Consumer Behaviour

Unless you’ve been living in a hole for the past few years you’ll be aware that the unconscious mind is crucially important in human (and consumer) behaviour. The big question that arises from this appreciation is, “So what do I do about that?” In Consumer.ology I make the point that the first thing you should do is stop focusing all your attention on the conscious mind.  It’s entirely understandable that people don’t embrace this all-important first stage: human beings are, if nothing else, extremely adept at indulging in wishful thinking. Last night I played a tennis match against another Cambridgeshire team.  One of our opponents was grumpy, rude and unpleasant throughout the entire match: if a child behaved that way he would have been sent to his room until he could ‘play nice’.  The only disputed line call on our side of the net in four sets of tennis was […]

When I was studying statistics at university I was told about a project that a previous year’s student had conducted on weather forecasting. The story went that, after studying lots of data about the weather, the best way of predicting it was to say that tomorrow’s weather would be the same as todays. The same is true for predicting almost anything to do with consumers. The best way of seeing into the future is to assume people will buy tomorrow what they have today. Regrettably, this isn’t a very empowering model to use. Of course, you could change the world with your product launch or marketing plan and render the ‘what happened yesterday’ model obsolete. When this happens it really stands out and we pay considerable attention to it. However, this awareness is a bias that makes us underappreciate the fact that, mostly, things stay more or less the same. […]

You don’t know what you think about all sorts of things. At least, you don’t know what you will think in the future about them. The reason you don’t know what you’ll think is that you (like everyone else) struggle to take into account the dramatic extent to which context will influence your response to any particular issue or question. Your unconscious mind is busy processing information from all your senses, a task far too demanding for your conscious mind, which is much more inclined towards a ‘one thing at a time’ state of affairs. This is a big problem for market research because, in the quest to understand what people think, methodologies are used that are really good at getting answers to questions and really bad at providing the context in which the real issue takes place. This is illustrated beautifully by the differences that emerge when different platforms […]

Approaches to paying tips vary a lot from one culture to another. Here in the UK a number of factors influence whether a tip is paid that have nothing to do with the service you receive. For example, if payment is collected when the food is ordered, the notion of paying a service tip is essentially by-passed. On other occasions, the inability to process a tip when payment is made by a card can lead to a situation where you don’t have the cash to tip with and the hassle of getting change can nudge people towards leaving and, somewhat justifiably, blaming the payment systems. Some restaurants, an increasing number it seems, have taken to including a tip (or ‘service charge’) on the bill. In psychological terms, applying a default option is a powerful way of influencing behaviour – most people will go with it because it’s easy – but […]