Stop Listening to the Customer

chapter 12 ask what your consumer can do for you

One of the reasons I'm cynical about market research and insight is it projects forwards and attempts to guess and anticipate how people will act. People are more likely to rationalise their actions after the fact than act rationally. We are terrible historians of our own behaviour and even worse predictors of it. The human condition is to act first, think later.

Attitude follows action

When I worked at the prison, my supervisor often talked about our chances of survival if we weren't junior psychologists but inmates locked up and made to tough it out with the other inmates. To my surprise, my supervisor said I would cope very well. His rationale was that I was good at getting people to do things for me. There would be many inmates who would look after me, because they'd invested in me. This chapter explores my favourite theme from my previous book, The Advertising Effect: How to change behaviour. It's that ‘action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action'. If you want people to like you, ask them to do something for you. For your business or personal life, this is very useful.

One of the counterintuitive concepts I've come across in marketing is this: ask not what you can do for your customers, but what your customers can do for you. It is related to the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance that states we feel uncomfortable if our thoughts, feelings and actions are not aligned. We make them align by changing ...