Strategic marketing agency The Marketing Store has analysed the ‘perceived wisdoms’ that shape the majority of retail marketing strategies. Drawing on emerging and established scientific research, the study challenges the traditional thinking behind the retail marketing campaigns that we see in stores, on the high street and in other major retail environments.
The study is a precursor to the launch of a major research project that will profile consumer groups by their emotions and chart heuristic* patterns amongst shoppers, in order to create a series of retail and brand marketing tools informed by consumer psychology.
The Marketing Store in collaboration with Anthony Tasgal of strategic consultancy POV, have identified five established assumptions about human behaviour that have influenced marketing for decades. These assumptions carry the benefit of being consistent, convenient and susceptible to conventional market research. Unfortunately, the growing body of psychological and behavioural research shows them to be flawed.
It’s true that much work has been done to combine psychology with effective retail marketing. However, very few organisations or individuals have attempted to apply the depth of knowledge built up in the field of cognitive psychology over the last twenty years or so, to the field of marketing in a comprehensive way.
Simon Marshall, Managing Director of The Marketing Store London comments; “In terms of the retail environment there are certainly pioneers that have made inroads into parts of this territory; we can all name retailers we admire who are breaking new ground. But many of the insights psychology has to offer remain largely unexplored. The Marketing Store’s Hidden Shopper research is a first step towards opening up that territory and translating the insights offered by psychological research into useable tools and practical steps that can enhance shopping experiences and boost business performance.”
So what are the five inconvenient truths of modern retail marketing?
Assumption 1: We are primarily rational and decisive, and know why we do what we do.
We like to think of ourselves (whether as shoppers or otherwise), as primarily rational and decisive agents with deep self-insight, liable to the odd emotion, but able to keep them in check via the power of reason.
The awkward scientific truth: We underestimate the role of emotions and the unconscious at our peril. The human unconscious mind is more complex than the conscious mind. Think of your unconscious as an instinctual elephant and your conscious mind as an elephant driver sitting on top. Your conscious mind tries to drive the elephant and has the impression it is. The truth is it is not; the unconscious mind is making key decisions for you.
Why? The reason is that the unconscious human mind evolved to respond effectively to life -threatening situations; to survive, reproduce and to improve its status. The result is we think we know what we want but in reality we don’t.
The human unconscious is framed by the six universal human emotions that are hard-wired into our brains: happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger and finally disgust. The interesting thing is that these emotions are very contagious. These contagious emotions are used by the brain to navigate our environment, to fit into it effectively. This means that very often emotion leads to action, where as plain old reason only leads to conclusions.
It’s also very easy to ignore the power of emotions such as surprise and disgust, but they play a fundamental role in shaping our behaviour. In fact it is true to say that whenever emotions compete with reason, emotion wins.
So what does this mean for retailers?
Retailers must shift their marketing focus from the conscious towards the unconscious mind because the unconscious or the elephant is the main source of desire and drive. The information directed at this dominant decision making force should be less about messaging and more about massaging.
Assumption 2: We think of ourselves as acting in a consistent manner. The awkward scientific truth: This is an illusion.
The decisions we make are often largely determined from outside influences; things that are going on around us. There are in fact many different parts to our personalities acting as one. You could say there are “many mes”.
Our brains are able to switch off and on different “me’s” to create different emotional states which mean we are able to see things from different points of view. And we can compartmentalise different parts of our personality and views through the same on/off compartmentalisation. But the switches between emotional states are not controlled by us. Very often they are controlled by external forces. Think about the latest blockbuster film you saw – perhaps it was Slumdog Millionaire. Did you see it because you thought the storyline and product would appeal to your tastes, or because it had become a very popular movie?
Psychologists believe that content is only part of the reason we listen to certain sorts of music or watch particular films. It can be as much about the social context within which we’re watching it.
"It's difficult for people to accept," says psychologist John Bargh of Yale University, "but most of a person's everyday life is determined not by their conscious intentions and deliberate choices, but by mental processes put into motion by the environment.”
So what does this mean for retailers?
