Consumer Behaviour

A nice bloke called Jamie has just installed a heating system in our house and he’s done a wonderful job too. It’s particularly impressive given the scale of the task: he was replacing three separate heating systems, none of which worked very well and he did it, with two assistants, in just nine days. Only one thing doesn’t work as planned. The house is divided into three zones, with the office on its own heating loop so that we’re not heating 3000 square feet that we’re not using a lot of the time. Each zone has its own wireless thermostat, which controls the business end of the system down in the cellar. Despite having a theoretical range of 30m (presumably requiring the clear lines of site you tend not to find in houses with rooms) the thermostat can’t reach its base unit. Jamie phoned the manufacturer for advice. The first […]

“I don’t ask why patients lie, I just assume they all do.” Gregory House (MD) I’m a big fan of the Fox Television series House. There’s something about the way that Hugh Laurie’s character navigates his way through life that is as appealing as it’s unattractive. Perhaps it’s that for him wisdom is the panacea for life’s anguish, not wealth or love, although of course House himself appears as driven as people fixated on the more traditional goals. Or perhaps it’s that he has the sort of self-confidence and personal conviction that we’d all like to possess, and through watching him we can have a taste of how that might feel. I know that one thing I do share with this TV character is his firm belief that people don’t tell the truth. As someone who’s watched and interviewed more consumers than most people, it’s usual that there’s a wide […]

Ok, perhaps it’s not up there with the great phrase used by highwaymen “Your money or your life” but, given the lack of portable time measuring devices at the time, watch-theft wasn’t likely to be a lucrative pastime. Nowadays, in the competition to part people from their cash in less elicit ways, such as when marketing to consumers, there is an infinite number of propositions one could choose. Is this product going to make the customer sexier, stronger, look better, ingratiate me to others, and so on. Of course there’s always a price message “great value”, “money off”, “discount”, “low price”, “SAVE!”, etc. From the amount these price messages are used you’d be forgiven for thinking that they are always the most motivating way to go. However, research so recent it won’t even be published until the summer suggests that’s not necessarily the case. Researchers have discovered that when customers […]

Stephen Fry once quipped, “It’s a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés that cliché is untrue.” I read that quote four times and it still makes my head spin. I don’t like clichés. For the most part they’re said without much thought; copied because they sound  compelling, or simply because they’ve been said so many times people think they must be true.  I see them as a kind of linguistic flatulence. As someone who listens intently to song lyrics I can also be completely alienated by an otherwise decent tune when the writer lets a little lyrical gas go. He or she finishes a verse, or even worse a chorus that I’ll have to hear repeatedly, with a phrase so predictable that I could sense it coming from a mile away, even though I’ve never heard the song before. You know the kind of thing, they […]