Consumer Behaviour

The path to writing a book and getting it published is, without doubt, one that winds a lot.

On the way there will be plenty of dead-ends and no shortage of obstacles to circumnavigate.

However, what makes all the anguish worthwhile, are the moments that result from starting out and that are every bit as gratifying as the writer’s block, rejection letters and suggested revisions are aggravating.

I find there are usually three ways to deal with virtually any situation in life: ignore it and carry on regardless, take it badly or use it for inspiration.  It’s no coincidence that there really was something to learn from each ‘bad’ moment along the way.

Writer’s block: (which I hardly ever got) you’re trying to hard, go and do something else for a bit, or skip this section for now, it’s obviously not flowing.

Rejection letters: there’s always a lot of luck involved, but are you sure you’ve sent the book to the people who are most likely to have an interest in it?

‘Suggested’ Revisions: the biggest benefit of having a publisher is someone else who cares about your book almost as much as you do looking at it objectively.  Every single one of the suggestions my publisher and editor put to me have made the book better.  I confess that, once or twice, I had to count to ten, because I thought the book was finished.  Fortunately I made it to the last finger on the second hand, started to look at what they were advocating without the frustration from the process and the book was better for it.

And what about those moments that make it all worthwhile?  I’m reliably told that having the first copy in your hand is one of them, but I’ve not reached that point yet.  Thus far the highlights have been:

• Realising I had the structure of a book that excited me: you’re going to be working on it for a while, so you need to keep yourself interested!
• Every five thousand word threshold as I wrote.
• Finishing the first draft and seeing that I had written a book (even if I did have no clue whether anyone would be interested enough in it to publish it).
• Getting a meeting with a publisher.
• Walking through the door of the publishers.
• Receiving a contract.
• Getting a cheque for the first part of the advance.
• Seeing the cover for the first time.

And here is that cover….

Consumer.ology

It’s still making me smile….

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Getting a Book Published book, consumer behaviour, consumer.ology, market research

As I mentioned last time, I’ve only once found an impromptu use for my understanding of consumer behaviour and consumer psychology, and I certainly never anticipated that a situation might arise where market research might make a difference between life and death.

But that just shows how little I know.

Recently, the UK government has announced that 10% of hospital (NHS Trust) funding will be dependent on patient satisfaction levels.  To put that in financial terms, that could mean around £10billion of expenditure will be dependent on patient satisfaction.

And here’s the thing.  This is, in my opinion, the most profoundly stupid example of using market research that I have ever encountered: it’s going to result in lives being lost.

Let’s go back a few years, before any of us had heard of MRSA or any of the other so-called super-bugs that are resistant to antibiotics and kill people.

How many patients would have walked out of a hospital thinking, “There was a risk of me contracting a life-threatening bacterial infection in that hospital, I’d better market them down to a 5 out of 10.”

Ah, you may say, but people might have said the hospital wasn’t very clean.

That’s true.  But against what standard of cleanliness are patients judging the hospital?  Most of us are fortunate enough not to visit hospitals too often, so can we really judge what properly, hygienically clean looks like?

Of course, now that we’ve been primed to think about something as important as super-bugs we’re very sensitive to how clean a hospital looks.  But we don’t know how effectively they are controlling this type of infection from what we see; that requires expert testing.

It might be useful to know what people are actually doing in the hospital.  Are they reporting toilets that they find are dirty?  Are they cleaning up after themselves effectively where they can?  Are they washing their hands properly?  Are they using the special sanitising products provided?  Are they only coming to the hospital as visitors when they know they aren’t carrying a cold or stomach bug?

There is no shortage of evidence to show that people are hopelessly poor at reporting this sort of information accurately – not that, as far as I know, anyone is proposing to ask them what they are doing.  It’s all about what  they think.

I don’t think the NHS is perfect – far from it.  But I don’t think that I know how to judge how it’s performing in totality.

