Incidentally, questions like Jennifer’s are enormously helpful to me when I’m thinking what to write, so thank you for all your questions and comments (this is very much an interactive process – I hope it feels like it!)

The key is to think about any aspect of your business in terms of how readily it will be assimilated by your customers and potential customers and passed on. 

At the more obvious end are things like your brand name and website address; how easy are these to recall accurately first time?

Next come the slightly more subtle elements; is your logo distinctively expressed?  Does it have a unique feel to it that will reinforce it in the mind; does it conjure an image when people think of the company name?  The more your name is seen as a picture the more likely it is to be remembered.

Tag lines are incredible useful for creating memes; in fact one could argue quite reasonably that memes are what tag lines are all about.  They can seem extremely glib and silly when you know your business is about far more than a short catchphrase; but remember that the guy who makes baked beans cares about every aspect of his offer too; the recipe, ingredients quality, packaging, product consistency, value for money, heritage, and so on.

Remember that stories can work well as memes; on Kevin Hogan’s public speaking course he pointed us towards a website that had audio stories.  One, for a life coach, told the remarkable story of the lady’s childhood; it was mesmerising, gripping, horrific and totally memorable.  I have no need for a life coach on the other side of the Atlantic so her service was of no interest to me, but I remember that story vividly and could probably trace the lady if I suddenly felt a need for her services.

No hang on readers; that won’t do.  Give me a second.

OK, now I feel justified.  One google search with the words “life coach” and the key moment of her story and there she was, just a Google away.  The lady’s name is Rhonda Britten and her story is there as an audio file (a small link saying “Hear Rhonda’s Story”) it is a superb example of the power of story too. 

And whilst you’re there, take a look at what else she’s done that works well from the perspective of memes.  Her face is there, lots of people remember a face, and she calls her site “Fearless Living”.

Fortunately, not all of us have a story like Rhonda’s, but there may well be stories centred around what we do or why we do it.  One of the reasons bad service experiences are remembered and can spread so poisonously, is that the events around them work wonderfully well as stories. 

You have everything a story needs when a company lets you down: a setting; good guys and bad guys, twists and turns, and always some resolution and a moral (even if it’s just “never use this firm in your life”).

But here’s the thing: you can create stories about your business without waiting for something to go wrong.  Make your presentations memorable, go way beyond what people expect.  A lot of companies focus on customer satisfaction.  That’s fine.  But it’s not memorable.

On the other hand, what if after someone buys something from your shop, you’ve taken their money and everything has gone fine, you say, “Hold on a minute”.  You go into the store room and come out with a box containing something.  “I just got these in and I’d be really interested to know what you think of them.  Please take this, I think you’ll enjoy it, and if you get the chance let me know what you think next time you’re passing.”

Not many shops give you something after the deal is done (rather than as an incentive to buy); now you have something potentially meme-able; a reason for that person to tell their friends about what happened to them in your store.

I hope that gives you a few more ideas.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Marketing incentives, Marketing, memes, Rhonda Britten, selling, stories, story

When it comes to marketing it’s important that your product, brand name, company name and proposition work as memes. 

That means making as many aspects of your offer as memorable and as easy to pass on as possible.

And as we saw yesterday, whilst having both is nice, memorable often beats meaningful.  Our heads are full of junk that we’ve heard from brands (and elsewhere) that have become etched into our unconscious, and we all know we’ve heard jokes, quotes or ideas that, at the time, seemed to us utterly brilliant, and yet a couple of hours later they’ve gone.

So what is it that makes a meme work well?  I’ll give you my personal opinion of what can help:

• Rhythm and rhymes create narrower options of associations thereby making it more likely that the whole phrase will be recalled accurately (if you can remember the first line, the rhythm and rhyme will lead you directly to the second line).
• Frequency / repetition – when something is repeated in the same way (style, tone, accent, cadence) it increases the likelihood of it being recalled.
• Music – music is very memorable.  I recall reading about one study that found people asked to sing a popular song didn’t just recall most of it, they even started on the right note.
• Alliteration – when we ‘know’ that one initial letter is repeated often in a phrase it narrows down the false associations we could divert to.
• Stories – for a longer message a story, with its forumlaic structure, is far more likely to be recalled than the same message in none contextual form.
• Utility – if there is a benefit to you of storing the meme you’re more likely to repeat it to yourself and therefore embed it more effectively.
• Quirkiness – the more something sounds like something else the greater the chance that you’ll make an error of association when you recall it.
• Intriguing – if it really intrigues you will lock it away whilst you look for answer, and you’ll remember it long after you have the answer too (“Who is John Galt?”).
• Concise – the shorter the better.

To give you an example of a (non-marketing) great meme; I was listening to someone advise someone else on how to undo a wheel nut.  “Righty tighty, lefty loosey”, he said, and I’ve never forgotten it. 

