Consumer Behaviour

With so much consumer behaviour, not to mention human behaviour, happening at an unconscious level, it’s all too easy for something that you say or do to not register in your own consciously accessible memory as significant.

One friend of mine was asked in a survey what brands of lager he purchased.  He wasn’t a big drinker, but would probably make a lager purchase (always of the same brand) every month or two. 

But faced with an interviewer’s question, and without the unconsciously filtered visual prompts of the packaging he couldn’t recall the brand he’d bought all these years (a little-known brand called Budweiser!).  How do I know the visual prompts were unconsciously filtered? Because faced with a bottle, even with a large proportion concealed he would recognise it and name it every time. 

But he couldn’t describe the bottle’s design, because if he could summon up a similar small proportion of the pack detail consciously, he would have been able to recall the name too.

Had the interview been conducted on a different day, or in a different place, he might have seen a visual cue that reminded him. 

It’s all a bit haphazard, don’t you think?

Recently I read an internet survey on mobile phone (cell phone) usage.  One of the early questions asked “When you share your thoughts about computers and IT topics how do you do it?”

A prompted list offered nine choices, and an ”other” and “I don’t share thoughts…” options.

Just how much reliving off the recent past the average respondent is supposed to invoke at this point isn’t clear.

A casual comment on an iPhone application mentioned in a car?  A pointer on the bottom of an email?  Telling someone that their blog formatting is off? 

Frankly, I can’t be bothered to give much thought to a question like this.  And I happen to think that the vast majority of other respondents, blasting through the survey so that they get entered for the sweep-stake prize or to receive some other recompense, won’t be that bothered either.

So just how much should faith should a company have in an answer to a question like this from consumer research?

Not much, is my professional opinion.

As you go about your consumer life it doesn’t matter at all that your thoughtless; in fact, it helps make you efficient at what you do.  Imagine buying beer for the first time and trying to make a “good” decision by reading all the packs, analysing the ingredients, and so on.  It would take forever, and you’d be none the wiser in any case!

But when it comes to trying to understand your own consumers it really is important to understand that consumers are, for the most part, consciously thoughtless.  They may well answer your questions, but you shouldn’t confuse the fact that you get an answer with the notion that the answer has any real relevance to them or people your survey is assuming that they’re representative of.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, consumer research consumer behaviour, consumer research

A couple of conversations recently have highlighted just how stupid consumers often are.

Case in point, me.

I like to think I’m reasonably capable, astute, switched on, together. But that’s just what I like to think.

You see, I’ve been following this blog on investment (www.greatwealth.com/).  To begin with I felt sort of obliged to stick with it, I’d said to someone that I would look at it.  But it was a bit annoying.

The investment adviser there (Rod) seemed determined to spell out assumptions people have about investing with the implicit message that they didn’t stack up.  Rod did say he would tell us why, but my resistance was, if anything, increasing as the days went on.

You see I know about investing.  Well, when I say “I know” that’s not totally accurate.  It would be more accurate to say that I have invested money in my time, like a lot of people. 

My “knowledge” is really no such thing.  It’s a market-driven, or rather marketing-driven, perspective of how investment works, derived almost entirely from what I see people doing.

If someone said you should do something just because it’s what everyone else does, you would give them that funny look you like to use just before you walk away dismissively.  And yet we make tacit judgments all the time entirely on this basis.

And I should know.

My biggest professional challenge is pointing out to people that, despite the fact that billions of dollars are spent on it, consumer research doesn’t work.  When it comes down to it, and given that even people who use research regularly find bits they disagree with and so could hardly be classed as true research theists, the main reason everyone does it is because everyone does it!

And as I’ve learned from Rod’s blog, it takes time to point out to someone if prevailing wisdom isn’t very wise.  But most marketing happens in moments, not minutes, let alone hours.  And that’s a big challenge.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, consumer research consumer behaviour, consumer research, Marketing

A little consumer behaviour fun with almost moving pictures!

