Consumer Behaviour

Take a look at the image above. I think it’s fair to say it looks nothing like a cereal you would expect to find on the breakfast table of most households these days, particularly those with children. It’s not just breakfast cereals either. Most food aimed at children is brightly coloured, heavily branded and, quite often, involves a colourful and familiar character. Sometimes it’s a character created by the brand, like Ronald McDonald or Tony the Tiger, at other times characters from well-known or currently popular cartoons and movies are licensed and added to food packaging. It would be easy to think that this use of characters is simply designed to make whatever product it is splashed on more noticeable and more attractive. This makes sense: one of the first things an infant learns is to recognise faces. So by the time a child has the language skills and opportunity […]

The British supermarket chain, Tesco, has grown very successfully over the years and is now the world’s third largest retailer. According to one source more than 15 million people in the UK had a Tesco Clubcard (it’s loyalty card) in 2010 – that’s almost one third of the adult population. On the face of it it’s not hard to see the appeal of Tesco’s ‘loyalty’ card: shoppers tell themselves that they would be shopping there anyway and, by using their Clubcard they receive ‘free’ points that they can save up and spend later. Further savings in the form of offers for selected products are also mailed to them from time to time. The psychological appeal of such a scheme is obvious enough: evolution has equipped many of us with a strong basic desire to save. That we no longer need to hoard nuts and berries to get us through the […]

Most people have heard the old saying, “First impressions last”. Most of us have also probably had an occasion when we’ve made a bad first impression and wished we could change it. The psychological phenomenon of priming is reasonably well documented and also easy to demonstrate in certain contexts. Ask people to quickly estimate one of the following calculations (don’t show them the other) and you’ll get very different answers: 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 = ? 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = ? The order of words have been shown to have a similar affect. People give more weight to what they encounter first. In the case of the example above, people guess a much higher number for the second calculation than for the first. But whilst we might […]

Despite the millions spent on market research, there is relatively little effort made to gauge the value of that investment. For the most part there is a default assumption, a belief, that asking people questions is a valid and useful thing to do (it often isn’t). One of the foundations of behavioural insight is that, with the precarious nature of the unconscious mind factored in, studies tend to be designed to isolate one or two variables, thereby proving their effect statistically-speaking (within the context of the study). Those that argue that market research also has statistical reliability at its core make a simple but crucial error: the base data to which those statistical processes are applied is unreliable because of the space that exists between the conscious and unconscious mind (something I call ‘The Mind Gap’). One study set out to go beyond identifying unexpected influences, and sought to put […]