The Blog

Let’s face it, most of us are familiar with the situation. The couple sit in the restaurant chatting happily, smiling at each other and enjoying themselves. Then… The menu arrives. He glances at it, selects something and puts the menu down, suddenly remembering how hungry he is and hoping that the food will arrive very soon. She sits back and starts looking at the menu as you might a favourite novel. She studies it with the sort of attention normally reserved for forensic investigations. He tells himself to relax. “Don’t spoil the evening by getting cross,” he thinks to himself. She is oblivious to his building discomfort. Wrapped up in the vast selection of delicious alternatives present. “Hmmm,” she wonders, “what would be best?” Several minutes pass. He can’t conceive what mental algorithms she’s juggling with that might necessitate such a long time between seeing the menu and choosing some […]

It’s nice to tell ourselves that we’re inherently simple creatures. If we want something we can decide we’ll go out and buy it. Perhaps we’ll see an advert that will encourage us to buy something and we’ll decide we want to own whatever it is. Possibly we’ll decide to go to the shops and see if we are tempted by something on display. But that’s just what we like to tell ourselves. And that’s fine in protecting our view of ourselves, but if you want to understand how to communicate effectively to consumers it is more helpful if you understand how the human mind works. That means understanding the way in which associations cause us to behave. How a sensory input – a word, a picture, a message, an advert – unconsciously triggers a thought because of what we’ve experienced in the past. It can be hard to reconcile the […]

Language can be tricky. I remember when I was trying to encourage my three-year-old son to be more polite I encouraged him to say ‘pardon’ rather than ‘what’ when he hadn’t heard someone. This resulted in a very silly exchange. I asked him to pass me the pencil he had been using so that I could put it away. He was distracted by his task and hadn’t heard me. “What?” he asked. “Pardon!” I said, with an emphasis intended to convey the fact that I was correcting his choice of word. He missed the subtle inflection, looked at me with a trace of annoyance and said: “I said ‘what’”. When we use particular words we (hopefully) know what we’re trying to convey. But that doesn’t mean someone hears those words in the same way. It’s all a question of the associations a person’s mind makes with those words. Which in […]

What’s your product worth? It’s a simple question but, from the perspective of consumer psychology, quite a complex one to answer. Of course there is the issue of the price. But it’s very hard to know if you have it priced right isn’t it. If you change your price you need to leave it at that price long enough for people to get over the comparison you’ve encouraged them to make by pricing it at different price, before you can get an accurate read on whether you sell more at that new price (if you see what I mean). And who’s to say if, when you change the price, some other change has occurred in the environment that renders a change in how your new price is perceived? A currency change or a competitor’s new product might mean your price is perceived very differently. On the internet clever people can probably design your site in such […]