If you would like to find out more about this peice of research which was conducted

for a Women In Research event please to get in touch and I will be happy to share
the raw data. We interviewed 500 men and 500 women in the UK and the USA.

Posted by Jonpuleston at 09:49

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Thursday, 31 March 2016

How to make a good prediction
This is some general advice on how to make a good prediction.

1. Have an intelligent conversation with your gut instinct!

Gut instincts are incredibly valuable when it comes to making a prediction, the
best predictors often heavily rely on their gut instincts, but remember that your
gut can be flawed. Your instinct is exactly that, an instinct, so any cognitive or
emotional biases you have could impede your predictive success.

The trick is to not rely 100% on what your gut instincts tell you but to always
question them: subject them to critical appraisal, think about any biases that
might be effecting your objectivity.

Its useful to be aware of some of the most common cognitive biases, thinking short
cuts which can corrupt our metal calculations.

Read more
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Friday, 20 November 2015

What should we be measuring in brand tracking studies?
In a nutshell, what brands do you buy and why?

Byron Sharpe et al have fairly convincingly proved that the key health metric of a
brand is its total universe of users.

The awareness of the brand, the loyalty of the users of the brand and how much they
like the brand are all rather academic constructs as all these measures highly
correlate with each other and ultimately with the brands universe of users. All
can be modeled using a Dirichlet distribution model.

The proportion of people who are brand-aware can be modeled from the proportion
that are spontaneously aware of that brand. With X number of total users there will
be Y number of loyalists and Z number of people who love and recommend the brand.
If users drop, liking, awareness and loyalty levels will drop all in parallel. If
you asking about liking of brand you will find we all like the brands we use at
pretty equal levels.

To illustrate the point, here is an example of data taken from a quite typical
brand tracking study where the statistical correlation between brands purchased in
the last 12 months and all the other core metrics measured in the brand tracking
study has been calculated. The correlation for nearly every metric is above 0.85
and some metrics in the high 0.9s.

So you could argue that the only brand equity question really worth asking in a
brand tracking survey is: Which of these brands do you use?

Read more
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Wednesday, 14 October 2015

What can researchers learn from film script writers?
If you study the art of film making, it will tell you that a good film script is
based around one great question, that grabs your attention from the off and then
the story naturally emerges from this and slowly reveals the answer. The question
drives the whole story.

Here are some examples:

What if every day was the same? GROUNDHOG DAY
What if a nun was made to be a nanny? THE SOUND OF MUSIC
What if a really smart innocent person went to prison? SHAWSHANK REDEPMPTION
What if dreams & reality were inter-changeable? MATRIX
What if there's more to life than being ridiculously good looking? ZOOLANDER
All the books also emphasise how important good narrative structure is to making a
great film i.e. films that people want to watch and concentrate on watching from
start to finish. Films construct heroes through which the story is told, and these
stories needs to adhere to a strict story structure. There are about 7 of these
basic story structures, established from a time well before the dawn of film
making, in fact the basic structure of storytelling has hardly changed much for
thousands of years.

Read more
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Wednesday, 7 October 2015

Non-evolutionary
Most business evolves in a classical evolutionary way. Through slow mutations in
their approach to doing business, which leads to the business being more or less
successful and in a survival of the fittest way - the strongest mutated variants
win through. The most common way businesses mutate is through making a whole
series of what is know as kaizen innovations small baby step improvements and
changes to increase the efficiency of a business.

Most kaizen improvement are logical evolutionary steps. If we do this we think we

will make more money.

All of life evolves in this way, through trial and error. There are some
interesting things thought that can happen if you break out of the evolutionary
approach to development. Start to create things that never could emerge as a result
of market forces of the demands of customers.

What do I mean by this, well the example I would like to use to illustrate this is
the unstable jet.

Imagine a bird evolving a really really long beak, the longer the beak in theory,
the more efficiently the bird could cut through the air and the faster if could
fly. The problem with having a really long beak though is you reaches a point of
instability, because a tiny fluctuation in the movement of the tip of the beak or a
gust of air in a different direction and the beak could be deflected and instantly
act like a sale and the bird would flip over its nose. As a result there are no
birds with really really long beaks like this as they would be unstable.

