Within the tale of New Coke resides the solution to the problem of understanding the consumer mind, at least in part. How do we know that the research didn’t work and the decision was fundamentally misguided? Because the product was launched and we know what happened. Reality, not abstract conscious evaluation, revealed that New Coke could not be substituted for the original product. Customers complained that they wanted the original product back. When that was reintroduced New Coke’s share fell to just 3% of the market, despite its research-claimed taste advantage.
Inevitably there were many factors that influenced consumer reaction and determined New Coke’s lack of success: it became fashionable to be critical of the change, the media spread the message of disaffection, and the marketing has since been described as “inexplicably clumsy.”1 However, all these elements (not to mention countless others) have the potential to arise between any abstract research investigation and the real-world moment of purchase.
Of course, a live trial doesn’t have to be a national launch. There are degrees of testing, from swapping in some products on one shelf in one store upwards. Yes, the degree of marketing support that it’s possible to include or simulate may be limited by the size of the trial – it’s not practical to create a television ad campaign to promote a single-store trial and the cost of small production runs will be disproportionately high. However, I would argue that the benefits of capturing true consumer response, especially the unconscious mind’s response, significantly outweigh the limitations. If the product doesn’t sell well and you still decide to press ahead, at least you have some idea of the scale of the marketing challenge.
When it comes to testing an idea there can be no substitute for live testing: trialing a concept in a real-life situation and observing what happens (from a suitably discreet distance) as a consequence. Tempting as it may be to believe that an idea can be expressed in conceptual form, presented to a number (large or small) of would-be consumers, and its potential evaluated accurately, it’s just not possible.
The challenge, therefore, is to develop live trials to test new or alternative ideas. Online retailers are particularly well placed to assess what really happens when they change elements of their selling space or their product mix. They can even create split tests where customers are randomly directed to one of a number of different versions of their website, enabling comparisons to be made when the broadest environmental influences are identical.
I doubt that many customers, if asked, would say they want fewer products to choose from, or that if you took products away they would say that the range left was bigger – but that’s exactly what one retailer client of mine discovered. When the visual clutter of a category was reduced people were happy to spend longer in it, found it easier to distinguish the products and the ones that were of potential interest to them, and could appreciate more of the smaller range available.
Another advantage of live testing is that, surprisingly often, something works, but not for the reason that was originally hypothesized. In this situation an idea that might have been rejected by initial consumer research, because the company’s rationale for the initiative wasn’t well received, can work because of an accidental byproduct that wasn’t previously considered. Environmental psychologist Paco Underhill recounts a time when he was asked to evaluate a new supermarket display for a soft drinks manufacturer. When he arrived at the store the products had just been left in a huge pile on the floor, rather than stacked as was intended. Underhill asked to leave the products as they were and, through observing customers for the day, found that a far higher proportion of customers noticed the products than was usually the case for the company’s merchandising.2
In my own work, a client’s new store failed to shift its customers’ behavior or product awareness, but my observations prompted the marketing director to consider whether a successful design had already inadvertently been created in another store, which had been designed differently because of space limitations. He was right and that store became the model for future refits.
Owners of small businesses learn this way all the time. Author and business consultant Dave Lakhani recounts an experience he had when he owned a computer parts store in the 1990s. Ordinarily, he separated the components into bins so that customers could easily find what they were looking for. But on one occasion he arrived too late to sort the stock that had arrived and couldn’t organize the products before people started shopping. He discovered that people “went crazy,” digging through the mixed boxes looking for what they wanted. Since the products weren’t priced, he asked people to offer what they thought was fair, and discovered that this was almost always at least 25% more than he would have charged.3
When I worked in the marketing department of a restaurant chain, I was given responsibility for the drinks range we stocked. Having looked at the sales data and cost prices one thing stood out: the beer we sold most of cost us 15% more, giving us a correspondingly lower profit margin. I proposed substituting the product concerned for an alternative that we could buy for a better price; in fact, because the manufacturer was keen to secure distribution we could buy it at a better price than all the other beers we sold. The directors were anxious, though. The beer I was proposing to drop was the most popular brand in the country and they asked me to research the change first with consumers. Despite the fact that I was also responsible for consumer research, I argued that there was absolutely no point in asking consumers. What would we ask?
“Do you want your favored choice of beer not to be available?”
It seemed inevitable that the answer would be “No.”
“What would you do if it wasn’t?”
“Go elsewhere!”
