Decoding the New Consumer Mind

How and Why We Shop and Buy

Kit Yarrow

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118647684
• eBook ISBN: 9781118859582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Take a glimpse into the mind of the modern consumer

A decade of swift and stunning change has profoundly affected the psychology of how, when, and why we shop and buy. In Decoding the New Consumer Mind, award-winning consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow shares surprising insights about the new motivations and behaviors of shoppers, taking marketers where they need to be today: into the deeply psychological and often unconscious relationships that people have with products, retailers, marketing communications, and brands.

Drawing on hundreds of consumer interviews and shop-alongs, Yarrow reveals the trends that define our transformed behavior. For example, when we shop we show greater emotionality, hunting for more intense experiences and seeking relief and distraction online. A profound sense of isolation and individualism shapes the way we express ourselves and connect with brands and retailers. Neurological research even suggests that our brains are rewired, altering what we crave, how we think, and where our attention goes.

Decoding the New Consumer Mind provides marketers with practical ways to tap into this new consumer psychology, and Yarrow shows how to combine technology and innovation to enhance brand image; win love and loyalty through authenticity and integrity; put the consumer's needs and preferences front and center; and deliver the most emotionally intense, yet uncomplicated, experience possible. Armed with Yarrow's strategies, marketers will be able to connect more effectively with consumers—driving profit and success across the organization.

Part One
The New Consumer Mind

Chapter 1
Rewired Brains

Technology: it’s not what we do with it, but what it’s doing to us.

Sara, a waitress and San Francisco State University undergraduate student, alternates between Neuro Sleep and 5-Hour Energy shots to achieve just the right amount of stimulation for any given moment. “I need something during the day. But it’s hard to fall asleep after I’ve been waitressing.” Sara says that most of her friends also alternate between energy products and sleep aids to help them navigate “too much to do.” And they’re not alone. For a growing number of people, “listening to your body” is only for the pharmaceutically challenged. In 2012, sales of energy drinks grew 19 percent from 2011.¹ And sleep-inducing products like teas, supplements, botanicals, tongue strips, and bath salts have grown 8.8 percent annually since 2008.²

Sleep management is obviously a problem, but counting sheep is so passé. Today, the marketplace is where people turn for solutions. Whether it’s a supplement or an app (yes, there’s an app for that—2,938 in the iTunes store), the shift from sheep counting to sleep supplements reflects our newfound trust in innovation and our insistence on quick fixes—two of the many ways that our relationship with technology has changed our psychology, which has in turn changed how we shop and what we buy.

TECHNOLOGY AND CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

In 1993, the word “web” was more likely to have been associated with a spider than something we use every day for work, entertainment, communication, and shopping. In 1995, the word “Amazon” might have conjured up thoughts of a river or a robust woman, but not the second-largest retailer in the world—which is what Wendy Liebmann, CEO of WSL Strategic, predicts Amazon.com will be by 2016.³ And in just over thirty years, we’ve gone from pay phones and home phones to smartphones that are no longer simply talking devices—they’re what Resource CEO Kelly Mooney insightfully describes as “weapons of personal empowerment.”⁴

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• The average American household has six Internet connected devices.^a
• By 2017, the average CMO will spend more on IT than the average CIO.^b
• More than one-third of marriages between 2005 and 2012 began online.^c
• In 2004, YouTube didn’t exist. Today, one hundred hours of video are uploaded every minute of every day, and over a billion unique users visit YouTube every month.^d

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Although parents, psychologists, politicians, philosophers, scientists, and educators hotly debate whether technology and the Internet are good or bad for us, there’s one thing that cheerleaders, hand-wringers, and everyone between agrees on: technology has changed us. And the influence of technology will only increase. Two-thirds of kids between seven and thirteen would rather have technology, such as a tablet, to play with than a toy.⁵

I’ll explain in this chapter how in a relatively short period of time—so fast that we’ve barely had time to register the impact—the pervasiveness of technology in our lives has affected every aspect of being human: how we think and make decisions, how we feel, what we crave, and how we relate to others.

