Consumer Behaviour

The man walked onto the station platform very casually.  Most of the other people around me paid him little or no attention at all, but I found my eyes drawn back to him repeatedly.  In fact, I had to work hard to make sure that he didn’t catch me looking his way a little too often.

I tried to size up the situation.  The group around him were standing too far away to be friends, but they were close enough to suggest they weren’t strangers either.  I guessed they were fellow commuters, familiar with one another, but not with each others’ lives.  They didn’t know what I knew about him.  Instead they had been taken in like so many others by his relaxed air and general bonhomie.

I considered what it was that had first made me recognise him; what unconscious reference had caused me to notice him, fixate my attention on him and trigger that feeling of fear. 

It was several factors, I decided.  Like a simple jigsaw puzzle any one of the elements would have been insufficient, but together they fired up that recognition I’d experienced and made me instantly wary and attentive.  It was the distinctive coffee-coloured hue of his (Asian) skin, his height, the strong physique softened by a considerable paunch, and the back-pack, worn with both straps over the shoulders.  I recalled I’d only ever seen him with that distinctive back-pack.

My unconscious mind had filtered the situation and, within microseconds, made its judgment.  This was the murderer Maninder Kohli!

Except it wasn’t.

I knew that because at the end of the television programme I’d watched about Kholi’s viscious crime and the manhunt for him in India, the police had caught him and he’d been sent to prison (for a very long time).

But primed by the programme. and the powerful emotions it evoked (particularly given that I’m the father of a daughter and he raped and murdered a teenage girl), my unconscious had new data to use in protecting me.

In evolutionary terms this mechanism makes great sense.  It can keep me safe and help me protect my family.  But, as I knew within moments of ‘recognising’ the man at the station, it can also be wrong.

Had I known someone who looked like Kholi I doubt I would have looked at the man in the same way.

So what does all this reveal about consumer behaviour?  Well, the unconscious mind can be easily influenced.  When emotion and uniqueness are combined, particularly if it’s through a recent event, it creates a prime.  The unconscious mind is then on the look-out for elements of the event that have caused that emotion.  When enough are encountered, or sufficiently close approximations of them are, it triggers the emotions experienced on the first occasion as a warning (or incentive in the case of something pleasurable) to act.

Where you can create an emotion and attach your brand or product to it the sensory associations at the time will be mapped onto it and can be deployed to recreate the intended emotions.  That’s how brand logos work.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Advertising, consumer behaviour Advertising, brands, logos, marketing communication

When it comes to observing consumer behaviour, or any aspect of human behaviour, there is an important tip you would do well to keep in mind.  The process of observation needs to be as detached and objective as possible.

It’s also worth remembering that you will learn the most when your presence as an observer isn’t something the people you’re observing are aware of: “I’ve just come here to watch, you carry on as normal” is not going to work. 

You’ve just raised the question of what “normal” is and virtually guaranteed that someone is going to be consciously aware of their own actions.

Yesterday I had a fascinating insight into sexist behaviour.  You know the sort of thing, putting women down, not treating them as equals, pushing people into gender stereotypes.  It can get you a little cross can’t it.

Who was guilty of this?  Would you be surprised if I said a group of middle-aged men?  Probably not, that’s just one of those things you’ve come to expect.

Oh, I nearly didn’t mention, some boys too.

Oh yes, and some girls.

And some women.  Ranging in age from twenty-somethings to ladies in their seventies.  Including one who is a social worker.

In fact, everybody in the room was at it.  It was like a convention for sexism.  Except, in fact, it was the annual draw for Wimbledon tennis tickets.

Each club that’s affiliated to the Lawn Tennis Association receives an allocation of tickets for the championships.  Members of the club were there to watch the draw to decide who would get a ticket.  The earlier your name came out the sooner you got to choose which day of the tennis you would attend.

So the choice people made was a good indication of what they wanted to watch.   What was first to go?  Centre Court tickets on men’s final day, of course.

What was last to go?  Any day the men weren’t playing (ladies’ quarter finals, semi finals and even the ladies’ final).

So whilst the organising bodies in women’s tennis have achieved equal pay in the main tournaments, it seems that the tennis-watching public isn’t seeing things as being equal.  Of course, if you asked the ladies present if the prize money should be equal, they wouldn’t hesitate to say “yes”.  But what people say, and what they reveal through their behaviour are rarely the same thing.

Whilst this was going on I was sitting next to a lady with a baby, just five or six weeks old.  On three occasions she had cause to go up to the board where the choice of tickets was displayed and, on each occasion, she passed the infant to someone to hold.

She always passed it to another woman.  She never asked me.  Nor did she ask any of the other fathers in the room.

Was this all sexist behaviour?  I’m pretty sure it was.

You see, despite what we like to tell ourselves about what we think, our behaviour will give us away.

Our unconscious works ahead of our “nice to have” conscious notions, to find the safest route for us to pursue.

To be honest, the chance of a woman knowing what to do with a baby are much greater than a man; it’s not guaranteed, but it’s a safer bet.

And tennis elitism is a male preserve; fewer errors, better movement, higher quality (this is all statistically verifiable); not that that matters.  People know what they’d rather watch: a first round men’s match featuring a great male player, than a grand slam final featuring two of the best female players.

So if you make sure those conscious pretentions don’t get in the way - your own value judgments and those of the people you’re interested in - you may be surprised (or disappointed) by what you see. 

But however you feel about it, it is the way things are.  You can try and fight it or you can recognise it and tailor your marketing accordingly.

For example, if you put a mixed sex group of people in a room to watch a TV programme, and asked a lady to start the DVD player, but fixed it so that it wouldn’t work, who do you think she would turn to?  Would she look at one of the other women or one of the men when she realised she needed help with something technical?

Trust me, I know plenty of very technically competent women and, for the record, my golf teacher is a woman, but I’m fairly sure most of the time the person would look towards a man.  So if you’re putting a voice-over on your TV ad for an electronics product or retailer, does the choice of a female voice make sense?  I suspect not.

It’s a shame that we should have to choose between pragmatism and idealistic values, but I would never recommend to one of my clients that they embrace the latter over the former.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Advertising, consumer behaviour, consumer research Advertising, consumer behaviour, consumer research, marketing communication

I recently discovered some research which dovetails quite nicely with the blog I posted recently on Unconscious Advertising. 

Researchers wanted to explore the impact of drug companies’ low-key promotional items on medical students; were those scientifically-minded students, on the verge of becoming fully fledged doctors, susceptible to the old-fashioned marketing technique of branding any old trinket in the hope that your customer sees it and decides to choose you over a competitor?

The results shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s read my blog or my eBook.  But they are an interesting reminder that we could all benefit from tactical marketing that gets our brand around our customers as frequently as possible (however indirectly).

You can find the article under the Latest Articles section here.

As always, I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Marketing Advertising, Marketing, marketing communication

Following on from my post on the unconscious nature of advertising, Duane Cunninghamasked whether it was fair to say that any exposure was good for a brand?  The old chestnut of “there’s no such thing as bad PR”.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, when it comes to consumer behaviour and the workings of the consumer mind, there isn’t a clear cut answer in my opinion.  Let me explain…

For the most part exposure to a brand works positively.  As I’ve mentioned previously, the unconscious (largely visual) detection of brands builds unconscious familiarity and this alone is preferable to nothing.  When the brand is encountered consciously, it feels slightly familiar, safer and therefore slightly preferable to a previously unencountered rival.

Often there will be some associations with that brand.  It might be a high street sign, in which case the associations are with the environment of that high street (perhaps upmarket, perhaps skanky!).  Even without contextual associations, a brand logo may be redolent of another business or may use colours that carry particular associations, which will also shape the feeling created.

It is perfectly possible that mildly bad publicity will, over time, serve as a positive.  If all that is remembered is that the brand has been encountered before then, at an unconscious level, that is beneficial.  Where the bad publicity fails to stir up an appropriate level of emotion in the person, they may well quickly recall the negative component.

On the other hand negative labels have been shown to be very strong influencers of opinion.  Where a customer hears a story about a brand that is compelling and emotionally engaging (in other words, when it’s a good story), and particularly if that story emanates from a friend, it will be a prime association with the brand.

This bad association works at an unconscious level like the advice from a parent not to eat the poisonous berries on a bush; you’ve never tried the berries, nor have you ever seen someone eat them and fall to the ground clutching their stomach, but you have a reflexive reaction that they feel unappealing, which you will recognise (and post-rationalise) as a reason not to want to eat them.

