Monthly Archives: August 2013

It’s nice to tell ourselves that we’re inherently simple creatures. If we want something we can decide we’ll go out and buy it. Perhaps we’ll see an advert that will encourage us to buy something and we’ll decide we want to own whatever it is. Possibly we’ll decide to go to the shops and see if we are tempted by something on display. But that’s just what we like to tell ourselves. And that’s fine in protecting our view of ourselves, but if you want to understand how to communicate effectively to consumers it is more helpful if you understand how the human mind works. That means understanding the way in which associations cause us to behave. How a sensory input – a word, a picture, a message, an advert – unconsciously triggers a thought because of what we’ve experienced in the past. It can be hard to reconcile the […]

Language can be tricky. I remember when I was trying to encourage my three-year-old son to be more polite I encouraged him to say ‘pardon’ rather than ‘what’ when he hadn’t heard someone. This resulted in a very silly exchange. I asked him to pass me the pencil he had been using so that I could put it away. He was distracted by his task and hadn’t heard me. “What?” he asked. “Pardon!” I said, with an emphasis intended to convey the fact that I was correcting his choice of word. He missed the subtle inflection, looked at me with a trace of annoyance and said: “I said ‘what’”. When we use particular words we (hopefully) know what we’re trying to convey. But that doesn’t mean someone hears those words in the same way. It’s all a question of the associations a person’s mind makes with those words. Which in […]

What’s your product worth? It’s a simple question but, from the perspective of consumer psychology, quite a complex one to answer. Of course there is the issue of the price. But it’s very hard to know if you have it priced right isn’t it. If you change your price you need to leave it at that price long enough for people to get over the comparison you’ve encouraged them to make by pricing it at different price, before you can get an accurate read on whether you sell more at that new price (if you see what I mean). And who’s to say if, when you change the price, some other change has occurred in the environment that renders a change in how your new price is perceived? A currency change or a competitor’s new product might mean your price is perceived very differently. On the internet clever people can probably design your site in such […]

There’s no shortage of research that shows we’re fundamentally emotional creatures. The triggering of emotions sets in place the reactions that become our behaviour and, somewhere or other along the way, our conscious mind catches on and gets involved to a greater or lesser extent. Why does the emotional reaction come first? Well, imagine that something is flying towards your head at great speed. You could spend time consciously wondering what it is that’s about to hit you; provided you don’t mind whatever it is hitting you first. Instead the brain has evolved to detect the threat in the many millions of sensory inputs it’s receiving each second, and react in a way that protects you. In some cases these reactions are evolutionary; simply put those ancestors of ours who didn’t instinctively duck eventually died out. In other cases it may be a learned response; you soon learn that if […]