Consumer Behaviour

In my recent (very short) consumer behaviour video I made a reference to how unhelpful it can be to ask someone how satisfied they are with their consumer experience.  My point was that, given you don’t know what frame of reference someone has in mind when they respond, it’s really not that useful to know.

Are they satisfied because their expectations are so low that, when nothing terrible happens, they’re grateful?

Are they satisfied because what’s on offer is so formulaic that all they could do is be very dissatisfied if the delivery was below the standard?

Are they satisfied because they have such little interest in whatever it is that “yes” is all they can think to say; they’ve forgotten what happened and assume, because it wasn’t memorably bad, that it must have been OK at the time?

It turns out a recent study has found that people’s ratings of satisfaction change according to the nature of the alternatives they were considering at the time they made their choice.  So satisfaction, rather than being an absolute measure, is going to depend on what the person was thinking at the time they made their choice and, in the case of research, what you’ve framed the question with (particularly if you’ve been asking about other brands that operate in the same category).

You can read my full article here,  and make comments below if you’d like to. 

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer research consumer research, influence

Yesterday’s article, for all its mediocrity (sorry about that), did spark an interesting question from Yann.  He questioned the extent to which the ads I was discussing would generate business for those companies.

As I mentioned in my reply to Yann, at least part of the way in which advertising works is to “register” a brand or product at an unconscious level.

Given the way in which the unconscious mind works (by associations) I’m convinced that the unconscious benefit is likely to be maximised when unconscious awareness of the ad coincides with positive emotions.  Even if the humour has little or no relevance to the product, the fact that the two exist together at that moment in time can have a positive impact.

Part of the support for my theory comes from the fact that the only meaningful correlation that people who track advertising have been able to identify from the many (it turns out mostly pointless) questions they ask people, is that ads that score well for ‘like-ability’ generate more sales.

Forget unprompted awareness, prompted awareness, accurately identifying the brand, recalling the tag line, remembering what product it was promoting… none of that seems to count for much.

Last year researchers from the University of Maryland discovered that, simply by showing pictures of people going about daily activities near a product (Dasani bottled water in this case), participants were more likely to choose that product over three alternatives; this was the case even when people were unaware of having seen the product in those pictures.

The more pictures they saw containing the product, the more likely they were to select it later.

When alternative versions of the pictures were shown that included either someone wearing a cap from the same university or one from a rival (again with the product present), the presence of someone with an unconscious link to themselves also prompted greater take up of the brand.

The more I see studies like this, the more convinced I am about the importance and power of unconscious associations in determining consumer behaviour.

Perhaps most crucially, it’s important to understand that what the unconscious mind values isn’t necessarily the same as what we would like to think is important to us.

Philip Graves

Source: University of Chicago Press Journals (2008, October 15). Subconscious Encounters: How Brand Exposure Affects Your Choices

Philip Graves Advertising, consumer behaviour, selling Advertising, consumer behaviour, influence, marketing communication, The Secret of Selling

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

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

I really appreciated all of the comments received in response to yesterday’s post and I wanted to pick up on one that, as a consumer behaviour expert, I found fascinating.  It also was one of the last comments posted so people scanning through what others have said wouldn’t have seen it.

Mark (MarketingScoops) said: “I had an interesting shopping experience today. I had no intention of shopping but I received a 40% off one item special on my blackberry. Once I was in the store, I entered the shopping mode and bought 3 things. The super special got me in the store and completely changed my mindset.”

This reveals a couple of very interesting issues.

1. It reinforces my point about a lot of consumer behaviour not being “need” based, but being triggered far less rationally and influenced much more indirectly.
2. It illustrates the route to understanding consumer behaviour: whilst there is no direct link between the adaptive unconscious mind and the conscious mind, an awareness that it is the former that directs the show enables you to become more aware of its involvement in your own behaviour.  By looking at our own behaviour dispassionately (rather than with the distorted bias of our own conscious delusions) we can start to see how we’ve acted unconsciously and then begin to trace what might have influenced us to do so.  In essence what we have to learn to do is stand back and observe ourselves.

The way to enhance this understanding further is to apply what’s been discovered through studies in social psychology and neuroscience, which often help to explain our seemingly random acts of consumerism.  And that’s the sort of thing I bring readers of my eZine (honestly, how can you resist signing up?!)  Of course, once you start to develop this skill you can apply it to what you see your own customers doing.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour consumer behaviour, influence, neuroscience, psychology, why customers buy

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

I read recently that a study has found that we don’t see things all the time. Brain activity has peaks and troughs (about ten per second) and when it’s in a trough we don’t see.

Then there is inattentional blindness.

You know, the thing that happens when a man in a monkey suit walks across a two-ball basketball counting game (it happens all the time, but people fail to see monkey-man because they’re so busy counting the number of passes).

And then there’s the problem that my wife can’t find her keys or her phone or her address book (often her address book).

Because I understand the psychology of looking at stuff I know that her strategy is a reckless one. It’s no good putting stuff down any old place and relying on your eyes to find it when you start looking. You might momentarily have your attention elsewhere, or be in one of those brain activity dips when you happen to walk past it.

Then you get cross because you can’t find it and, when someone else points out where it is, you get even more cross because you’d looked there.

So I always put the things I might lose in the same place. I always know where they are. [One other option is to attach everything you own to a piece of string; that way you always know where it is... on the string.]

What has all this got to do with consumers? Well, when we do something in our business we see it. We know it’s there because we thought about it.

But that’s no guarantee that your customers will see it.

So one of the most important skills in understanding consumers is to recognise that they don’t see your world and your products in the way you do. If you have a physical shop it is really useful to stand back and watch where they look and, in particular, where there attention lingers.

If you only sell on-line there are only two things you can do:

1. Learn how consumers’ minds work and what influences them (I wrote my EBook The Secret of Selling to help with this).
2. Trial different approaches to how you present your information and measure the response.

Now, if I could only find my keys, I’d go to the bank like I’ve been meaning to for three days.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour analysis, consumer behaviour, influence, marketing communication, psychology, selling, The Secret of Selling

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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