Ideas

Continuing my article on the problem of using focus groups to investigate consumer’s thoughts, feelings and behaviour. (Part one is here.) 4. People are Lazy Another problem that stems from our thoughts not being created in the vacuum of our own minds is the laziness of our thought processes. If I ask you to think of a number now, what would you say? Seven is most likely, for some reason it is the number of people tend to pick, but it is also likely that you would pick a number between one and 10. Most of the time when people say ‘pick a number’ it is in this range.  Rather than go to the mental effort of questioning what parameters the questioner might have in mind, the easy thing to do is pick on this basis. What’s interesting though, is what happens when you prime someone to think of a bigger […]

Despite what consumer research would have us believe, people are very bad at working out why they’ve really done something. To be fair we are all taken in by the vain illusion that we are in conscious control of pretty much everything we do. But it is just an illusion. When you’re marketing a product it’s easy to focus on the rational features and benefits, when in fact what’s going on around the edges may have just as much to do with whether or not a customer buys from you. It’s often all about emotion. Don’t you hate it when someone you know, who’s had a bad day, takes it out on you? You make an innocent remark and all of a sudden you find you’re being yelled at for no reason. You’re pretty sure that had you said the same thing on another day it would not have led […]

When the unconscious mind gets excited it’s not very good at knowing quite what it’s excited about.  It picks up on something that sets it off (and it gets jittery about all sorts of funny things) and sends out a feeling. One of the world’s leading experts on emotions (the neurology professor Antonio Damasio – rather than someone who reads a lot of agony columns) describes consciousness as the “feeling of knowing” something.  He’s quite sure from his work studying images of brains in action, and patients who have lost various important areas of brain function, that this feeling occurs quite clearly after the other feelings have had their go.  Lots of other psychologists agree with him too. So ‘excitement’ gets registered by one sense and the rest of the mind tries to work out what might be causing this potentially important sensation.  We’re being prepared so that we can pursue […]

Most of us would like a brand as powerful as Stradivarius, the man who made violins three hundred years ago – although we’d probably want that recognition a little sooner. Fortunately we can learn a lot about how consumers relate to products and brands from examining these musical instruments more closely. With any luck we can save ourselves a bit of time and effort in the process. To understand what makes a Stradivarius special we need to get our laboratory coats out and start analysing a few things. It turns out the wood he used was mostly from trees that grew during the “little ice age” when winters were longer and summers shorter (from the mid 1400s to the mid 1800s). This seasonal twist of fate produced very dense wood that was more resonant. Further scientific analysis reveals that the application of a mineral such as borax helps make the […]