How well do we understand our customers, let alone ourselves? Let’s try to explore this by looking at tomato sauce, a chair, coca cola and one of the reasons our diets do not work.
Let me give you a famous example from a study conducted by Bargh, Chen and Burrows in 1996, titled ‘Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action‘: reading words sounding “old” like “worried,” “Florida,” “old,” “lonely,” “gray,” “bingo,” and “wrinkle” – make you behave slower.
Another example: consider yourself open minded and inclusive? Take this simple test called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). It measures attitudes and beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report. A humbling experience – I can guarantee you.
As a marketer I am always amazed how we tend to explain our customers by binary numbers. Responses, conversions, visits, percentages and rates. Your customers become a simple number and the target is to either increase or decrease it. We reduce the complexity of the marketing effort to optimise it, for instance by changing colours and words.
As humans we are much more complex though. Hence, in order to review where my points of view come from and trying to reset some of my thoughts on how customers are supposed to react, I like to look to the field of social studies to better understand myself. Only then I believe we can better understand customers.
In order to gain this type of insight, I have gone to a couple of authors in the field and tried to better understand what drives me. Some really inspiring books are from Daniel Kahneman and Steven Levitt, who I have written about here:
Another really inspiring thought leader (as far as I am concerned) is Malcom Gladwell. If you have not read a book by him already, do yourself a favour and do so now!
How important is it to better understand yourself to understand your customers? Take a read here and here about the Cola wars in 1985. On April 23, 1985 Coca Cola has changed it’s formula and released “New Coke”. It took 79 days for the business to realise how bad that decision was. What went wrong? Coca Cola over-interpreted sip tests of customers in their comparison between Pepsi and Coke. People liked Pepsi better. It was sweeter. However, in another test (at home testing their drink over the period of a couple of weeks) people liked less sugar better. The company simply made a bad decision not understanding the motives driving their customers decision. 99 years of experience and still the result was a terrible mistake.
Coca Cola had a massive marketing and research budget, but did not understand their customers well enough.
Your customers do not always act in a logic way however. They also do not always know what they want. Take the phenomenon of moral licensing (based on a study by Merritt, Effron and Monin). Another interesting feature of the human being acting outside logic.
“Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviours that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviours that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral.”
A really interesting form of behaviour especially in the light of recent developments in politics. If you want to dig a little deeper into this topic, listen to Malcom Gladwell’s podcast series. His first episode called ‘The Lady Vanishes‘ is truly inspiring!
Moral licensing acts like a loophole, letting us wriggle out of establishing new habits like working out, eating healthy, or getting a side project off the ground. It may be the reason you ruin your own diet and goals. Read more here.
So you basically have to ask yourself: Can we believe what people tell us? Can you believe what you tell yourself?
https://youtu.be/964va3YwPms
So what can we take away from these studies and results in psychology and sociology for marketing and all of the examples from Malcolm Gladwell above?
Let me try to give you an example of what I have taken away from the above examples:
- Review your own bias and come with an open mind to a question
- Look into your data to better understand your customers, but also look at the humans behind the data
- Ask yourself WHY a customer is showing you a certain behaviour
- Preferences are unstable, so look at your outcomes from multiple angles
- Test and trial and then test again
- Be careful not to believe in the stories you tell yourself when looking at data
Oh and let’s not forget about tomato sauce:
More reading for you:
Howard Moskowitz
Ketchup Conundrum
The Aeron chair