Seek to own one of the universal human emotions and design brands, stores and communications that are rooted in this.
Worry less about values and attitudes; positioning that appeals to the conscious rational part of the mind and focus instead on creating the right kind of context, surroundings or moods for positive decision-making.
Assumption 3: It suits us to think that most of our decisions occur at the time they are made and on the basis of mature reflection.
The awkward scientific truth: Many of the decisions we believe are current, are actually influenced by decisions, views or impressions formed years before. Some of these anchor decisions may have been formed through experience, others by word of mouth, advertising or assumptions.
If the influence of these decisions is repeated enough they become rather like a path across a field. These old decisions are actually very useful because they act rather like short-cuts. They speed up decision making and are known as “heuristics”.
This area of research has thrown up some unsettling findings. Psychology has shown that sometimes even the most trivial matters matter. For example it may seem unlikely, but research in the US found that dentists were 82 percent more likely to be called Dennis than any other name, and that people move to states that have names similar to their own names. For example, people called Florence are disproportionately likely to move to Florida, and people named Louise are disproportionately likely to move to Louisiana. Weird and creepy, but it is evidence that our decisions can be based on the most trivial and unconscious details.
So what does this mean for retailers?
Remember that many decisions are automatic or heuristic in nature, so beginning the process of understanding how heuristics can be used to segment shoppers and how communications can be designed with heuristics in mind, will be an important step.
Small amounts of personalised meaning can influence big decisions. People will hunt for things that connect with them on a personal level and these snippets of information are far more powerful than large scale “lowest- common-denominator” communications.
Assumption 4: We conveniently assume that the huge amount of decision-making power we wield in modern life makes us happier people.
The awkward scientific truth: We may have more and more to choose from, but psychologists think that all this choice could be making us unhappy. This certainly appears to be true for some of us. Broadly speaking society breaks down into two basic decision-making types, Maximisers and Satisficers. Maximisers tend to obsess about the detail of decisions, and are happy to make lots of them. Satisficers, on the other hand, are happy enough to make a quick “reasonable” decision and move on.
In his book “The Paradox of Choice”, Barry Schwartz suggests unlimited choice produces genuine suffering. As we’ve seen from some of the earlier assumptions we don’t always know what we want, so choices can be mentally demanding and lead to a decrease in well-being.
Not only do we experience “buyers’ remorse” when shopping goes wrong, but we may also have started to “anticipate regret” in our purchases. So are we creating hordes of unhappy Satisficers? Are we addressing these groups with distinct offerings?
So what does this mean for retailers?
We could be making half our audience miserable by overloading them with choice. Should shoppers be segmented and targeted according to whether they are Maximisers or Satisficers?
Assumption 5: We see ourselves as fiercely individualistic and unimpressionable; free in our choices and from any hint of influence, control or manipulation by others.
The awkward scientific truth: We may love to think of ourselves as individuals with free choice, but in fact we are highly social animals with ingrained tribal or herd instincts. Psychologists now believe this is down to “mirror neurons”. These are neurons that fire both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspicuous) animal.
This mirroring behaviour has been revealed in famous experiments such as the one conducted by Stanley Milgram of Yale University who demonstrated that many people will go to almost any length (in the case of the experiment, administering painful electric shocks) to conform to the wishes of authority figures.
It is true that we often surround ourselves with people we believe are similar to us. We derive psychological support from them by listening to the words and attitudes we have ourselves seeded with them. This can lead to what’s known as “Groupthink”, where a group of individuals will tend to seek consensus on an issue or question without critically testing it. They’ll prefer not to challenge views of others in the group possibly through a desire not to look foolish or to avoid angering or embarrassing other members of the group.
So what does this mean for retailers?
Think about how the retail environment can be used to facilitate our herd or tribal instincts, to create a context that will make people feel they belong because they are with people like them. Remodel the shopping experience so as to allow people to interact more with people like them in the way that online brands have done (“people like you also bought…”).
Don’t rely on asking people to predict what they want, where they will shop, what they think of a new idea, because the brain isn’t very good at predicting, but it is far better at extrapolating from what it knows.