All posts by Philip Graves

Last week, my mobile phone provider didn’t send me a SIM card they had promised. In my conversation with the call centre I explained that visiting their store wasn’t a good use of my time; something they might have guessed from my initial decision to have them post the card to me. They said they couldn’t get it to me by the promised date any more (the following day). I was cross. The call centre person decided that it would be a good idea to recap on exactly what she and I had done up to that point. I politely interrupted her and pointed out that, I was getting the impression I valued my time quite a lot more highly than the phone company. I didn’t want a potted history of my (bad) recent experience, I wanted a solution. Oblivious to this and presumably because of some awful training, the […]

It’s hard to regard the success of the Red Bull brand as anything less than astonishing. They took a workers’ energy drink from Thailand and turned it into one of the biggest brands in the world. Not bad for a product that market research taste testing concluded was amongst the worst it had ever presented to respondents. Red Bull realised that taste is not the point. Put the right associations around a product and that determines, to a large extent, how we will experience it when we drink it. We’ve seen studies that show how people’s brains respond differently to the same product at different prices: increase the price and the reward centres of people’s brains will light up more in fMRI scans. In Consumer.ology I wrote about a study by researchers at Duke University who subliminally exposed people to brand logos. They flashed logos for Apple, IBM, Disney and the E! […]

Take a look at the image above. I think it’s fair to say it looks nothing like a cereal you would expect to find on the breakfast table of most households these days, particularly those with children. It’s not just breakfast cereals either. Most food aimed at children is brightly coloured, heavily branded and, quite often, involves a colourful and familiar character. Sometimes it’s a character created by the brand, like Ronald McDonald or Tony the Tiger, at other times characters from well-known or currently popular cartoons and movies are licensed and added to food packaging. It would be easy to think that this use of characters is simply designed to make whatever product it is splashed on more noticeable and more attractive. This makes sense: one of the first things an infant learns is to recognise faces. So by the time a child has the language skills and opportunity […]

The British supermarket chain, Tesco, has grown very successfully over the years and is now the world’s third largest retailer. According to one source more than 15 million people in the UK had a Tesco Clubcard (it’s loyalty card) in 2010 – that’s almost one third of the adult population. On the face of it it’s not hard to see the appeal of Tesco’s ‘loyalty’ card: shoppers tell themselves that they would be shopping there anyway and, by using their Clubcard they receive ‘free’ points that they can save up and spend later. Further savings in the form of offers for selected products are also mailed to them from time to time. The psychological appeal of such a scheme is obvious enough: evolution has equipped many of us with a strong basic desire to save. That we no longer need to hoard nuts and berries to get us through the […]