Ideas

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 […]

Has market research ever been wrong? Of course it has. Pretty much everyone I know who has any experience of using market research has had some experience where it didn’t turn out to be right. Marketing history is littered with famous and infamous examples from big companies like McDonald’s, Mattel, Coca-Cola, Chrysler… But often the questions that research asks can’t ever be accurately defined any other way. In the absence of another number to use, people believe that the number coming back from the research is an accurate read on what customers think. However, there is lots of evidence to show that people really shouldn’t be so willing to believe what market research reports back. One such study arrived on my desk this week at just about exactly the same time that what it said was demonstrated in reality. A friend from my university days got in touch through LinkedIn […]