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 […]
When a Consumer Behaviour Expert Says “No”
I enjoy watching myself as a consumer, in that slightly schizophrenic way that I encourage everyone interested in understanding customers better to do. If you have the right framework you can learn a lot about the way in which other people make decisions by watching how you make a decision – after all, you’re a person aren’t you? The challenge is always to split out that part of you that consciously post-rationalises what you do in a totally bogus way. If you can learn to tell yourself that, deep down, you’re smart, sexy, clever and incredibly good at parking a car, you can put your ego to one side for a few minutes and observe what you’re doing as a consumer. You’ll have a reasonable idea that you’re on the right track when you spot yourself doing things that are impulsive, irrational, poorly judged and altogether a bit dumb. Recently, […]
Too Much Choice: Part IV
Christian and Sonya raised an interesting conundrum with their question in reply to my last post. “In a category like breakfast cereal, are the manufacturers hurting themselves by having so many brands and varieties within those brands?” There are two aspects to this from a retail marketing and consumer behaviour perspective. The brands are doing themselves a favour (with an approach that was started by the cigarette manufacturers many decades ago): by proliferating the number of brand options you increase the likelihood that someone will choose one of your brands (and they basically don’t care which the customer takes so long as it’s one of theirs). This makes it much, much harder for a new entrant to take market share away. The retailers however are not helping their cause. It’s been found in one study of European supermarkets, that those who stock a smaller ranges sell more in total than those that stock […]
Too Much Choice: Part III
When faced with a small choice consumers can deploy simple strategies to make a choice and feel better about the option they choose. Three options usually works well because customers can use extremeness aversion. By selecting the middle option they know that they don’t have the worst that they might, but nor have they been indulgent and spent more than they might. The options present frame the choice; put another way, they way in which the decision is made is largely a by-product of what has been presented to the customer at the time he or she is making the choice. We’d all like to believe that what we’re buying is the thing we would want to buy in considering our own “needs” (and indeed marketers often talk about “consumer needs” as if such a thing were tangible and real. It isn’t. The human (and consumer) mind reacts to its […]
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