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Video consumer behaviour

When it comes to interpreting consumer behaviour people sometimes aren’t quite sure what they might be looking for, so I put together this audio to provide a starter guide to consumer behaviour, why it’s important and two or three things that are worth looking out for.

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Philip Graves

Philip Graves Audio consumer behaviour

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 if I said a group of middle-aged men?  Probably not, that’s just one of those things you’ve come to expect.

Oh, I nearly didn’t mention, some boys too.

Oh yes, and some girls.

And some women.  Ranging in age from twenty-somethings to ladies in their seventies.  Including one who is a social worker.

In fact, everybody in the room was at it.  It was like a convention for sexism.  Except, in fact, it was the annual draw for Wimbledon tennis tickets.

Each club that’s affiliated to the Lawn Tennis Association receives an allocation of tickets for the championships.  Members of the club were there to watch the draw to decide who would get a ticket.  The earlier your name came out the sooner you got to choose which day of the tennis you would attend.

So the choice people made was a good indication of what they wanted to watch.   What was first to go?  Centre Court tickets on men’s final day, of course.

What was last to go?  Any day the men weren’t playing (ladies’ quarter finals, semi finals and even the ladies’ final).

So whilst the organising bodies in women’s tennis have achieved equal pay in the main tournaments, it seems that the tennis-watching public isn’t seeing things as being equal.  Of course, if you asked the ladies present if the prize money should be equal, they wouldn’t hesitate to say “yes”.  But what people say, and what they reveal through their behaviour are rarely the same thing.

Whilst this was going on I was sitting next to a lady with a baby, just five or six weeks old.  On three occasions she had cause to go up to the board where the choice of tickets was displayed and, on each occasion, she passed the infant to someone to hold.

She always passed it to another woman.  She never asked me.  Nor did she ask any of the other fathers in the room.

Was this all sexist behaviour?  I’m pretty sure it was.

You see, despite what we like to tell ourselves about what we think, our behaviour will give us away.

Our unconscious works ahead of our “nice to have” conscious notions, to find the safest route for us to pursue.

To be honest, the chance of a woman knowing what to do with a baby are much greater than a man; it’s not guaranteed, but it’s a safer bet.

And tennis elitism is a male preserve; fewer errors, better movement, higher quality (this is all statistically verifiable); not that that matters.  People know what they’d rather watch: a first round men’s match featuring a great male player, than a grand slam final featuring two of the best female players.

So if you make sure those conscious pretentions don’t get in the way - your own value judgments and those of the people you’re interested in - you may be surprised (or disappointed) by what you see. 

But however you feel about it, it is the way things are.  You can try and fight it or you can recognise it and tailor your marketing accordingly.

For example, if you put a mixed sex group of people in a room to watch a TV programme, and asked a lady to start the DVD player, but fixed it so that it wouldn’t work, who do you think she would turn to?  Would she look at one of the other women or one of the men when she realised she needed help with something technical?

Trust me, I know plenty of very technically competent women and, for the record, my golf teacher is a woman, but I’m fairly sure most of the time the person would look towards a man.  So if you’re putting a voice-over on your TV ad for an electronics product or retailer, does the choice of a female voice make sense?  I suspect not.

It’s a shame that we should have to choose between pragmatism and idealistic values, but I would never recommend to one of my clients that they embrace the latter over the former.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Advertising, consumer behaviour, consumer research Advertising, consumer behaviour, consumer research, marketing communication

I recently discovered some research which dovetails quite nicely with the blog I posted recently on Unconscious Advertising. 

Researchers wanted to explore the impact of drug companies’ low-key promotional items on medical students; were those scientifically-minded students, on the verge of becoming fully fledged doctors, susceptible to the old-fashioned marketing technique of branding any old trinket in the hope that your customer sees it and decides to choose you over a competitor?

The results shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s read my blog or my eBook.  But they are an interesting reminder that we could all benefit from tactical marketing that gets our brand around our customers as frequently as possible (however indirectly).

You can find the article under the Latest Articles section here.

As always, I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Marketing Advertising, Marketing, marketing communication

Mostly I think customer service is a matter of common sense; but as we all know common sense can be a surprisingly rare commodity.