Obviously this is of great importance to marketers. After all, people buy to elevate their emotional state, whether by removing a negative, satisfying aspirations, or gaining a positive. They are solving and improving both practical and emotional problems and situations. And even purely practical purchases will be strongly influenced by an emotional overlay of things like self-identity, belonging, obligation, or boredom. Technology has created a new set of “problems” and emotional needs, new ways of acquiring perceptions of products and brands, and new ways of interacting with the marketplace. The hunt for happiness has evolved.

There is immense pressure on marketers to conceptualize how to use the flood of new technology and platforms to engage with consumers. Although new platforms provide important tactical solutions in connecting with today’s consumer, I believe that the bigger opportunity is in driving new strategies that take their cue from how technology has changed the consumer.

Today’s frenzied pace of innovation renders “now” an increasingly untrustworthy predictor of what consumers will want tomorrow. Although meaningful insights (as well as tactical solutions) can be culled from market and technology trends, marketers with a deeper, empathic understanding of the psychology of consumers can build high-impact, sustained strategies swiftly and with confidence. It’s a significant opportunity for the marketers who get it, and it’s what I’ll focus on in this chapter.

FIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL SHIFTS

Five key psychological shifts catalyzed by our use of technology are of particular importance to how, when, and why people shop and buy. These psychological shifts are also affected by the other two major sociocultural shifts we’ll explore: our elevated levels of emotionality and an increased sense of isolation. Each of the three contributes to the effects of the others in a dynamic, mutually reinforcing manner. Our use of technology has changed our psychology in these ways:

1. Innovation optimism
2. Consumer empowerment
3. Faster ways of thinking
4. Symbol power
5. New ways of connecting

Innovation Optimism

Today we’re all early adopters. Once hesitant, consumers have become eager to try new products. The usefulness, ubiquity, and intimacy of technology have transformed innovation-wary consumers into optimists.

Brenda, for example, has a problem with navigation. “I can get lost in a closet, I swear. I have no sense of direction. I remember clearly why I bought my first cellphone. I was driving around lost and late for a date. I couldn’t find a pay phone, and I couldn’t even find where I was on a map. I got there, but I was like an hour late. I was stressed and anxious, and my boyfriend was mad. That was only maybe fifteen years ago. What a different life I have—not just navi and cellphone, but it’s hard to believe in my life I used a typewriter. It’s all so much easier and better now.”

The deep intimacy we have with our technology—phones that rest on our nightstands and computers that we interact with more than people—is unlike any relationship we’ve had with products in the past. And continuous brilliant advances in technology, coupled with the power of social media to champion new products, have created a trust in “new” unlike anything we’ve seen before. Products of all sorts, not just technology, have benefited. In the past, most consumers would have fallen into the “wait and see” category of shoppers. Today, like Brenda, nearly everyone is less suspicious and more willing to try unfamiliar products.

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I found my job, my apartment, and my boyfriend online.

—Jemmie, 26

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In fact, eagerness and even insistence might better describe many consumers’ view of innovation. This is particularly true of those younger than thirty-three, the first generations to grow up in a digital world. They have high expectations, and, like Sara, who turns to the marketplace for sleep solutions, they want quick fixes to their problems, and they view innovation as the hallmark of excellence in product design and communication.

Sara’s faith in the power of purchases to quickly fix problems is due, in part, to the brilliant innovation she’s witnessed in the technology that’s fundamental to her life. Every new generation of computer or cellphone is proof that new is better, faster, and hipper.

The intersection of innovation and the demand for immediate solutions is highlighted by a new phenomenon the New York Times called “smartphone shrinks.”⁶ Apps like iStress, MoodKit, Fix a Fight, and Unstuck use algorithms to tackle the kinds of problems a therapist might have been called on to help with in the past. The popularity and prevalence of these apps are yet another indication of our quest for the quick fix—a direct result of our belief in the power of innovation and of the impatience we’ve developed through our use of technology.

New? Bring It ON

Consumer cravings for “new” are bolstered through the consumer championship and trust building of social media, rating, and review sites. Products can go from introduction to popularity at an unprecedented rate through the reach and reassurance provided by social media. The ability of the Internet to provide a platform, voice, and marketplace for new companies and entrepreneurs ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: The New Consumer Mind
• Part Two: Strategies to Connect with Today’s New Consumer
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments and Gratitude
• About the Author
• Index
• More from Wiley
• End User License Agreement