Consumerology

The Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping

Philip Graves

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781857885767
• eBook ISBN: 9781857889239
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

This new updated and revised second edition of Consumerology: The Truth About Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping contains a new preface and epilogue, in which Philip Graves reveals the myriad tricks and psychological games high street shops play on consumers; the ways in which we are manipulated into buying things we don't want; the ways in which we deceive ourselves; and the cutting edge behavioural science being used to change our habits to even more significant degrees.

1
UNDERSTANDING THE
UNCONSCIOUS MIND

Why we buy what we do but can’t explain it

The story of New Coke has gone down in marketing folklore. In the early 1980s Coca-Cola’s main rival, Pepsi, was making significant inroads into Coke’s market share. One strand of its attack was with the Pepsi Challenge, in which Pepsi conducted thousands of blind taste tests and publicized the fact that more people liked its product. Despite questioning the results, Coke’s own research got the same result: 57% of people asked to taste both products preferred Pepsi.¹ The Coca-Cola Company undertook extensive further research, which led to the creation of a new, sweeter formula for Coke. This recipe did the trick and turned around the taste test results: now Coke was beating Pepsi by around 7 percentage points. At that time, and given the value of the market the two were competing for, the $4 million spent to research and develop the new formula must have seemed like money well spent.²

It’s well known that the resulting launch of New Coke as a replacement to the original formula was something short of a complete success. It triggered a large public backlash and the company was inundated with complaints. Within just three months the product had been withdrawn from sale and the original formulation was back on the shelves.

Much has been written about why the market research was misleading and most of the arguments put forward have merit. There’s a world of difference between sipping a drink and consuming an entire can of it: the initially sweet hit can become overpowering in much the same way that the first chocolate from the box is heavenly, but the tenth consumed in the same sitting can leave you feeling somewhat nauseous. Separating the product from the packaging also removes the brand from the equation, with the implication that marketing Coke is simply a way of reminding people that your brown fizzy drink exists and can be bought wherever you see the distinctive red-and-white logo.

However, amid all the analysis and explanations, no one to my knowledge has reached the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from the New Coke fiasco: it isn’t just that Coke’s extensive market research on the new recipe was wrong, it is that no such research can be right, other than by chance. Yes, there were technical flaws in the research process, but that doesn’t mean that the theorized remedies would have produced a more accurate answer. Giving people a complete branded can to drink or a crate of them to consume over a month at home would probably have produced a different answer, but not necessarily one that would then have been borne out by reality.

Nevertheless, the belief remains: “Of course you can find out what people think by asking them, you just have to ask them the right questions in the right way.” The market research industry has gone on unabashed; companies still believe that reassurance can be found in the exchange of corporate question for consumer answer and politicians that public opinion can be gauged from a poll or focus group. No verifiable alternative has emerged for product development, because the crux of the matter is far more challenging to a business world and research industry that rely heavily on the reassurance that market research provides: consumer behavior is a by-product of the unconscious mind, whereas research is inherently a conscious process.

New Coke highlights just how little companies understand about the role of the unconscious mind (little has changed in the intervening decades). Most organizations don’t understand consumer behavior or how and why their marketing works (or doesn’t work).

The unconscious mind is the real driver of consumer behavior. Understanding consumers is largely a matter of understanding how the unconscious mind operates; the first obstacle to this is recognizing how we frequently react without conscious awareness. As long as we protect the illusion that we ourselves are primarily conscious agents, we pander to the belief that we can ask people what they think and trust what we hear in response. After all, we like to tell ourselves we know why we do what we do, so everyone else must be capable of doing the same, mustn’t they?

The problem of the unconscious mind

Most people can identify with that moment of driving a car when they realize that, for some indiscernible amount of time, they have been driving without conscious awareness. The section of journey has been uneventful, they have progressed without incident or harm, but they have no recollection of what has occurred or for how long they have been consciously absent from the driving process. Contrast this experience with the first time you sat in a car and attempted to coordinate the actions of steering, depressing the clutch, balancing the clutch and accelerator, selecting a gear, timing the release of the handbrake, and so on. I can still recall bouncing my driving instructor away from the traffic lights on my third lesson as I struggled to combine raising the clutch and depressing the accelerator simultaneously. An extraordinarily complicated array of actions is learned and assimilated, to the extent that we can do them without conscious thought. And there can be no suggestion that this is an innate skill: cars have only been around for a century or so and evolutionary development can’t work quite so swiftly!