However imagine a bird with a really long beak and a the end of it there was a
sensor and small computerized navigation system that could make microadjustments to
the direct of the beak to ensure that its always in a stable position facing
directly into the headwind and not deflected off course by a gust of wind and now
you have designed what in theory is a bird that can fly faster because it can cut
through the air more efficiently. Unfortunately no bird is likely to evolove this
extra step because the solution is non-evolutionary. It can never get there by
baby step "kaizen" mutations. It takes a major new "non-evolutionary" improvement
to get over the hurdle of an unstable beak.

Yet Man has been able to make this non evolutionary improvement that would have
been impossible in the natural world and we have designed jets now with exactly
this feature.

And this is the type of non-evolutionary form or innovation that I am particularly

interested in.

Most of the establish businesses that are killed off are by major disruptive
innovations like this business solutions and leaps of improvement that break the
classic evolutionary kaizen business development model. The step changes that
existing businesses cannot make because it would result in the total
cannibalization of their existing business (making them unstable).

To get there businesses need to take a completely different approach to innovation

stop thinking about what would make money and start focusing on what is possible.
What would happen if....To think more abstractly about what could happen if this
other thing happened. To cross connect ideas. To build field of dreams. To invest
in the connecting points. To look out for the non-evolutionary leaps.

Posted by Jonpuleston at 00:15

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Wednesday, 15 April 2015

Business personality test
Take part in this business and researcher personality test....

http://qsdc.gmisurveys.com/srv/?p=eK0jAj

Posted by Jonpuleston at 02:41

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Wednesday, 7 January 2015

Non-commercial
Imagine if there was no commercial agenda set by your company and you could do
exactly what you wanted to do. What would you do?
Posted by Jonpuleston at 02:19
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Saturday, 3 January 2015

2015 the survey design tipping point: change now or pay the price later
I can't change my survey as it will effect all our historical trend data.

This dilemma sits at the heart of most the discussions we have with companies
wishing to update their research studies. "I would love to do things differently
but I can't!"

And it is also the is the reason why so many of the surveys we look are behind the
curve in way of design and questioning techniques,the reason why the average online
survey length has crept up from 15 minutes to over 20 minutes over the last 5
years.

Well 2015 is the year in which things are going to have to change.

...and the reason is, our respondents are going mobile.

At the end of 2013 only 5% of people completing our surveys did so via mobile or
tablet device, by the end of 2014 that figure has reached 20%. In some lead markets
of Asia its already approaching 30% and as an indicator of where things are going,
by the end of 2014 more than half the people signing up to our online panels did so
via a mobile or tablet device.

What we are starting to see is stark differences in completion rates between those
surveys that are mobile compatible and those that are not.

We are going mobile too...

By the end of this year all our survey respondents are going to have the choice of
what surveys they want to complete and every survey that is not mobile compatible
will be marked as non-compatible. As a result, the cost of fielding these non-
mobile compatible surveys will start to increase significantly.

This is a change or die moment for many peoples tracking studies.

The days of getting away with a 20 minute+ grid dominated survey are pretty much
over. The dropout rates of these types of longer surveys on respondents
completing surveys mobile devices are over 50% , which is simply not acceptable for
anyone.

Posted by Jonpuleston at 02:12

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Tuesday, 30 December 2014

10 things I learn in 2014

We convert statistics into emotions: and so the best way to fast track getting your
statistics remembered is to emotionalise them!
Our brains are Bayesian decision making engines: by and large designed to work out
what choices will make us most happy
A question is a problem that you ask respondents to solve: it is easy to lose
sight of this simple thought. Often we design questionnaires that skirt around the
problem we are trying to solve. We ask questions so euphemistically, we ask
questions that are a Chinese whisper away from what we are trying to find out.
We like to think in different ways: Researchers like to quantify things,
particularly types of people and how they think and consumer. We have
personalities that get classified and we are this type of person or that. The
simple fact is that we are all sorts of different types of people depending on the
time of day our mood and our circumstance. We all like to think in different ways,
its boring the make the same types of decision especially when we go shopping. the
concept of "type" in research is limiting. The same person who liked to try out new
types of shampoo
Scale effects: you scale something up and sometimes different maths starts to apply
If there are infinite number of universes, then in some universes it is certain
that a god will exist (as some of us know it) ..and in others it is certain that a
god as we know it will not exist: A nice thought, that's assuming that there is
such a thing as infinity, some physics question this too ... it might, but there is
an infinitesimal small chance!
Rating something is inherently a system 2 thinking process: compared to a binary
choice process which is more system 1. The example being you come out of a film
your friend asked did you like it and in a fraction of a second you can say yes or
no, but likewise if the friend asked you to rate the film this takes more mental
processing and anything up to 5 seconds thinking to give it a score.
16 is a crowd: Prediction as opposed to market research is not about the numbers
of people you ask its about the quality of information available to the group of
predictors and their effort and objectivity.
Unwise crowds: crown wisdom is a nice idea but it only work in certain rather rare
circumstances. Crowd predictions are mostly corrupted by system errors & network
cognitive biases.
Computers using artificial intelligence can now read some of our emotions better
than we can: Artificial intelligence tools are getting so good at reading our
emotions by combining various input data sources ranging from how we are typing,
the language we are using and the music we are listening to that they can identify
traits of depression often months before it is apparent to ourselves

