The Blog

In Consumer.ology I talk about how other people influence our own consumer behaviour.  From our unconscious desire to copy what we see other individuals doing, to fads that sweeps through lots of the people around us, we are social creatures who have evolved to follow other people. Whilst we might all like the idea that we’re free spirits, charting our own path through the world, the reality is that we’ve evolved to play it safe; and that means doing the thing that is demonstrably ‘OK’ because everyone else is doing it. Recently a study examined how social networking sites can drive the uptake of new items and, specifically, looked at what made the difference between something gaining widespread social acceptance and not getting that traction. By analysing the installation of 100 million apps through Facebook (all with anonymous data in case you were starting to feel nervous) they were able to track the […]

Although we’re over a year away from the London 2012 Olympics the commercial competition to be part of this amazing spectacle is already running. A quick check reveals more than 40 brands that are linked to this event in some form or another: “Worldwide Partners”, “Official Partners”, “Official Supporters” and “Official Suppliers”. So what’s in it for a sponsor? After all, we’re watching the athletes not the advertising banners. And why might some of these brands do much better as a result of their sponsorship than others? The Unconscious Marketing ‘Victim’ Whilst you will not be directing your conscious attention at the names dotted around the stadium, your powerful unconscious mind will be picking it up anyway. This will have three important consequences: firstly, you will be more likely to find yourself thinking about those brands than you otherwise would have done. Secondly, when you encounter those brands you will […]

For some reason (and I could make an educated guess) wine is a popular subject matter with psychologists looking to explore aspects of the way in which people are influenced without realising. I referenced several of these fascinating studies in my book Consumer.ology: price, label design and music have all been shown to influence what people think of the same wine. Now researchers in Germany have returned to the bottle to see if the colour of light in a room influences what people think about a wine. As with all good studies the people taking part weren’t being asked to make comparisons (which can produce results simply because the focus on comparing makes us imagine differences even when none exist). Instead different people were asked to taste the same wine in different settings and asked to say how much they liked the wine and what they would be prepared to pay for […]

There is an old saying in retail, “The customer is always right”. The only issue is that, as anyone like me who has ever worked in a shop will tell you, “Some customers are idiots!” If working in a store teaches you anything is that, in the course of your day-to-day life away from that environment, you tend to meet a very small cross-section of what one would broadly term “people”. In much the same way that people tend to assume that they like a wide selection of music, we like to think we know people from all walks of life. But just as your musical taste is usually a by-product of the same social context as everyone else, and quite possibly as narrow as everyone else’s, so the cross-section of society you encounter is defined to a large extent by the things you do. we tend to meet people […]