“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”  - Chinese proverb

Connecting the dots

The tremendous advances in brain science (along with changes in the media landscape) mean we need to rethink how we engage customers, taking on board some of the lessons of neuroscience and behavioural economics, and sometimes going back to ancient wisdoms which preceded the rise of rational approaches to consumer behaviour, especially in the West.  The truth is that most of our decision making is unconscious, emotional and highly context dependent (especially social context). Read more »

Questions, questions

After watching the world go by for a while, you may still have some unanswered questions which means it may be time to start a conversation with your customers.  Although more than 90% of communication is non-verbal, there is a huge amount to be learnt from listening to consumers (and asking the occasional question), especially when this is done in the right way. Read more »

Getting started in research

Last week I was asked to facilitate a workshop for marketing and communication professionals to empower them to build their understanding of consumers through their own investigations.  The workshop covered some of the key psychological insights, but focused on practical ways to help them observe, listen and ask questions in a more structured way.  The session was great fun, and over the next two articles I can share some of the practical tips I gave them.  Today I will focus on observation, which should always come before asking and listening. Read more »

“There comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation.”  - W.C. Fields

Fundamentally flawed

In What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the effects of the fundamental attribution error (FAE) in several different articles.  For example, in one chapter he discusses the Challenger disaster and the impossibility of having complete control of complex technologies and systems, arguing that attempts to find causes and scapegoats in such situations are futile.  Without acknowledging the FAE, his argument in the chapter touches on the desire of all of us to attribute outcomes, and especially bad outcomes, to specific traits of the people involved rather than the situation they are in. Read more »

Learning the research alphabet

There are clear lessons for market research (and marketing which I will explore in separate posts) from the importance of affect, behaviour and context in understanding ourselves and our customers.  I am writing this listening to Bill Evans and Tony Bennett, so it seems appropriate to argue that research needs to become more VOCAL. Read more »

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.  Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”  - Herbert Simon

Do you need more information?

How much can information can the world use?  It can certainly create a great deal of information according to a study by Martin Hilbert at the University of Southern California, but the ability to create and even store more and more information is not the same as the ability to understand, synthesise and communicate the information.  I believe this is one of the most important issues we face today, both as content producers and as content consumers with increasing competition for our limited attention.   Read more »

Over the past two weeks we have learnt 12 key insights into what makes us who we are, based on the latest understanding from neuroscience, behavioural economics, psychology, biology and the social sciences.  They can be summarised in three (or perhaps four) key themes, but first let’s review the 12 lessons of human behaviour. Read more »

Context in mind

We have already talked about social bias, and the human tendency to follow the herd as one of the mental shortcuts we all use to guide our decisions more quickly and efficiently.  We have also seen how context is a critical trigger of memory, and how different contexts can lead to very different behaviours even when our basic needs or goals are the same.

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As we have seen previously, the basis of new memories are new physical connections in the brain.  The more elaborate the connections, the more meaning they have, and the more specific the context, the stronger and more long lasting is the memory. Read more »

To perceive is to act

Perception is all about action. What we perceive is not just based on input from our senses, but also based on our expectations in a specific context or situation.  Our senses work very well, but our brain integrates, interpolates and interferes with the information coming from the senses to fit the data to pre-existing models of what it thinks should happen (based on a vast databank of previous experiences).  For example, our brain expects that two towers going up into the sky away from us should converge following the laws of perspective, and when they don’t (as above) this can cause unintended effects in how we perceive the world. Read more »