One of the biggest problems I encounter with customer service people is the procedures they’re shackled to.  Not only are those procedures infuriatingly short-sighted at times, they also tend to have the effect of causing the customer service agent to turn his or her brain off. 

A customer service  encounter I experienced today didn’t run into trouble for any of these reasons though.  The person at the (small) company was clearly bright, sensible and not tied to any procedures; it may very well have been her own company.

But when I asked when I could expect delivery of a product I’d ordered four weeks ago that they’d told me would be delivered in about four week’s time I was told that, “We’re doing a collection from the manufacturer on Friday but I can’t say if your order will be on it.”

No offer to find out.  No suggestion that it was unusual that something could be manufactured to order and yet the manufacturer not be able to say when it was ready.  Nothing in her tone suggested that anything was amiss at all.

In fact, when I said that I was “disappointed” that she couldn’t tell me, she was mildly aggrieved.  She explained that this was the process, that this was how the manufacturer did things, and that they ordered a lot of products from this manufacturer.

We ended up discussing whether this was a reasonable way of managing supply chains for quite some time, perhaps ten minutes; my view was that it was not.

Eventually I found out that it all came down to one thing.  The manufacturer was unreliable.  All the companies that manufactured this product were small, old, unreliable companies.  The retailer had tried to provide more specific delivery timing in the past and ended up constantly disappointing customers when orders weren’t fulfilled as expected.

The error that the person I spoke to made was simply to assume that a situation she had assimilated over time would make as much sense to me as it did to her.  It never occurred to me that, in this day and age, someone would have no option but to use unreliable suppliers.

They’d arrived at a compromise that was the best of a bad set of alternatives, as far as minimising customer disappointment was concerned, but that didn’t mean it made any sense to me.  Their process for providing delivery dates made sense to them, but not to me.

I’m glad I expressed my disappointment, and I’m glad I pushed and pushed until I’d uncovered the assumptions that, despite seeming obvious to the retailer, were unknown to me.

So, if you want to avoid upsetting your customers:

• Try and put yourself in their position, they don’t have your knowledge.
• Don’t take offense when a customer challenges what you say; if you’re sure it’s reasonable they evidently don’t have the same perspective and you have the chance to provide it.
• A customer that tells you he’s “disappointed” is giving you opportunity to set the record straight, not attacking you personally.
• Avoid procedures that suit your organisation but make it harder for customers and turn off your customer service people’s brains!.
• Empower people providing customer service to do whatever they need to (within reason) to address and satisfy customer issues.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Customer Service Customer Service

A lot of my work in understanding consumers is based on watching consumer behaviour; people do give away quite a lot.

One of the reference points I also use quite a lot is children.  They aren’t so adept at hiding their feelings and thoughts and so tend to reveal even more of what’s going on in their minds. 

Given that, psychologically speaking, a lot of what makes us tick is well established by the age of two, this provides a wonderful window of opportunity for insights into what’s going on.

Here’s a behavioural example of the extent to which my daughter, aged four, likes reading.  She first revealed that she could read at the age of two, she’d picked it up from being around her brother we suppose, we hadn’t spent any time teaching her. 

I think it’s fair to say that she enjoys reading!

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Uncategorized

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 without contextual associations, a brand logo may be redolent of another business or may use colours that carry particular associations, which will also shape the feeling created.

It is perfectly possible that mildly bad publicity will, over time, serve as a positive.  If all that is remembered is that the brand has been encountered before then, at an unconscious level, that is beneficial.  Where the bad publicity fails to stir up an appropriate level of emotion in the person, they may well quickly recall the negative component.

On the other hand negative labels have been shown to be very strong influencers of opinion.  Where a customer hears a story about a brand that is compelling and emotionally engaging (in other words, when it’s a good story), and particularly if that story emanates from a friend, it will be a prime association with the brand.

This bad association works at an unconscious level like the advice from a parent not to eat the poisonous berries on a bush; you’ve never tried the berries, nor have you ever seen someone eat them and fall to the ground clutching their stomach, but you have a reflexive reaction that they feel unappealing, which you will recognise (and post-rationalise) as a reason not to want to eat them.

