Much of the information we hold and reference isn’t consciously processed.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 Within just three months the product had been withdrawn from sale and the original formulation was back on the shelves.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?
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.
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.
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 years and were comfortable with the product. However, as I watched shoppers in a store it was apparent that a rational purchase decision, even of a major product such as this, was virtually impossible.
There were 40 white boxes that either were washing machines or looked like them from a distance (washer-dryers being virtually indistinguishable from more than a few feet away). Each product had an information label with up to 20 technical specifications for the product, and further information such as product dimensions, accessories, and extended warranty options. Any customer had at least 800 data points to compare. Assuming that they could consolidate their choice by two variables, say spin speed and price, this would still represent 80 data points to weigh up!
Arguably, a logical response to this would be to grab a pen and paper and start writing things down, design a spreadsheet to compare them, or at the very least seek independent advice from someone who might have had the capacity to make such a comparison. However, the very real need for a washing machine and the prior belief that such a purchase should have been simple must compete with the unexpected complexity and confusion that the actual task of buying one has introduced. Often this cognitive dissonance isn’t manifested as a rational awareness that buying a washing machine is harder than had been anticipated; it arrives as feeling of awkwardness, as though the unconscious mind throws out a generic “error” message.
So what happens? Either the unconscious screens out options at a very general level and defaults to something familiar, or the customer lets someone else (the salesperson) make the decision for them, or they walk away, making up a reason why they haven’t got a product they really do need. The resulting rationale for their actions can be extremely tenuous. One woman I interviewed justified her selection by saying: “I decided to get this brand because my mother had one that lasted for years, although I know they don’t make these as well as they used to.” I had watched her spend several minutes comparing, or at least attempting to compare, machines from several manufacturers at a similar price point and hypothesized that the process had become overwhelming. When I discussed her experience in the context of the confusion that I suspected she’d experienced, she said she had wanted to look at a wider range and make an informed choice, but had been overcome by the number of alternatives.4
When I put just two tickets in front of her and asked her which appliance she thought would better suit her requirements, she changed her decision from the Hotpoint she had selected to buy to a Whirlpool model. It confirmed my theory that her chosen purchase had far more to do with the psychological discomfort of making a choice from so many options and far less to do with her rationalized washing machine ideals.
This example highlights another conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind. When you ask them, most people say they want choice; often it will be a conscious consideration when selecting a retail outlet for a purchase – “I’ll go to X because they have the biggest range.” Choice is a good thing, isn’t it? Social psychologists Iyengar and Lepper carried out an experiment that illustrated how, in practice, more choice isn’t necessarily beneficial.5 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.
This simple but elegant study illustrates the point perfectly: what someone thinks they want, and will say they want because it seems sensible and reasonable, may conflict with what really matters to their unconscious mind when the moment in question arises. At that point it will be the unconscious mind that determines what happens next.
Google made the mistake of asking customers how many results they wanted to see on each page after using its search engine. People responded to the rational question in a rational way – if you’re searching for something of course more choice is better. However, when Google tripled the number of results it provided, it found that traffic declined.6
The nature of a conscious response says much about a respondent’s conscious values and how they would like to perceive themselves, but can reveal very little about what really has driven their behavior in the past or what they will do in the future. For example, there are thousands of people each year who resolve not to overeat; they generate a well-intentioned conscious response to the tightness of a favorite pair of jeans, or their doctor’s health warning. However, only a small proportion of these people will develop sustained new eating and exercising behaviors. This is not because their conscious intention was insincere, but because the unconscious drive to eat in response to particular physical or emotional stimulus will cut in and trigger consumption irrespective of their conscious intent. In the end, the unconscious drives that we might characterize as habit, emotion, or impulse often exert a much stronger influence over behavior than conscious intent. 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.7
Ultimately, the reasons that are consciously hypothesized for consumers’ choices – and this is a large part of what makes the New Coke story a valuable lesson for research in general – end up being a reflection of the desire to see ourselves as fundamentally conscious creatures. It’s hard to believe that people would buy a drink for any reason other than that they liked the taste, and it’s entirely logical to suppose that finding a taste they like better, however one approaches that, is a laudable goal. But the unbridged gap between the conscious and unconscious mind makes the exercise largely futile. Asking people to focus consciously on the difference between two alternative drinks produces a preference (as you’ll see in a moment, it can even produce a preference if the products are identical), but the unwitting detachment of the unconscious mind triggers involved in the real-world decision to buy make that conscious evaluation an irrelevance.
