Consumer Behaviour

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

You’d be hard pressed to find any marketing text book that doesn’t talk at some point about “consumer need”.

It’s a simple enough concept: the products that will do best are those that meet a requirement that someone has.

At the next level you may find there’s a discussion on the types of consumer need.  Broadly these break down into physical and emotional needs. 

So, by way of simplistic example, the former says that, because you’re cold you will buy a hat.  The latter that because you want to feel special you’ll buy an expensive hat. 

This is all fine up to a  point.  But I happen to think that most consumer behaviour is nothing to do with “need”.  This is a problem because the notion of consumer need suggests that, at some level, a consumer is aware of what it is they are getting as a result of acquiring the product, and in my experience that’s often not the case.

Have you ever noticed how much some people’s lives are taken up with shopping; for some people human behaviour is consumer behaviour, almost exclusively.  When they aren’t shopping, they’re thinking about shopping, or watching TV programmes surrounded by ads, or reading magazines that are promoting consumerism directly through their copy or indirectly through their adverts. 

And some people will talk about shopping for hours; granted they’re not talking about the physical act of buying, they’re talking about something they’re thinking about buying, or something they’ve bought, or what happened when they tried to buy something.

All of this is has precious little to do with how cold someone’s head is.

I suspect that we’re collectively so preoccupied with shopping because of how our brains work.  Studies show that the brain works by estimating risk and reward, and then sending out extra dopamine (the feel good factor) when a decision is proved correct.  This increases the strength of the the neural pathway, essentially increasing our perception that what we thought would happen did.

I won’t explore the many fascinating implications of this mechanisms now, but when it comes to shopping I suspect it’s so prevalent because it’s so predictably rewarding.

Most of the time when you go out to buy you successfully do so.  The process is completed and you now own something new.  Owning stuff feels nice.  In fact, studies like the one I talked about recently in my eZine (The Importance of Touch) show that we get very attached to things we hold very quickly.

In evolutionary terms it’s generally been advantageous for us to have stuff: stored provisions, items we can use as tools, things we can defend ourselves with, mechanisms for protecting ourselves from the elements and so on.  So our brains have evolved to reward us for having things.

Rarely is shopping disappointing or dissatisfying.  When it is we learn quickly to change our expectations or to avoid places that fail to satisfy, and we can quickly find substitutes.

In essence shopping is low risk, high reward behaviour, and our brains get a kick out of that.

Philip Graves
P.S. You can sign up for my eZine here.

Philip Graves consumer behaviour, consumer research analysis, articles, consumer behaviour, consumer research, 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

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

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

When it comes to marketing it’s important that your product, brand name, company name and proposition work as memes. 

That means making as many aspects of your offer as memorable and as easy to pass on as possible.

And as we saw yesterday, whilst having both is nice, memorable often beats meaningful.  Our heads are full of junk that we’ve heard from brands (and elsewhere) that have become etched into our unconscious, and we all know we’ve heard jokes, quotes or ideas that, at the time, seemed to us utterly brilliant, and yet a couple of hours later they’ve gone.

So what is it that makes a meme work well?  I’ll give you my personal opinion of what can help:

• Rhythm and rhymes create narrower options of associations thereby making it more likely that the whole phrase will be recalled accurately (if you can remember the first line, the rhythm and rhyme will lead you directly to the second line).
• Frequency / repetition – when something is repeated in the same way (style, tone, accent, cadence) it increases the likelihood of it being recalled.
• Music – music is very memorable.  I recall reading about one study that found people asked to sing a popular song didn’t just recall most of it, they even started on the right note.
• Alliteration – when we ‘know’ that one initial letter is repeated often in a phrase it narrows down the false associations we could divert to.
• Stories – for a longer message a story, with its forumlaic structure, is far more likely to be recalled than the same message in none contextual form.
• Utility – if there is a benefit to you of storing the meme you’re more likely to repeat it to yourself and therefore embed it more effectively.
• Quirkiness – the more something sounds like something else the greater the chance that you’ll make an error of association when you recall it.
• Intriguing – if it really intrigues you will lock it away whilst you look for answer, and you’ll remember it long after you have the answer too (“Who is John Galt?”).
• Concise – the shorter the better.

To give you an example of a (non-marketing) great meme; I was listening to someone advise someone else on how to undo a wheel nut.  “Righty tighty, lefty loosey”, he said, and I’ve never forgotten it. 

• It’s quirky: it actually contains ‘words’ that I never say in connection with anything else.
• It’s useful: I say it to myself on the rare occasions I’m poised over a nut of some kind and I know I’ll turn it the right way.
• It rhymes and has a good rhythmic feel.
• It has a little alliteration.

Pretty good, huh!

In his hugely enjoyable blog, JJ Jalopy posed the question, what do you say when people ask “what do you do”.  The more meme-able your answer the better.

I came up with, ”I help businesses understand customers better than their customers understand themselves”, which does moderately well on intrigue, no better.

In a recent post several people picked up on, “see your business through the eye of your customer’s unconscious mind”; again moderate intrigue is the best I can do.

“The psychology of shopping” is perhaps the best I’ve come up; it has alliteration on its side, is short and still a little intriguing.

How can you tell if what you have is memorable?

Recently someone recommended I read a book called Management Revisited.  Except that’s not the name of the book he recommended.  That was how my brain remembered it, but it (I) remembered it incorrectly. 

The moral of the story… if someone makes a mistake when they recall your name, company name, product name or slogan, then it hasn’t taken root as it could have done. 

If it’s not remembered accurately first time it’s very unlikely to work as a meme.  It will die like a fish on dry land.

And because frequency is a factor it’s worth resisting the temptation to change key parts of your communication too often.  Get it right and then give it the time to become familiar.

As you can see, it’s something I need to work on myself.

Philip Graves

Philip Graves Marketing Marketing, memes, psychology