The Blog

Life runs in a strange cycle. At the outset you’re an infant reliant on the care of your parents. As you get slightly older you begin to explore the world under their watchful gaze: which is just as well because, with no knowledge of the world around you, you’re going to make plenty of mistakes. By your mid to late teens you’re fairly sure that you know all there is to know (the folly of which is reflected in the statistics that show the disproportionately high incidence of deaths involving young people and driving). Having got your first job you realise that you don’t know anything after all. A few years later you discover that no one else knows that much either. Freed from any anxiety about your limitations, you will briefly find yourself seeing the world and your position in it as it really is. Eventually, you reach the […]

‘Psychological what?’ you may well ask. OK, I may have just made up a new phrase for the marketing lexicon, but stick with me, and you’ll discover how you might just be able to make people perceive your products in a completely different way. I would define psychological product enhancement as something that improves the experience a product delivers to its customer by virtue of changing how the customer thinks about it, rather than necessarily by changing the physical product. This is something that goes on all the time, but we’re often so taken in by it that we don’t really notice. At the risk of creating two new marketing phrases in one day, I’d argue that most marketing is about congruent misattribution.  When it comes down to it relatively few products have a genuine technical edge of the competition – and even if they do, relatively few of these […]

It’s more than a little ironic: as a consultant helping organisations understand the psychology of their customers better, my biggest challenge is navigating my own customers’ psychological heuristics and biases. Sometimes the work is done for me: faced with a market research tracking study that confounds their belief about their brand or the firm’s increasing sales and market share, people can be very receptive to learning why asking questions is frequently a poor route to understanding consumers. However, often there is a fundamental belief that past market research has been helpful and that makes people understandably resistant to taking a different approach: why fix it if it you can’t see that its broken? Part of the problem, and it’s only one part, is that our minds jump to conclusions to protect the sense that we’re smart and in control.  Rather than take a dispassionate, objective view of events and the information that informed […]

Part One Recently I was in heading for a meeting with a company in a part of London I haven’t visited for several years. I arrived by tube and emerged from the station into a shopping centre. Since I had some time to spare I decided to have a wander around and undertake a bit of shopper-watching (something I enjoy a lot more than shopping). What struck me most was the nature of the shops I was seeing: virtually every single store was a food outlet!  Cafes, restaurants, fast food outlets, coffee shops, bakeries… almost nothing but food. That there is a trend favouring this kind of retail doesn’t surprise me: on-line shopping has grown rapidly by virtue of being able to offer more choice, more cheaply and, frequently, more conveniently. Our love of what’s easy extends to food: increasingly, we pick up something that’s been prepared for us rather […]