Consumer Behaviour

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

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

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