Please find my highlights from Consumer.ology by Philip
Graves
The goals of market research are laudable: the better an
organization understands its customers, the more likely it is that it will make
good decisions and avoid bad ones. It’s just that the approach has been
misguided. It’s no coincidence that fast-food companies often launch healthy
products that customers don’t actually buy. In research, McDonald’s McLean,
KFC’s Skinless Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut’s low-cal pizza all appealed to
customers, but in restaurants they failed.
It may surprise you to learn that any market research
that asks people what they think, what they’ve done, or what they would like in
the future is based on belief. Market research is a pseudo science – in fact
it’s consumer.ology – and the beliefs under- pinning it are false. We are Strangers to Ourselves. And the way in
which we can be influenced without realizing that our thoughts have changed,
while more than a little disconcerting, reveals what is required if understanding
what people think is important to you and why the research process is
frequently the cause of its own inaccuracy.
What people see, hear, and feel influences their
behavior, but they can’t account for what has happened or how it has influenced
them. However, this inability to under- stand ourselves doesn’t stop us
answering questions in research. Diners at a restaurant in Illinois were given
a free glass of wine to accompany their meal. In each case the actual wine used
was the same (and inexpensive). However, different bottles were used to signal
different wine qualities. Where the wine was perceived (purely from the label)
as being better, people rated both the wine and the food as tasting better, and
ate more of their meal. In a second study, people given a wine they believed
(from the packaging) was from a superior region rated the wine 85% higher and
the food 50% higher.14 How many of these peo- ple, if interviewed two weeks
later in their local High Street, would have said: “I enjoyed the meal because
the wine looked nice”?
Repeated studies might produce similar results, but that
doesn’t mean that the original results are accurate. The fact that people react
similarly to consistently executed questioning processes doesn’t tell us
anything other than that the cause-and-effect relationship of such research is
consistent.
Scientific scrutiny should be directed first and foremost
at understanding consumers themselves, rather than merely at the process of
summarizing their claims. It reveals what drives customer behavior, how anyone
can obtain genuine insights into their own customers, and how much weight
decision makers should attach to any claimed “consumer insight.”
The more familiar and efficient the process is (or any
one part of it is), the more likely it is to be driven by mental processes outside
of conscious awareness. How much of an American consumer’s soda-buying process
is not conscious? The consistent branding of the pack, selected from the same
point on the shelf in the store that is visited every day or every week –
there’s a strong argument to say that the purchase often functions just like
that moment of the car journey, passing smoothly without conscious involvement.
More Choice – No Choice
Social psychologists Lyengar and Lepper carried out an
experiment that illustrated how, in practice, more choice isn’t necessarily
beneficial. They evaluated reactions to two tasting tables at a supermarket; on
one they laid out 24 different jams and on the other just 6. While more people
elected to stop for the wider selection (60% vs 40%), a dramatically higher
proportion purchased from the selection of six jams, whereas only 3% did so
from the larger choice. Put another way, less than 2% of people will buy from a
display of 24 jams, but 12% will if you give them a choice of just six.
Safe Choice rather
than best choice
Being mindful that people are primarily focused on not making
a bad choice – in other words making a safe choice, rather than necessarily
making the best choice. Why do new products often start out with a trial price?
Because most marketers realize that a financial discount can not only help get
the product noticed on the shelf, but also offset the unconscious risk
associated with deviating from the usual choice. While there has been some
debate whether what drives this is a fear of risk (loss aversion) or a
preference for the status quo over change, the effective result remains the
same: people are often very resistant to trying or doing something new, however
logically compelling that alternative is. The conscious mind is far more
receptive to new concepts than is the unconscious. New things arouse our curiosity.
When the fear of missing out overpowers the fear of making a bad choice, people
will buy.
Easy usually wins –Mental
Fluency
Studies show that thinking uses glucose, so the more
thought any activity requires the more tired we will become. We unconsciously
like what’s easiest and most familiar; in other words, what our brains can
process most fluently.
The crowd matters –
social proof
It has even been argued convincingly that our ability to
imitate is what distinguishes humans from other creatures. When it comes to understanding consumer
behavior, despite what most of us would like to tell ourselves, at an
unconscious level we aren’t individual pioneers, we’re sheep.
What is first
matters most – priming
Much as we may all like to pretend that we’re objective,
well-balanced, and rational judges of what we encounter, research shows that
we’re primed by our first experiences and, from there, go about seeking
evidence that will fit with what we’ve decided is right.
Sound
Charles Areni, who specializes in studying the
environmental psychology of commercial space, set up a test in a shop that sold
wine, playing either top 40 or classical music. He found that people spent more
than three times as much on a bottle of wine when classical music was playing
compared to when pop music was selected.
Light
It is well documented that light levels have an effect on
brain chemistry: light regulates the body clock and is associated with the
release of serotonin, which plays an important role in the regulation of mood,
anger, and aggression. However, only people who’ve been diagnosed with a
condition such as Seasonal Anxiety Disorder might be expected to recognize that
they’d feel better if they got more light.
Two marketing professors created four rooms that were
identical except for the height of the ceiling, which they set at either 8 or
10 feet. By giving participants different tasks that required different types
of mental processing and analyzing the results, they discovered that people in
rooms with higher ceilings performed better at tasks requiring relational
processing (to do with identifying and evaluating the connections between
different sports), whereas when the ceiling was lower participants performed
better at item-specific tasks. They also found statistically significant
differences in how two products were evaluated.
Price is not as
important as we have used to think
A 2001 study based on click-through analysis of North
American web users found that only 8% were aggressive price hunters.