Posted by Jonpuleston at 00:22

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Thursday, 18 December 2014

Meeting Jargon in heard in 2014
These are some of the wonderful pieces of jargon I heard and noted in various
meeting I attended this year...enjoy (and forgive me, I have probably use most of
these myself!)

Boil the ocean

Spin our wheels
Capability area
Landing it
Resonate with...
Next steps
Gun up
Creating confusion
Lense (wide angle /focused/zoom)
Data science unicorns
The unsexy stuff
Slower pace
Focus in on...
Support of the board
Additional resources
Executions logistics
Treat as a priority
Alignment
Asking for permission not asking for permission
How we are going to scale it
Catching lightening in a bottle
CDO
UI
Mathmagicians
Tentpoling
Lumascape
Ecosystem
Insights into actions
Data at the centre...
Making a brand more culturally relevant
Triangular across the data
Effecasy
The mandate
Manadated
Implementation
A hard stop
The pillars
The lead sled dog
Skin in the game
In the new world
Analysis paralysis
90% of data created in the last 2 years
Experience based economy
Product service experience
Ubiquitous computing
Ambient intelligence
Embedded
Network
Internet of things
Context aware
Sensor fusion
Personalised behavioural profiling
Adaptive ai learning
Anticipatory predictive analysis
The Google car crash dilemma
Cut off data cut off blood
Hyper personalisation

If you have any nominations do tweet them #mrjargon

Posted by Jonpuleston at 09:36
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2014 market research book list

Coming to the end of the year, I I thought I would share a list of the best books I
have read in 2014 that I think other market researchers might like to read. Now
not all of these are new books by any means so forgive me if you have yourself read
half of them.

This will make you smarter

John Brockman
This book is a compendium of scientific and philosophical ideas in one of two page
essays on quite a remarkable cross section of topics. There are some really
exciting thought packed into this book that I think market researcher could make
good use of. I think reading it really did make me a little smarter!

Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

Philip E. Tetlock

Philip Tetlock's thinking has had more influence on how I think about conducting
market research than any one person this year. I was introduced to this book by
Walker Smith from the Futures Company and I would recommend that anyone who has an
interest in the science of prediction should read this book. Learn that political
experts are not quite as good as chimps tossing coins at predicting things!

The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction

Nate Silver

I realise this book is a few years old now, and I wish I had read it sooner. There
are so many really important ideas stuffed into this book that market researcher
can use in their every day research. Its both inspiring and useful.

Strategy: A History

Sir Lawrence Freedman

This small thumbnail belies a bloody thick book which I have to admit to not to
have read every page of. It looks at strategy from all sorts of angles from war
through to politics and summarizes the thinking of every major strategist in
history including the likes of Sun Tzu, Napoleon and Machiavelli. There is loads
of great thinking for market researchers to digest. And probably even more valuable
incites for anyone running a business. It contains a detailed look game theory
and the trials and issues with trying to apply strategy in real life. There is some
sage advice in this book

Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy

Phil Barden

This book is a really helps explain the basics of shopping decision making and is a
compendium of behavioral economic theory, an important topic for nearly all market
researchers to understand - I really like the way it uses visual examples to
explain some of the theory making it an effortless read. This book should be on
every market researchers shelf.

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People

Susan Weinschenk

This book should really be titled, 100 things market researchers designing surveys
and presentations should know about people! ...And everyone involved in either of
these task encouraged to read this. Loads and loads of really clear, sensible
advice.

The Curve: Turning Followers into Superfans

Nicholas Lovell

I read this after reading a very enthusastic linkedin review by Ray Poynter, thank
you! It persuaded me to buy it. There are some nice radical ideas in here about
how to market things by giving things away and at the same at the other end of the
scale offering premium high price solutions for the those willing to pay for them.

