Why Black Friday Sales are Here to Stay in the UK

Why Black Friday Sales are Here to Stay in the UK

“There’s a new shopping genie.” “Oh no there isn’t!” “Oh yes there is!” The genie in question has emerged with the force of a hurricane, granting shoppers’ wishes (which can be best summed up as giving them an extra excuse to spend money to satisfy their desires and feel good).  It goes by the somewhat curious name of ‘Black Friday’. This year several retailers have brought US-style Black Friday discounts to the UK.  And shoppers here haven’t let the fact that we don’t have the vaguely meaningful justification of a preceding day, thanking imaginary friends for a good harvest, put us off.  Most of us have either forgotten that food actually is harvested or else have moved beyond attributing meteorological deviations to divine entities. For the record the name ‘Black Friday’ stems from the traffic chaos that came about in Philadelphia when people rushed to the shops after Thanksgiving.  In […]

Why Food Waste in the UK will Only Increase

Why Food Waste in the UK will Only Increase

Today the UK news has been dominated by research suggesting that the average British family throws away the equivalent of six meals a week.  The research, by WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme), claimed that this would equate to throwing away £60 each month. I haven’t studied the research in detail, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true. Having read the reports and listened to people discussing the matter on phone-ins (I’ve just taken part in one for BBC Radio Five Live), there is no shortage of suggested solutions – none of which will work. All the advice about shopping more carefully, preparing meals from scratch and being more discerning about what you throw away is well-reasoned and well-intentioned: it would even solve the problem.  But it won’t happen because people haven’t diagnosed the problem properly and, in particular, haven’t considered how the consumer mind works. The first […]

Dell Finally Convert me to Apple

I honestly believed that I would stick with PC based computing.  After twenty years using PCs they’re more familiar than my wife and kids! Despite all the positive things friends have said about Macs, and even though I have owned an iPhone for the last couple of years, there were good reasons not to change.  PCs have always worked well for me and, on the occasions when I have used Macs, I’ve always found them uncomfortably unfamiliar. If nothing else, we humans are creatures of habit: it takes quite a shove to push us out of our comfort zone and into unchartered territory.  For me and PCs that shove was Dell. I enjoy observing my own consumer decision-making and, although I know that much of the action takes place outside of my conscious awareness, my work on the consumer unconscious mind gives me a dual perspective for my own consumer […]

Market Research Recruitment: Be Honest

People aren’t desperately honest creatures.  Through no fault of our own we’re victims of the way our brains have evolved; it’s wise not to take the things people claim at face value. Among the many issues affecting market research the quality of respondent recruitment is reasonably frequently debated.  It’s not something I got into in Consumer.ology mostly because even when you recruit the “right” people, asking them questions throws up a whole world of other issues.   However, over the last couple of days I’ve had a fascinating insight into the recruitment process and can, at no charge to the market research industry, offer them a high quality recruitment tool.  I was contacted by a television network who wanted to interview me about a story that has been in the news regularly over the past few weeks; the cost of filling your car with petrol (or diesel).  Prices have risen substantially over the past few weeks and since […]