Monthly Archives: August 2013

I realise it’s a bit forward of me to ask, but I really need to know: have you had sex recently? In the business of market research you have to be prepared to ask all kinds of things and it’s surprising what people will talk to you about just because you’ve asked them a question and, perhaps unusually, are really listening to the answer. But there’s a problem with words. They don’t always mean the same thing to different people. And yet we can get so comfortable with the mental pictures we attach to linguistic labels we can easily forget. Cultural differences are often, but not always, easy to recognise: you could ask an English person how they felt at winning the lottery and they might well tell you it was ‘nice’! Meanwhile, an American might define a slightly altered recipe of peanut butter as ‘awesome!’. George Bernard Shaw once […]

Probability is an interesting thing. It’s relatively easy to evaluate the probability of a particular event happening but, when it comes down to it, we humans are much more concerned with our own experience. If we experience an unlikely event we tend to massively over-estimate the likelihood of that event happening again. For example, last week I was hit on the head by a golf ball. There I was waiting for someone else in my group to play, minding my own business, when an errant drive from an adjacent hole landed a direct blow to my skull. Fortunately, this was a good inch above either of the points where it could have killed me (the temple and the eye). The probability of me being hit was tiny. I was playing golf with friends who I play with only once or twice a year. We had never played the course before. […]

You spend all that money on marketing because you want people to notice you, right? If you had the choice between knowing that 50% of your target market had seen your ad and 10% had seen it you’d be crazy not to want the higher figure, wouldn’t you? Well, perhaps not. Consider two people. One walks into the room, taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hi. I’m the new accountant and I’m the best accountant you’ve ever met. I do everything better than other accountants. In surveys I came top every time. Nice to meet you.” The second is in the room before you arrive and you don’t really notice him. He’s quietly going about his business. You don’t pay any attention, but there’s a constant stream of people headed his way and they seem happy. You’re vaguely aware that he’s sitting where the accountants sit. When you need […]

I’d love to be able to tell you that I’m going to write this article about focus groups and I don’t care what you think, but that wouldn’t be true. If you think back over the conversations you’ve initiated recently with people – particularly if you were speaking to someone whose opinion you valued, who you thought of as something of an expert on the matter – what was really at the heart of those exchanges? When you choose to talk about your thoughts on your team’s performance last night, the film you’ve seen, or the new coat you’ve purchased, what are you getting out of such an exchange? It’s likely that, neurologically-speaking, what you’re getting – or at least what you’re hoping and expecting to get – is the pleasure of that expert agreeing with you. Recent research has shown that what other people think, particularly people whose opinions […]