"Our knowledge and assumptions about how our customers think and act have fundamentally changed over the past several years," writes William J. Cusick in All Customers Are Irrational: Understanding What They Think, What They Feel, and What Keeps Them Coming Back. "And yet, most companies continue blindly down the old path."
In this excerpt from All Customers Are Irrational, Cusick dispels previous assumptions about how our brains work and explains why customers' irrational subconscious should be a major consideration when crafting business strategies:
Irrational, But Not Crazy
We're all irrational. We have no choice in the matter. By "all," I mean you and me and each of your customers. You'll see that there is a delicate interplay between our logical but subservient conscious brain and our more powerful subconscious, or irrational, brain. It's this dynamic in how our brains operate that dictates how all of us, as customers, make choices and behave. By understanding those dynamics, we can then look at just how companies have traditionally approached disciplines such as customer research, product design, and customer service and consider some more effective methods for dealing with our irrational customers.
You don't need to become an expert in every technical nuance of how our brains work. While I've done some research into it, I'm certainly no expert in neurology or cognitive science. But the evidence that has been uncovered in these areas is too obvious and too important for us to ignore. It shines a light on our basic nature, and as businesses we can't afford to be oblivious, to march on using the same old approaches.
In order to create successful customer experiences and keep your customers, you won't be required to understand how the synapses and dendrites direct and fire electrical pulses, for example, and you won't have to gain intimate knowledge of the structure of the brain. However, with just a little extra information, you'll be able to gain some game-changing insights into how you can design new nontraditional research, products, and services to take advantage of the irrational way we all think.
The result can be higher retention and higher profits.
We Don't Think the Way We Think We Think
Over the last twenty years, it's become clear that how our brains work is fundamentally different than previously accepted. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and authors built on a progressive series of theories, experiments, and technologically enabled observations to paint a new picture of the brain. These findings and examples that have been impressively put forth by authors like Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Dennett, Gerald Zaltman, Tim-othy Wilson, and others. We will certainly touch on their findings as we discuss the particular quirks and idiosyncrasies that are a part of how all of us think and act, but the focus will be on how these pertain to your customers, and how companies have been missing the boat on how they research, attract, and keep those customers.
Let's start with some pure, observable science and move our way toward the really fascinating stuff. Take a moment, right now, to observe and feel your surroundings. What color are the walls or, if you are outside, can you feel a breeze in your hair? What does the air smell like? Are you sitting? Is the chair hard or soft? Is it easy to balance on the seat? Is your breathing easy or labored? When was the last time you consciously thought about your breathing? What about your heart rate? A moment ago, were you consciously thinking about any of these things? Probably not.
As you sit there, how many individual thoughts can you consciously hold on to? In the book Strangers to Ourselves, author Timothy Wilson describes this dynamic, calling it the "adaptive subconscious." At any given moment, we are bombarded with 11 million bits of information. Everything from the temperature, to how your left pinky toe feels in your shoe, to that thing moving over to the side in your peripheral vision. And of those 11 million bits of information, you can consciously handle about forty at any given moment. Everything else is being handled by your irrational subconscious.
Let me repeat that: Everything else is being handled by your irrational subconscious.
Your heart rate, your breathing pattern, your balance, the spatial relationships of objects to your body as you move through a room...you don't need to consciously think about any of it. There is a powerful engine—your subconscious brain—that is working 24/7 to keep you safe and sound. Of course, you probably had some inkling that there was stuff going on under the surface in your day-to-day activities. After all, when you sleep, you keep breathing, right?
But this goes much deeper than some of the more automatic physiological systems that occur within your body. Much deeper and wider. So let's look more closely at this irrational subconscious.
This Is Your Brain, by Homer
For centuries, the assumption was that the majority of brain activity was conscious, while the subconscious was a dark, mysterious place, a place where Freud located our Id, a place that fueled our dreams and our darker motivations, but that had little to do with how we perceived the reality of the world around us or how we processed information and made choices. According to the philosopher Descartes, our emotional reactions are not just separate from our more logical, conscious mind, they are "opposing forces."
In fact, the truth is close to the exact opposite. We don't just deal with long-lost issues about our mothers or fear of water because of a childhood bathtub incident; rather, we process almost everything through our subconscious. According to Gerald Zaltman in his book How Customers Think, a ridiculous 95 percent of all cognitive activity takes place in our irrational subconscious. I'm not strong in math (more right brained than left, I guess), but I figure that leaves a paltry 5 percent of your brain power occurring in our logical or conscious portion of the brain. And just what is that 5 percent of our rational brain spending its time on? It's not typically making decisions. Rather, it's rationalizing the decisions and actions we take after the fact. In other words, it's creating explanations and excuses for us as to why we behave the way we do.
To better understand just how the brain operates, let's take a look at an exemplar of truly irrational behavior, Homer Simpson, the lovable patriarch on the animated television show, The Simpsons. Our perception of Homer is that he is ruled by his Id, or his irrational subconscious. Here's what I project Homer's thought process to be in a typical situation. When Homer sees a pink frosted donut, Homer thinks (and utters, since there's apparently no filter between Homer's brain and his mouth), "hmmmm, donut." Then Homer starts salivating profusely, grabs the donut, and snarfs it down.
We like to think we are different in how we react to the world, that we are much more rational, more logical, even more noble. But in reality, we aren't too far from Homer. When you see a donut, you might picture the thought process this way: "That donut looks good...I know it's high in calories...and I'm trying to eat healthy and watch my weight...still, I didn't eat breakfast yet, so my calorie intake is low...and I'm really hungry...and it's over two hours until lunch...and so this is perfectly justified."
Yes, that might be what you "see" happening in your brain. The truth is most of that processing is happening after the fact. Your subconscious has already made the determination "eat the donut" and has instructed your hand to reach out and grab it off the plate. The reason you eat the donut? You'll never know. The determination occurred in your irrational subconscious, and all that back and forth ("reasoning," some might call it) takes place more or less in a vacuum, without access to the real processing that just occurred under the surface.
Irrational About More Than Donuts
For the most part, then, you, as well as all your customers, make choices and decide your next action without conscious knowledge. Crazy, yes? And this doesn't just happen with trivial matters, like whether to eat a donut. Almost every decision you make—what to major in at college, to what car to purchase, to whom you might marry—is dramatically impacted by influences outside your immediate logical reasoning in a mysterious and, yes, irrational, yet incredibly powerful instrument called your subconscious.
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About the Author: William J. Cusick is the author of ALL CUSTOMERS ARE IRRATIONAL: Understanding What They Think, What They Feel, and What Keeps Them Coming Back (AMACOM 2009). He is CEO and Founder of customer experience consulting firm Vox Inc.
Excerpted from ALL CUSTOMERS ARE IRRATIONAL: Understanding What They Think, What They Feel, and What Keeps Them Coming Back, by William J. Cusick. Copyright 2009 William J. Cusick. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission. All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.