Monthly Archives: August 2013

I’m willing to admit it. In fact, it can be quite hard to hide. I have big feet. Despite having parents of average height my mother’s parents’ genes found their way down the line to me and ended up with above average height and big feet. I’m fine about them. They aren’t circus huge or anything. However, when it comes to buying shoes I’ve come to learn that the chances of disappointment are quite high. I walk round the shop find one or two styles I like and ask the usual question. “Do you have these in a size 12 or 13?” The answer is frequently no. Which is annoying because I know they make shoes in this size – plenty of people have bigger feet than me – but the retailers don’t stock many pairs and they soon sell out. You could argue that they are best placed to […]

It’s fascinating how unaware we all are of what really drives our behaviour. We’re convinced by our conscious minds that what we do is driven by what we decide on the basis of our beliefs. We are kidding ourselves. More evidence appeared this week in a study that was conducted to look at how people’s fairness and generosity could be influenced by scents. All of you who have read my eBook The Secret of Selling will already be making the most of this influential mechanism in the human unconscious, but for those who aren’t here are more reasons why you really should! Researchers set up two studies using two different rooms. In each case one room had the clean, fresh, citrus scent of Windex, the other did not. Subsequent questioning showed that none of the participants were aware of the scent’s presence in the room and that their mood was not a […]

This morning as I was leaving my bedroom I looked at the empty mug sitting next to my bed. Ten minutes earlier it had contained a most welcome cup of tea that made the transition from sleepiness to life altogether more palatable. I had a lot to thank that mug for. I should have picked it up and taken it down to the kitchen so that a machine could do the tedious job of washing it for me. But I didn’t. And that was really lazy of me. It would have involved a two step detour on my journey; that’s all. But did I bother? No. It wasn’t a conscious decision; but when I went into the room in the evening there was no disguising the fact that the mug was still exactly where I’d left it. Perhaps it’s not surprising. Modern life is such that there are a myriad of […]

Does one of these pictures look more attractive to you? Read on to find out why. Often marketing people will spend a lot of time and money getting the right person associated with their product. Although the science behind why this is important is relatively recent, it doesn’t take a genius to know that it is better to put your product in the hand of someone attractive. It’s not just that we’re instinctively drawn towards attractive people, the associations our unconscious mind makes between the product we’re seeing and the context we’re seeing it in changes the way we feel about that product. However much we like to tell ourselves we’re objective about these sorts of things, we usually aren’t. If your product is related to health then how healthy a person looks is even more important; it just wouldn’t make sense to sell your exercise programme with a picture […]