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 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 […]
The Problem With Eyes
I read recently that a study has found that we don’t see things all the time. Brain activity has peaks and troughs (about ten per second) and when it’s in a trough we don’t see. Then there is inattentional blindness. You know, the thing that happens when a man in a monkey suit walks across a two-ball basketball counting game (it happens all the time, but people fail to see monkey-man because they’re so busy counting the number of passes). And then there’s the problem that my wife can’t find her keys or her phone or her address book (often her address book). Because I understand the psychology of looking at stuff I know that her strategy is a reckless one. It’s no good putting stuff down any old place and relying on your eyes to find it when you start looking. You might momentarily have your attention elsewhere, or […]
Advertising Reviews
Technorati Profile Every so often I take an advertisement, usually from TV, and analyse it from a consumer perspective. What I’m interested in is the way in which the advert is likely to work at an unconscious level, since I’m convinced that this is most important dimension for marketing communication of this kind. Now that presents it’s own particular problem, because it’s generally acknowledged that we have no direct link between our unconscious and conscious minds. The unconscious triggers various feelings, which our conscious mind then receives and attempts to decode into some kind of rational explanation: “I feel bad, I must not like what I’m looking at.” Unfortunately there’s lots of evidence to show that we’re quite bad at evaluating these feelings accurately (which is one of the reasons that consumer research has so much potential to be misleading). By applying models of how people think and developing my […]
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