Consumer Behaviour

It’s fascinating how unaware we all are of what really drives our behaviour. We’re convinced by our conscious minds that what we do is driven by what we decide on the basis of our beliefs. We are kidding ourselves. More evidence appeared this week in a study that was conducted to look at how people’s fairness and generosity could be influenced by scents. All of you who have read my eBook The Secret of Selling will already be making the most of this influential mechanism in the human unconscious, but for those who aren’t here are more reasons why you really should! Researchers set up two studies using two different rooms. In each case one room had the clean, fresh, citrus scent of Windex, the other did not. Subsequent questioning showed that none of the participants were aware of the scent’s presence in the room and that their mood was not a […]

This morning as I was leaving my bedroom I looked at the empty mug sitting next to my bed. Ten minutes earlier it had contained a most welcome cup of tea that made the transition from sleepiness to life altogether more palatable. I had a lot to thank that mug for. I should have picked it up and taken it down to the kitchen so that a machine could do the tedious job of washing it for me. But I didn’t. And that was really lazy of me. It would have involved a two step detour on my journey; that’s all. But did I bother? No. It wasn’t a conscious decision; but when I went into the room in the evening there was no disguising the fact that the mug was still exactly where I’d left it. Perhaps it’s not surprising. Modern life is such that there are a myriad of […]

Does one of these pictures look more attractive to you? Read on to find out why. Often marketing people will spend a lot of time and money getting the right person associated with their product. Although the science behind why this is important is relatively recent, it doesn’t take a genius to know that it is better to put your product in the hand of someone attractive. It’s not just that we’re instinctively drawn towards attractive people, the associations our unconscious mind makes between the product we’re seeing and the context we’re seeing it in changes the way we feel about that product. However much we like to tell ourselves we’re objective about these sorts of things, we usually aren’t. If your product is related to health then how healthy a person looks is even more important; it just wouldn’t make sense to sell your exercise programme with a picture […]

Sometimes people are just plain wrong. Take the decision of the UK and US governments to invade Iraq because they believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Whatever the arguments for and against the action that was taken, the justification was wrong. At the moment there is an enquiry in the UK into quite how this came about. Anyone who is aware of the work of the psychologist Irving Janis on Groupthink will be able to understand the process of self-delusion and self-justification that took place (and continues to take place). Some of the protagonists, rather than acknowledge their mistake, simply move the argument on: the UK Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, has said he would have invaded Iraq anyway, for some other reasons he can think of. Leaving aside the issues of group psychology what, if anything, does this reveal about consumer behaviour? And what does […]