• It’s quirky: it actually contains ‘words’ that I never say in connection with anything else.
• It’s useful: I say it to myself on the rare occasions I’m poised over a nut of some kind and I know I’ll turn it the right way.
• It rhymes and has a good rhythmic feel.
• It has a little alliteration.

Pretty good, huh!

In his hugely enjoyable blog, JJ Jalopy posed the question, what do you say when people ask “what do you do”.  The more meme-able your answer the better.

I came up with, ”I help businesses understand customers better than their customers understand themselves”, which does moderately well on intrigue, no better.

In a recent post several people picked up on, “see your business through the eye of your customer’s unconscious mind”; again moderate intrigue is the best I can do.

“The psychology of shopping” is perhaps the best I’ve come up; it has alliteration on its side, is short and still a little intriguing.

How can you tell if what you have is memorable?

Recently someone recommended I read a book called Management Revisited.  Except that’s not the name of the book he recommended.  That was how my brain remembered it, but it (I) remembered it incorrectly. 

The moral of the story… if someone makes a mistake when they recall your name, company name, product name or slogan, then it hasn’t taken root as it could have done. 

If it’s not remembered accurately first time it’s very unlikely to work as a meme.  It will die like a fish on dry land.

And because frequency is a factor it’s worth resisting the temptation to change key parts of your communication too often.  Get it right and then give it the time to become familiar.

As you can see, it’s something I need to work on myself.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Marketing Marketing, memes, psychology

Memes are a fascinating concept and vitally important to anyone with an interest in marketing. 

Defined as “… that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation.”

Crucially for someone with something to market, what meme theory says is that one aspect that contributes to effective marketing is how easily whatever it is you’re doing can be copied.

“Beanz Meanz Heinz” means roughly nothing.

But it’s very memorable and very easy to copy, so it gets propagated by people.  It enters your mind, gets remembered instantly and accurately, and stays way beyond the point where it serves any useful purpose to you (if it ever did). 

When it comes to buying beans the simple fact that the brand Heinz is familiar to your unconscious may well be sufficient for it to seem better (for which read a safer, less risky option) than any other available.

Some people go so far as to suggest that our entire mental world is made up of memes.

It is perfectly possible to hold (or host) conflicting memes, and certainly possible to host memes that aren’t particularly constructive or useful; some may even be damaging to us.  For example, supposing you believe that the readings from tea leaves can guide your future and they tell you not to seek medical attention for a condition that could be treated effectively by, say, antibiotics.  Your stupid tea leaf reading meme would be the prime cause of your death.

Some people dispute the theory of memes, saying that if everything is a meme, and copied for its own sake of being copied, then nothing makes any sense at all. 

But this ignores what I consider to be the key issue with memes; that of timescale. 

In my view, over an appropriately long timescale, only good memes will survive.  Good memes are those that serve a useful function for the people who host them.  But just as for genes, that timescale is many thousands of years, rather than the compressed periods people typically consider.

Lots of beliefs were fundamentally accepted in their day and now have no place in our brains.  There was a time when it was widely accepted that the sun and planets revolved around the earth.  Someone suggested it, it seemed a reasonable explanation for stuff in the sky changing, and even probably made the people who passed it on seem clever.  Now we don’t think of that thought, it’s been bumped by a different, more useful meme, that tells us our planet revolves around the sun.  Of course, most of the memes that died out are thoughts we have no historical record of and certainly no memory of – which helps us delude ourselves that everything we think is absolutely right.

So why is this so important to marketing?  I’ll tell you next time…

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Marketing Heinz, Marketing, memes, slogans

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 requisite level of desire for the individual concerned. 

That could be one purchase driver activated very powerfully – to give you an extreme example; we would nearly all snap up, say, a fancy pen, if we could buy it for 1% of its typical cost, irrespective of anything else (and certainly irrespective of whether we needed a new writing implement).  Equally, we would pay anything we had for a bottle of water if we’d walked out of a desert, not having drunk anything for three days.

In these hastily constructed examples our desire to save and desire to drink exist so powerfully that we wouldn’t want to stop ourselves buying.

It’s not just about our psychological desires though.  At a higher level what we’re told by someone else or the colour used on the pack can influence our choice dramatically (to name just two other factors).  This is all a by-product of how our unconscious minds’ process what they encounter (and something I explain how to harness in The Secret of Selling, if you’ll forgive the shameless plug.)

So, when it comes down to it, purchase choices are complex but not unfathomable.

Understanding your own customers is first and foremost a matter of seeing your product, service and marketing through the eye of their unconscious mind.

Philip

Philip Graves consumer behaviour buying behaviour, consumer behaviour, consumer choice, The Secret of Selling, why customers buy