The Blog

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]