All of this raises the question: just how much of what we do as consumers is unconsciously driven? This is where the story becomes fascinating or slightly unnerving, depending on how you look at it, and the case for consumer insights that aren’t dependent on people’s ability to explain themselves becomes particularly compelling. It’s also the point at which elements that can be leveraged to connect with the unconscious mind of the shopper emerge. Traditional marketing theory preoccupies itself with meeting customers’ needs, but market research can only identify those needs of which customers are conscious. When my computer breaks I know I need a replacement (at least I do if I’m going to finish writing this book). But the vast majority of products are not consumed out of such necessity. Frequently an emotional desire drives people to spend and we’re beginning to identify some of the elements that trigger the feeling of “want.”
Social psychologists are continually exploring the ways in which we are unaware of what really shapes our behavior, and the extent to which it is at odds with our self-perception.
Recent research has shown that smells that are too faint to be consciously detected can influence how we act. Our senses are constantly filtering information and in doing so they process much more than they bother to bring to our (conscious) attention. Dr. Wen Li and colleagues at Northwestern University asked people to sniff bottles containing one of three scents at such low concentrations that most participants were not aware of having smelled anything.8 They were then shown an image of a face with a neutral expression and asked to evaluate its likability. The researchers found that the type of smell influenced the reaction to the face, but only when the smell had not been consciously noticed. Our unconscious mind is great at collecting data, but it doesn’t let our conscious mind in on what it’s collected or how important it has deemed it to be, nor how it has influenced what we’ve gone on to do.
In another study, researchers put one new pair of Nike running shoes in a room with a light floral smell and another identical pair in an unscented room. Afterwards, 84% said they were more likely to buy the pair in the room that smelled of flowers. Yet another study found that pumping a scent into one part of a casino led to people putting 45% more into the slot machines.8
The same is true of our visual sense: how people respond can be influenced by things their eyes have seen that they haven’t consciously registered.9 Bargh and Pietromonaco conducted one such study where participants were asked to take part in an exercise on a computer screen, during which half were exposed to words flashed on the screen at a speed too quick for conscious awareness.10 The words were associated with antagonism (such as “hostile,” “insult,” and “unkind”). In a subsequent, and ostensibly unrelated, experiment, the same people were asked to make a judgment about someone based on an ambivalent description about him: “A salesman knocked at the door, but Donald refused to let him enter.” Those who had seen the flashes of hostile words judged the person to be more hostile and unfriendly than the group who had not seen these words.
There is some evidence that such priming can even override conscious processing. Draine and Greenwald flashed words on a screen and asked people to make a very quick judgment as to whether those words meant something good or bad.11 They also flashed priming words even more quickly, beneath conscious awareness, that were also good or bad in meaning. When the priming word and overt word were mismatched, the researchers found that people would frequently make a mistake about the meaning of the word they had seen.
While studying the impact of single words is one thing, certain images (particularly relating to female faces) have also been shown to influence how people respond subsequently, so an image on a shop wall, an actress in an advert, a smiling female shop assistant, or a female research interviewer may all change the outcome of the consumer’s experience.
The price label on an item can also prime expectations and alter how people actually experience things. Researchers in California found that participants in their research consistently gave higher preference ratings to a wine just because it was priced higher. Having given participants in the research the same wine, but different information about the purchase price, they asked them to rate how much they liked it. Although we might all like to believe that our palate is far too discerning to be led solely by price, we shouldn’t be quite so sure. The researchers conducted brain scans during the experiment, which revealed that the area of the brain believed to be responsible for encoding pleasure relating to taste and odor showed increased activity when the participant had been told that the price was higher. Since people believed that the experience would be better (on the basis of the financial context of the wine, in other words its price), the reward centers of the brain encoded it as feeling better.13
Other studies have observed consistently different responses from variations in light levels and from differences in temperature. Romantic moments are often associated with the lights being slightly dimmer and a pleasantly warm temperature; is it a coincidence that these same environmental conditions have been shown to make people feel more positive about a neutral stimulus?
Two other studies demonstrate how little we understand about what shapes our own reactions and the potential prize for marketing that connects with the unconscious mind. 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 people, if interviewed two weeks later in their local High Street, would have said: “I enjoyed the meal because the wine looked nice”?
