Today I’ve been writing a lengthy article on consumer behaviour for an international magazine. Whilst I was working on it I remembered a video I posted a long time ago over on my Vox blog (and yes, a new post there is long overdue). Anyway, I thought I’d share the video here because it’s both entertaining and quite informative. Bird & Fortune are a pair of satirical comedians who regularly draw attention to the silliness of politics and the world. Here they talk about the subprime crisis that seems to have triggered the recession we’re ‘enjoying’ globally at the moment. The point I was making in my article is that consumer behaviour is also all a matter of sentiment. People can be in exactly the same financial position and with the same inability to forecast the future accurately as they were eighteen months ago, but they behave very differently as consumers. […]
The Problem With Eyes
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 […]
Advertising Reviews
Technorati Profile Every so often I take an advertisement, usually from TV, and analyse it from a consumer perspective. What I’m interested in is the way in which the advert is likely to work at an unconscious level, since I’m convinced that this is most important dimension for marketing communication of this kind. Now that presents it’s own particular problem, because it’s generally acknowledged that we have no direct link between our unconscious and conscious minds. The unconscious triggers various feelings, which our conscious mind then receives and attempts to decode into some kind of rational explanation: “I feel bad, I must not like what I’m looking at.” Unfortunately there’s lots of evidence to show that we’re quite bad at evaluating these feelings accurately (which is one of the reasons that consumer research has so much potential to be misleading). By applying models of how people think and developing my […]
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