The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football is Wrong

Chris Anderson (Author), David Sally (Author)

I rather immersed myself in reading sports stats books this year. The way that data
is transforming sporting strategy, there are lessons to be learnt by the whole of
the market research industry. As an English person with a love of football, I feel
rather a bounden duty to promote the Numbers game which looks at how statistical
data has changed how the game is played. I loved this book and I am afraid I bored
senseless everyone I knew who had any interest in football quoting incites from it.
I also read Money Ball this year too which is the classic opus on how a proper
understanding of stats transformed the fortunes of a major league baseball team, it
is a great story and lovely read.

Who owns the future?

Jaron Lanier

This book has an important message about the impact of the digital economy on our
future I cite from the book directly as it best explains "In the past, a
revolution in production, such as the industrial revolution, generally increased
the wealth and freedom of people. The digital revolution we are living through is
different. Instead of leaving a greater number of us in excellent financial health,
the effect of digital" Worth a read!
The golden rules of Acting

Andy Nyman

This is a lovely little book, you can read in one short sitting. Why though do I
recommend market researchers read it? Well not because it teaches you anything
about acting more about life and humanity and dealing with failure and the right
approach to challenges. There is not much difference in my mind to going for an
audition and going and doing a pitch presentation. I took some heart from reading
this book.

Want to see some other book recommendations? Try this site:

http://inspirationalshit.com/booklist#

Your 2015 recommendations?

Love to hear your recommendations for books I might read in 2015 tweet me
@jonpuleston

Posted by Jonpuleston at 06:32

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Questions on trial
Surveys are competing with a billion+ largely more fun things to do online these
days and we are reaching tipping point were many people, the young age groups in
particular are simply refusing to complete survey because they are too boring.

To have any chance of competing we have to change our approach and I think this
starts with taking a long hard look at some of the boring questions we are asking
in our surveys.

One of them being this one...

"What brands are you aware of?"

It a question asked in nearly every consumer survey I come across, usually asked
both unprompted with an open ended question and then prompted with a closed
question set of brand options (twice the work). Its one of those sacred cow set of
questions that everyone insists on asking.

Do we actually need to keep asking this question? Are there not better questions
that could be asked in better ways, that make better use of a respondents brain
that deliver more useful data?

Here is the case for the prosecution:

Its a really dull question: From a respondents point of view these are probably the
dullest most cliched question they continually have to answer in surveys.
Respondents don't like answering these questions, they trigger drop out.
Respondents put little thought into their answers: Less than half the respondents
you ask this question name more than one or two brand when asked unprompted and
well over 20% say don't know. The prompted question often gathers together a random
set of clicks from respondents.
Little statistical value: If the average respondent list 1 or 2 brand and assuming
the number of individual brands listed adhere to a Zipf's law style distribution,
the most popular brands named much more often than the least popular brands - on a
typical sample of 400 respondents there will only likely to be 1 or 2 brands you
ever have enough data to work with statistically.
Large error boundaries: The data error boundaries on this question on most survey
samples are of often so large that in wave to wave in brand tracking studies the
fluctuations down to pure statistical error are often of an order of magnitude
larger than the actual underlying change in brand awareness. Resulting in a lot of
"overfit"
No stand alone value: The data it delivers back is almost always duplicated or can
effectively be modeled from answers given to other questions in the same survey.
Meaningless metric: Brand awareness information is totally useless in isolation
from anything else. What it measures is intangible it's certainly not an accurate
measure of purchase behavior for example - Unprompted awareness correlate at around
about 0.54 with purchase behavior*, prompted awareness it drops to under 0.2*. If
you specifically want to find out what brand consumers are likely to buy there are
other question that are far more effective. It is also not a measure of how much I
may like a brand....
I have never see how this information is really used profitably: It's always the
chart that everyone skips past in a presentation.
The case for the defense:

Now I have challenged several prominent and respected researchers many of whom are
still very wedded to asking this question in survey and asked them why they like to
use it.
Its a fundamentally important measure: The brand that is mentioned first is the
brand that has the most brain neuron connections and associations between the
product and the category. So many see it as fundamentally the most important
question you can ever ask in a survey.
Now I get this but I am still left with a feeling of so what....if you ask me what
brand of chocolate I am aware of - I will say Cadbury's. I have been exposed to
this brand all my life seen thousands of Cadbury's ads, seen the brand in every
confectionery counter I have ever visited. But I never buy Cadbury's and so what
x number of people are aware of a brand.

