Consumer Behaviour

It seems from many of your comments about focus groups that many of you have experienced some of the problems I mentioned in relation to asking consumers about their perceptions.

To be fair to focus groups I should point out that I was talking about research more generally. 

There’s little doubt in my mind that the focus group, per se, is far and away the most useless, unreliable, misleading and distorting ‘tool’ in the marketers armoury. 

Actually, I should qualify that a little.  A focus group in a viewing facility is the pinnacle of disastrous research techniques, but the focus group part of that is no small component.

I would really appreciate hearing more details from those of you who have had bad experiences with focus groups.  Please email me if you have any stories to share (and I’m happy to respect requests for confidentiality).

Back to the subject at hand…

Yes, perception is everything, but asking consumers about their perceptions is fraught with difficulty; on the other hand, understanding them is very important if you want to understand consumer behaviour.

So how do you understand what customers’ perceptions are?

It’s mostly about time.

One of the benefits of unconscious processing is how fast it is.  Whilst you’re wondering what you’re looking at, your unconscious has filtered 10 millions bits of data about your environment and caused you to respond in the way it thinks best – the way that will keep you safest, usually.

So when it comes to establised brand perceptions what you need to look for are quick associations that a customer makes with a brand or product.  For example, when the opportunity occurs naturally (or apparently naturally) for them to talk about a brand, the more fluently they talk and the more they have to say – in a sense, the more they are reeling off something that’s clearly established and familiar to them – the more deep-rooted what they have to say is.

Similarly, when someone engages with a product (for example in a store), you can see how engaged with it they are, and how readily they select it over the alternatives available. 

You might think this is a tricky skill to acquire, but if I asked you to watch some people meeting in a room do you think you would be able to spot who already liked who?  Assuming they weren’t aware you were watching them and had no reason to mask their behaviour, my guess is you would get it right most of the time.  Trained observers can usually tell even when people are trying to conceal their connections.

In talking to people, the biggest clues to brand perceptions come from inconsistencies.  When what someone says doesn’t match all their experiences or what they do it is a significant clue that confirmation bias is turned up high.

When someone is naturally eulogising about a brand (i.e. not in response to a research-style question) the natural thing to do is to empathise with them and mirror their account with those of your own.  Instead, using a suitably gentle tone, explore the contradictions; “You must have had a few problems with them though, everyone does.”

Yes, this is a leading comment / question (the best ones usually are, but I’ll save that point for another time), but it allows you to find out whether this is a genuinely unblemished experience or a biased assessment.

In case you’re wondering, the most likely source of such biases are people’s first experiences with the brand concerned or what they were told by a friend that made them select it in the first place.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, consumer research consumer behaviour, consumer choice, influence, psychology, 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

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

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