If someone happens to go for an out-patient appointment and is kept waiting for two hours they would feel bad.  In completing a survey they would probably exhibit be a ‘halo effect’ whereby they misattribute that bad feeling to many aspects of their experience.  Now if the delay was caused because the doctor in question was saving a life elsewhere would the patient realise?

Individual patients don’t have the perspective or the expertise to judge how well a hospital is performing.  But these inexpert, myopic opinions, when collected in their thousands and pressed together in a report, take on a gravity that is totally out of proportion to the base data.

And people will almost certainly die as a result.

Money will be wasted.  It will be wasted on the survey process itself.  It will be wasted on implementing the wrong solutions.  It will be wasted because the hospitals will invest in playing the game – anticipating what they think patients will want to see and hear to give them good scores.

All of these will drive money away from the expert evaluation of hospital effectiveness, drug funding and objective decision-making that should be taking place on the basis of managers doing the best job they can, as experts in the hospitals they are tasked to run.

You may never hear someone say, “Market research saved my life”, but if you’re unfortunate enough to need the UK’s National Health Service and not get the care you need, market research might just be responsible for you not living.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, consumer research, market research 10%, consumer behaviour, consumer psychology, market research, National Health Service, NHS, patient satisfaction

Be honest, how many of you thought you would ever read that as a headline?

As someone who has worked in and around what is generally known as “market research” for twenty years I was always slightly disappointed that I didn’t have a job that might be called upon dramatically.

“Help!!! Is there a market researcher on the plane?” Is not a phrase I ever expected to hear.

As a brief aside, I was once able to put my consumer behaviour skills to good use with strangers: I was taking a train with a friend and a number had been cancelled, resulting in the sorts of over-crowding that’s not permitted for the transportation of any other mammal.

We’d failed to get on two trains and watched two passengers almost come to blows as one attempted to compress an over-crowded carriage.

When the third train arrived we saw a tiny space, possibly only an illusion based on sixty people inhaling simultaneously, but decided we had to go for it.  Just then two people started fighting their way OFF the train that we wanted to get on.  They were at their intended station and were struggling to get through the packed groups of people between their place and the train doors.

As they made it through they were defiantly angry at the people they felt were blocking their route – in fact they just had no space to move into to get out of their way, and no one was planning on stepping off this train that they had worked so hard to get on to.

My friend and I, emboldened by a sense of mathematical justice – two people had now got off the train, their hadto be room for two more – pushed into the crowd.  Whilst the people we were now pressed against weren’t exactly happy about it, they also had seen the people get off and were, I suspect, torn between personal discomfort and resignation at the fact we were only re-balancing a distasteful equation.

After my friend broke the silence with a cheery “Hello” a conversation sprang up in our area of the carriage – an extraordinarily rare event on any form of London public transport.  After laughing about the fact that a train operator wouldn’t think to have drivers for all the trains they were operating the conversation turned to contrasting the general bonhomie of my friend and I with the couple who had only moments earlier escaped the packed carriage: why, one of my travelling companions asked, had they been unhappy to leave a crowded train whilst we were happy to be on it.

“Ah ah,” I said, pleased that my consumer psychology skills were at last coming in handy in an impromptu situation, “it’s the psychology of loss aversion!  The people getting off the train were anxious about losing out because they want to get home by getting off the train.  My friend and  I were afraid we would lose out by not getting onto a train and not getting home.  So the same psychological mechanism that makes us happy makes them unhappy because of the context.”

So, personally, I’ve been slightly useful but not saved any lives.  Which brings me back to the title of this blog: Market Research Saved My Life!  Has that happened?  Could it happen?  What would you spend on it if it could?

I’ll tell you next time!

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, Uncategorized consumer behaviour, loss aversion, market research, train travel

There’s no escaping the fact that Tiger Woods’ personal life has become very public in the last couple of  days.

But what, you may well ask, could his “transgressions” possibly have to do with consumer behaviour or market research?

