Technorati Profile Every so often I take an advertisement, usually from TV, and analyse it from a consumer perspective. What I’m interested in is the way in which the advert is likely to work at an unconscious level, since I’m convinced that this is most important dimension for marketing communication of this kind. Now that presents it’s own particular problem, because it’s generally acknowledged that we have no direct link between our unconscious and conscious minds. The unconscious triggers various feelings, which our conscious mind then receives and attempts to decode into some kind of rational explanation: “I feel bad, I must not like what I’m looking at.” Unfortunately there’s lots of evidence to show that we’re quite bad at evaluating these feelings accurately (which is one of the reasons that consumer research has so much potential to be misleading). By applying models of how people think and developing my […]
New Articles on Consumer Behaviour
I have a couple of new articles on consumer behaviour available on my main site. “How to Make Your Customer Buy” (see the Latest Articles section at the top on the left), reveals what some of the most recent research into what influences consumers has discovered. This is one of those occasions where the information from one of my articles could be used by the unscrupulous to push people into purchases they wouldn’t otherwise make. I hope you won’t misuse this information. “What Other People Think” reviews the implications of some of the latest neuroscience that looks at why people change their opinions when they learn what other people think about something. These are articles that people who have signed up for my E-zine get to know about first, so if you’re interested in the latest consumer behaviour research you can save yourself some time and effort by signing up; […]
Memes and Marketing: Part iii
Tinnitus expert Jennifer Battaglino mentioned that she would like some suggestions on how to apply memes in her marketing so I thought I would add to yesterday’s post on what makes for a good meme by talking about the ways in which you might use them. Incidentally, questions like Jennifer’s are enormously helpful to me when I’m thinking what to write, so thank you for all your questions and comments (this is very much an interactive process – I hope it feels like it!) The key is to think about any aspect of your business in terms of how readily it will be assimilated by your customers and potential customers and passed on. At the more obvious end are things like your brand name and website address; how easy are these to recall accurately first time? Next come the slightly more subtle elements; is your logo distinctively expressed? Does it have a […]
Memes and Marketing: Part II
When it comes to marketing it’s important that your product, brand name, company name and proposition work as memes. That means making as many aspects of your offer as memorable and as easy to pass on as possible. And as we saw yesterday, whilst having both is nice, memorable often beats meaningful. Our heads are full of junk that we’ve heard from brands (and elsewhere) that have become etched into our unconscious, and we all know we’ve heard jokes, quotes or ideas that, at the time, seemed to us utterly brilliant, and yet a couple of hours later they’ve gone. So what is it that makes a meme work well? I’ll give you my personal opinion of what can help: Rhythm and rhymes create narrower options of associations thereby making it more likely that the whole phrase will be recalled accurately (if you can remember the first line, the rhythm […]
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