Consumer Behaviour

One of the challenges with studying consumer behaviour is that the behaviour itself is incontrovertible, but the interpretation of that behaviour is often much more open to debate: what caused what?  What can be inferred from what happened

Recently, when I casually commented on a reported change in consumer behaviour, the person I was speaking to got quite indignant.

You can read about what happened and what I learned in the process here (it’s a sneak preview of one of the articles that will be in my next Mindshop! e-Zine, out tomorrow).

And linking to it here gives those who do read it a chance to comment if they would like to – I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour articles, consumer behaviour

You’d be hard pressed to find any marketing text book that doesn’t talk at some point about “consumer need”.

It’s a simple enough concept: the products that will do best are those that meet a requirement that someone has.

At the next level you may find there’s a discussion on the types of consumer need.  Broadly these break down into physical and emotional needs. 

So, by way of simplistic example, the former says that, because you’re cold you will buy a hat.  The latter that because you want to feel special you’ll buy an expensive hat. 

This is all fine up to a  point.  But I happen to think that most consumer behaviour is nothing to do with “need”.  This is a problem because the notion of consumer need suggests that, at some level, a consumer is aware of what it is they are getting as a result of acquiring the product, and in my experience that’s often not the case.

Have you ever noticed how much some people’s lives are taken up with shopping; for some people human behaviour is consumer behaviour, almost exclusively.  When they aren’t shopping, they’re thinking about shopping, or watching TV programmes surrounded by ads, or reading magazines that are promoting consumerism directly through their copy or indirectly through their adverts. 

And some people will talk about shopping for hours; granted they’re not talking about the physical act of buying, they’re talking about something they’re thinking about buying, or something they’ve bought, or what happened when they tried to buy something.

All of this is has precious little to do with how cold someone’s head is.

I suspect that we’re collectively so preoccupied with shopping because of how our brains work.  Studies show that the brain works by estimating risk and reward, and then sending out extra dopamine (the feel good factor) when a decision is proved correct.  This increases the strength of the the neural pathway, essentially increasing our perception that what we thought would happen did.

I won’t explore the many fascinating implications of this mechanisms now, but when it comes to shopping I suspect it’s so prevalent because it’s so predictably rewarding.

Most of the time when you go out to buy you successfully do so.  The process is completed and you now own something new.  Owning stuff feels nice.  In fact, studies like the one I talked about recently in my eZine (The Importance of Touch) show that we get very attached to things we hold very quickly.

In evolutionary terms it’s generally been advantageous for us to have stuff: stored provisions, items we can use as tools, things we can defend ourselves with, mechanisms for protecting ourselves from the elements and so on.  So our brains have evolved to reward us for having things.

Rarely is shopping disappointing or dissatisfying.  When it is we learn quickly to change our expectations or to avoid places that fail to satisfy, and we can quickly find substitutes.

In essence shopping is low risk, high reward behaviour, and our brains get a kick out of that.

Philip Graves
P.S. You can sign up for my eZine here.

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, consumer research analysis, articles, consumer behaviour, consumer research, psychology, why customers buy

Having suggested that perception is far more important that the reality of experience in determining consumer behaviour, you might think that finding out how a consumer perceives your brand is a useful exercise.

And, of course, you’d be right.

You might suggest, therefore, that asking a sample of your target consumer audience or existing customers would be a smart think to do.

And you’d be a lot less right.  In fact, if you don’t mind me saying so, you’d be wrong.

There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, we aren’t always aware of our perceptions.  A lot of our reactions happen at an unconscious, emotional level.  We like to believe we’re wonderfully good at decoding this responses consciously and post-rationalising them accurately, but we really aren’t.  We just make it up and then convince ourselves that what we’ve just told ourselves is true.

This is what I call “the what we like to tell ourselves” error.

In general, we’ll tell ourselves that we’re smarter, sexier, funnier and all round better than we really are.  We’ll also tell ourselves that we’re not in the snare of any silly old brand, it’s just that we’ve happened to find their products are better suited to our needs.

Secondly is the problem of how we think our answer will be perceived by someone else; we’ve learned through the “mistakes” of childhood not to say what we’re thinking but screen it for social acceptability. 

Kids are wonderfully honest and direct: I remember my two-year-old son staring at a man in the doctor’s waiting room and asking very loudly, “Why has that man drawn all over himself?”  The tattooed man didn’t take exception and it was, I think, a very good question to ask (although not one I would except to get an accurate answer to from the chap himself!).  By the age of six my son has enough of a developed sense of social awareness not to ask that sort of question in public.

This filtering process becomes automatic and gives us the “what might they think if I told them” error.

Most people don’t want to be seen as being influenced by brands and advertising even when they’ve fallen for a brand hook, line and sinker.  Even when they are aware they’re very loyal to a brand they probably wouldn’t want to acknowledge the full extent of it’s impact on what they do (even if they are aware of it).

Last, but not least, the actual process of asking someone a question changes the way they think and, therefore, how they respond.  I won’t go into all the psychological nuances of this now, but suffice it to say there’s a reason that psychotherapy makes such extensive use of balanced questions to bring about change.

So, whilst customers’ perceptions are deeply significant in determining their behaviour, asking them about those perceptions isn’t likely to reveal the nature or extent of them reliably.

Next time, if you haven’t guessed already, I’ll tell you how you can understand this aspect of consumer behaviour better.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, consumer research analysis, articles, buying behaviour, consumer behaviour, consumer research, why customers buy

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

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
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