Unfortunately (for consumer research), all these studies are interesting for the very reason that the people taking part can’t attribute their responses and behavior to the variable being manipulated by the experimenters. 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 understand ourselves doesn’t stop us answering questions in research.
Of course, all these unconsciously processed elements exist in every consumer experience. We don’t buy products in white-walled, sterile laboratories devoid of smells or visual content. Marketing, in all its forms, is surrounding products with associations. However, as any brand that isn’t experiencing soaring sales will testify, marketing is a fairly hit-and-miss affair. This is precisely because it is success at the level beyond conscious awareness that is required, but conscious appraisal that is directing the show. Getting all the elements around a product right allows us to feel desire, however it may ultimately be expressed and rationalized consciously. Indeed, in most studies conscious awareness of potentially subliminal influences entirely negates their impact. Utilizing the sphere of unconscious influence around your product is one thing, but it only works if you accept that the people it is influencing will never be able tell you directly that it’s working.
The fact that people can’t accurately account for what has influenced their behavior in the experiments mentioned in the previous section doesn’t stop them creating reasons of their own that appear, at least superficially, to account for what they’ve done.
The conscious mind is a powerful tool that, for our own sanity, is highly practiced at wrapping our behavior in a veneer that suits our perception of ourselves. Generally, people perceive their own actions as self-generated, well-intentioned, sensible behavior. The extent to which this is an invention will vary, but since the capacity for it so evidently exists, consumer research must at the very least be mindful of the fact that the independent, well-conceived, and logical responses obtained in research are artificially constructed by respondents, however innocently.
An extreme example of this artificial construction was noted by German psychiatrist Albert Moll.15 After a hypnotic induction, he instructed a man to take a flowerpot from a window, wrap it in a cloth, put it on a sofa, and bow to it three times. Moll then asked the man why he had done that and was told:
You know, when I woke and saw the flowerpot there I thought that as it was rather cold the flowerpot had better be warmed a little, or else the plant would die. So I wrapped it in the cloth, and then I thought that as the sofa was near the fire I would put the flowerpot on it; and I bowed because I was pleased with myself for having such a bright idea.
The man did not consider his actions foolish and was happy with his self-justification.
A more recent example comes from University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy Wilson, who conducted a study with Richard Nisbett in which they set up a “Consumer Evaluation” of four pairs of tights (panty hose). Respondents were asked to say which they thought was the best quality and to explain why they had chosen the pair that they did.16 The results showed what the psychologists expected: a statistically significant position effect – A 12%, B 17%, C 30%, D 40%. However, the reasons people gave for their choice referenced an attribute such as sheer-ness, knit, or elasticity. No one spontaneously mentioned that the position had influenced their preference, despite the fact that all four pairs of tights were identical (a fact that went unnoticed by almost all of the participants). While most people know that you need to design research carefully to remove any order effect when presenting alternatives, the key issue here is that people will invent reasons for a preference in research when none can exist!
In a second study, these researchers highlighted more evidence of the potential for misattribution when investigating the impact of noise on enjoyment of a film.17 College students were asked to watch a film while someone outside the room intermittently operated a power saw. Partway through the experiment the “worker” was asked overtly to stop making the noise, thereby bringing it to the conscious attention of everyone present. The students rated their enjoyment of the film, as did another group who had watched the same film without the disturbance outside. It would be reasonable to suppose that the group who had watched the film with the noise going on in the background would have enjoyed the film less. Indeed, this is what the researchers anticipated and what those taking part claimed was the case. However, their ratings of enjoyment for the film were no different from those whose experience was unadulterated by the noise.