The research could easily scare the business away from making what I was sure would be a profitable decision. I could see no reason why anyone would choose our restaurants on the basis of the beer available. I persuaded the company to undertake a trial in one region. When the change was made, total sales remained unchanged while profits increased dramatically as a result of the increased margin we could make on the less expensive product we’d substituted. Shortly afterwards the change was rolled out into every restaurant with no ill effects.
The key challenge with live testing is to avoid the pitfalls of sensitizing consumers to what is being tested and consequently inducing the artificial reactions that follow when people are tacitly encouraged to shift from unconscious to conscious consideration of whatever is being explored. Even when it’s impossible not to involve staff in a test, and therefore their sensitization should be expected and may be transferred to customers, this approach is still vastly preferable to asking customers directly what they think. In addition, by setting up a control condition when the status quo is maintained, the sensitization of staff – at least in so far as they are aware that measurement is taking place – can be factored into the trial.
It is important that the scale of a live trial is considered carefully and, in particular, that thought is given to the nature of consumer behavior. The rational notion that people can be made aware of a product that meets a need they have and that, provided it’s available at an agreeable price, they will buy it is just not the case most of the time. If you have a product that has relatively isolated customer interactions, for example a food product like a tin of beans sold in a supermarket, it is reasonable to conduct a one-store trial. A large proportion of people shop regularly at one supermarket and confine their unconscious “attention” to tinned beans to the moment they are in that supermarket and actually getting the product. If, on the other hand, your product is consumed in the presence of other people, a drink for example, then seeing the product in several pubs you visit over a period of time and being consumed by other people like you will have a major bearing on whether you try the product or not. Also, once such a product has been purchased on the first occasion, it has more chance of longer-term success if consumers can repeat their purchase experience again easily. If, by virtue of visiting a different outlet, they lapse back into established (unconsciously automatic) purchase behavior of an alternative product, they are far less likely to develop the familiarity and habituation that lead to frequent consumption and subsequent affinity with the new brand.
Finding a way to live test products, services, and marketing communication ideas is the only reliable way of evaluating consumer response (short of a full launch). Granted, it has the potential to be expensive and there may still be reasons why it can’t match a full launch; for instance, it’s not always technically possible or financially feasible to replicate large advertising campaigns for a small test. However, given the role of the unconscious mind in consumer behavior, the importance of context (environment) and mindset in response, the problems of asking people in research what they think about something and what they will do in the future, and the distortions of introspection or artificial deconstruction, live testing provides the next best thing to going ahead and launching something anyway. Through appropriate observation of what consumers do in response to the test and, when relevant, by comparison with the status quo, it is possible to obtain genuine insight.
The challenge of testing initiatives in this way is considerable, and most companies give little thought to how they might accommodate it because they have a misplaced faith in market research to provide a substitute. When one considers some industries, however, the proof of consumer research’s failings is immediately obvious: publishers of books and computer games, companies making television programs, and the film industry release to the market countless products that fail. Wouldn’t it be worth testing these with consumers before launching and saving all the time and expense of producing them? Of course it would, but there’s a reason publishers don’t forward all the manuscripts they receive to research companies for evaluation in focus groups: they know there’s no way of predicting what will be successful and what won’t.
Through recognizing the limitations of research and the benefits of live testing, companies have the chance to reconsider how they approach the development of initiatives that might otherwise be left to the distinct vagaries of market research. At present, too many organizations align their projects to a research process that can easily reject a good idea or endorse a bad one. Through taking responsibility for what gets developed, and finding other ways of deciding what to take forward, not least the astute observation of existing customer behavior, companies can dramatically increase their chances of success. When failures occur, there is the opportunity to learn from them and, by removing the rogue variable of solicited consumer opinion, establish more accurately what aspects of the business development process have contributed to that failure.
I mentioned that many large corporate functions can be viewed as attempts to model the “natural” practice of entrepreneurs; at present, consumer research has been allowed to creep in as a substitute for entrepreneurial judgment when it has no right to do so. It is the imagination, tenacity, and flexibility of such people that lead to their ability to capitalize on opportunities, not some mystical power to see inside the mind of consumers and deliver something to them that they didn’t know they needed. No model of this process will be failure free, just as no entrepreneur gets everything right, but by using a live testing approach organizations can start to learn how to emulate the innovativeness and flexibility that often contribute to entrepreneurs’ commercial success.
