Memes are a fascinating concept and vitally important to anyone with an interest in marketing. Defined as “… that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation.” Crucially for someone with something to market, what meme theory says is that one aspect that contributes to effective marketing is how easily whatever it is you’re doing can be copied. “Beanz Meanz Heinz” means roughly nothing. But it’s very memorable and very easy to copy, so it gets propagated by people. It enters your mind, gets remembered instantly and accurately, and stays way beyond the point where it serves any useful purpose to you (if it ever did). When it comes to buying beans the simple fact that the brand Heinz is familiar to your unconscious may well be sufficient for it to seem better (for […]
What Makes a Consumer Choose?
Persuasion master Duane Cunningham was interested to know what causes a customer to choose a product (and dating expert April Brasswell was curious curious too). I suppose, when it comes down to it, this is the most important question for a consumer behaviouralist like me to answer. The difficulty is that it’s a much easier question to ask than to answer – not that that makes it a bad question, I hasten to add. As it happens I’ve been steadily cataloguing (if that’s the right word – which it probably isn’t) the reasons that customers buy something. You may not be surprised to learn that there are quite a lot of factors that can be involved: thus far I’ve detailed 41. When it comes to any single consumer purchase there may be any number of these involved and the purchase is triggered (I suspect) when enough of them exist with sufficient strength to generate the […]
Too Much Choice: Part IV
Christian and Sonya raised an interesting conundrum with their question in reply to my last post. “In a category like breakfast cereal, are the manufacturers hurting themselves by having so many brands and varieties within those brands?” There are two aspects to this from a retail marketing and consumer behaviour perspective. The brands are doing themselves a favour (with an approach that was started by the cigarette manufacturers many decades ago): by proliferating the number of brand options you increase the likelihood that someone will choose one of your brands (and they basically don’t care which the customer takes so long as it’s one of theirs). This makes it much, much harder for a new entrant to take market share away. The retailers however are not helping their cause. It’s been found in one study of European supermarkets, that those who stock a smaller ranges sell more in total than those that stock […]
Too Much Choice: Part III
When faced with a small choice consumers can deploy simple strategies to make a choice and feel better about the option they choose. Three options usually works well because customers can use extremeness aversion. By selecting the middle option they know that they don’t have the worst that they might, but nor have they been indulgent and spent more than they might. The options present frame the choice; put another way, they way in which the decision is made is largely a by-product of what has been presented to the customer at the time he or she is making the choice. We’d all like to believe that what we’re buying is the thing we would want to buy in considering our own “needs” (and indeed marketers often talk about “consumer needs” as if such a thing were tangible and real. It isn’t. The human (and consumer) mind reacts to its […]
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