I really appreciated all of the comments received in response to yesterday’s post and I wanted to pick up on one that, as a consumer behaviour expert, I found fascinating. It also was one of the last comments posted so people scanning through what others have said wouldn’t have seen it. Mark (MarketingScoops) said: “I had an interesting shopping experience today. I had no intention of shopping but I received a 40% off one item special on my blackberry. Once I was in the store, I entered the shopping mode and bought 3 things. The super special got me in the store and completely changed my mindset.” This reveals a couple of very interesting issues. It reinforces my point about a lot of consumer behaviour not being “need” based, but being triggered far less rationally and influenced much more indirectly. It illustrates the route to understanding consumer behaviour: whilst there […]
The Consumer Need Myth and Why Customers Really Buy
You’d be hard pressed to find any marketing text book that doesn’t talk at some point about “consumer need”. It’s a simple enough concept: the products that will do best are those that meet a requirement that someone has. At the next level you may find there’s a discussion on the types of consumer need. Broadly these break down into physical and emotional needs. So, by way of simplistic example, the former says that, because you’re cold you will buy a hat. The latter that because you want to feel special you’ll buy an expensive hat. This is all fine up to a point. But I happen to think that most consumer behaviour is nothing to do with “need”. This is a problem because the notion of consumer need suggests that, at some level, a consumer is aware of what it is they are getting as a result of acquiring […]
Consumers: Reality is Over-rated Part iv
It seems from many of your comments about focus groups that many of you have experienced some of the problems I mentioned in relation to asking consumers about their perceptions. To be fair to focus groups I should point out that I was talking about research more generally. There’s little doubt in my mind that the focus group, per se, is far and away the most useless, unreliable, misleading and distorting ‘tool’ in the marketers armoury. Actually, I should qualify that a little. A focus group in a viewing facility is the pinnacle of disastrous research techniques, but the focus group part of that is no small component. I would really appreciate hearing more details from those of you who have had bad experiences with focus groups. Please email me if you have any stories to share (and I’m happy to respect requests for confidentiality). Back to the subject at […]
Consumers: Reality is Over-rated Part iii
Having suggested that perception is far more important that the reality of experience in determining consumer behaviour, you might think that finding out how a consumer perceives your brand is a useful exercise. And, of course, you’d be right. You might suggest, therefore, that asking a sample of your target consumer audience or existing customers would be a smart think to do. And you’d be a lot less right. In fact, if you don’t mind me saying so, you’d be wrong. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, we aren’t always aware of our perceptions. A lot of our reactions happen at an unconscious, emotional level. We like to believe we’re wonderfully good at decoding this responses consciously and post-rationalising them accurately, but we really aren’t. We just make it up and then convince ourselves that what we’ve just told ourselves is true. This is what I call “the […]
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