Judging from the replies yesterday, some of you are certainly familiar with the concept that customer perceptions may not tally with reality. Indeed, it’s fair to say that there are even a few cliches on the subject. And I’m the sort of person who dislikes cliches and enjoys challenging them whenever possible; they can be an excuse for not bothering to think about something. For example, take the old chestnut of which came first the chicken or the egg? It seems pretty clear to me that it was the egg, so using this as a phrase to convey the point that the sequencing of events is unclear to you, simply suggests to me that you haven’t thought about it enough! [Where something evolved to a point where whomever decides such things was willing to say, “Yes, what you have there is what I would call a chicken” it must have […]
Consumers: Reality is Over-rated
When it comes to understanding consumer behaviour there’s a tricky conundrum; a consumer’s perception of a brand is far more important than the reality of their experience. But… You can’t trust people to account for their perceptions accurately. So, how can you get any further forward if understanding consumers is important to you? I’ll leave you to think about it and tell you more next time! Philip Graves
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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