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 […]

Rebranding: Learning from the Past

I once had a conversation with the Marketing Director of a brand that is a household name in which he suggested that no products had updated their brand identities.  We were having the conversation because his main brand was so tired that sales were in decline and customers didn’t see its packs on the shelves of their supermarkets: it looked exactly the same as it had a decade earlier (and it was hardly the most relevant product back then). When I used Skoda as an example, he moved the goal posts to FMCG products.  Then when I referenced other FMCG products that had dramatically redesigned their brand without disaster he argued that these weren’t in the same category as his product. So his point was, that since none of his competitors had successfully updated their brand identity, he shouldn’t be the first one to risk it. Except, of course, all of […]

Market Research Saved My Life Again

As I mentioned last time, I’ve only once found an impromptu use for my understanding of consumer behaviour and consumer psychology, and I certainly never anticipated that a situation might arise where market research might make a difference between life and death. But that just shows how little I know. Recently, the UK government has announced that 10% of hospital (NHS Trust) funding will be dependent on patient satisfaction levels.  To put that in financial terms, that could mean around £10billion of expenditure will be dependent on patient satisfaction. And here’s the thing.  This is, in my opinion, the most profoundly stupid example of using market research that I have ever encountered: it’s going to result in lives being lost. Let’s go back a few years, before any of us had heard of MRSA or any of the other so-called super-bugs that are resistant to antibiotics and kill people. How […]