The answer is in Tiger’s statement after his private life became monumentally public.  Here’s what he said on his website:

“I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart. I have not been true to my values and the behavior my family deserves.”

Now none of us can say whether this is what Tiger Woods really feels, or whether this is just the best thing he can think to say in the position he has found himself.  But for the purposes of this post, let’s take Tiger at his word.

He has not been true to his values.

Market research is frequently preoccupied with asking people what they think.  What are their attitudes (something very closely linked to their values)?

And here is classic example of something we all are manifestly capable of: our behaviour not matching our values.  Our attitudes and values are what we like to tell ourselves about how we are; our behaviour is how we actually are.

When it comes to understanding consumers what would you rather know?  What people like to tell themselves or what they really do?  I promise you there is, more often than not, a world of difference between the two.

I believe it’s a very important distinction.  I suspect Tiger Woods’ wife might be struggling to reconcile the two because most people like to think that there is a strong connection between values, attitudes and behaviour.

I’m not criticising Tiger Woods’ actions because I have no idea what he did or what circumstances surrounded it (and, frankly, it’s none of my business), but if Mrs Woods wants to know what Tiger’s values are she will find out from his behaviour not his words.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, consumer research consumer behaviour, market research, Tiger Woods, Transgressions

I pondered whether to use this blog on consumer behaviour to detail my book-writing journey and have decided that, since the book is (of course) about consumer behaviour and market research, it’s fair enough.  And I’ll be explaining elements of psychology that crop up along the way too, so I hope it will be interesting from a number of angles.

So, I’ve written my book. 

And writing a book is quite hard.  Between making the decision that I wanted to write a book and sitting there thinking, “Bloody hell, I’ve finished” there were weeks of sitting and researching and typing and hoping and wondering.

The wondering is quite preoccupying.  Writing is a very solitary process and you occasionally wonder if what you’re writing is worthwhile, whether anyone would be in the least bit interested in what you’re writing about and, perhaps most worryingly, whether you’re capable of writing at all.  The problem is that there’s no easy way of answering any of those questions until you’ve finished, and even then you probably don’t really know.

The best writing advice I received was from published author Kevin Hogan who said that I should never go back and edit before the book was finished.  Too many people end up with a perfect first chapter, or first page, but nothing more.  You just have to write until it’s done, then make it better.

For me the best writing aid was the Microsoft Word ‘word count’ feature.  I’ve always found numbers reassuring and it was comforting to track the progress I made (which I did on an old envelope).  This provided me with the most astonishing discovery; if you write at least a little each day the word count increases and you get closer to your target (I know, astonishing isn’t it).

What I discovered, psychologically-speaking, was that if you want to become a writer you have to pretend to be a writer for a couple of months, after which time you forget you’re pretending and the ingrained habit of writing becomes something you find yourself doing.  Fairly soon the serotonin buzz of seeing the word count tick over another 5,000 word threshold was significantly greater than the low doses available from watching re-runs of Friends or some other TV show that I wasn’t really that bothered about.

I’ve heard people say that you should stop watching TV if you want to make time to write.  Undoubtedly that’s a great idea, but in order to want to do something else like writing you have to push yourself to the point where that something else is more rewarding.   Just like with dieting, wanting an outcome is unlikely to be enough for most people, you’ve got to force the behaviour first.  It’s easy to be smug and say, “Stop watching TV and write”, but it doesn’t work that way for most of us.

So having written my book what now?

Over the coming weeks I’m going to share my experience of trying to get a book published. 

Some of what I’m going to write about has happened (but over such a long time period that you would have undoubtedly lost interest if you’d been living through it in real time – I nearly lost interest and it’s my book!). 

You’re going to meet some interesting characters, a few villains and perhaps even a hero or two. 

One thing is clear, no one knows what the ending will be.

Next time I’ll talk about the different routes to getting your book into print, what I believe the benefits are of each, and which route I plan to take.   I’ll hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Getting a Book Published consumer behaviour, consumer research, getting published, market research, psychology, writing a book