How Customers Think

1. Most New Products Fail: Marketing Doesn't Understand Customers.

Despite the resources spent on market research, nearly 80 percent of new offerings fail.

Predictable failure pattern. Companies often create products based on what customers say they want, but customers don't buy them. This high failure rate (around 80%) persists despite significant investment in market research, indicating a fundamental misunderstanding of customer behavior. The core issue isn't that customers don't know what they want, but that conventional marketing tools fail to uncover their true, deeper desires.

Surface-level insights. Traditional methods like surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups only scratch the surface of customer thinking. They rely on conscious, articulated responses, which represent a small fraction of what truly drives purchasing decisions. This leads to a disconnect between stated intentions and actual buying behavior, frustrating both companies and consumers.

Need a new approach. To succeed, marketers must move beyond flawed paradigms and dig deeper into how customers think, not just what they say. Understanding the dynamic interplay between consumer and marketer thoughts – the "mind of the market" – is essential for creating offerings that truly resonate and succeed in the marketplace.

2. The Unconscious Mind Drives 95% of Decisions.

95 percent of thinking happens in our unconscious.

Vast unconscious influence. The vast majority of our thoughts, emotions, and learning occur outside of conscious awareness. This "cognitive unconscious" is a complex mix of memories, emotions, and cognitive processes that profoundly shape our decisions and behavior, far more than the small portion we are consciously aware of.

Consciousness explains, not controls. While consciousness allows us to reflect on our actions and make considered judgments, it often serves to make sense of behavior after it has occurred. Relying solely on conscious self-reports from consumers provides a woefully incomplete picture of their motivations and decision-making processes.

Beyond articulation. Forces that consumers are unaware of or struggle to articulate significantly shape their behavior. Emotions, for instance, are fundamentally unconscious and require special techniques to surface. Marketers who ignore this vast unconscious realm miss the most powerful drivers of consumer action.

3. Traditional Research Methods Miss Deep Customer Truths.

...marketing’s most overused tools— surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups— and conventional thinking don’t dig deeply enough...

Limited to the surface. Standard market research methods primarily access conscious thought, which accounts for only about 5% of cognition. They rely on verbal reports and direct questioning, which are insufficient for uncovering the deep, unconscious drivers of consumer behavior.

Method limitations:

• Surveys: Good for tracking familiar issues, but miss new or deeply held attitudes.
• Focus Groups: Limited air time per person, susceptible to groupthink, don't build trust for deep sharing, lack scientific foundation for uncovering unconscious thought.
• Direct Observation: Valuable, but cannot access internal thoughts and feelings.

Mismatch with reality. There is a significant mismatch between how consumers experience and think about their world (largely unconsciously, non-verbally, and emotionally) and the methods marketers use to collect information (largely consciously, verbally, and rationally). This leads to misinterpretations and ineffective strategies.

4. Metaphor: The Language of the Unconscious Mind.

Metaphors, the representation of one thing in terms of another, often help us express the way we feel about or view a particular aspect of our lives.

Unlocking hidden thoughts. Metaphors are fundamental to human thought and communication, occurring frequently in everyday language. They serve as powerful tools for bringing unconscious thoughts and feelings to a level of awareness where they can be explored.

Beyond literal language. By inviting consumers to express themselves through metaphors (including images, analogies, etc.), researchers can uncover deep insights that literal language often misses or underrepresents. This is why techniques like metaphor elicitation are increasingly used in clinical psychology and market research.

Embodied cognition. Many metaphors are rooted in our sensory and motor systems ("I see what you mean," "get the point"). This "embodied cognition" highlights how abstract thought is often grounded in physical experience, further emphasizing the non-verbal, unconscious nature of thinking. Understanding these deep, universal metaphors (like journey, balance, transformation) is crucial for connecting with consumers.

5. Memory Isn't a Snapshot; It's Reconstructed.

But our memories are far more creative— and malleable— than we might expect.

Dynamic and changing. Contrary to the common metaphor of memory as a fixed snapshot, memories are constantly changing and reconstructed each time they are recalled. They are influenced by current cues, goals, moods, and new experiences, often without our conscious awareness.

Marketing shapes memory. Marketers play a significant role in shaping consumers' memories of products and experiences. Advertising and other touchpoints can influence not only what people remember, but how they remember it, altering the perceived quality or nature of a past experience (backward framing).

