Monthly Archives: August 2013

It’s all a matter of consumer need. If you can understand the consumer need your product satisfies then you can tell prospective customers about it and they will buy it. And the great news is that you find out what consumers’ needs are in relation to any product or service by asking them. So, if you aren’t currently succeeding you have a simple route to turn things around. Find out what the consumers needs are by asking them. Tell them your product meets them. What could be easier? Well, the great news is that I can save you the trouble of step one. Because I’ve done the research already and I can tell you the answers. Consumers don’t really need anything. Ok, the basics, food, water, heat, shelter. But unfortunately (or not depending on how you look at it) someone has beaten us to all these markets. And the only people […]

Let’s face it, most of us are familiar with the situation. The couple sit in the restaurant chatting happily, smiling at each other and enjoying themselves. Then… The menu arrives. He glances at it, selects something and puts the menu down, suddenly remembering how hungry he is and hoping that the food will arrive very soon. She sits back and starts looking at the menu as you might a favourite novel. She studies it with the sort of attention normally reserved for forensic investigations. He tells himself to relax. “Don’t spoil the evening by getting cross,” he thinks to himself. She is oblivious to his building discomfort. Wrapped up in the vast selection of delicious alternatives present. “Hmmm,” she wonders, “what would be best?” Several minutes pass. He can’t conceive what mental algorithms she’s juggling with that might necessitate such a long time between seeing the menu and choosing some […]

It’s nice to tell ourselves that we’re inherently simple creatures. If we want something we can decide we’ll go out and buy it. Perhaps we’ll see an advert that will encourage us to buy something and we’ll decide we want to own whatever it is. Possibly we’ll decide to go to the shops and see if we are tempted by something on display. But that’s just what we like to tell ourselves. And that’s fine in protecting our view of ourselves, but if you want to understand how to communicate effectively to consumers it is more helpful if you understand how the human mind works. That means understanding the way in which associations cause us to behave. How a sensory input – a word, a picture, a message, an advert – unconsciously triggers a thought because of what we’ve experienced in the past. It can be hard to reconcile the […]

Language can be tricky. I remember when I was trying to encourage my three-year-old son to be more polite I encouraged him to say ‘pardon’ rather than ‘what’ when he hadn’t heard someone. This resulted in a very silly exchange. I asked him to pass me the pencil he had been using so that I could put it away. He was distracted by his task and hadn’t heard me. “What?” he asked. “Pardon!” I said, with an emphasis intended to convey the fact that I was correcting his choice of word. He missed the subtle inflection, looked at me with a trace of annoyance and said: “I said ‘what’”. When we use particular words we (hopefully) know what we’re trying to convey. But that doesn’t mean someone hears those words in the same way. It’s all a question of the associations a person’s mind makes with those words. Which in […]