Monthly Archives: August 2013

In the past week there has been a fuel shortage in the UK. This wasn’t the result of any change to the supply of fuel, but by dramatically increased demand. That demand was triggered by government advice that people should fill up their cars because a strike by petrol tanker drivers was quite likely. The media, who were of course the ones who were so quick to pass on the views of government ministers and report the threat of strike action from the drivers’ union, were then surprised when consumers started queuing for fuel and stations ran dry. Why, they wondered, were people queuing for fuel when there was no confirmed strike? The answer, from a psychological standpoint, is very simple: loss aversion…. … with a bit of social proof, some availability bias and the influence of authority. But not necessarily in that order. First was the availability bias and influence […]

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 […]