I once inadvertently demonstrated the extent to which the delicate actions of driving are controlled unconsciously while sitting in a queue of traffic. Feeling bored at the slow progress of my journey, I decided to let my left foot do the braking instead of my right. My right foot is entirely adept at slowing the car down by pressing a pedal; it knows just how hard to press to bring the car to a stop smoothly. My left foot, even though it was in an unfamiliar place, evidently couldn’t change the habit it had developed from depressing the clutch, an action that I came to appreciate requires a much longer, firmer push. The result was an emergency stop. Even though the car couldn’t have been traveling at more than ten miles an hour, it was sufficient for the seatbelt-locking mechanism to engage to save me from banging my head on the windscreen, and for the person behind to wonder what the hell was going on!

The unconscious mind isn’t solely preoccupied with physical actions. The way in which we acquire language skills as very young children, including complex grammar, occupies an area of the brain that allows us to know that, for example, “we were winning” is right, but “we was winning” is not. We create sentences such as these without conscious reference to the rules of grammar; many people do so in the absence of knowing these rules at all, at least without knowing them at a level where they can express them.

So what is happening in those moments when we don’t consciously know what we’re doing? How are we making decisions? How accurately can we be expected to self-analyze and report on our behavior?

What would it mean if this phenomenon were not unique to matters of transportation? What if we often do things without being aware that we are doing them? What if that is often the case when we are choosing or consuming products? How useful would it be to ask consumers what they think about a brand, product, or service if the unconscious mind plays a part in their consumption?

We are surrounded by examples of how the unconscious mind and conscious mind behave very differently, examples that show the contributions that each makes to the way we behave. One function of the unconscious mind is its ability to screen out information, enabling us to focus on one area more effectively. A 2 year old who has yet to develop these powers will find a shop far more distracting (as any parent in a hurry will testify).

Similarly, a mother may sleep through a storm but immediately wake if her child coughs (fathers may do this too, but they wouldn’t let on if they did). Golfers will play their best shots outside of conscious awareness, and will be unable to recall all the movements their body made in executing a perfect shot, causing frustration when they can’t replicate it on every occasion they stand over the ball. We walk or run without any conscious sense of triggering the complex sequence of muscular contractions required.

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.

Evolution has equipped us with the capacity to make such decisions automatically. There’s no need to look at every pack, scrutinize the list of ingredients, and question whether the experience will be positive. In much the same way as eating the distinctive berry from the same bush hasn’t killed us or the other people we’ve seen eating there, we “know” that particular drink is safe from our initial, cautious, and deliberate encounters and now we can simply take one as we pass, directing our attention elsewhere (whether we want the sun lounger that we’ve just seen is on offer in the next aisle or making sure we don’t get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger). In evolutionary terms, it’s easy to conceive how those who could effectively automate more mundane tasks at an unconscious level of mental processing would prosper.

Businesses frequently spend large sums of money investigating what customers think about them. Ironically, it’s arguable that the greatest success a brand can achieve is to be selected without conscious thought: when it has become so synonymous with a person’s desires that the unconscious mind has it as the answer before the conscious mind gets involved in considering the question.

But how do you understand what the unconscious mind thinks? The answer, as I will explain, comes in what people do. However, given that asking people what they think is so much more convenient, first I need to persuade you that people really can’t accurately account for their actions, thoughts, and feelings in a conscious way.

We don’t really know what we know

It’s very easy to demonstrate how detached our conscious mind is from our unconscious. If I gave you a £10 note, how confident would you be that what you had in your hand was a £10 note and not something I’d made illegally in my garden shed? My guess is that you would feel very confident you could accurately identify a £10 note, particularly as distinct from something made by a man who has no experience of making bank notes or specialist forgery equipment at his disposal. When you’re handed one as change in a shop, I presume that a cursory glance and feel are sufficient to inform you that you have a legitimate note in your hand, and my guess is that you have invariably been right. However, if I asked you to describe a £10 note to someone who had never seen one so that they could create it from scratch, I’m guessing that you wouldn’t get very close to reality. Are the “£” and “10” in the same color? Does the word “ten” appear on the note anywhere? If so, how many times? How many digits does the serial number have? Is it printed vertically or horizontally? What pictures are there? How big is the note exactly? Your unconscious mind has the answers, but your conscious mind is evidently preoccupied with other things!