Now I am open to some other arguments as to why it should be kept if anyone wants
to make them, but my judgement verdict is that its a question that if not
completely banned, should at least be taxed, in the same way that cigarettes and
alcohol are taxed to discourage their usage.

What could be asked instead?

There are a range of alternative ways of directly or indirectly measuring brand

awareness that are more interesting and potentially useful.

I find one of the frustrations to answering the what brands do you recall question
is thinking why does it matter and not knowing how many to list, Simply applying a
rule to the question that contains the task it in a more meaningful framework for
respondents can make it far less dull to answer.

you could ask:

...what are their favorite brands
...which brands they would have in their perfect supermarket
...which brand, if they could only buy one, would they choose to buy a life long
supply of... ...which brands they would take to the desert island
...which brand they would invite to a party
...which brands they would recommend to their best friends
...which brand they would invest in
...which brands they think they will still be buying in 5 years time

All these will gather top of mind awareness to
interesting and purposeful for the respondents
can make them more salience and relevance e.g.
have in their perfect supermarket it not just
intent to purchase.
some degree or other but are more
to answer and adding in these "rule"
asking about what brands they would
just a measures awareness but also

In head to head experiments we have found we get more responses to these more
conceptually fun questions too.

You could turn it into a full blown game by adding to your list of brands some fake
ones and challenge respondents to pick out the real brands. We have used this
approach on several occasions, its more fun for respondents and the data you get
back is almost identical to prompted brand awareness. You could also show them a
facet of the packaging of a brand and see if they can guess which brand its for, or
show them a de-branded ad.

I would also advise jumping straight past the specific awareness question and
asking what range of brands they have purchased on there last 10 shopping
occasions. The has very high correlation with actual sales c0.8 and again cuts to
the heart of the problem, if they are aware of it but not purchased it in any of
their last 10 shopping occasions its not on their purchase radar!

If you want to defend the use of this question in your surveys and have got a
strong argument for doing so i would love to hear your thoughts.

Posted by Jonpuleston at 06:27

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Sunday, 7 December 2014

How I feel is how I choose: A Gedankenexperiment

As market researchers we like to classify people and in particular we like to

classify how people make decisions. However, we have a dreadful habit of thinking
that there are different types of people who think and make decisions in these
different ways. We define segments like loyalists and switchers, impulse v
considered shoppers.

The reality is that how we feel so often dictates how we choose; and our ever
changing mood states mean we are all manner of different types of shopper all
rolled into one.

We might have...our stress choice, our curious choice, our distracted choice, our
I've just been paid choice, our practical choices, our happy choices, our don't
care choices etc....

The process of observing things changes things

All these different thinking process are all bundled together and co-exist in a
quantum style mix - we are all or nothing of these or a random mix at any one point
in time. Its difficult to determine, and - just as Schrodinger pointed out - just
the process of observing changes things. You ask someone why they have purchased
something and it immediately puts people into an analytical thinking framework, far
removed from the mind state they might have been in when they made the purchase.

The biggest problem for market researchers trying to understand decision making
processes is how to simulate these different moods to be able to effectively
measure these different choice situations and how to take account of observational
biasing effects.

Some mental states are easier to evoke than others. The price conscious mood state
and the impulse mood state are actually quite easy to simulate in say an online
piece of research. You just ask people to either shop with a price conscious budget
or ask them to perform the choices quickly.

Some of the others, though, are a lot harder to evoke. For example our distracted
shopping mind-set is an important one, as when we go shopping its likely that we
will often get distracted and have other things on our minds while we do it e.g. I
am having a relationship crisis and as I go round the supermarket I am thinking
mostly about that and making some choices on auto pilot. What are these choices
like? Are they the same as when we are, say, in a hurry? I think not. The choices
would probably be the more habitual ones and could perhaps be more reward driven
and may also be quite impulsive.

How you evoke these mind-set in a survey is a difficult one. If you ask people why
they bought something their rational thinking processes kick in and what you get
out is in effective cognitive dissonance - we can shape our reasons for purchasing
around what makes us feel good so often.

Don't get me wrong; this is useful information in itself. But it can hide other
less conscious factors that for many marketers are the factors we are most
interested in.

e.g. to say I bought it because it was cheap could hide some resentment to the
purchase. In a sense this statement is an excuse for buying it or hide some guilty
feelings about buying a brand that is viewed as extravagant.

