Sometimes people are just plain wrong.

Take the decision of the UK and US governments to invade Iraq because they believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Whatever the arguments for and against the action that was taken, the justification was wrong.

At the moment there is an enquiry in the UK into quite how this came about. Anyone who is aware of the work of the psychologist Irving Janis on Groupthink will be able to understand the process of self-delusion and self-justification that took place (and continues to take place).

Some of the protagonists, rather than acknowledge their mistake, simply move the argument on: the UK Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, has said he would have invaded Iraq anyway, for some other reasons he can think of.

Leaving aside the issues of group psychology what, if anything, does this reveal about consumer behaviour? And what does it have to do with beating your competitors?

Well, unless you have a monopoly, you have competitors. And if you have competitors you have potential customers of yours who have decided to buy from someone else.

Bringing new people into a market is great, if you can do it, but a key aspect of growing your business is going to be taking market share from your competitors.

That means finding a way to tell their customers that they’re wrong. And, as we see with Mr Blair, admitting you’re wrong isn’t easy.

The art (or is it a science) of changing what people think is the art of influence. And to understand how to influence someone you need to think of how brains work.

The mind works by making associations. When a customer thinks of the product they currently buy instead of yours it will trigger a package of thoughts and feelings.

At the heart of this is the product, but that’s a very difficult place to direct your attack. That’s the equivalent of someone buying X and you telling them they’re wrong, they should buy Y.

Inevitably they will feel resistance to what you’re trying to sell them because product X has lots of associations that, for the most part, are positive (they’re sufficiently positive for them to be buying that product).

Suppose instead that you are confident that one aspect of the product is of particular significance; for the sake of argument we’ll take price because it’s something that applies to most products (although it’s rarely as important as people like to claim).

Putting the focus on the complete value your product offers, gently encouraging the customer to do the comparative maths for their current product and, ideally, then removing any fears of making a bad mistake by offering some kind of satisfaction guarantee, is much more likely to be persuasive than saying, “We’re much cheaper than the one you currently buy”.

The key is not to attempt to put your product in a head to head comparison with what someone else is currently buying. Also, any advertising knocking a competitor is inherently promoting them too: most advertising isn’t consciously evaluated, so all the unconscious mind notices is that familiar brand name.

Of course, there will be exceptions to this approach, but even when you offer a quantitatively definable advantage, being too direct about it can work against you. Not because your product isn’t better, but because of the way consumers’ brains work.

Image courtesy: Fadzly Mubin