People aren’t desperately honest creatures. Through no fault of our own we’re victims of the way our brains have evolved; it’s wise not to take the things people claim at face value. Among the many issues affecting market research the quality of respondent recruitment is reasonably frequently debated. It’s not something I got into in Consumer.ology mostly because even when you recruit the “right” people, asking them questions throws up a whole world of other issues. However, over the last couple of days I’ve had a fascinating insight into the recruitment process and can, at no charge to the market research industry, offer them a high quality recruitment tool. I was contacted by a television network who wanted to interview me about a story that has been in the news regularly over the past few weeks; the cost of filling your car with petrol (or diesel). Prices have risen substantially over the past few weeks and since […]
Fighting the Fat (or Not): Behavioural Insight
With levels of obesity increasing, efforts are being made in several of the countries affected to find a way of getting overweight people to stop cramming high calorie food into their mouths on a regular basis. Diet is a fascinating area, since it’s one in which many people have first hand experience of what I call “the Mind Gap” – the space that exists between the unconscious and conscious mind. In this case it’s experienced when people make firm commitments to lose weight, commitments that they have with complete (conscious) conviction at the time, then find that after an initial period of success their weight returns to its previous level. Sometimes they ascribe their return to greater mass to mystic forces or an underlying medical condition, but more often they realise that they’ve not been sticking to the good intentions they made and, in a distracted moment, have taken it upon themselves to […]
The True Meaning of Christmas?
In the run up to December 25th I received several requests from broadcasters to talk about Christmas, how much we spend and whether the “true meaning” gets lost in this consumer age of ours. I was happy to contribute to the debate and add my point of view. But the best time to analyse Christmas and its meaning is now, a few days after the event – or depending on how you look at it – still in the middle of it. Rather than muddle matters with our self-perceptions and idealisations, look back at our Christmas behaviour and see what happened. I believe that, here in the UK, the following generalisations will apply to most people – I could be wrong, this is a blog after all, not a piece of formal research: People get together with family and friends far more frequently and for longer than at other times […]
Customer Service: Sometimes Firms Don’t Get It
Large companies spend a fortune on customer service: implementing it, training people, monitoring it and, yes, even researching it. And yet all too often when you deal with a company it seems apparent that they just don’t get it. Take Barclays – one of the largest financial services companies in the UK. Last week I was in the centre of Cambridge and, for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious, they had a team of blokes dressed as Grenadier Guards (the ones who wear the bearskin headgear) except with corporate blue tunics rather than red and giving out balloons rather than shooting at people. No doubt this was a bold marketing campaign to draw attention to what a lovely bank Barclays is. And it must be said that the people in uniform were great; joking with shoppers as they passed by. Unfortunately, the person I dealt with in their customer service department […]
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