“Why don’t (consumers)….?” Is a question that is rightfully asked often in organisations.
Why don’t they buy our product? Why don’t they rate our service more highly? Why don’t they switch to our better service?
In many ways, it’s asking this type of question, rather than resting on your laurels, that leads to long term success.
Unfortunately, “why don’t you…” is a profoundly bad question to ask consumers. On a scale of bad questions to ask someone, and there are lots, it’s probably at the bottom.
To be fair, “why do you…” is not that far above it. Inviting people to post-rationalise their behaviour feels reasonable, not least because we like the idea that we understand our own actions. However, the abundant evidence from behavioural psychology points to the fact that we’re accomplished fiction tellers, not introspective geniuses. In virtually every behavioural psychology experiment, where something contextual is changed and people’s behaviour altered, they fail to ascribe their action to what we know was different.
This is because of the role the unconscious mind plays in our behaviour; the fast-working part of our brain that focuses more on getting stuff done than giving us an awareness of why we’re doing something.
“Why don’t you…” brings with it all the same problems that accompany “why do you…” but compounds them with the issue that the respondent may never have considered the matter prior to being asked. That would be fine if people were comfortable with the idea of acknowledging an absence of thought. But the unconscious mind is so geared up for finding associations that we immediately invent a justification for our highlighted inaction. In a fraction of a second, an apparently coherent answer emerges.
This trick is enhanced by the absence of any perceivable delay between the end of the question and the start of what might be a long and involved reply: one minute there’s nothing there, the next a fully formed answer seems to have appeared out of nowhere in much the same way a magician produces a rabbit from a hat. Rather than sleight of hand, the question invokes a brilliant sleight of mind. And much as with magicians and rabbits, it’s mightily impressive, but not at all useful.
There is a solution to this; focus on existing behaviour. What do people currently do instead? How are they buying your competitor’s product? How do they experience service that they regard as superior? How do they behave around the brand that they stick with? When are decisions made and when are they influenced?
This involves psychoanalysing specific consumer experiences in depth to identify the ‘what’ in sufficient, specific, contextually rich detail. Then, overlaying an appreciation of the psychology that drives consumer behaviour to infer what is happening in their minds. Only then are you in a position to work out the implications for what an organisation needs to do to achieve its goal.
At Shift we consider how people think before we begin exploring what they think. Knowing that someone doesn’t think about something at all can be incredibly useful. And, since we’re focusing on questions, here’s one for you: Would contacting us to understand how we’d give you deeper insight be a terrible idea? No. Yes.