When the failure to recognize the importance of consumers’ unconscious responses leads to a flawed idea being validated by research and implemented, companies can spend a long time looking elsewhere within the complex commercial chain for the reason that sales are not meeting expectations – “We know consumers like it because of the research, we must have done something else wrong.” When the barometer of success is those sales figures, there is less scope for failing to see the consumer response to your activity accurately.
Live testing requires people to make real choices that have real and measurable consequences: the risk and opportunity cost of selecting a new product over an existing one; the requisite shift out of engrained patterns of behavior to notice something different; breaking through the unconscious filtering of visually busy retail environments and the distractions of shopping in real life.
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, there are common psychological traits that, despite often contradicting what people claim, typically influence their behavior. These are the unconscious traits that any marketing must be mindful of if it is to be successful. Had Coca-Cola appreciated these it might well not have ended up being described as the architect of “the marketing blunder of the century.”4
The idea of getting something new is, for most people, exciting and appealing. A casual glance at the pace of progress in the developed world and the rate at which people assimilate new products is a powerful illustration of our collective thirst for innovation. However, what appears to be a taste for novelty, even to the extent that we believe it’s something we consciously desire, masks the fact that our first instinct tends to be much more cautious. The thorny problem of a discrepancy between our conscious view of ourselves and the role our unconscious takes in protecting us can all too easily prevent us from selecting something new or different.
This propensity to be risk averse can be challenging to accept. After all, you have all the positive mental associations from new things that you have bought or, even better, been given: the ceremony of unwrapping boxes, the anticipation of the first experience, the thrill of the first time you use whatever it is. But these belie the reality that, on a daily basis, you frequently make an unconscious decision not to do something new: to put your shoes on in the same order, to buy the same newspaper every day, to watch an episode of a television series even though you’ve seen it several times before.
One experiment conducted by Kahneman and Tversky in 1984 and recounted by Kevin Hogan in The Science of Influence compares people’s reactions to risk by asking them to make a quick gamble from the following pairs of options:5
Alternative A: A sure gain of $240
Alternative B: A 25% chance to gain $1,000, and a 75% chance to lose nothing
Pair Two
Alternative C: A sure loss of $750
Alternative D: A 75% chance to lose $1,000, and a 25% chance to lose nothing
The researchers found that 73% of people chose the AD combination. Only 3% chose BC, even though it is a slightly better choice. While people might like the idea that they are open to new ideas and willing to take a chance on something, there is no personal risk in telling a market researcher that you would buy the product being shown to you in the focus group. When it comes down to a real purchase decision, however, the unconscious mind’s desire to avoid risks can often make the choice of something new feel far less appealing.
It’s easy to illustrate this type of loss aversion with children in a different way. Ask them which toys they like and you will get a list. Then tell them you are going to get rid of several that they haven’t mentioned, are way too young for them, and they no longer play with, and they will forcefully state that they want to keep them.
For some reason, presumably of evolutionary benefit, people feel loss far more powerfully than they feel gain. I sometimes demonstrate this during presentations to clients by asking someone for a £10 note. I then give this to another person in the room before carrying on as if nothing has happened. It’s revealing to watch how difficult it is for the person who lost the money to think about anything else, whereas the person who receives it, while being surprised and grateful, doesn’t dwell on the event for anywhere near as long. You’ll almost certainly have experienced this phenomenon yourself when you realize you’ve lost something. The desire to find it can become all-consuming, even if it’s a relatively trivial item, and yet once it’s found the joy of discovery is quickly forgotten and the thing concerned slips back into the humdrum place it occupied in your life before it vanished.
It is intriguing to speculate about why we should be so sensitive to potential loss. One theory is that the unconscious mind is preoccupied with safety, checking the environment rapidly and evaluating what is a potential threat, conducting a first pass of the data to protect us from potential dangers. So when the unconscious recognizes something distinctive and connects it to a benign or pleasant experience in the past (perhaps a glossy ad next to an article about your favorite actor), it can allow us to feel “good” about that option.
