Consumer Behaviour

I once had a conversation with the Marketing Director of a brand that is a household name in which he suggested that no products had updated their brand identities.  We were having the conversation because his main brand was so tired that sales were in decline and customers didn’t see its packs on the shelves of their supermarkets: it looked exactly the same as it had a decade earlier (and it was hardly the most relevant product back then).

When I used Skoda as an example, he moved the goal posts to FMCG products. 

Then when I referenced other FMCG products that had dramatically redesigned their brand without disaster he argued that these weren’t in the same category as his product.

So his point was, that since none of his competitors had successfully updated their brand identity, he shouldn’t be the first one to risk it.

Except, of course, all of his competitors were either so new they hadn’t reached the point of needing a freshen up, or else they had updated their brand, he just hadn’t noticed.

It must be said, this manager was one of the most risk averse people I’ve ever met: it was a surprise that he took a chance of putting his feet in socks each day – who knows what could have been lurking inside them!

One of the best examples of rebranding is the British Royal Family (granted they aren’t a fast moving consumer good).  Before 1917 the royal family was a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.  However, by that point in World War I associations with Germany weren’t desperately popular.  Matters were hardly improved when the German’s starting dropping bombs from their Gotha G.IV on England.

George V (or his advisers) decided a rebranding and repositioning job was called for.

It was decided, presumably without the need for a million pounds of design consultancy and consumer testing, that the rather more quaintly English ‘Windsor’ would do a better job of endearing the monarchy to the masses.

Crucially, this wasn’t just a case of calling the same snack by a new name and hoping people would accept it.  Yes, pretty much everything remained as it had been before. However, there were some important tweaks that, given that the broad support for the monarchy hadn’t yet been entirely eroded, were sufficient to edge things back in their favour for the next century or so.

He changed the rules about marriage; it was now possible for members of the British royal family to marry British people. 

The King also allied the monarchy to the emerging social forces: the honours system was changed and anyone in the country could receive an OBE (Order of the British Empire) award if it was felt they went beyond the ordinary: this included trades unionists and people who did voluntary work.  Now the monarchy wasn’t the enemy of “the people”.

One less fortunate change came when the Russian Tsar, a cousin of George V, turned to him for help when the Russian revolution took hold.  The King, fearing he would be seen as putting other nation’s interests above those of the British, refused to provide him with a safe haven: the Tsar of course was executed by the revolutionaries.

I think there are good lessons to learn from this event about the nature of rebranding and human (or consumer) psychology:

• If you want people to perceive your brand differently, you need to do more than just change the name – but changing the name gives you a chance both to create new associations and to harness those that already exist (provided you choose wisely).
• Provide a clear benefit that people can positively associate with the change.
• Once you’ve made a stand for something new, you need to act consistently with those values if you want them to be credible.
• Rebranding can’t easily transform ill will.  But it can catch people before they feel alienated and can give people a reason to reappraise how they feel if they are becoming ambivalent.

Back to that marketing director I mentioned.  Eventually he was persuaded to accept a minor updating of his brand.  It wasn’t everything that it could be, but it turned the brand from declining sales to growth for the first time in years.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Marketing, consumer behaviour, market research consumer psychology, rebranding

Yesterday I visited the Marketing Week ‘Insight Show’ at London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre.  I was underwhelmed.

For the most part the market research companies who were exhibiting were pedalling the same old methodologies in the same old ways – all the stuff that doesn’t really work but makes companies feel better.

A number of firms were presenting themselves as excellent at helping clients with innovation: I’m not convinced that this is something market research can help with: as Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”  Or perhaps they would have said they wanted the same horse cheaper.

I have no problem with talking to consumers – it’s a very worthwhile thing to do: there’s a small chance that one person might say something that sets an idea off in your head and leads to create something amazing.

But the problem with market research is that it thinks it can find consensus: it can’t resist asking people to come up with ideas and then gauging how interesting people think those ideas are.  That’s pretty pointless.

Firstly, a concept expressed as words can take on a myriad of forms once developed and it may be the form that determines whether consumers take to the idea or don’t.  No one would have said they wanted an iPod: there were already MP3 players around that performed the same function or that were technically superior: but none of them looked half as good as the iPod did.

