All posts by Philip Graves

You don’t know what you think about all sorts of things. At least, you don’t know what you will think in the future about them. The reason you don’t know what you’ll think is that you (like everyone else) struggle to take into account the dramatic extent to which context will influence your response to any particular issue or question. Your unconscious mind is busy processing information from all your senses, a task far too demanding for your conscious mind, which is much more inclined towards a ‘one thing at a time’ state of affairs. This is a big problem for market research because, in the quest to understand what people think, methodologies are used that are really good at getting answers to questions and really bad at providing the context in which the real issue takes place. This is illustrated beautifully by the differences that emerge when different platforms […]

Approaches to paying tips vary a lot from one culture to another. Here in the UK a number of factors influence whether a tip is paid that have nothing to do with the service you receive. For example, if payment is collected when the food is ordered, the notion of paying a service tip is essentially by-passed. On other occasions, the inability to process a tip when payment is made by a card can lead to a situation where you don’t have the cash to tip with and the hassle of getting change can nudge people towards leaving and, somewhat justifiably, blaming the payment systems. Some restaurants, an increasing number it seems, have taken to including a tip (or ‘service charge’) on the bill. In psychological terms, applying a default option is a powerful way of influencing behaviour – most people will go with it because it’s easy – but […]

Have you seen that new advert? The one with the armadillo throwing water balloons at the small family car as it drives through a field of flowers; the graphic over the top says ‘Awesome’ and is whooshed away in the breeze as the car whizzes past the countryside. It’s been on all the channels… a lot! If you haven’t seen it, does that mean it isn’t a good advert? An over-preoccupation with conscious thought processes would almost certainly bring you to that conclusion. It seems entirely logical that, assuming you’ve been watching some commercial TV you would have been exposed to it. Therefore the only logical conclusion is that you’re not being aware of it means it has been ineffective. But hold on a moment. Do you usually watch the adverts? I mean actively watch them: consciously engage with them? Perhaps you take notes in your little book of interesting […]

I don’t know about you but I hate clichés. I hate songs that have lyrics that reach for them as predictable solutions for rhyming couplets… ‘Tomorrow is another day’, ‘Down on my knees begging please’, pretty much any mention of a road (‘road going nowhere’), things that ‘cut like a knife’… you will, I suspect, have your own pet hates. Now, my objection to clichés is not that they are factually wrong (well, usually not, roads always go SOMEWHERE). My issue is that the hackneyed phrase concerned has appeared like a linguistic tick to fill the space where the person uttering it couldn’t conjure something original to say. Or perhaps it’s that, once the well-known phrase starts, the entirely predictable nature of its ending, means that I know the next two seconds will be a waste of my life! Often clichés end up being a mix of two psychological phenomena: […]