The evaluation of advertising usually involves asking respondents what brands they can recall (top-of-mind awareness), conscious spontaneous recall of advertising for a product type or brand, and prompted recall using the advert (or sometimes stills from it); all conscious measures. But what about what the unconscious mind has seen? Research has shown that print adverts processed outside of conscious awareness shift attitudes just as much as those processed consciously. In one study, 80 subjects were exposed to adverts either deliberately (they were asked to look at them) or incidentally (they were asked to assess the layout of the magazine page opposite). Afterwards, the group were asked to rate 50 adverts and say whether they had seen them earlier. Just 11% of those who had seen them incidentally recalled the ads that had been shown, but their ratings of them as more memorable, appealing, eye-catching, and distinctive were just as positively biased over the adverts not shown as those who had been exposed to them deliberately.6 It appears that the unconscious mind recognizes what it has seen before and, because it is familiar, can process it more fluently, which creates the feeling of liking something more – unconscious familiarity breeds affection! So even where people can’t recall seeing an advert for a product, it can “feel” like a better idea to purchase it because it is unconsciously familiar.
One of the ways in which brands themselves work is through risk aversion. Over time, through experience, familiarity, the suggestion of advertising, or the context of positioning, we take reassurance from the name on the pack. It implies a set of standards and qualities for the product that reassure when the factual information that might ideally be referenced is either too difficult or too time consuming to consult. For example, I believe that if I buy a Sony television it will be well made and last a long time, because these are values I associate with the brand. In reality, I don’t know if the television I am buying has been made in the same factory, by the same people, with the same quality of components, and with the same quality testing that I assign to the brand. I could probably find out which country it’s made in, but that wouldn’t tell me very much. I might be able to find an independent review, but that wouldn’t be based on a sufficiently large sample of products over a representative lifespan for the product to tell me about the quality; more likely it would have involved one person looking at the television and rating the picture, sound, and, perhaps, apparent quality of the finish. In choosing the Sony brand I feel as though I’m taking less of a risk than buying a brand with which I have fewer or lesser associations.
The extent to which people will go to minimize the risk of feeling bad in the future is considerable. In the project I undertook watching people buying washing machines, I saw one woman wander around the display of appliances for 30 seconds without actually looking at any appliance in a way that suggested she was seriously considering it. Eventually, she stopped by a particular appliance and waited for a salesperson to come over to her. While pretending to be testing the robustness of the hinge on a tumble dryer, I listened in to the conversation that took place. The woman declined the offer of help and advice, stating that she wanted the washing machine in front of her. When the salesperson asked if she had purchased the brand before, she said that her last three machines had been made by the same company; she also expressed the hope that this one wouldn’t damage her clothes like the previous two had. Logically, rationally, and (above all) consciously, her choice made little sense. However, viewed as a response to the confusing variety of products on offer, and a fear that a brand of which she had no empirical experience might be worse, the “devil you know” policy makes a sort of sense.
Another way of identifying situations where shoppers are preoccupied by risk is through the questions they ask. A friend of mine owns a guitar shop and recounted the following questions from a customer enquiring about a guitar he was selling at a remarkably good price as the result of a bulk order. The first was: “How many have you got left?” In other words: “Can you reassure me that lots of other people have thought this was worth buying?” My friend advised him that he had just six of the original 100 guitars remaining. “How many do you usually sell on a Saturday?” In other words: “Can you offset my anxiety about spending my money on this guitar by telling me that if I don’t I will miss the opportunity and feel worse because of that?” He was informed that the most they had ever sold on one day was six guitars. Finally, the potential customer enquired: “What else do you have for the same money?” In other words: “What might I regret not having bought if I buy this one?” My friend told him that they had several other choices at the same price, but that none of these guitars matched the value, nor had obtained the enthusiastic reviews from guitar magazines that this one had. At no point had the customer made any attempt to establish if the guitar concerned might suit his “needs” better than others; he had never said what style of music he played, which other guitars he liked or had owned, or what amplifier he planned to pair it with. He hadn’t asked about the voicing of the pickups, the quality of finish, or how the instrument would be set up (how well it would play). Instead, he revealed that the substantial discount, while having attracted him, was still insufficient to convert him into a buyer.
Being mindful that people are primarily focused on not making a bad choice – in other words making a safe choice, rather than necessarily making the best choice – can provide a powerful insight into why they do what they do, and the lengths to which it may be necessary to go if you are to encourage them to do something different. Unless the environment is such that they are already in a risk-taking mindset (for example at a theme park or perhaps in a night club), or they are making an extremely deliberate and conscious decision, they will require a significant level of persuasion to break with what feels unconsciously safe.