As Daniel Wegner observes in The Illusion of Conscious Will:
Much of what we do seems to surface from unconscious causes, and such causation provides a major challenge to our ideal of conscious agency. When life creates all the inevitable situations in which we find ourselves acting without appropriate prior conscious thoughts, we must protect the illusion of conscious will by trying to make sense of our actions.18
Quite how far ahead unconscious processes are is an issue at the forefront of neuroscience, but the technology is starting to provide an insight. Very recently, researchers using sophisticated brain-imaging techniques found that they could accurately predict the “free” choice a person would make up to ten seconds before the person made or was aware of making that conscious choice. Noticing the decision we ourselves have made appears to happen quite a long way down the processing hierarchy and as the result of processes to which we don’t have conscious access.19
Antonio Damasio, professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, describes a study he conducted with an individual, David, with severe learning and memory defects.20 David had extensive damage to both temporal lobes, was incapable of learning any new fact, and could not recognize anyone, nor recall any part of their appearance, voice, or things they may have said. To explore whether the brain required a link between consciousness and emotions, Damasio created a situation where David experienced three distinct types of interaction from three different people over several days: one was consistently positive, one neutral, and one unpleasant. Later David was shown sets of photographs, each containing one of the people with whom he’d had the interactions, and asked whom he would go to for help and who was his friend. Despite not being able to remember ever meeting the people or anything about them, David selected in a way that proved he had factored in his experience from the previous day, yet he was able to provide no basis for his selections. This extreme case lends further support to the notion that we don’t need our conscious processes to act effectively. As Moll showed, when our conscious faculties are working properly, we’re adept at creating a justification that works for us.
Our selective attention is continually screening out a huge amount of information but, as I have explained, that doesn’t mean that this information isn’t being processed. Quite the opposite: in order to screen it out we must first receive it. Studies such as those by Bargh and Pietromonaco show that, while we are not consciously processing it, our unconscious mind can be changed by what passes through it, leaving us with no realization that such a change has taken place and certainly no ability to report it accurately after the event.
The unconscious mind appears to operate as a first-stage pattern checker, the first, and sometimes only, stage in the processing and reacting chain. However, since people have no direct access to the references it’s using, consumer research respondents are unlikely to report accurately its role in their decision making. Consequently, the information provided by research that is responded to at a conscious level has bypassed a critical stage of mental processing that may well prevent the person ever acknowledging its existence. There is little point in asking a television viewer what he thinks of a new program’s title, if it contains words that his unconscious mind would pass over and filter out of conscious appraisal at the moment that the selection decision is made in reality.
Another (slightly cruel) way of seeing this unconscious filter at work is with young children who are totally absorbed by a television program. If they don’t respond to general requests or questions such as “Where are your socks, Martha?”, try asking “Is Dolly Della (one of Martha’s favorite toys) going in the bin?” in exactly the same tone of voice. Instantly, the unconscious filter kicks in to flag that there is an imminent risk, and the mesmerizing spell of the television is broken. Similarly, some Coke customers may be drawn toward Pepsi by its claims of taste superiority, but that doesn’t mean that shaking your entire customer base from their established behavior is a good idea. When the familiar design of the can has changed to deliver the news that the recipe has altered, the most likely reaction is to focus on what has been lost rather than what might be gained.
Practical examples of these unconscious filtering processes and their impact abound with internet retailers. Their capacity to make small changes and observe their impact using split tests that randomly assign visitors to different versions of a website have found dramatic differences in response, and sales can be achieved with alternations that appear incidental and certainly reflect elements of design that we would never consider influential in shaping our own behavior: changing a headline, shifting the position of a message, or using a different color on a page can transform how people react to what is ostensibly the same message. The US retailer BabyAge.com experimented with different layouts that remained true to the existing look and feel of the brand’s website and found that it converted 22% more visitors into customers.21 People would probably like to think their purchase of a nutritional supplement was decided by what it contained and what would be most effective, but when the makers Sytropin tested an informative medicinal theme against one that focused on how people’s lives might be after they’d used the product, it found that 50% more people who arrived at the page went on to make a purchase.22
While it could be argued that the analysis of New Coke’s failure is too easy in hindsight, my basis for suggesting it stems from people’s fundamental psychological makeup. As I will explain in the next chapter, there are certain psychological traits that people consistently exhibit and that are far more likely to determine their actual behavior in response to something new than anything they may tell themselves or a researcher asking them questions.
The truth is that consumer behavior is a reflection of the complex brain processes that drive all human actions. The unconscious mind is “in play” far more significantly than most people are willing to acknowledge. As you will see throughout this book, it shapes what we do, how we do it, and why we do it in the first place. In the next chapter I’ll discuss how context dramatically changes what people think and do, and in ways that, were it not for the work of social psychologists and neuroscientists, we might never believe are influencing our behavior.
The unconscious mind has a lot going for it. It has the ability to process vast amounts of data from the five senses, the capacity to react extremely quickly (relative to conscious thought processes), and the means to trigger large numbers of complex actions simultaneously. And it’s evident from the way in which we can learn skills like driving a car and acquire language that the unconscious mind certainly has the capacity to learn new things. On the other hand, its role in shaping our behavior isn’t perfect. With no access to its processes, the first we’re consciously aware is when we find ourselves doing or saying something.
