The market for satisfying thuds
My last marathon post on consumer psychology and supposedly ‘irrational’ consumer decision-making was rather long and very complicated, but that’s how these things work. You can distort the truth in one single phrase – but it may take thousands of words to unravel just how and why the distortion works.
Fact is, the issues I described in that post are played out in thousands of ways across every consumer market every day.
Take one simple example: car marketers have discovered that the sound the door makes when you shut it is very important to car users. If it closes with a satisfying ‘thud’ then that ‘thud’ sends a signal telling the user that this car is solidly constructed and safe.
Now. This liking for satisfying thuds is not a ‘rational’ judgement as per pink elephant theories of rationality. Engineering wise, the satisfying thud may, or may not, be connected to the car’s safety performance, but thuds in themselves are not a source of safety. For the most part, the signal is working at an unconscious level: the car user may never notice it enough to comment on it. It goes in ‘under-the-radar’ of consciousness as part of the environmental monitoring we discussed in the previous post – but it does connect directly and powerfully to those primeval decision-making drivers relating to safety and security.
So how does this play itself out in the marketplace? There are a number of possibilities.
• It might just so happen that in the course of making the car safer, engineers create a door that closes with a satisfying thud. In this happy coincidence, both aspects of the car user’s needs are met: the ‘rational’ need for a safer car, and the ‘irrational’ need for the emotionally charged, under-the-radar signals that create an emotionally satisfying sense of safety.
• It might be, however, that in the process of making a safer car, engineers create a door that closes with a tinny ‘clink’. In this scenario, even if their car is now objectively speaking the safest car in the world, they risk being punished in the marketplace. No matter how much prospective buyers look at the data on a piece of paper, their largely unconscious senses urge them powerfully – and irrationally – that this car is not safe. So they don’t buy it.
• A clever marketer then comes along. Because he’s interested in the ‘irrationality’ of consumers decision-making, he uncovers the cause of the problem and tells the engineers that they need to redesign the door so it gives a satisfying thud, even if in doing so, they add nothing to its objective safety performance. In this way, the marketer addresses the car buyer’s ‘emotional’ ‘irrational’ needs as well as his rational needs, and everybody is happy.
But does it stop there? In the last case of adding the satisfying thud to an already safe door, how much extra cost should the engineers incur in making this change, and how much more should the car buyer pay for it? Here we enter the treacherous territory of consumers paying a premium for ‘irrational’ emotional ‘added value’.
But things can get even more complicated. What happens, for example, if in the process of producing the satisfying thud engineers produce a product that’s actually less safe? Here, addressing the consumer’s ‘irrational’ emotional need comes at the expense of the product’s rational, objective performance.
Or consider the possibility of two very different trajectories of competition. One trajectory focuses on the actual process of delivering improved safety performance. The other trajectory focuses on delivering emotionally-driven signals of safety, without bothering with the underlying realities. What happens if the second strategy of addressing the ‘irrational’ emotional signals delivers the company more sales, more quickly than the first one? If so, the industry gets sucked into a spiral of intensifying competition, not around who is best at actually delivering better value, but over who is best at exploiting the consumer’s irrationalities.
The contribution of buyer-centric services
How then, can we positively deal with this situation?
One answer, of course, is via a deus ex machina – the regulator. If a regulator specifies that no car can be made with doors below a certain safety level, then having delivered this minimum standard, marketers can compete in the market for satisfying thuds to their hearts’ content. In many markets, that’s where we’ve ended up.
This answer is not 100% satisfactory however, because often it simply recreates the conflict at another even more intractable level – of condescending, patronising nanny state-minded regulators on the one hand and ‘free market’ marketers forever bitching about how these nanny state regulators a) don’t understand ‘what the consumer really wants’ and b) are always adding cost and complexity via all their extra red tape.
An alternative – perhaps supplementary – approach is that of the buyer-centric service which adds value by helping buyers make and implement better decisions. There are three ways such a service could help.
1) It could focus on the facts – say, helping to produce league tables about which cars are, in objective tests, safer. This can be a useful service – it’s certainly part of the buyer-centric approach – but, as our professors pointed out, it fails to address the realities of ‘irrational’ decision-making; the raw emotional power of that satisfying thud. This is one reason why worthy institutions such as The Consumers Association in the UK and Consumer Reports in the US have always had less influence than they ‘should’. In a funny sort of way, actually just focusing on the ‘rational’ facts in this way actually leaves the field open to marketers seeking to exploit our ‘irrational’ decision-making foibles.
2) It could go one step further by playing the ‘stop and think’ card, I talked about this in the previous post. Here, it wouldn’t just produce a league table of car safety, it would also expose and publicise the devious, manipulative aspects of competition around satisfying thuds when this competition fails to actually address the issue of safety. Such ‘stop and think’ education works in the same way as brand awareness. Once you are aware of something, you can’t make yourself unaware of it. And once you ‘stop to think’ you are more able to let your ‘what if’ mental modelling facilities play a bigger part in your decision.
Buyer-centric services can help buyers make better decisions in this way, though the approach does have a drawback which the professors would have been quick to point it out. If ‘stopping to think’ increases the cost of decision-making too much, many people just won’t bother: life is just too short to spend your time worrying about all these little nuances, especially when they crop up in thousands of different ways, in every market you can think of.
So, unless the buyer-centric service can provide this service in a way which is either very low cost and very easy to use, or fun, it still might not work (though, in cases where the buyer recognises the value of stopping to think it might do the trick perfectly).
3) The third step is to play the marketers at their own game: to deploy the supposed ‘irrationality’ of consumer decision-making in ways that help individuals make better decisions, rather than getting in the way and obfuscating matters.
There are many ways of doing this. One way is to use the same unconscious ‘nudges’ that marketers use to distort buyers’ decisions to help buyers make better decisions. This is the theme of the book Nudge.
Another trick is to note that there is never just one instinctive emotional driver behind a decision. Usually, there are many.
In the case of the satisfying thud, the thud appeals to our instinct for safety. However (for example) human beings also have equally strong emotional instincts around reciprocity, reputations for being trustworthy, punishing cheaters who pretend to be trustworthy and are not, and so on.
Now, if a company prioritises competition around the pretence of safety (the market for satisfying thuds) at the expense of real safety, there is a potentially strong emotional reaction against its cheating motives and actions. This emotional reaction to the company’s cheating is potentially far, far stronger than the one relating to satisfying thuds (once you stop to think about!).
It’s the combination of the three above approaches that makes the buyer-centric service so powerful. Buyer-centricity is not about telling consumers they should be rational pink elephants, or pretending that they are. It’s about understanding how real human beings make real decisions and then using this knowledge to help them make better decisions, instead of trying to use this knowledge as a means of conning them and extracting value from them.
Unfortunately, we still haven’t dealt with all the professors’ objections, because they made another point too: that ‘consumers don’t know what they want until marketers tell them’.
This is another one of those glib catch-phrase distortions that’s simple to say and complex to unravel. I will return to that in my next post.
Alan Mitchell
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