Why do new products often start out with a trial price? Because most marketers realize that a financial discount can not only help get the product noticed on the shelf, but also offset the unconscious risk associated with deviating from the usual choice. While there has been some debate whether what drives this is a fear of risk (loss aversion) or a preference for the status quo over change, the effective result remains the same: people are often very resistant to trying or doing something new, however logically compelling that alternative is.
The conscious mind is far more receptive to new concepts than is the unconscious. New things arouse our curiosity. Knowing which type of thinking is more involved at each stage of a consumer decision is crucial to understanding the likely accuracy of any research methodology. Telling customers that New Coke tasted better wasn’t sufficient to overcome their reaction to what they were losing when “old” Coke was withdrawn. As Mark Pendergrast points out, this is perhaps even less surprising when one considers that Coca-Cola had been telling its customers that “old” Coke was “it” and “the real thing” for years! The original product and packaging had all the established associations, all the comfort, familiarity, and safety for the unconscious mind, with those positive emotive associations planted by Coke’s likable advertising and sponsorship. Picking up New Coke was like picking a berry from a new bush; the unconscious had every reason to be anxious and look for reasons not to drink it.
A study using brain imaging conducted in 2003 found that the results of the original Pepsi Challenge were more than reversed when participants were shown the packaging of the product they were drinking. When subjects were shown the familiar design of a Coke can before they tasted the product, a different area of the brain became involved and the results changed: significantly more preferred Coke when they’d seen the can design than both Pepsi and an unlabeled sample, even though it too contained Coke.7
One classic driver of consumer behavior leverages the unconscious mind’s aversion to loss to influence purchase: perceived scarcity. As I learned to my cost during a “traditional Greek dancing” excursion on holiday one year, there’s nothing like perceived scarcity to induce a different consumer response. When the unfounded rumor went round the table that the wine was running out, I acted quickly to ensure I got value for money (in my defense, I was a student at the time). The resulting hangover meant that one of seven precious days on a Greek island was wasted and I developed an aversion to retsina that I retain to this day.
Most salespeople know that if they can convince someone that an opportunity to buy a product, or better still the product itself, won’t be available later, they can persuade them to part with their money.8 When a person’s fear that they will miss out offsets their perceived risk in making the purchase, they have a powerful motivation to act. How much more quickly do you press the “buy” button when a website tells you it only has one of the product that you’re interested in? When the fear of missing out overpowers the fear of making a bad choice, people will buy.
When New Coke was launched and the previous version withdrawn, “old” Coke’s perceived value was massively enhanced by its (very real) scarcity. There were stories of people buying up whatever stock they could find and stores selling what stock they had for three times its usual price.9
I mentioned previously how frequently repeated conscious actions create unconsciously driven behavior. It’s worth noting just how much of most people’s daily lives function at this level; it is, after all, a highly efficient way of going about life. Studies show that thinking uses glucose, so the more thought any activity requires the more tired we will become.10
The extent to which our unconscious mind likes the path of least resistance is both intriguing and slightly disconcerting! Studies have found that stocks and shares with easily pronounceable names are preferred and selected over those with less familiar strings of letters, and that handwriting clarity and font choice also affect how people respond to something.11 It would seem that our response to words and the style in which they are written is influenced by the associations and filters we unconsciously map onto them. We unconsciously like what’s easiest and most familiar; in other words, what our brains can process most fluently. But of course, as is the way with the unconscious, we don’t know we’re doing this and that it is shaping our judgments. “Oh no,” we tell ourselves, “we’re making conscious, balanced, desperately sensible decisions.” There is evidence that this bias toward fluency starts at a very early age: a study looking at the spelling ability of children aged 5 and 6 found that children’s names influence the way in which they approach the spelling of other words.12
When the US firm Extra Space Storage tested alternative versions of its website, it found that making a picture of its storage facility larger and adding a more prominent map of directions increased the proportion of people who arrived at the site and went on to make a booking by 10%. A combination of what people presumably found a reassuring image and making it easy to find made an appreciable difference to the business.13
Making a conscious decision to buy something new is, quite literally, an effort. It’s one thing to be mentally geared up for the process of answering some questions, it’s quite another to expect customers to feel good about not being able to go with the flow through the supermarket’s beverage aisle and suddenly to invest unexpected energy in a purchase evaluation.