Another element to consider is how confirmation bias fits in with bad publicity.  If someone was very critical of your favourite musician you wouldn’t attach anywhere near the same weight to it as if the same criticism was levelled at a musician you didn’t like.  Similarly, criticism of a brand you love may be perceived as an unwarranted attack that causes you to want to support that brand, rather than reappraise or reject it.

The strength of affinity for the brand will also determine how long bad publicity has an impact.  If the brand is really liked and the competitors are relatively weak (in terms of brand strength and distribution) customers will gravitate back to the brand relatively quickly.  The bottled water brand Perrier had a major health scare several years ago, but managed to survive the experience. 

Another brand of water, Dasani, marketed by Coca Cola had an ill-judged launch, bad publicity about it being filtered tap water that was associated with a famous and hugely popular comedy series (where the characters also marketed tarted up tap water) and then experienced a similar health scare.  Without a credible brand to support it the product was pulled and never sold again.

Philip Graves

So, it’s certainly possible to have bad publicity that can damage your business.

Philip Graves Advertising, Marketing Advertising, Dasani, marketing communication, Perrier, psychology

Firstly, thanks for all your comments, I find them encouraging, constructive and inspiring.

Secondly, Yann has raised another question.  Questions are wonderful things and, yet again, Yann has raised something that causes me to think about the subject of consumer behaviour (which I love to do) and given me a direction for this edition of my blog.

Yann asked whether our unconscious associations of brands are more influenced by broader environmental factors than advertising; things like what we hear (reputation).

Of course, there isn’t a single, clear-cut answer to this.  It is certainly the case that, were someone to hear an involving account (story) from a friend (social proof / trusted source / someone like me) this would trump an advertising message.  In this case, the powerful associations primed by the friend’s account work very similarly to negative personal experience: as soon as the brand name appears (be it at the start, middle or end of the ad) those established associations spring up and cause the person to dismiss what they’ve just seen.

By way of example, the UK furniture retailer MFI had a lousy reputation.  In fact, the first episode of a consumer rights TV programme Watchdog (in 1980) featured a complaint about the company that was handled extraordinarily badly by the poor store manager who was confronted by the BBC’s cameras.  I have never known anyone who had a problem with them, but I have been primed by the media to steer clear at all costs.  [MFI went under a few months ago.]

On the other hand, a lot of people don’t have an experience of a brand.  A lot of brands deal with superfluous elements of our lives.  Many of the things people tell us are not conveyed with sufficient emotion for us to assign unconscious significance to them (and so they are soon forgotten).

So humorous adverts, whilst inevitably failing to work on those already alienated, can create a positive emotional association for a brand.

Some brands have transformed their fortunes in exactly this way.  In the UK, Pizza Hut and Tango both experienced significant growth and profitability by taking brands that had lapsed into indifference and associating them with upbeat emotion.

When it comes to measurement of the unconscious impact of marketing (another of Yann’s questions) the only reliable way to evaluate is with a test and control methodology.  One area gets one set of unconscious associations the other doesn’t; or for a period you try one way, and later you try another.

With large brands it’s easier to do the former; it’s also important to consider the potential timescales involved.  Advertising that creates a more positive image of a brand in the way I’ve described might not produce immediate sales success; but it may still have an impact.

The key here is to adopt a strategy and persist with it for long enough for consumers to be influenced.  This is a by-product not just of the opportunity to be exposed to the communication sufficiently frequently, but also of the incidence with which they come into potential purchase contact with the brand.  If purchase frequency is low the campaign would have to be sustained without becoming irritating.  Of course, if a more motivating proposition appears on the scene from a competitor this can further muddy the waters.

Good marketing needs to be consistent at all the points it comes into contact with consumers.  The attractiveness of TV advertising (when it’s understood and applied correctly) lies in the opportunity to create emotion and associate the brand with it:  for a few seconds, the brand has full control of the consumer’s environment.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Advertising Advertising, analysis, psychology, why customers buy