From your smart TV to your iPhone to your iPad, we’re seeing more but reading less.
All courtesy of digital technology.
The research interview process does more than merely ignore critical components of why people behave as they do, it changes how and what they think.
Consumer.ology by Philip Graves
Moments of discovery are often accompanied by surprised laughter;
when I heard laughter he could took it as a cue that there might be something going on that was worth looking at.
Consumer.ology by Philip Graves citing former dean of Yale Medical School, Lewis Thomas
Creativity isn’t an objective pursuit. Its value can’t be measured the way other skills can be.
Eventually, of course, its value will be confirmed, but often long after it was created.
Your tool of persuasion might be a paintbrush or a guitar, but it’s your audience’s mind that you really want.
Once you’ve captured a corner of that, you’ll have made it.
I believe that a lot of extremely useful biographical experiences can be elicited by asking:
How was the experience for you?
What did you notice? and
What did you feel?When doing this I help people to stay as close to a description of what happened as possible – before they get on to what they made it mean!
Roy Langmaid. “What is Behavioral Economics – Really?” (via peterspear)
When companies or organizations do not have a clear sense of why their customers are their customers, they tend to rely on a disproportionate number of manipulations to get what they need. And for good reason.
Manipulations work.
Start With Why by Simon Sinek
Sometimes consumers want to save the planet; other times they want to selfishly show their discerning taste through ‘status’ symbols or buying an outrageous luxury brand.
Brand Jam by Marc Gobé
Asking a consumer about something overrides the natural state that thing occupies in his or her experience.
It’s very hard to preempt what people will find interesting or attention worthy – which makes it very risky to presume by asking them a question about it.
When research has put a focus on the issue it’s investigating that causes people to consider it in a way they otherwise wouldn’t, it has manufactured the response it gets.
Consumer.ology by Philip Graves
The best briefs are when the creative team leaves the brief meeting with ideas already in their head.
If your brief is boring, or leaves the creative team with more questions than answers, or worst, demotivated, then your creative brief was a failure.
Include just enough information to spark creativity- you should be able to accomplish this in one page.
A lot of our behavior and opinions are undertaken to avoid cognitive dissonance.
We want to feel good about ourselves and we desperately go around constructing stories that prop up that belief.
Here’s what you need to know about social media:
The hundreds of millions of people using social media are interested in interacting with each other.
Not brands, not ads, not you, not me.
The Golden Age of Bullshit by Bob Hoffman
You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.
Albert Einstein (via psych-facts)
Identifying how long visitors to a site spend on each page can reveal how well it is serving its function of helping them find their ultimate destination on the site and how engaged they find it when they get there.
Consumer.ology by Philip Graves
The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.
They make one story become the only story.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The danger of a single story (via ted)
Questions inadvertently tell people what to think about. Raising something as a question pushes it into the conscious mind for a conscious response.
It frequently makes a presumption about how relevant or interesting that issue is to the person concerned.
In an understandable attempt to explore what someone thinks about something, the very fact that you asked them about that thing is a potential distortion of reality.
Consumer.ology by Philip Graves
Once you understand how consumers are interacting with your products and services, only then will you have the insight to say, ‘How do I address those needs?’ Only then can you make the series of moves to optimize.
It is possible to gain a good insight into the mindset of a customer by closely observing their total package of ‘expressions.’
By paying attention to the words people choose to use, their tone of voice, the gestures, postures, and facial expressions, one can read with surprising accuracy the frame of mind they are occupying at any particular time.
The key is to observe the total package rather than erroneously attach significance to just one aspect and deduce, for example, that because someone has their arms folded they are feeling defensive (they may very well just be cold, feel more comfortable that way, or be unconsciously modeling someone else’s behavior).
Consumer.ology by Philip Graves
Industries where the packaging design is nearly identical is likely due to supplier limitations or governmental regulations or maybe that all of the ‘competing’ products are actually owned by the same parent company who find it more economical to print a universal box for all their products.
Whatever it may be, if you can differentiate your brand with package design, you should by all means.
But if your package cannot be redesigned to be distinguished from your competitors, then you’ll have to differentiate yourself in other ways.
When consumers can be covertly observed from a dispassionate perspective, noticing what someone is doing, particularly when a shift in emotions occurs, can be very revealing.
Consumer.ology by Philip Graves