Consumer Behaviour

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 attention on him and trigger that feeling of fear. 

It was several factors, I decided.  Like a simple jigsaw puzzle any one of the elements would have been insufficient, but together they fired up that recognition I’d experienced and made me instantly wary and attentive.  It was the distinctive coffee-coloured hue of his (Asian) skin, his height, the strong physique softened by a considerable paunch, and the back-pack, worn with both straps over the shoulders.  I recalled I’d only ever seen him with that distinctive back-pack.

My unconscious mind had filtered the situation and, within microseconds, made its judgment.  This was the murderer Maninder Kohli!

Except it wasn’t.

I knew that because at the end of the television programme I’d watched about Kholi’s viscious crime and the manhunt for him in India, the police had caught him and he’d been sent to prison (for a very long time).

But primed by the programme. and the powerful emotions it evoked (particularly given that I’m the father of a daughter and he raped and murdered a teenage girl), my unconscious had new data to use in protecting me.

In evolutionary terms this mechanism makes great sense.  It can keep me safe and help me protect my family.  But, as I knew within moments of ‘recognising’ the man at the station, it can also be wrong.

Had I known someone who looked like Kholi I doubt I would have looked at the man in the same way.

So what does all this reveal about consumer behaviour?  Well, the unconscious mind can be easily influenced.  When emotion and uniqueness are combined, particularly if it’s through a recent event, it creates a prime.  The unconscious mind is then on the look-out for elements of the event that have caused that emotion.  When enough are encountered, or sufficiently close approximations of them are, it triggers the emotions experienced on the first occasion as a warning (or incentive in the case of something pleasurable) to act.

Where you can create an emotion and attach your brand or product to it the sensory associations at the time will be mapped onto it and can be deployed to recreate the intended emotions.  That’s how brand logos work.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Advertising, consumer behaviour Advertising, brands, logos, marketing communication

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

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

Yesterday’s article, for all its mediocrity (sorry about that), did spark an interesting question from Yann.  He questioned the extent to which the ads I was discussing would generate business for those companies.

As I mentioned in my reply to Yann, at least part of the way in which advertising works is to “register” a brand or product at an unconscious level.

Given the way in which the unconscious mind works (by associations) I’m convinced that the unconscious benefit is likely to be maximised when unconscious awareness of the ad coincides with positive emotions.  Even if the humour has little or no relevance to the product, the fact that the two exist together at that moment in time can have a positive impact.

Part of the support for my theory comes from the fact that the only meaningful correlation that people who track advertising have been able to identify from the many (it turns out mostly pointless) questions they ask people, is that ads that score well for ‘like-ability’ generate more sales.

Forget unprompted awareness, prompted awareness, accurately identifying the brand, recalling the tag line, remembering what product it was promoting… none of that seems to count for much.

Last year researchers from the University of Maryland discovered that, simply by showing pictures of people going about daily activities near a product (Dasani bottled water in this case), participants were more likely to choose that product over three alternatives; this was the case even when people were unaware of having seen the product in those pictures.

The more pictures they saw containing the product, the more likely they were to select it later.

When alternative versions of the pictures were shown that included either someone wearing a cap from the same university or one from a rival (again with the product present), the presence of someone with an unconscious link to themselves also prompted greater take up of the brand.

The more I see studies like this, the more convinced I am about the importance and power of unconscious associations in determining consumer behaviour.

Perhaps most crucially, it’s important to understand that what the unconscious mind values isn’t necessarily the same as what we would like to think is important to us.

Philip Graves

Source: University of Chicago Press Journals (2008, October 15). Subconscious Encounters: How Brand Exposure Affects Your Choices

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

Humour is often used to make an advert engaging.  What’s less well understood is that it also helps to create positive emotions which are then unconsciously associated with the brand or product concerned.

The tricky part is that humour is a relatively personal thing and if your ad isn’t funny to enough people the strategy can backfire in exactly the same way.

I had hoped to show you a recent Barclays Bank advert, but You Tube let me down – it’s there but with no sound (and the soundtrack makes this particular ad work).

