What Consumer Behavior Tells You About Marketing
- MidAmerican Printing
- Feb 8, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 16, 2021
The New Coke. Pizza Hut Low-Calorie Pizza. Earring Magic Ken. What do all of these have in common? They are products that consumers said they wanted, but when the products were introduced, they flopped.
As consumer behavioral consultants know, consumers often have little true understanding of what motivates their shopping decisions. They may say one thing, but they are often unaware of the subconscious influences that influence their choices. This is why smart marketers pay less attention to what their customers say and more attention to what they do.
Philip Graves, renowned consumer behavioral consultant (Consumer.ology) gives the following examples from the wine industry:
When wine stores played classical music rather than pop, consumers spend three times as much when shopping for a bottle of wine.
When researchers switched labels to show the wine as being made in a more desirable region, consumers rated that wine more highly.
Brain scans indicated that participants genuinely experienced more pleasure when drinking the re-labeled wine, even though the wine itself was the same.
What should this tell you? That you should be using metrics on each and every piece of print marketing. You should be regularly changing up the elements to see how customers react. What will they do if you use this image instead of that one? Does it make a difference if you change the wording? What if you offer a different incentive or use different timing? Monitor the responses and see what happens.
This is how Google found out that its customers prefer smaller, faster maps over the larger ones. Its market research indicated that consumers wanted the maps to be larger, but when it followed the research and enlarged the maps, map traffic actually dropped. When Google changed its maps to smaller, faster versions, map traffic increased by 23%!
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Interesting insights on how understanding consumer behavior can help businesses create better marketing strategies. Knowing what people value and how they make decisions is essential for building trust and long-term relationships.
The same idea applies to service industries as well. Customers often look for reliability, transparency, and quality when choosing professionals like an asphalt paving contractor. Understanding customer needs is what helps any business deliver better results.
Consumer behavior provides valuable insights into how people discover, evaluate, and purchase products or services. By understanding customer preferences, motivations, and buying patterns, businesses can create more effective marketing strategies, improve customer experiences, and increase conversions. Analyzing consumer behavior also helps companies refine product offerings, optimize pricing, and better position solutions such as burden carriers, dumpster movers, and other industrial equipment to meet market demand and customer needs.
This article explains how consumer behavior helps marketers understand buying patterns, preferences, and decision making. I liked how it connects psychology with marketing strategies in a practical way. While preparing a consumer research assignment, I once searched to do my assignment for me support to structure my findings more clearly. Understanding consumer behavior is key to building effective marketing campaigns. nice post
Such a well-written post and honestly one of the most underrated topics in entrepreneurship — trust isn't something you can manufacture overnight, it's built through consistent ethical behavior over time. The point about prioritizing integrity over short-term benefits is so important because so many early-stage entrepreneurs make the mistake of cutting corners for quick wins, not realizing that one unethical decision can permanently damage a reputation that took years to build. What really resonated is the idea of trusting your product and trusting yourself — because confidence is contagious, and if you genuinely believe in what you're building and stay true to your original vision, that energy naturally attracts the right partners and customers. For young entrepreneurs especially, understanding that…