Numerous studies reveal that the unconscious mind works in terms of associations. Imagine a scenario where every time you press a square red button you get an electric shock, whereas pressing a circular blue button plays a favorite song. The unconscious makes an understandable connection between the red button and pain that it will use to protect you in the future. Next time you see a button that looks like the red one that shocked you, how likely are you to press it? The conscious realization that an identical button in a different location might not have the same effect may well be something you draw on to overcome your desire not to press the button, but the desire not to press it will come first and require your conscious intervention if you are to overcome it.
Could this be an example of conscious learning rather than unconscious associations? Tests have shown that we are able to detect patterns and adapt our behavior well in advance of having conscious awareness of the calculations our unconscious has made.23 In a study where participants were gambling on the outcome of a selection from one of two decks of cards (one of which was loaded against them), they exhibited physiological signs that they had distinguished between the risks of the decks (increased skin conductivity response) well in advance of the point at which they could articulate a hunch about which deck was the better choice. Skin conductivity differed by the time the 10th card was selected, yet it took 50 cards for the hunch to be expressed.
You may well think at this point: “Well, if someone can consciously choose to override the desire not to press the red button, surely what matters is what they consciously think.” But in most circumstances, and certainly in most consumer scenarios, people aren’t challenging themselves (or being challenged) to act against their instinctive response. Instead, their feelings will be triggered by the unconscious associations they process and, just like Moll’s hypnotized subject, they will look for reasons to justify that feeling.
In Thomas Keneally’s account of his discovery of the story of Oscar Schindler, which became the basis for his book Schindler’s Ark and the film Schindler’s List, he describes a powerful and moving example of the way in which unconscious associations influence what people do. Among the many amusing and tragic accounts he collected during his travels interviewing Jews who had been protected by Schindler, Keneally interviewed one woman who had a very successful and comfortable life in Sydney, Australia. She confessed that she still took a crust of bread in her handbag whenever she left the house to travel anywhere. Despite being healthy and affluent, and although it was more than 30 years since the horrific events that created them, her unconscious associations from the journey she had made to a concentration camp remained. She felt compelled to have something with her to ward off hunger, however short and predictable the trip. When Keneally later recounted this story to a group of Jewish women in New York who had experienced the same traumatic events, several of them opened their bags and showed him the crusts of bread they, too, carried.
We don’t need extreme experiences to find evidence of our own behavior being shaped unconsciously. In all the years I’ve worked for and with manufacturers and retailers, one factor has been of more concern and made more of a difference to sales in any one period than anything else: the weather. The weather determines how much certain businesses will sell: when it’s cold people buy more soup, when it’s hot more carbonated drinks. When it’s a nice day they’d rather do something other than go shopping; when it’s cold and raining they cheer themselves up by going somewhere that’s brightly lit and where the serotonin triggered by buying something makes them feel a little better.
I’ve used what happened with New Coke as a prime example of just how far our conscious illusions about how our own behavior is driven can go in misleading the actions of a company. Coca-Cola’s executives made a series of apparently rational judgments and undertook seemingly reasonable evaluative measures to make a major corporate decision. The smokescreen formed by suggestions that methodological issues were behind the failed product launch, rather than the fault lying with the fundamental failure of market research to understand how the consumer mind actually works, has meant that research has continued to flourish. The notion that risk can be mitigated by soliciting consumer opinion is so tempting that millions of pounds continue to be spent pursuing it. And yet it’s regularly reported that over 80% of new product launches fail.24
Ultimately, however inconvenient it may be when seeking consumer insight, it is unrealistic to expect consumers to know what they think. Just because we can obtain an apparently rational and consistent response from a sample of people doesn’t provide any guarantee that such information is accurate.
It would be reasonable to ask: “When are we able consciously to appraise ourselves, our attitudes, or even our preferences?” From the biggest aspects of human life such as the people we love and the house we buy, to the smallest decisions like the chocolate bar we choose or even that we choose to buy one at all, the involvement of consciousness is partial at best:
Much of the information we hold and reference isn’t consciously processed.
We don’t have conscious access to such information – we can’t describe how we know a £10 note is a £10 note.
The more established and routine the behavior, the more likely it is to be dominated by unconscious drivers.