We are Bayesian decision making engines working out what would make us happy

It has been observed that when we buy things we make a Bayesian trade off
prediction about what will make us most happy. On one side might be the price, how
long a product will last and the risks involved in making that choice, on the other
side are the benefits that the product delivers.

So to try and untangle some of this, I have been thinking about a new research
technique. A form of self-observed Choice ethnography, where we get people to try
to mentally map out all the different thinking protocols involved in making a
decision for different products. A sort of helicopter viewpoint on their own
behaviour, the sort of thinking that takes place when you sit in front of a
therapist and really try to self-observe your own thoughts and feelings.

To test this idea out, I conducted a Gedankenexperiment, a thought experiment on

myself to see how easy it was to self-observe my decision making protocols.

What I found was that the more I thought about it, the easier and more interesting
a process it became.

My Gedankenexperiment

I started to observe my own behaviour and traced out my decision making on a

variety of different types of purchases.

I started out by imagining my choice of beer in a pub, thinking about it. Here are
some of the potential factors that I decided were influential in my choice:

What I fancy,
What choices they have available
What others are drinking
What I had last time
How much I had already drunk.

Interestingly, when I examined my decision making behaviour in a pub, the first

thing I learned, was that it was never about what it costs.

Even more interestingly I realized that when I go into my two local pubs, in each
one I am a completely different type of shopper: In one, perhaps because it is more
conventional with a limited choice of beer, I always buy exactly the same brand of
German lager. I never vary my choice of drink ever...I thought about it and
realized I am buying instant relaxation. That brand has been ingrained into the
experience.

In the other pub, which has a fuller range of craft beers, I never, ever buy the
same beer twice and certainly never ever buy lager. I take pleasure out of trying
different things and so I move from one pub being beer monogamous to another where
I am completely polygamous.

I then started to think about my choice of a beer in a supermarket. These are the
criteria that I process in my mind:

What they cost

What they have
What l like
What I have not tried before
What looks nice

In the supermarket the look of the beer became paramount compared to the pub where
it was the taste. Additionally, in the supermarket cost suddenly becomes near the
top of the list.

Then I thought about my choice of wine in supermarkets...

A weird thing about my wine shopping is that I realise I decide based on trying to
game the system as here there is actually too much choice... what I do is I look at
all the brands on discount and try to find the ugliest bottle. My reasoning is that
is probably the best tasting wine but its on discount because nobody wanted to buy
it because of the ugly packaging.

Next, I thought about my choice of shampoo. This boils down to:

What they have

What it costs
What I can bear to buy

I end up picking the cheapest brand that has the least offensive packaging. But it
often takes several minutes to decide.

Compared to choice of deodorant & toothpaste.do they have Dove/Colgate, is it on

offer, yes but my decision making time is seconds. In both these categories I have
made up my mind as to what brand to buy and have stopped deciding.

This went on and I examined my thinking process across a wide range of product
purchases, trying as best as possible to observe some of the less conscious
factors.

I realise, for example, that my choice of confectionary was triggered often by

childhood associations. would literally buy a chocolate bar to try and feel like I
felt in a situation when I was younger.

What have I learnt about thinking about my own behaviour?

1. How dramatically varied it is, I could be described as both a loyalist and a

switcher. From a market research point of view it would be almost impossible to
classify me as one thing and I am sure the same could be said for anyone.
2. I realise I was able - by simply observing my own thinking process - to
gather a range of personal incites
I buy old things in new places where I don't feel comfortable
In new places where I feel comfortable I buy new things
In familiar places I buy new things to break out of the routine sometimes
I buy a limited portfolio of things if I am unsatisfied with the portfolio on offer
generally but hold resentments to the products I buy and so am not loyal
I am an extremely loyal purchaser once I have made up my mind about what is the
best product
When I have not made up my mind I vacillate
When there are more than one product I like in a category I sleep around, so to
speak, and can be very promiscuous (wine is a good example)
When I am buying something from a category for the first time aesthetics control so
much of my decision making protocols - what it looks like is key and I rely on
design cue that basically say that product understands me
When I don't like any of the packaging this is when I become an instantly
disgruntled shopper
3. The process, once I got into it, was fun, easy and quite cathartic, and I am
sure with a bit of explanation anyone could use this same process easily on
themselves, but it does take time and thought.

I am left with the thought that this would be a very interesting process to do on a
larger scale, so that is what I am looking at doing next.watch this space.
Posted by Jonpuleston at 05:42
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