Secondly, people are hopeless as predicting what they want in the future: context is perhaps the single biggest influencer of behaviour, and if you see a product everywhere you’re far more likely to want one.  If a friend tells you it’s great, that can make you want it too.

Thirdly, for the average product to be successful how many people out of every hundred need to like it enough to buy it?  If you have a group of eight people coming up with ideas it probably only needs one of them to love it for it to be viable – but who launch a product that seven out of eight people hated?

So, by all means talk to consumers, get them coming up with ideas and listen to the things they say spontaneously when they are buying your products or talking about them naturally if you can: but don’t pay thousands of pounds to a market research agency for this. 

In fact, don’t let somebody else do it.

Do it yourself.  Do it with your product experts and product designers.  These are the people who have the base knowledge and existing expertise that might be sparked into a new dimension by what one person says.

And, for the most part, as Henry Ford realised, it will be ideas from the experts and enthusiasts inside a company that will see the opportunities and develop the best innovations.

For example, perhaps you ride a bike.  If you do, I sincerely hope you have a bike helmet.  If you don’t, please get one!

I expect you think your helmet is fine, that it fits reasonably well and will do the necessary work in an accident: I hope you’re right.

But, the chances are, that your’s doesn’t fit very well.  You just don’t have a good fitting helmet to compare it to, because most helmets don’t fit well.

Yes, they’re tested; but they’re tested on dummies for impact protection not people with funny shaped heads who sweat and move around.

Yesterday I discovered the Kask brand of cycle helmets.  They fitted my head like no other.  They stay in place.  They don’t slip up if you gently push the front.

I looked around on-line and found out that lots of other people had discovered the same thing as me.  I also discovered what I consider to be the best product review I’ve ever read.  It was in the comments at www.cyclosport.org after the website’s official review.  Some chap called Mark Liptrot said the following:

“£155 for a piece of polystyrene that the excellent innovators at Kask have had the genius to make head shaped.”

Sometimes innovation is simply about not settling for the status quo: consumers aren’t going to help much there because they, for the most part, rather like things as they are.  But when you show them things can be better, you can charge rather a lot for not very much and they’ll be happy to pay.  My Kask helment will be arriving soon.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Innovation, market research innovation, kask bike helmet, market research

It’s often claimed in market research circles that perception is everything.

I suspect this stems from the thought that, provided the customer perceives things as being good then that is what matters, be it customer service, product quality, your brand’s image.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a really stupid way of thinking about consumers. Let me explain…

In one sense, perceptions are all that customers have to provide in market research. Life isn’t absolute when you’re living it. For example, I’ve been having some lower back ache (too much time spent writing in a bad chair) and have been treating it with a physiotherapist and lots of exercises. Unlocking my lower back has caused other parts of my back to react and the other night I turned over and stretched at night and managed to pull a muscle higher up my back.

Now, at the moment, my lower back doesn’t hurt. So I perceive that my lower back is fine. However, this is largely because my pain attention is directed higher up at the part that really hurts. In reality, the issues in my lower back are not resolved yet, it’s going to take a few weeks to undo what I’ve done over many months. So my perception about my back is almost certainly misleading.

If you ask me now how bad my back health is I will say it’s fairly bad: my attention is directed at the pain right now and I’m very sensitised to backs.

But if you ask me in a couple of weeks, when I expect it to be considerably better, I will probably say that my back is pretty healthy. In a couple of weeks it shouldn’t be hurting me any more, but I’ll have many more weeks of exercises to do to make it properly mobile.

Perceptions change over time. The further people are from an event the less likely they are to perceive it accurately.

When it comes to customer service (for example) what matters is what service you actually deliver. The only way you can judge that is by seeing what experience you deliver to customers.

They may say that service is poor because they’re expecting red carpets and rose petals.

They may say that service is good because they have such low expectations of your brand.

You have no way of knowing what frame of reference they’re making, how time is shaping it or how recollections of experiences will be factored in to future purchase behaviour.