Another element to consider is how confirmation bias fits in with bad publicity.  If someone was very critical of your favourite musician you wouldn’t attach anywhere near the same weight to it as if the same criticism was levelled at a musician you didn’t like.  Similarly, criticism of a brand you love may be perceived as an unwarranted attack that causes you to want to support that brand, rather than reappraise or reject it.

The strength of affinity for the brand will also determine how long bad publicity has an impact.  If the brand is really liked and the competitors are relatively weak (in terms of brand strength and distribution) customers will gravitate back to the brand relatively quickly.  The bottled water brand Perrier had a major health scare several years ago, but managed to survive the experience. 

Another brand of water, Dasani, marketed by Coca Cola had an ill-judged launch, bad publicity about it being filtered tap water that was associated with a famous and hugely popular comedy series (where the characters also marketed tarted up tap water) and then experienced a similar health scare.  Without a credible brand to support it the product was pulled and never sold again.

Philip Graves

So, it’s certainly possible to have bad publicity that can damage your business.

Philip Graves Advertising, Marketing Advertising, Dasani, marketing communication, Perrier, psychology

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

Humour is often used to make an advert engaging.  What’s less well understood is that it also helps to create positive emotions which are then unconsciously associated with the brand or product concerned.

The tricky part is that humour is a relatively personal thing and if your ad isn’t funny to enough people the strategy can backfire in exactly the same way.

I had hoped to show you a recent Barclays Bank advert, but You Tube let me down – it’s there but with no sound (and the soundtrack makes this particular ad work).

Instead here are two examples.  The first is an ad that you’ve probably seen before – it spread superbly when it was first released onto You Tube because it’s extremely funny (at least many people think so).

And here’s another for a rival credit card that was shown repeatedly in the UK and seems, to me at least, entirely devoid of anything positive to connect with the company concerned at any conscious or unconscious level!

It can be difficult for brands to make an advert that is light-hearted or humorous and works well.  There is a need to balance the credibility of the unconscious associations they are inviting the consumer to make with something that will engage their target market and make them smile. 

Often a brand manager or marketing director isn’t personally representative of their target audience, invariably their understanding of their brand and product isn’t anything like typical.  Some would take this as a justification for asking consumers what they thought of an advert (or the script) in advance.  Unfortunately, this usually just leads to an invitation to consciously appraise the ad, and consumers will never sit and watch it in such a critical and judgmental mindset.  As a result, what’s reported back is usually misleading.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Advertising Advertising, Barclaycard, marketing communication, Master Card, psychology, unconscious mind

Today I had the last of five or six conversations with my brother about buying a camera.

I’m no Annie Liebovitz!  But I did get into SLR photography many years ago and have had the good luck to take one or two half decent photographs over the years – including one of the Brooklyn Bridge that my brother has in his house.  It’s a good picture, although not so good that he’s ever asked me to sign it or anything.

Probably the best picture I ever took was of a sculpture.  I was in Paris and took a black and white photo of a Rodin work called The Woman Under the Stone (only that in French, I imagine).  By over-exposing the picture perfectly, the dark weathering of the sculpture was magically transformed into a dramatic blend of shimmering shades. 

Of course, this was in the days when you didn’t know what your pictures would look like until you got them developed.  Incidentally, when I said I had been lucky to take some good pictures, it wasn’t false modesty.  The Rodin picture only came out that way because I’d forgotten to change the settings over when I got outside!

All of which is nothing to do with consumer behaviour.  But what I did learn from the many conversations with my brother is how much easier it is to make a clear recommendation when your own money isn’t involved: it’s much easier to help spend someone else’s money.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’d hate to give my brother bad advice.  But the difference is that I don’t have any unconscious rumblings of loss aversion to contend with.  If there’s disappointment down the line I won’t have lost anything personally; it is, after all, still my brother making the final decision about what to do with his money.

So how might this be useful from a consumer behaviour perspective?  Well, if you can find a way to encourage people to recommend your product or service to their friends it’s likely to reap dividends.  Persuading someone to recommend you to someone else (ironically, even if they haven’t used your services themselves) can be more influential and compelling than delivering your sales message to them first-hand!

Everyone is a potential customer.  And even someone who doesn’t buy from you may recommend you to someone else.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, selling consumer behaviour, marketing communication, why customers buy

I’d like to pick up on a long reply to yesterday’s post because I hope I can be more constructive than I was able to be yesterday.

