Ian Addie Ian joined Nunwood as Innovation Director in March 2004 following positions with MORI, Research International and NOP. With more than 15 years valuable insight experience focusing on advanced research methods, he is well placed to suggest big changes are afoot. And Nunwood, he maintains, is prepared. Read the full biography here.

Experience is Everything
What customers really feel

By Ian Addie, - 3rd February, 2012

For a long time, researchers have concerned themselves with understanding consumers’ reactions to advertising, perceptions of brands, their satisfaction with services and products, and their wants and needs.

In doing so, the industry has striven to provide insight to consumer-facing organisations which will help them better communicate with their markets to achieve a competitive advantage.

However, it’s often the case these issues are addressed in isolation of each other – largely mirroring the organisational structures of the client’s business, where individual issues are generally ‘owned’ by the marketing department, operational divisions or NPD teams. Each lobby internally for research funding and act upon the results of market research effort. To the consumer, however, these organisationally siloed activities are irrelevant. They rarely evaluate an organisation’s proposition to them in terms of these facets.

People do not naturally say to themselves: “I like the advertising for product A and the brand position resonates with me, but the product does not perform as well as I would like, therefore on balance I will choose product B which, which may have less interesting advertising and a brand position less relevant to me, but has a product which better suits my requirements”.

Growing evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience indicates such an approach to decision making goes against the instincts of the human mind.

Our minds can be divided into two parts: cognitive psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman refers to these as System 1 and System 2.

A System 1 mind operates outside of our consciousness; taking in information passed to it by our senses and internal signals relating to the physiological balance of our bodily functions. It compares these to blueprints from previously acquired experiences to dictate our responses. Where a good match with the existing blueprint is evident, the System 1 mind acts according to the preordained script and any subtle changes bring about revisions to the blueprint. The System 1 mind is responsible for managing ‘business as usual’, but it’s not adept at compartmentalising the various inputs it receives and weighing these against each other.

The subconscious management of our day-to-day existence by the System 1 mind suits the System 2 mind very well, because the latter is a conscious tool. When System 2 is in operation, we’re aware of it. It is geared to weigh up alternatives, judge and solve problems for which System 1 has no blueprint. However, System 2 has a low bandwidth compared to System 1 and can only cope with small levels of information at one time. When faced with a problem it must concentrate all its efforts, excluding anything else in order to reach a resolution.

This can be very well demonstrated here:

Although in principle the Add 1 Task seems fairly simple, if repeated several times you will become aware of the mental effort required to complete the exercise. This is your System 2 mind working in overdrive.

As a consequence of its low bandwidth and high attention requirements, System 2 is selective over which problems it gives its attention to. So, whether we’re watching a TV ad or picking up a can of beans in a supermarket, it’s usually our System 1 mind that’s responsible for dictating our actions according to a subconscious blueprint.

The holistic way in which System 1 forms and adapts its blueprint means all relevant stimuli associated with a business’ proposition finds itself in the same pot, resulting in a ‘net affect’. If different stimuli contradict each other, they’ve the potential to cancel each other out – confusing the blueprint. But if all stimuli fit together then the blueprint is clear and reinforced with every subsequent exposure.

For this reason businesses should not only be concerned with the popularity of their advertising, the perception of their brand and the service levels they deliver, but also the ‘net affect’ of each of these upon the consumer’s System 1 blueprint.

Achieving a consistent fit between individual facets of the stimuli requires a ‘glue’ to bind advertising, purchase and consumption experiences together. The ‘glue’ is the Brand - the consistent perceptions generated by all areas of the consumer experience.

As such, branding activity does not merely involve communicating with consumers through advertising media, but also requires a business to consider how else perceptions are formed and strengthened (or weakened).

It is not simply a case of talking the talk; to create that ‘glue’ a business must also walk the walk. By doing this a consistent and cohesive Branded Customer Experience can be engineered which will serve to solidify the behavioural blueprint and strengthen the consumer’s relationship with the business.

However, it’s not only the consistency of the glue that is important. It is also its nature. Whilst the System 1 mind -which acts as the custodian of the blueprint - does not have the ability to weigh up the individual facets of the consumer experience that it receives, its ability to integrate these into the blueprint relies upon their connectivity. The System 1 mind thinks in terms of stories, where one thought links to another by association. Creating a consistent brand perception across all exposures through the telling of a brand story is therefore a highly prized goal.

Take the energy drink Red Bull. The brand is one centred on a story of vitality. Whilst all facets of Red Bull’s interaction with the consumer are different, each one in its own way, from the “Gives you wings” advertising to the virtual form as a “power pill” in the Playstation game Worms 3D, reeks of vitality. It’s that consistent story of vitality that allows the consumer to relate to the Red Bull brand across the diversity of circumstances.

As market researchers, when we’re asked by our clients to tell them how effective an advertising campaign is, we should consider these issues in a wider context and ask how these individual experiences contribute to the relationship the consumer has with the business. To be effective in this, however, we must have developed an understanding of how to assess both the strength and quality of that relationship.

A number of papers have been written in recent years about how people relate to brands, many suggest interpersonal and consumer-brand relationships work on a similar basis. One particular paper, written by Ahuvia, Batra & Bagozzi of the University of Michigan and published in the Handbook of Brand Relationships (2009) is entitled Love, Desire and Identity: A conditional Integration Theory of the Love of Things.

The discussion of the results from the primary research upon which this paper is based states: 'Even when respondents spoke in the strictest and most literal sense of the word, 72 per cent still said that they loved something other than a person with whom they had a close personal relationship'

So if people can love brands in the same way as they love other people then if we can understand how to evaluate the relationship between two individuals then we can reasonably apply the same principles to develop an understanding of how a consumer relates to a brand. Fortunately the past 20 years has seen a flurry of activity in the psychology community aimed at developing models to describe the strength and quality of interpersonal relationships.

By taking inspiration from this research, a realistic measure of the consumer-brand relationship can be developed which enables the market researcher to judge the influence of brand exposures and consumer experiences on a consistent basis.

In turn, it can help organisations better understand how their Branded Customer Experience is delivered and manage this in a consistent fashion, giving rise to the glue which enables the System 1 mind to develop an effective blueprint which in turn solidifies the relationship that a consumer has with an organisation.

Ian Addie

Comments on this article

Want to share your thoughts...?

Want to share your thoughts?

NOTE: Please note that this board is moderated, and comments are published at the discretion of the site owner.