Instead here are two examples.  The first is an ad that you’ve probably seen before – it spread superbly when it was first released onto You Tube because it’s extremely funny (at least many people think so).

And here’s another for a rival credit card that was shown repeatedly in the UK and seems, to me at least, entirely devoid of anything positive to connect with the company concerned at any conscious or unconscious level!

It can be difficult for brands to make an advert that is light-hearted or humorous and works well.  There is a need to balance the credibility of the unconscious associations they are inviting the consumer to make with something that will engage their target market and make them smile. 

Often a brand manager or marketing director isn’t personally representative of their target audience, invariably their understanding of their brand and product isn’t anything like typical.  Some would take this as a justification for asking consumers what they thought of an advert (or the script) in advance.  Unfortunately, this usually just leads to an invitation to consciously appraise the ad, and consumers will never sit and watch it in such a critical and judgmental mindset.  As a result, what’s reported back is usually misleading.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Advertising Advertising, Barclaycard, marketing communication, Master Card, psychology, unconscious mind

Since we’ve been discussing stories with Kevin, I thought I’d share this one here.  Readers of my Mindshop! E-zine will see it when they receive the next edition (sorry for the duplication, but you can comment on it easily here).

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I sat looking across the desk at the man holding a set of white boards close to his chest.

“We’re really excited about this,” he said nodding confidently, whilst looking up at the rest of us with big eyes that said “please me”.

I could feel the energy in the room, the sense of anticipation, the others not aware and not affected by the incongruence between his tone and his body language.

I sat back with an impending sense of doom.

“We’re sure this is going to be so good for the brand.”  His statement did nothing to change my feelings, but the others were shifting on their seats with nervous excitement; they were trying to look composed but failing to carry it off.

“I’ll let Simon tell you a bit more about how we got here.”  I knew this wasn’t going to be a story about the car journey, although part of me wished it would be.  Rather this would be more nefarious razzle dazzle, more self-justification, more winding up the audience.  This little act was priming the pump.

I didn’t know at the time how an excited unconscious mind thinks differently; how much more likely it is to buy what’s in front of it.  I did know that the wool was being firmly pulled over the eyes of the audience and that whatever they were about to say “yes” to (and I was fairly sure that they would say yes to it) wasn’t going to be judged objectively.

Paul, the man with the boards containing his agency’s new campaign of magazine adverts, got ready to perform the big reveal.

The problem I had was that I had no objective basis with which to counter what was happening.  If I’d been able to point to the ads we were looking at and say, “Look, this won’t work because…” I would have felt much happier. 

I could either agree with everyone else or I could be the outsider, the lone voice sounding gloomy about the new advertising campaign.  The chances were that the advertising agency had used the old leave-it-as-late-as-possible technique, whereby the original launch has little chance of being met if they’re sent back to the drawing board. 

No one was going to thank me for being negative.  After all, weren’t we just expressing our opinions?  Was there really anything more to it than that?  I certainly couldn’t tell people what I know now: that their feelings were, at least in part, a by-product of their excitement and nothing to do with the adverts they were seeing.  They would have thought I was mad.

I opted for a non-committal but wimpy, “I’d like to think about it a bit more” and let the others revel in their pleasurable anticipation of higher sales that they expected but wouldn’t get.

Now I could take that advertising campaign apart very simply and very logically.  Now I understand how the unconscious mind processes an advert.  Now I understand the secret of what sells and what doesn’t.

If you want a more considered response to marketing material, whether it’s your own website or a new television advertising campaign I’d recommend you read The Secret of Selling: How to Sell to Your Customer’s Unconscious Mind.  Inside you won’t just find the mechanisms that influence how a potential customer perceives you or your product, you’ll also get a step-by-step guide to developing the right associations for your product or service, whatever you sell.

The Secret of Selling is available for a limited time at just £27.00, backed by a full 60 day money back guarantee; honestly, I’m really excited about it !

 Philip Graves

Philip Graves Advertising, selling Advertising, buying behaviour, influence, psychology, The Secret of Selling

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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