Here’s is Pam’s reply to yesterday’s post:

It’s interesting to read how the rational and unconscious minds often pull us in opposite directions. Your point is well taken that people often think they want A but actually choose B because it fulfills an unconscious need, want or desire. It is good to bear this in mind.

If you are looking to invest your money though, at some point – unless you choose to navigate the investment world yourself – you will likely be forced to make a choice between various options and advisers available to you. In essence, you are trusting your future to advice of someone and their investing philosophy and strategy.

The question then becomes in whom do you trust and why do you trust them?

As you have been explaining so well in your blog, our buying decisions must fulfill some type of psychological need. In the case of investing, one must feel comfortable entrusting their life savings.

For some it is purely an emotional investment. They will invest with the person who makes them feel most comfortable or represents a philosophy they feel most comfortable with.

For others, such as myself, our comfort-zone is found by analyzing details and facts. Rod’s approach will likely not persuade the masses. Nor does he intend it to. It’s a targeted niche of investors to whom his strategy will appeal. He knows and understands the demographics of those whom he is targeting.

I have seen first-hand the results Rod’s methods of investing. The process through which he takes his clients is thorough, rigorous and intense. I can speak to this through personal experience as I am one of his numerous clients. And yes, even I had to go through the same battery of tools he uses to devise a plan tailored and targeted specifically to my risk tolerance and time horizon – which I might add is different than the risk tolerance of us as a couple. I would be remiss if I didn’t add that while the market has taken a hit in recent months, my portfolio has weathered the storm quite nicely given the current economic conditions.

Everyone has to find their own comfort level – after all its YOUR money and YOUR future that you are banking on. While past performance is not a predictor of future earnings or performance, I know where my comfort-level is an I’m very happy with the results I’ve achieved through Rod’s methodology and strategic investing.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Respectfully,

Pam
Well the first thing I’d like to say is that I’m sorry if Pam took it as an indirect attack on her and Rod’s business, it certainly wasn’t intended to be.

Secondly, Pam’s reply didn’d address the key point of the research I was reporting: it was investment advisers whose judgment was influenced (primed) by what they had just read, although no doubt consumers are susceptible to being primed in the same way.

So how could someone in the investment business use research like that which I referenced, which opens a veritable can of worms regarding the veracity of investment advice?

From the point of view of the investment advice they offer, other research on subliminal influence and priming shows that its effects are reduced, or removed altogether, where people are aware that something could prime them.  So, provided Rod recognises that he could be unconsciously primed to give different advice on the basis of what they read and hear, they are somewhat less likely to do so.

[Incidentally, I'm certain that none of the very rational and analytical investment advisers and accountants that took part in the research believed their advice was the by-product of something they'd just read.  This isn't a reflection on the individual, it's a reflection of how our brains work.]

Perhaps more importantly this information is an opportunity for them to differentiate from their competitors.  In their position this is exactly the sort of information I would communicate to potential clients, along with an overview of the systems in place to make the advice offered as rational and robust as possible (something that seems to be a real strength of theirs).

Rest assured, there is nothing like providing a genuine source of anxiety in your consumer’s mind regarding the risk of using a competitor, for that competitor to seem far less attractive.  Handled the wrong way knocking the competition can be alienating, but when you have scientific studies to quote it’s not you that’s doing the knocking, it’s implicit (or explicit if you point out that “very few other investment specialists are aware of the fact that…”).

I hope that this makes for a more constructive post. 

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, selling Add new tag, analysis, consumer behaviour, marketing communication, priming, psychology

Today I’ve been writing a lengthy article on consumer behaviour for an international magazine.  Whilst I was working on it I remembered a video I posted a long time ago over on my Vox blog (and yes, a new post there is long overdue).

Anyway, I thought I’d share the video here because it’s both entertaining and quite informative. 

Bird & Fortune are a pair of satirical comedians who regularly draw attention to the silliness of politics and the world.  Here they talk about the subprime crisis that seems to have triggered the recession we’re ‘enjoying’ globally at the moment.

The point I was making in my article is that consumer behaviour is also all a matter of sentiment.  People can be in exactly the same financial position and with the same inability to forecast the future accurately as they were eighteen months ago, but they behave very differently as consumers.

The fear of what the future might hold increases unconscious sensitivity to future losses and that has big repercussions for what consumers will and won’t do (points I’ll need to save for the magazine article).

Philip Graves

Philip Graves consumer behaviour consumer behaviour, marketing communication, subprime crisis

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