Why You Can’t Answer 3 Customer Satisfaction Questions

I just bought a new printer.  It’s wireless. Buying it was tricky.  The Amazon reviews of Wifi printers had alerted me to the fact that getting them set up wasn’t necessarily easy.  In the end I selected one that almost everyone said was easy to set up. And it was, sort of. I decided to reconfigure my network a bit, because the last addition to the Wifi set up was temperamental in that way I associate more with pet cats than digital devices. In the end all was well and the printing thing happened from all machines. Until it stopped happening.  The printer interface told me that it was looking for the printer… (grrrr) and then that the printer was off-line (bigger grrrr). The manual had already presumed that I knew the difference between an infrastructure installation option and an ad-hoc one: I didn’t.  It offered no suggestions as to […]

Playing with Market Research

One of the advantages of understanding how the process of asking people questions influences them is that you can have fun demonstrating its impact. I was recently invited to speak to a local business group and took the opportunity to demonstrate the frailty of asking questions and the nature of the unconscious mind. Whilst the samples were too small to be scientifically valid, the differences in responses to my fake research were both predictable and entertaining. I set up a taste test using three very similar products: one was from a value range, one from the ‘standard’ range and one the premium offer.  Everyone was led to believe that they were taking part in legitimate market research and that they all had the same questions. In fact there were five different questionnaires, all asking the participants to taste three products and answer some questions. What was I able to demonstrate? […]

Charity Begins at Home

One of the things I really enjoy about the calls I get from journalists is that they prompt me to consider new aspects of consumer issues.  This morning I was called by BBC Radio Bristol to talk about the rise of charity shops on UK high streets. At the heart of the issue is the advantageous cost base that charity shops enjoy.  Not only do they receive heavily discounted business rates (80% discounts are mandatory), they also capitalise on difficult economic conditions by taking on retail premises at very low rents: the landlords must continue to pay business rates even if their premises are unoccupied, so they are under considerable pressure to find a retail tenant. With their donated stock and volunteer staff, charity shops benefit from significantly lower running costs. The issue is far from simple. The very nature of ‘charity’ is highly emotive: few people would say charities […]

Are Consumer Interest Groups Bad for Consumers?

We live in a consumer age.  My own view is that consumerism is part of evolution.  I know that there are a few people out there who really hate how far it’s gone: I’m certainly not arguing that the consequences of being a consumer society are all good.  However, I don’t think we can turn back this particular tide. Increasingly, what was once a case of consumer need (indeed, many marketers still talk in such terms – mistakenly, in my view) is now much more often a case of consumer desire: we meet our basic psychological desires by buying products. These psychological desires that have served us so well in evolutionary terms, can now be satisfied from a trip to the shops: if you want status, buy a Rolex or an iPad; if you want power, buy a high performance car; if you want romance get a make-over and buy […]