Consumer Behaviour

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 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

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