Another factor that can help explain why people do things, which again runs counter to our preferred view of ourselves as independent-thinking entities, is our striking propensity for copying what other people do. This capacity has become a topic of great philosophical and psychological interest in recent years under the topic of memes, cultural elements that are passed on by imitation. It has even been argued convincingly that our ability to imitate is what distinguishes humans from other creatures.14
When people see others doing something, at the very least they tend to form a view about it, and in many cases will go ahead and copy it. This trait is capitalized on by people who set up temporary market stalls or rent retail space for a short period. They know that if they get a few “friends” to stand around them as they start to sell, other people will stop too. Once there’s a crowd present a few of those friends start getting excited and rush to buy the “amazing” deals on offer; other people start to follow their lead.
While most of us would like to tell ourselves that we wouldn’t be taken in by the temporary shop scam, we are unconsciously influenced in many other ways by what other people are doing. The language we use, even our inflexion when saying the words, the fact that we acquire language at all and that we talk so much, all reflect our love of copying and having ourselves (and our ideas) copied.
In one experiment, researchers put people into a room into which they started to blow smoke. For the most part people on their own sensibly went to report it, but when others were planted who didn’t react to the apparent emergency, more often than not the ones who weren’t aware that the smoke wasn’t the sign of something serious didn’t either. In another study, when someone was heard to fall off a ladder nearby, 70% of individuals went to help, but when a couple of people were added to the room who had been told to act unconcerned by the noise outside, just 7% felt the need to go the person’s aid.15
An intriguing aspect of our willingness to follow the flock is that we don’t actually need to see the flock ourselves: it’s enough for someone to tell us what the flock is doing. Psychologists looking at how people react to signs requesting that hotel guests use their towels for more than one day found that far more people did so when the message explained that most of the people who’d used the room before them had reused their towels.16 Another study looking specifically at consumer attitudes found that consumers who had been asked to evaluate products individually, and were then told that their peers had evaluated the same products negatively, were heavily influenced by what they heard.17
It’s no surprise, then, that consumer fads are so commonplace. Products come along and seem almost essential, so compelling is our desire to buy them, and yet within a matter of months the excitement passes. Inevitably another fad soon follows, revealing both the extent to which we are influenced by what goes on around us and our inability to distinguish what’s truly useful from what seems like a good idea because everyone else is doing it.
For a period in the 1990s people in the UK, particularly teenagers, were hugely excited about being “Tangoed.” The phrase “you’ve been Tangoed” was quickly assimilated as a euphemism for shocking someone and, most importantly, was passed around from person to person. Nowadays many people wouldn’t be able to tell you if the brand still exists (it does). One of the most important elements in determining the success of a book, film, or television program is the extent to which its publicity gets talked about; this is arguably a far better indicator of success than the quality (however that may be judged) of the entity itself.
When it comes to understanding consumer behavior, despite what most of us would like to tell ourselves, at an unconscious level we aren’t individual pioneers, we’re sheep.
It’s almost impossible to overestimate the importance of what people encounter first for what they go on to think. Much as we may all like to pretend that we’re objective, well-balanced, and rational judges of what we encounter, research shows that we’re primed by our first experiences and, from there, go about seeking evidence that will fit with what we’ve decided is right.
As an example of how people are influenced by what they see or hear first, consider the following two calculations:
1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 = ?
8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = ?
The average guess for the first calculation is 512, for the second 2,250, more than four times higher. Of course, the actual answer is exactly the same (and, for what it’s worth, considerably higher than people guess: 40,320), but what happens is people attach far greater significance to the first few numbers and estimate an answer accordingly.18
The same is true with words. People can be asked to consider two people and quickly decide who they think they would like more:
John is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and jealous.
Mark is jealous, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and intelligent.
