Monthly Archives: August 2013

Why Buying Should be Exciting

Why Buying Should be Exciting

When the unconscious mind gets excited it’s not very good at knowing quite what it’s excited about.  It picks up on something that sets it off (and it gets jittery about all sorts of funny things) and sends out a feeling. One of the world’s leading experts on emotions (the neurology professor Antonio Damasio – rather than someone who reads a lot of agony columns) describes consciousness as the “feeling of knowing” something.  He’s quite sure from his work studying images of brains in action, and patients who have lost various important areas of brain function, that this feeling occurs quite clearly after the other feelings have had their go.  Lots of other psychologists agree with him too. So ‘excitement’ gets registered by one sense and the rest of the mind tries to work out what might be causing this potentially important sensation.  We’re being prepared so that we can pursue […]

Stradivarius’s Consumer Behavior Insights

Stradivarius’s Consumer Behavior Insights

Most of us would like a brand as powerful as Stradivarius, the man who made violins three hundred years ago – although we’d probably want that recognition a little sooner. Fortunately we can learn a lot about how consumers relate to products and brands from examining these musical instruments more closely. With any luck we can save ourselves a bit of time and effort in the process. To understand what makes a Stradivarius special we need to get our laboratory coats out and start analysing a few things. It turns out the wood he used was mostly from trees that grew during the “little ice age” when winters were longer and summers shorter (from the mid 1400s to the mid 1800s). This seasonal twist of fate produced very dense wood that was more resonant. Further scientific analysis reveals that the application of a mineral such as borax helps make the […]

Consumer Research of the Future with Squirrels

Consumer Research of the Future with Squirrels

You know what you want don’t you. You know what you like. It’s like the old saying about art, “I don’t know much, but I know what I like” (usually followed by something resembling, but not convincingly matching, a laugh). And so it is that, often, organisations will turn to consumers to find out what they want. It seems a sensible enough thing to do after all, what sort of person doesn’t know what he wants? Let’s do some market research! Except that, what we think we want and what we ultimately end up choosing to do are completely different things. There are a number of reasons for this: Most of our behaviour is unconsciously triggered.  We react to our environment in a way that we have learned is best (safest) for us.  But with no link to the way in which our unconscious mind works, we are not aware […]

Are You Keeping It Simple?

Are You Keeping It Simple?

When it comes to marketing, one thing is sure; you will never see your product or service in the same way that one of your consumers will. This is, unfortunately, inevitable. Pretty much everything you do for your business is a deliberate action, you think about what you’re doing and the reasons for it (at least I hope you do). As a result of this you will look at the elements you offer and consider them. Most of the time you have had to think about them to have them be there in the first place. But this doesn’t mean you are always mindful of how small details can be significant to consumers. For example the background in the picture of the car you’re selling may well convey an awful lot of information to a prospective customer either at a conscious or unconscious level. But the seller, having dutifully cleaned […]