To celebrate Shift’s 20th anniversary, our founder, Philip Graves, has collated his top ten insights that we’ve identified over the past two decades.
- Never Presume that Consumers Will Notice Something New
It still surprises me how changes that appear significant to everyone involved can be placed in a consumer’s path, only for them to be entirely oblivious to anything being different. What feels like a significant packaging redesign or branding evolution often goes entirely unnoticed.
The unconscious mind has a phenomenal ability to filter out what doesn’t matter. It’s important to remain mindful of the considerable gap in focus that exists between people who live and breathe a brand every day, and the consumers who buy it.
- Priming Matters
A lot of the academic studies that identified priming effects have the feel of parlour games. But we see priming influencing consumers everywhere: packaging, communications, store design… not to mention most consumer insight work (apart from ours, obviously).
Understanding where a consumer’s mental journey begins can unlock ‘make or break’ differences in commercial outcomes.
- Decoding the Psychology of Consumer Behaviour Made Easy
If you ever need a super-quick way to understand why consumers are doing something, the answer can often be found by considering three key drivers of consumer (and human) behaviour: ease, loss aversion and reward.
Much of what we observe in research can be explained by how these drivers interact within a given context. Behaviour is most likely to occur when loss aversion is low and action is easy, regardless of whether reward is maximised.
- The Unconscious Mind is Everywhere
It’s fairly easy to illustrate the less-than-rational behaviour that exists in consumers; once you’re sensitised to it, it becomes hard to overlook. However, there’s often an assumption that ‘professionals’ operate to different standards.
Over the last two decades, we’ve seen the same unconscious traits at play in salespeople, senior managers, organisational thinking, terminal cancer patients, healthcare professionals, journalists, and people buying pizza. In most circumstances, it is a mistake to think that the unconscious traits that drive our behaviour are mitigated to a major degree by the veneer of professionalism.
So, whatever the area you’re trying to understand or influence, it’s beneficial to focus on what’s happening outside the conscious awareness of the people concerned.
- Good Customer Service Isn’t Relative, It’s Universal
The problem most organisations encounter when designing customer service is faulty framing. When developing a service proposition, the tendency is to focus on how you currently operate, or how your competitors do.
However, consumers don’t think this way. They are far less inclined to segment industries when forming judgements. Instead, they estimate the size and capability of your organisation and implicitly reference best-in-class experiences from across all the categories they interact with.
If Amazon can call me back in sixty seconds and address my problem swiftly when I spent £20 on light bulbs, why can’t BA reply to an email when I’ve spent considerably more flying with them? The reference point isn’t other airlines, it’s what’s corporately and technologically possible.
- Customer Loyalty Isn’t!
At the risk of sounding psychologically pedantic, when a customer stays with the same brand, they’re usually not being loyal. Unless they’d genuinely feel guilty going elsewhere (and they don’t), what you’re observing is better described as stickiness.
This distinction is important because what drives loyalty and what drives stickiness are very different. If you convince yourself it’s the former, you risk coming unstuck when a competitor out-performs you on what was actually driving that stickiness.
When you define it accurately, you can understand it properly and protect it. Considering factors such as what consumers find easiest, what implicit associations influence brand perceptions, how empirical experiences create psychological anchors, and what perceived risks stop consumers switching, are more likely to be relevant than any strong feelings of support or allegiance.
- What the Best Brands Share
Having worked with hundreds of brands over the last twenty years and looked inside consumers’ minds to see how they work, the best share one quality: they have created clear and consistent associations.
What makes this hard is, frankly, the turnover that takes place in marketing departments. Without question, the best brand we’ve worked with directly was a family business that was hundreds of years old. Their way of being was so deeply ingrained that it permeated throughout their interactions with customers and transcended changes in personnel.
If you want to get a quick understanding of how your organisation performs in this regard, ask everyone in a senior position to write down three associations consumers have with the brand and see how similar (or not) the answers are. Then do the same thing with a sample of appropriately primed consumers.
- Creative Without the Fanfare
Creative work is often experienced very differently by clients than by consumers. When clients see creative, it typically arrives with fanfare and explanation. Consumers see none of this. Before testing, we therefore often need to strip away layers of influence that would need to be inferred in the finished communication, because effectiveness depends on whether consumers make those inferences for themselves.
For this reason, we would argue that clients would benefit from seeing creative without priming or subjective framing, so they can fairly gauge its potential against their (usually very attuned) brand instincts.
- Predicting the Future Is Hard
This is primarily because context is such a huge factor in determining consumer behaviour and context is made up of so much stuff.
You can tell it’s hard because, typically, if you ask someone to think about some aspect of their future, they entirely ignore context. It is preferable, in my experience, to put one’s efforts into understanding now as deeply as possible and to accept that the unfathomable complexities of future contexts might still make you look foolish.
- The Best Consumer Insight Is Useless…
Try as we might, we know that even the best consumer insights are of no commercial value to an organisation unless they can navigate the internal complexities of that company and land in the right place, in the right way.
Without our clients’ skill to bridge the gap between what we learn and their organisation, we will almost certainly make no difference to what matters. The last twenty years would not have happened without us having been fortunate to work with some brilliant planners and insight managers.