All you have is a score. Which feels compelling because it has a number attached. But it’s actually meaningless.

Ah, they say, we can track it over time.

So now you know how a meaningless number changes. That’s helpful!!

The solution?

Decide what quality of service you want the customer to experience and design your service to deliver that.

Then watch, dispassionately, to see if it looks as though customers are getting that experience.

If you want them to leave the store delighted, look for delight on their face: we all know what ‘delighted’ looks like, don’t we?

If you’re studying the moment that customer service happens you’re studying reality. If you’re asking customers what they think you’re getting perceptions but you have no way of knowing their durability or relevance to that customers future behaviour.

There. That should save your company some wasted money on customer satisfaction surveys.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Customer Service, market research Customer Service, design, market research, perception, reality

So here’s the thing.

If I convinced you that crossing the road without looking was a wonderful, amazing, liberating, life-transforming experience, and I mean really convinced you so that you believed it, what would happen?

You would take your first attempt with extreme nervousness, shaking with fear, but you would probably make it across the road just fine.

With your senses heightened you wouldn’t really be using your new-found faith in traversing streets with total disregard for what was passing: no you would heighten your other senses until you were certain it was safe and then over you would go.

Of course, after a while, if I’d done a really good job and kept reinforcing the message, you would start to foster the genuine belief that you didn’t need to look to cross the road.  After all, you’ve now got my enthusiastic message – and I’d tell you about how many millions of followers were doing it; you’re own ‘experience’ and, in all likelihood, you would have started to notice other people who didn’t seem to be looking when they cross the road (confirmation bias).

For a while you might have luck on your side too.  Most car drivers aren’t looking to run a pedestrian down.  They would drive around you or stop their vehicles.

Their anger would surprise you.  But you would smile inside, knowing that they simply didn’t have your deeper understanding.

There would, however, almost certainly come a point at which you would get hit by a vehicle.  It would hurt, a lot, and you would be extremely confused.  But would you abandon your belief that you don’t need to look when crossing the road?

I suspect that you are telling yourself, “Of course I would!” and probably also, “I would never have believed it in the first place.”

The latter is almost certainly true.  But why?

You haven’t (I hope) experimented with both techniques.

You believe you should look when you cross the road because it’s been drummed into you as a child.  Quite possibly with a good explanation that seems eminently sensible.

But you don’t KNOW for certain because you haven’t personally tested all the alternatives (and, incidentally, please don’t start exploring this theory with road crossing!).

If you really believed in not looking when you crossed the road, you would almost certainly carry on believing it.

Don’t believe me?

Let’s take a less extreme example: Market Research.

In the last week I have listened to or read two discussions on two unrelated surveys.

Survey one explored a number of questions relating to people’s bank accounts.  It asked people if they had moved their main account recently and also if they were happy with their bank.

Now, to set the scene: Here in the UK the banks are coming under huge pressure from some consumer groups and government regulators.  It’s been noticed that people aren’t switching to get the best deals and the finger of blame is being pointed at the banks for not providing customers with information and for making the process of switching from one bank to another extremely difficult.  Recently there was a mass action court case claiming that the charges banks levied were unreasonable.

The survey discovered that 93% of the people who hadn’t changed banks in the past two years (which was 92% of the people interviewed) were “happy” with their banks.

One reporter was “astonished”.  They even had a psychologist (sadly not me) to explain why the result might have been so high.  She pointed out, very reasonably, that having asked if they had changed banks and stated that they hadn’t, it would have been difficult for them to say they were unhappy.  She also pointed out that “happy” is a word that is open to a multitude of interpretations: aren’t they all!

So does this mean they’re happy?  Or does this mean the questions have primed them to say they are happy when they otherwise wouldn’t have done?

The answer is both.

The second survey, an internet poll, concerned the strike action of British Airways cabin crew.  It asked: “As the world’s highest paid cabin staff, should BA cabin crew go on strike?”

The result was that 97% said “no”.

Is the question fair?  It seems extremely leading, doesn’t it.  But if the statement about them being the highest paid is true isn’t it reasonable to include it?

[One entertaining note on the 3% who said "yes": there is a suspicion from the IP addresses of respondents that they all came directly from trade union organisations!]

The problem for this survey, and all surveys, is how much information do you give people so that they can tell you their opinion?  ”Facts” are often not accepted universally as being factual.  But if you don’t provide relevant information people might make uniformed opinions that they would revise if they heard the information.

But if we ask “should they strike” and someone says “yes” and then add “should they strike if they are the highest paid” you get another problem.  People have just said “yes”, perhaps on principle of a workers right to strike, so some won’t change their answer when the new information arrives.

So perhaps the only logical solution is to ask different people different questions.  And to make sure that people only answer only one question so that they aren’t inadvertently primed by any preceding questions.

And what would you conclude from such a set of  surveys?  That people think different things depending on how much information they have and how you ask them about whatever it is.

Hmmm, not likely to make for a compelling headline in the press, or to give a company massive reassurance about a decision they’re considering.

And yet, despite these surveys producing such extreme responses that weren’t believed by the media commentators reporting them, will they keep going back to market research in a bid to understand what people think on a topic?  Of course, they will.

Why?  Because we are convinced we know what we think: we simply pose ourselves a question and find out.  And it seems entirely logical that other people must know what they think and that we can find that out by asking them.

But it just doesn’t work.

That’s the reason I wrote Consumerology.

So, to return to my road-crossing example, don’t be so sure that you would let the first hit by a car transform your beliefs.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves market research BA, banks, beliefs, British Airways cabin crew, market research, polls

Once upon a time there was a country.

They were having a very difficult time indeed.  Some greedy goblins had got out of control and now everyone in the land was troubled.  The money that the greedy goblins had taken had somehow disappeared, some said they had taken money that never existed, and now everyone was having to repay it whether it ever existed or not.

Everyone except the goblins that is, who had somehow found a way to get more money  for themselves – but that’s another  story.

Anyway, the country had a democratic process of sorts, of which it was most proud.  And in the midst of the “difficult time” it replaced one leader with another one, who thought things should be done a little differently.  This was done through something called “voting”, where those who wanted to shape what the country did explained their ideas and then people got to say which person they wanted to represent them when the decisions about what to do were made.

Some people didn’t vote.  Either because they had no interest in what was happening or because none of those asking for their votes said anything that impressed them – it’s hard to know which, but you could always “not vote” and some argued that it was the degree to which people “not voted” that really influenced the results.

But then there was a problem: the country also had other voting, not for the top job, but for the people who voted on what the leader proposed to do in the “difficult times”.  This voting was to make sure that the view of the people doing the voting was always current – it could keep the leader on track.  This seemed very fair.  And it would have been, were it not for the Opinion Pollsters.

The Opinion Pollsters were a fidgety bunch.  They didn’t like to wait for the voters to decide and hear the result.  They liked to find out in advance.

This was quite curious because the people doing the voting often changed their mind quite a lot, or else didn’t vote at all: in any event, very often what the people told the Pollsters turned out not to be the real result after all.

But that didn’t stop the Pollsters.

In fact, something very unfortunate happened.  The Pollsters started to influence what happened in the real voting.

To be fair, this wasn’t entirely the Pollsters’ fault.  Whilst it would have been nice if they had pointed out how hopelessly inaccurate their opinion polls were (especially when they were conducted quite a long time ahead of the real vote), they earned their money from conducting opinion polls, so that would have been asking a lot.

The Media Moguls were really calling the shots.  They too had seen how unreliable the opinion polls were, but that didn’t stop them running them as the headline story when what they showed reflected what they wanted them to say. 

When the people who thought they could represent other people well, heard from the Media Moguls’ polls that they were going to be crushed in the voting, they got scared.  They decided they didn’t want to be humiliated and began to talk about not competing for votes in the way they usually would.

They forgot about the importance of giving people a democratic choice; they were convinced by what the Media Moguls and Opinion Pollsters had told them that the people didn’t want them.  But they forgot not only that the opinion polls were often wrong, but also that things changed: a new attack on the country, a discovery that someone who wanted to represent the people was actually not a “nice person”, or a shift in the country’s financial fortunes, might all change how people felt and which way they voted.

But the Media Moguls and Opinion Pollsters didn’t worry about that: they liked the sort of voting that they could edit, shape and selectively publish that came from opinion polls, much  more than the kind that took place on a given date and with everyone taking part  (except those who didn’t want to) and everyone getting the results at the same time.

The Media Moguls understood that people could be like sheep and would follow the crowd if they were given enough reassurance that the crowd had decided something.  In other lands this approach to influencing the flock had caused all sorts of horrors – horrors that are far too unpleasant for this fairy tale.

And so the democracy about which the country was so proud  was killed.

But no one really noticed and they all lived happily everafter (especially the Media Moguls, Opinion Pollsters and, for some strange reason, the goblins).

Philip Graves

Philip Graves market research democracy, market research, opinion polls, philip graves

As I mentioned last time, I’ve only once found an impromptu use for my understanding of consumer behaviour and consumer psychology, and I certainly never anticipated that a situation might arise where market research might make a difference between life and death.

But that just shows how little I know.

Recently, the UK government has announced that 10% of hospital (NHS Trust) funding will be dependent on patient satisfaction levels.  To put that in financial terms, that could mean around £10billion of expenditure will be dependent on patient satisfaction.

And here’s the thing.  This is, in my opinion, the most profoundly stupid example of using market research that I have ever encountered: it’s going to result in lives being lost.

Let’s go back a few years, before any of us had heard of MRSA or any of the other so-called super-bugs that are resistant to antibiotics and kill people.

How many patients would have walked out of a hospital thinking, “There was a risk of me contracting a life-threatening bacterial infection in that hospital, I’d better market them down to a 5 out of 10.”

Ah, you may say, but people might have said the hospital wasn’t very clean.

That’s true.  But against what standard of cleanliness are patients judging the hospital?  Most of us are fortunate enough not to visit hospitals too often, so can we really judge what properly, hygienically clean looks like?

Of course, now that we’ve been primed to think about something as important as super-bugs we’re very sensitive to how clean a hospital looks.  But we don’t know how effectively they are controlling this type of infection from what we see; that requires expert testing.

It might be useful to know what people are actually doing in the hospital.  Are they reporting toilets that they find are dirty?  Are they cleaning up after themselves effectively where they can?  Are they washing their hands properly?  Are they using the special sanitising products provided?  Are they only coming to the hospital as visitors when they know they aren’t carrying a cold or stomach bug?

There is no shortage of evidence to show that people are hopelessly poor at reporting this sort of information accurately – not that, as far as I know, anyone is proposing to ask them what they are doing.  It’s all about what  they think.

I don’t think the NHS is perfect – far from it.  But I don’t think that I know how to judge how it’s performing in totality.

If someone happens to go for an out-patient appointment and is kept waiting for two hours they would feel bad.  In completing a survey they would probably exhibit be a ‘halo effect’ whereby they misattribute that bad feeling to many aspects of their experience.  Now if the delay was caused because the doctor in question was saving a life elsewhere would the patient realise?

Individual patients don’t have the perspective or the expertise to judge how well a hospital is performing.  But these inexpert, myopic opinions, when collected in their thousands and pressed together in a report, take on a gravity that is totally out of proportion to the base data.

And people will almost certainly die as a result.

Money will be wasted.  It will be wasted on the survey process itself.  It will be wasted on implementing the wrong solutions.  It will be wasted because the hospitals will invest in playing the game – anticipating what they think patients will want to see and hear to give them good scores.

All of these will drive money away from the expert evaluation of hospital effectiveness, drug funding and objective decision-making that should be taking place on the basis of managers doing the best job they can, as experts in the hospitals they are tasked to run.

You may never hear someone say, “Market research saved my life”, but if you’re unfortunate enough to need the UK’s National Health Service and not get the care you need, market research might just be responsible for you not living.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, consumer research, market research 10%, consumer behaviour, consumer psychology, market research, National Health Service, NHS, patient satisfaction