All posts by Philip Graves

Despite what consumer research would have us believe, people are very bad at working out why they’ve really done something. To be fair we are all taken in by the vain illusion that we are in conscious control of pretty much everything we do. But it is just an illusion. When you’re marketing a product it’s easy to focus on the rational features and benefits, when in fact what’s going on around the edges may have just as much to do with whether or not a customer buys from you. It’s often all about emotion. Don’t you hate it when someone you know, who’s had a bad day, takes it out on you? You make an innocent remark and all of a sudden you find you’re being yelled at for no reason. You’re pretty sure that had you said the same thing on another day it would not have led […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]