You can repeat this exercise with no end of everyday items. Many people can’t say how the numbers on their watch face are represented, despite it being something they visually reference many times each day, and despite them extracting conscious information about the time when they do.

A relative of mine was recently stopped in the main shopping area near his home and asked to take part in a survey on beer. Seated in front of a computer screen, he was asked which brand or brands of beer he bought. Despite the fact that in the supermarket aisle he knows exactly which product he would select, in the absence of the established visual patterns (including the stylized brand name) that would be available to his unconscious mind, he couldn’t consciously think of the brand name “Budweiser” in isolation. He told me that instead, he gave the names of the beers he could remember, despite the fact that they weren’t the beers he would buy. The next time he saw a Budweiser pack, he remembered what he should have said in the research.

We all experience moments when we can’t quite grasp something we feel sure we know. This is because our mind doesn’t store the information we reference from our memory in an absolute way. In his infamous “known knowns” speech, former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forgot to mention that there are things we know that we can’t recall at that moment, what he might have called “unknown knowns” if he’d remembered them. Researchers have used fMRI scans to explore this phenomenon. Asking participants to remember unusual word pairings such as “alligator” and “chair” by putting them into a sentence, they tested their recall of individual words from a list containing a mixture of individual words they had been shown and others they had not, while scanning which regions of the brain were active. Only when the second word was provided as a cue did one area, the hippocampus, become involved, at which point participants were able to recall their sentence with much greater detail.³

Our unconscious minds have vast amounts of data that we regularly rely on to make decisions, but we have no direct, conscious access to those processes. And that’s a problem if a business is expecting customers to respond accurately in research. Asking someone to taste a sample of a product seems an entirely reasonable thing to do, as does asking them what they think of what they’ve tasted. On the other hand, the normal purchase process involves neither of these elements, but does involve referencing a different set of mental associations to do with factors such as temperature, thirst, previous experiences of the product, and the context in which you find yourself. When taste-test results are considered in this context, any result they produce seems far less compelling.

We don’t always know what we’re doing

Recently I was asked to investigate why a new television drama program had failed to achieve good ratings. The television network felt that the program itself was of sufficient quality to merit a reasonable audience and couldn’t understand why it hadn’t performed better. At a conscious level, viewers appeared to be receptive to the program: I spoke to a number of people who were adamant that they liked drama, liked to watch new programs, and were interested in the subject matter of this particular drama. I knew from information I’d collected in advance that these people were watching television when the program was aired, and even that they had selected a program using an electronic program guide that included this one in the listing. Often the alternative program they had selected was not of particular interest to them, or was one they had watched before. The respondents were adamant that if they had had the option to watch the new drama they would have both seen it and selected it; therefore, they concluded that the program did not exist, and had not been shown on the night in question (despite the fact that it had).

It transpired that these viewers had scanned the television listings in such a way that they hadn’t registered the new program at all. When using this type of reflexive mental processing, the unconscious mind can process established program titles very quickly – they are “linked” to a rich tapestry of previous emotions, stories, and experiences – whereas the new title was, in this context, essentially abstract. The unconscious response to abstraction in the midst of all the other association-laden titles available is to ignore it. Faced with between 30 and 200 channels (depending on which type of digital system they own), people have learned to scan the listings guide very quickly. In essence, for efficiency’s sake, the unconscious mind has taken over the practice of selecting a program and the apparent conscious desire to watch a new program on a topic of interest is irrelevant.

When an electrical retailer asked me to investigate its ticket design for washing machines, I found more evidence of the gap that can exist between what people would like to believe they will do as consumers and what actually happens. I asked people prior to buying such an appliance how they would make the decision and they provided a rational set of criteria, generally relating to price and one or two specific product attributes (such as spin speed and load capacity). Each person expected the purchase process to be straightforward; after all, they had owned and used a washing machine for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to the paperback edition
• Overture: The moment of truth
• 1 Understanding the Unconscious Mind
• 2 Reading Consumers
• 3 The Consumer in Context
• 4 What Consumers Do
• 5 The Irrelevant Consumer
• 6 Relevant Answers
• 7 Understanding the Crowd
• 8 Consumer Futurology
• 9 Gaining an Edge
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments