Consumer Behaviour

One of the joys of a home office is that the commute time is pretty short – I estimate 65 yards from breakfast to the desk.  My preferred option is to get straight into my work for the day – not because I’m one of these incredibly driven types, it’s just that I find it’s one of my most productive times of the day.

However, with two young children there’s some healthy competition for my time.  Today I opted for games before school, which meant a couple of games of table football with my son, one with both children and a game called Balloon Lagoon with my daughter.  They headed off to school and I started my day a little later than usual, but still considerably earlier than if I was commuting somewhere.

It was whilst I was helping Martha put the Balloon Lagoon game away in the cupboard that I reflected on the packaging for children’s games.

There is, it seems, a fashion with some manufacturers, to put their games in the smallest box possible.  Honestly, they must have CAD specialists and mathematicians working round the clock to figure out ways of getting X pieces of plastic and cardboard game components into the smallest conceivable box.

MB Games Mousetrap is hugely entertaining to play, but I can only get it back into the box properly afterwards if I treat putting it away as a Rubik-style puzzle all of it’s own!  The children have no chance.

So, you might be wondering, what has all this got to do with worrying about the consumer’s unconscious mind.

Well, here’s the thing.  All the evidence points to buying decisions being decisions being hugely influenced by unconscious elements; the apparently irrelevant artistic picture next to the product increasing perceptions of luxuriousness; the classical music playing causing customers to spend much more on wine than they otherwise would; and so on. 

Every time I do battle with that Mousetrap box I spend far more time being irritated by their penny-pinching design, than I do being impressed that they managed to fit it into such a small space.

And don’t even think about mentioning Tomy’s Ali Baba!  Once assembled it is totally impossible to close the box again, and I can’t believe it’s designed to be disassembled and reassembled each time – the plastic catches would soon snap.

And as I’m being irritated by the Mousetrap box and, now you’ve brought it up, the Ali Baba box too, what am I looking at?  A bright colourful logo for either MB Games or Tomy.

Now my unconscious mind is filtering this out as largely irrelevant, but it’s still seeing it.

So when I’m standing in front of the games at the toy store and I’m weighing up how much fun any game might be, those same brand logos are there for my unconscious to detect.  If the neural paths linking to that image include some negative associations (which they surely will, thanks to the clown who thought squeezing games into tiny boxes was worthwhile) that brand is disadvantaged. 

I won’t necessarily stand there and think about the problem of getting a game back into the box, but I may feel slightly less inclined towards one game and falsely post-rationalise this as being because the game looks less entertaining.

I realise that saving costs is a sensible goal to pursue for any business.  I can see that, with large volume products, a penny saved on a smaller cardboard box and the corresponding reduction in transportation costs can soon mount up to a worthwhile amount.

But it is important to understand consumer behaviour and, in particular, the role of the unconscious in consumer purchase decisions.  That’s one of the reasons I wrote “The Secret of Selling: How to Sell to Your Customer’s Unconscious Mind”; it explains how apparently peripheral elements can have a profound impact on what customer’s actually do.

It’s always wise to try to see what you’re doing through the eye of your would-be consumer; but it’s even more important to see this through the eye of their unconscious mind.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, Marketing choice, consumer behaviour, influence, MB Games, Mousetrap, packaging, The Secret of Selling, toys

I enjoy watching myself as a consumer, in that slightly schizophrenic way that I encourage everyone interested in understanding customers better to do.  If you have the right framework you can learn a lot about the way in which other people make decisions by watching how you make a decision – after all, you’re a person aren’t you?

The challenge is always to split out that part of you that consciously post-rationalises what you do in a totally bogus way.   If you can learn to tell yourself that, deep down, you’re smart, sexy, clever and incredibly good at parking a car, you can put your ego to one side for a few minutes and observe what you’re doing as a consumer. 

You’ll have a reasonable idea that you’re on the right track when you spot yourself doing things that are  impulsive, irrational, poorly judged and altogether a bit dumb.

Recently, I had to choose between two suppliers for a fairly major contract.  Both put in a huge amount of work to provide their quotes and I felt both would have been excellent solutions for my needs.  But I could only choose one.

So I thought I would give as considered a response as possible to the firm that I wasn’t choosing, in the hope it would help them.

I’ve included it below.

Thank you for visiting me yesterday and providing the above quote in such a timely fashion.

I’m writing to inform you that I have decided to use another company.  The decision was incredibly hard and made all the more difficult by the fact that the specifications suggested by the companies I spoke to differed substantially, making a simple price comparison impossible (not that it was ever solely a matter of price). 

In your position I would be keen to understand why I had not been chosen over a competitor.  In this case it was a matter of finding it almost impossible to make a choice, opting to speak to the firm that I had spoken to first to try and resolve the best route forward and, as a result of that conversation, opting to go with the person who was giving me advice at that time.   

During the conversation I was better able to understand the reasons for them recommending the unit they had (a slightly higher specification), was able to appreciate the benefit of features they suggested, and they agreed to add in an additional item.  I was happier with the idea of a wired system over a wireless one (given wireless problems we’ve experienced in the past), and they remembered from their visit that the necessary cabling could be routed quite easily. 

Of course these differences are changes that could easily be incorporated into your own quote. However, as a consumer there comes a point where the complexities involved risk one never making a decision, and at some point it becomes necessary to “jump in” even though you know that you don’t have perfect data.   

I was hugely impressed by your company’s professionalism and, as you’re no doubt aware from your commercial success, my selection of a competitor was no reflection on your approach.

Thank you again for supplying me with a quote

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour analysis, choice, consumer behaviour, why customers buy

Christian and Sonya raised an interesting conundrum with their question in reply to my last post.

“In a category like breakfast cereal, are the manufacturers hurting themselves by having so many brands and varieties within those brands?”

There are two aspects to this from a retail marketing and consumer behaviour perspective.

The brands are doing themselves a favour (with an approach that was started by the cigarette manufacturers many decades ago): by proliferating the number of brand options you increase the likelihood that someone will choose one of your brands (and they basically don’t care which the customer takes so long as it’s one of theirs).  This makes it much, much harder for a new entrant to take market share away.

The retailers however are not helping their cause.  It’s been found in one study of European supermarkets, that those who stock a smaller ranges sell more in total than those that stock a larger one. 

This probably happens for a couple of reasons:

• The complexity of choosing makes venturing into a new product area (i.e. one that you don’t typically purchase) unattractive, because the consideration set is overwhelming and the potential risk of choosing badly is too high.
• The diverse choice where the range is larger makes the likelihood that you will default to an unconscious purchase strategy much higher; that means either buying what you always buy, or else picking the cheapest option (lowest risk).

So in these situations the retailer would be well advised to resist the demands of the manufacturers to carry extra lines.  Depending on the size of the retailer that’s sometimes not easy because the brands involved are powerful.  It’s also something that those brands will use as a bargaining point when the retailer squeezes them to reduce cost (which ironically may end up costing the retail more than they save).

Thanks for your question!

Philip

Philip Graves consumer behaviour breakfast cereal, choice, consumer behaviour, manufacturers, retailers

When faced with a small choice consumers can deploy simple strategies to make a choice and feel better about the option they choose.

Three options usually works well because customers can use extremeness aversion.  By selecting the middle option they know that they don’t have the worst that they might, but nor have they been indulgent and spent more than they might. 

The options present frame the choice; put another way, they way in which the decision is made is largely a by-product of what has been presented to the customer at the time he or she is making the choice.

We’d all like to believe that what we’re buying is the thing we would want to buy in considering our own “needs” (and indeed marketers often talk about “consumer needs” as if such a thing were tangible and real.  It isn’t.

The human (and consumer) mind reacts to its environment at an unconscious level, which triggers emotions.  Our conscious mind then constructs a “reasonable” (to itself)  justification for what it’s being told we’re feeling and from it sees us doing.

Whilst it’s a little scary to perceive oneself in this way, it’s pretty much essential to do so if you’re going to understand your customers and how to influence them.

Philip

Philip Graves consumer behaviour choice, consumer behaviour

Whilst the idea that more choice is a ‘bad thing’ can feel counter-intuitive at times, it’s not hard to demonstrate.

Imagine that you had to select a blog from a selection of twenty or so to follow for the next year, but that you could only choose one.  You’d better pick well because you’re going to be stuck with it for a while! 

And don’t dwell too long on what you might be missing out on from the others that you don’t choose!

On the other hand, what if there were just three to choose from?  The chances are that even if you liked two you would find that selection process far, far easier.

The key issues affecting consumers (and anyone else) when making a choice from a number of alternatives are:

• The absolute number of alternatives: however simple the choice, having to screen and mentally juggle a large number of items is taxing (and the fear you might have over-looked a good one nags away at you).
• The amount of data available for each choice: it’s one thing to choose between ten items that have one distinguishing variable (for instance, twelve identical pencils each with a different hardness of lead).  It’s quite another to choose between twelve computers with varying specifications of hard drive capacity, processor speed, RAM, graphics card and  auxiliary connectivity.
• The density of the choices: one of the reasons that choosing from three is easier is that, the chances are, those options are going to spaced further apart (or at least one of them will be).  In most cases the more choices you add in the more you close the gaps between the options available.

And here’s a funny thing.  In some cases you can reduce the options available and people will perceive that the range on offer is actually bigger (because now they can take in the range in its entirety).

Offering a customer a large number of choices is inherently risky!

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour choice, consumer behaviour

Following on from my post yesterday I thought I’d go into a bit more detail on the problem of choice, from a consumer perspective.

Choice is attractive.  Tell people that you have lots of alternatives and, for the most part, they will be more inclined to come to you.  From this perspective more choice is better.

But that’s not the whole story.

Once consumers arrive and are required to actually make a choice, more options can lead to confusion (congnitive dissonance). 

That confusion can take several forms:

1. Difficulty choosing between similar options.
2. Difficulty selecting any one option as the better.
3. Confusion over which product variable or attribute to attach most importance to.
4. Anxiety about how they will feel about a choice they’re inclined towards, knowing that a particular (and also attractive) alternative was available at the time they chose.
5. Customers may simply run out of energy (studies show cognitive processes burn glucose in a similar way to physical exercise).

How much difference can choice make?  In one study seven times as much was sold from a display of 6 compared with a display of 24.

Another study found that people’s rating of their satisfaction with what they’d chosen increased dropped significantly once the number of choices exceeded 10.

I’m enjoying the choice theme, so I’ll stop there for now and bang on about it a bit more next time!

Philip Graves
Consumer Behaviour Expert

Philip Graves consumer behaviour choice, consumer behaviour, consumer choice