Monthly Archives: August 2013

At the moment I’m doing interviews with the media about my book, Consumer.ology; there is quite a lot of concern about the extent to which consumers are open to manipulation as a result of retailers understanding consumer psychology better. My view is that optimising the retail environment is a sensible thing to do. Customers would expect a shop to make its window display look attractive – without necessarily understanding how that might be priming their experience – why not have it smell ‘right’ and sound ‘right’ too? Nevertheless, I do accept that the unscrupulous retailer can take advantage of other aspects of consumer psychology (and yes, these are explained in Consumer.ology). In particular, by exploiting heuristics (rules of thumb), it is very easy to influence someone to feel differently about a product than they otherwise would. My view on under-taking this sort of marketing activity is that it is foolish. […]

A lot of people are superstitious. The funny thing about superstitions is that we hatch an idea (or are told) that there is a connection between one thing and another and, if it suits us, we’re prepared to go on believing it even when there is no sensible basis for there being a connection between the two. Horse shoes are lucky. Finding a four leaf clover will bring you good fortune. You should carry around a rabbit’s foot for good luck (yours that is, not the rabbit’s). Many elite sportsmen and women have superstitions about when they put on their shirt, which ball they serve with after they’ve served an ace or what order they do things in before a big game. Of course, they do all these same things on the occasions when they don’t win, don’t serve an ace or get carried off the field injured; but that […]

Tell me all about it, you naughty thing. or Tell me all about it, you naughty thing.       No one likes to feel self-conscious. Recently I listened to interview with the actor, author, comedian and TV presenter, Stephen Fry. He was asked to sing a song called “Big John” that is essentially spoken rather than sung. Fry has made no secret of the fact that, despite his love of music, he can’t sing a note. As an actor, you might have thought that this task would have been well within his capabilities, but he stammered and stuttered and then stopped; “You’ve made me all self-conscious!” he declared. There are few things more unsettling than being made self-conscious. And yet, most market research invites the conscious mind to look in on itself; it asks the respondent to become self-conscious. It’s something we’re hopeless at. Partly because we’re unaware of […]

In my first book, Consumer.ology, I investigated the importance of the unconscious mind in consumer behaviour. There is now a wealth of evidence that shows how it is the unconscious mind that can be significant in shaping how consumers behave, and indeed, whether they buy or not. A lot of consumer behaviour is habitual; we quickly pass the processes that we’ve learned into our unconscious mind and let it take control of much of what we do. This is certainly a much more efficient way of existing (and this, I suspect, explains why we’ve evolved this way). Consider a supermarket shop. Imagine not knowing any of the brands, where anything was, or how to make good decisions about what’s good value for money and what isn’t: it would take hours to shop for your weekly groceries. Instead we have lots of short cuts. We “know” that bulk buying is usually cheaper, […]