It shouldn’t make a difference, since the descriptions contain exactly the same words, and yet most people unconsciously attach more weight to the words they hear first and say they prefer John to Mark.19
Priming and social proof can work together to exert a powerful unconscious influence on the way people behave. Another example of our being far less autonomous than we would like to think stems from our susceptibility to other people’s statements. In one study, participants were asked to play a game in which mutually beneficial outcomes were much more likely if they were trusting and trustworthy. They could either keep a sum of money or give some to the (fictitious) other person; if they chose to give the money away it would be trebled and the recipient would have the option to give some back. Two aspects made the game interesting: first, the person with the money was given a character profile of the recipient that indicated their moral character, but they were warned that that person’s responses in the game might not reflect the descriptions they’d just been given, and in fact people painted as morally “good,” “bad,” or “neutral” would all share 50% of the time. The second aspect was that the participant’s brain activity was being mapped during the exercise. It transpired that, despite realizing that all three fictitious partners were sharing at about the same rate, people continued to favor the partners they had been told were good. What the imaging showed was that the area of the brain usually associated with experience was only activated for the partner who had been depicted as neutral. Where people had been told something was good or bad, they no longer processed the evidence in the same way and consequently didn’t adapt their choice on the basis of what they were experiencing. The primed third-party information was given higher priority than the first-hand experience.20
In perhaps the most extreme experimental example of how being primed with information can be persuasive, people who took part in a study on social sensitivity in which they were asked to distinguish between genuine and fake suicide notes were arbitrarily told that they were either good or bad. Even after being informed later that the results were fictitious, people went on to rate their expected performance in a future test of their social sensitivity on the basis of the erroneous feedback they’d been given first of all.21
If we think back to New Coke, it was one thing being introduced to the new formula via a blind test, quite another being introduced to it by the wave of negative publicity that ensued within a few days of its launch. The media were captivated and within days it is claimed that 96% of Americans knew about the flavor change. Coca-Cola executives initially assumed that they were getting great free publicity, but it came at a price: consumers were being primed with the social proof that this new drink wasn’t appealing to Coke drinkers.22
Understanding the nature of priming is vital to understanding consumer behavior. First experiences, first brand messages, first impressions, first sensory experiences, and the first things people say about a product are hugely influential. If consumers pick up on a message they will unconsciously seek evidence to support it. The conscious notion that reason or balanced judgment might win through simply does not apply.
Crucially, potential primes are all around. As you will see later on, inadvertent priming is an inevitable consequence of almost every market research process.
As I said before, the reason to reflect on the development and launch of New Coke doesn’t lie in the blunders made by one company, albeit one of the world’s biggest brands. Rather, Coca-Cola’s use of market research relied on a rational model of consumer thinking that is totally at odds with actual behavior. It’s a mistake worth understanding, because it’s one that companies continue to make and through which they waste large sums of money, pursue flawed initiatives, and strangle what could be perfectly good ideas.
It’s easy for any initiative to be appraised consciously in one light and responded to quite differently when the unconscious is in full flow. If some accounts are to be believed, the New Coke launch can be summarized as follows: Pepsi tells customers that, after masses of blind taste tests, people think its product tastes better than Coke and, even though pretty much everyone has already tasted both, customers start to drift away from Coke. Coca-Cola changes the formulation of its product until it finds one that beats Pepsi in taste tests and replaces its old recipe with the new one, telling the world that it’s giving them a new coke that tastes much better (a “fact” it confirmed at great expense). Initially people are taken in (one source claims that Coke’s sales grew initially by 8% year on year, although this could have been weather related and I haven’t seen a claim that its market share went up over this time), then a public and media backlash emerges because people want the original product back. Within three months the original Coke is relaunched and sales of New Coke fall away dramatically. At the end of the whole process, Coca-Cola emerges as the dominant cola brand once more.
Along this journey we discover that taste isn’t taste when it’s branded taste, a sip isn’t the same as a can, people prefer to buy without thinking, hate losing something more than they like getting something new, are hugely influenced (primed) by what they first encounter, and, in spite of anything else, will follow the crowd if they get the chance. What market research was going to predict that?
Of course, among the four factors that preoccupy the unconscious mind are the reasons that research has flourished. First and foremost, research is perceived as a means of reducing the inherent risk in decision making. It has become so established that anyone starting a job in a large organization over the last 30 years will have found the principle and mechanisms for research easily accessible; it’s the default thing to do. Just as with managed investment funds, the majority of whom underperform the market average, successes are trumpeted and failings, for the most part, quietly discarded. The impression, or social proof, appears to suggest that everybody is doing it and it’s working well; indeed, it would take a brave person to discard such an apparently benevolent tool. The heady cocktail for the unconscious mind is complete if the first encounter is felt to have been a success.
While our awareness of the nature of the unconscious mind and the way in which it shapes behavior is relatively recent, social psychologists and neuroscientists are helping us to understand processes that are far from new; it’s likely that they have been around for thousands of years. Companies have much to gain from recognizing the considerable limitations of market research and the role and nature of the unconscious mind in consumer behavior. Live testing isn’t perfect, but it does tacitly acknowledge the place of the unconscious mind.
However, what about those situations when an organization wants to understand its existing customers better? Understanding the relationship between the way consumers think and the context in which they consume is a good place to start.