Using the Power of Framing

Using the Power of Framing

Recently my father-in-law took away a couple of photographs of ancestors that my wife had found on-line to frame on our behalf. Each week he attends a framing class at a college and he has been learning the art of making pictures look good for several years now. Yesterday the pictures came back and they were transformed. Somehow he had managed to make two different sized images look like a perfectly matched pair. This wasn’t just a matter of using matching mounts and frames, but of judging to perfection the size of the mount so that each picture looked just right on it’s own and sufficiently similar when viewed together. It’s not just pictures that are influenced by their frames. Psychologists have identified that our own perceptions of products and prices are shaped by what we encounter around a product, even when those elements have no direct relevance to the […]

To Sell More Think Sheep!

To Sell More Think Sheep!

Would you say you were more of a loner or more a herd-minded creature? A bear or a sheep, that’s the question?  (The other question could be, “What the heck’s this got to do with consumer behaviour or marketing?” Hold on, I’m getting there, I promise.) Most of us like to focus more on our individuality when we answer this question, but if you look at the way we live there’s as much commonality about what each of us does as there is with sheep. OK, so the range of activities is smaller, but if you drew up a list of the things we do, places we go, even the times of day that we do them, you’ll see that everyone starts to look fairly similar. So whilst we cling to the illusion that it’s just them and not us that’s part of the herd, what can we learn about […]

The Perils of Focus Groups

The Perils of Focus Groups

Focus groups have become part of the business and political landscape. They have acquired what you might call ‘cultural validity’: since lots of people use them, and lots of people talk about them, and lots of people have even participated in them, they must be okay mustn’t they? Sometimes clients ask me whether or not they should use a focus group and what sort of consumer research this approach is best suited to. I give one of two answers: the short answer, that it is safest never to use them, and the longer answer which I will share with you here. There are six fundamental problems with focus groups: 1. The Nature of Thought It would be one thing to explore consumers’ thoughts within the dynamic of a group if one believed that our thoughts are plucked from some preordained mental pot. When prompted, someone would go to their pot, […]

The Perils of Focus Groups (Part Two)

The Perils of Focus Groups (Part Two)

Continuing my article on the problem of using focus groups to investigate consumer’s thoughts, feelings and behaviour. (Part one is here.) 4. People are Lazy Another problem that stems from our thoughts not being created in the vacuum of our own minds is the laziness of our thought processes. If I ask you to think of a number now, what would you say? Seven is most likely, for some reason it is the number of people tend to pick, but it is also likely that you would pick a number between one and 10. Most of the time when people say ‘pick a number’ it is in this range.  Rather than go to the mental effort of questioning what parameters the questioner might have in mind, the easy thing to do is pick on this basis. What’s interesting though, is what happens when you prime someone to think of a bigger […]