We don’t necessarily have or retain knowledge of our actions when they are unconsciously driven.
The absence of that knowledge doesn’t stop us from constructing an apparently sensible rationale after the event, which may bear no resemblance to our actual behavior.
What the conscious mind thinks it wants may well be overridden by the agenda of the unconscious mind when the time comes, at which point habit, emotion, and impulse may well determine the behavioral outcome.
The information that the unconscious mind screens and filters and then factors into decisions is not available for the conscious mind to audit or report. As a result we can’t accurately identify what has influenced us at any point in time. Ultimately, what we believe (or would like to believe) influences our choices isn’t necessarily what really does.
At the very moment that any consumer research works on the presumption that consumers know what they think about a particular subject, in the sense that this is indicative of how they will behave when the moment of consumption arises, it has made a fundamental mistake.
In the last few years, two professors of psychology have examined the role of the conscious and unconscious minds in human behavior and published their studies. Timothy Wilson documents his findings in the book Strangers to Ourselves and Daniel Wegner in The Illusion of Conscious Will; the titles provide an apposite summation of their conclusions. The evidence of the distance between the conscious and unconscious is all around us should we choose to look for it: from those times we catch ourselves saying something clever and feeling inwardly pleased, to the moment a tone-deaf contestant is told by Simon Cowell that he can’t sing but remains convinced he can.
This does not mean that there is no place for consumer research, but there are significant ramifications for what form that research should take and what faith should be placed in research collected through the interrogation of the conscious mind. Ultimately, the imbalance between a conscious appraisal process and the (at least) partially unconscious one of consumption just isn’t reconciled by most research methodologies.
Ironically, given that the consumer research that feeds it fails to take it into account, it could be argued that most marketing leverages the unconscious mind, and indeed that it must do so in order to be effective. In many consumer experiences it is either impractical or impossible to compare the array of products on offer. To operate efficiently, consumers rely on their unconscious mind to make decisions. For example, in a supermarket a shopper may purchase 50 or 100 products. To rationally appraise the merits of each one against its competitors would be extremely time consuming. Instead, we rely on clearly delineated (branded) products that have prior values associated with them – ideally those of personal experience, but potentially those placed there from a memorable or distinctive claim. Is it true that Domestos “kills all known germs dead”? How many consumers could ever say? Only those with chemistry labs, presumably. Is a BMW really the “ultimate driving machine”? The chance that it might be means that a certain type of driver may at least consider the brand when making a purchase, and, in the absence of any meaningful and comparable statistic for what a car is like to drive, this promulgated claim becomes a mental substitute for first-hand knowledge or experiential feeling that could otherwise be referenced.
A fundamental issue for research arises out of the nature of consciousness itself. Since people can post-rationalize, and indeed since people are convinced that consciousness drives their actions even when it doesn’t and that their conscious self-analysis must be accurate, research questions are virtually guaranteed to get answers. They may very well provide reassuringly convenient and consistent answers. They may even offer answers that can be contrasted between groups in a way that gives reassurance that those answers are correct. However, such consistency or apparently meaningful delineation of responses may have absolutely no bearing on their underlying accuracy. When the business that has commissioned the research acts in accordance with it and puts its product or communication or revised brand strategy or new pricing (or whatever else) into the real world, they may well find that they do not get the reaction they anticipated.
While we can acknowledge that there are times when we don’t know what or how we’ve been thinking (driving the car, for example), we can console ourselves with the notion that we know what we must have been doing, and by inference thinking, during that time. The problem is that, as I’ve demonstrated, we often don’t know what really caused us to behave in the way we did, although our misguided confidence in post-rationalizing makes false accounts in research seem compelling. In social psychology this misattribution is sufficiently well documented to have its own label – the fundamental attribution error – but it’s not a term you’ll hear in many research debriefs, although you should. All too often the conscious responses garnered in research, be it qualitative or quantitative, are the myths people like to tell themselves.
Is all research pointless? Not necessarily. It’s entirely possible that someone talking about a product, brand, or service will say something in the course of research that is revealing of a fundamental consumer truth and that should be factored into decision making. But this is an exercise in selective judgment. This is just as likely, in fact this is far more likely, to be the result of what one respondent says, rather than the collective or aggregated opinion of a sample in totality. Considered in this light, there are significant implications for the way in which research is approached, the amount you might choose to spend on it, and the weight you should give the “results.”