False memories possible. Research shows that advertising can even lead to the creation of false memories of events that never occurred. This highlights the powerful, often unconscious, influence marketers have on consumers' internal representations of their experiences.

6. Customers Are Integrated Systems: Mind, Brain, Body, Society.

The most troubling consequence of the existing paradigm has been the artificial disconnection of mind, body, brain, and society.

Seamless interconnectedness. The traditional marketing paradigm often treats the customer's mind, brain, body, and social context as separate entities. In reality, they form a single, dynamic, and mutually influencing system. You cannot understand one part without considering its interaction with the others.

Beyond the individual. Social and cultural forces profoundly shape our brains, minds, and even physical responses. What is considered a delicacy in one culture might cause disgust in another, demonstrating how social context impacts biological reactions.

Sponges, not pellets. Humans are like sponges, saturated by their environment, rather than hard pellets rattling around independently. Understanding consumers requires focusing on the interactions within this integrated system, not just examining isolated components.

7. The "Mind of the Market" Emerges from Interaction.

When consumers and marketers interact— both of them operating from this maelstrom of mental activity— something called the mind of the market emerges.

Mutual influence. The "mind of the market" is the dynamic outcome of the interaction between marketers' and consumers' conscious and unconscious minds. Both parties bring their complex internal worlds, shaped by their own brain-body-mind-society systems, to the interaction.

Marketer bias. Marketers' own unconscious assumptions and expectations influence the research questions they ask, how they frame them, and how they interpret responses. This can subtly shape the information consumers provide and distort the marketer's understanding.

Consumer response. Consumers' responses are also influenced by unconscious processes, including priming and the context of the interaction. The messages consumers take away may be very different from what the marketer intended, highlighting the co-created nature of meaning in the marketplace.

8. Consensus Maps Reveal Shared Mental Models.

Consensus maps, when surfaced through metaphors, reflect consumers’ unconscious and conscious thoughts and feelings as well as the commingling of emotion and reason.

Bundles of thought. Individual thoughts don't exist in isolation; they bundle together and interact, forming networks called mental models. These models help us interpret information and decide how to act.

Shared structures. Despite individual differences, groups of people (market segments) share important features of their mental models about a topic. These shared structures, called consensus maps, represent the convergence of consumer thinking.

Strategic insights. Consensus maps are powerful strategic tools. They reveal the key constructs (thoughts/feelings) and the connections between them that drive consumer behavior in a segment. Understanding these maps allows marketers to:

• Identify key drivers of behavior.
• Evaluate current positioning relative to consumer thinking.
• Identify opportunities for reengineering consumer thinking.
• Define market segments based on shared reasoning processes.

9. Brands Are Stories Customers Co-Create.

All brands have a story, a story that consumers tell themselves when they reach for the product in the store to buy it.

Beyond attributes. Brands are more than just physical products or services; they are stories. These stories are not simply injected by marketers through advertising, but are actively created by consumers based on their experiences, memories, and existing mental models.

Storytelling is remembering. We remember by telling stories, and the stories we create are the memories we have. Marketers influence these stories by providing cues, experiences, and narratives that consumers weave into their own personal brand narratives.

Archetypes and core metaphors. Effective brand stories often tap into universal human archetypes (hero, journey, transformation) and core metaphors. These deep, shared structures resonate across cultures and provide a powerful foundation for building meaningful brand connections that go beyond surface-level attributes.

10. Belief and Expectation Drive Real "Placebo" Effects.

Much of marketing is about placebo effects.

Mind influences body. The "placebo effect" demonstrates the powerful influence of belief and expectation on physical and psychological outcomes. Our beliefs can trigger real biological changes, equivalent in effect to active treatments.

Marketing placebos. In marketing, consumers' beliefs and expectations about a brand or product can add significant value to their consumption experience, above and beyond the product's technical merits. Knowing a product is your favorite brand can make it feel better, even if it's identical to a generic version in a blind test.

Co-created value. This added value is co-created by the consumer's mind, often unconsciously, based on cues provided by the marketer (brand name, packaging, advertising). Understanding and leveraging these "marketing placebo effects" is crucial for building brand loyalty, especially for commodity products.

11. New Methods Tap the Unconscious: Implicit Measures & Neuroimaging.

Implicit measures offer two benefits that make them better predictors of behavior than explicit measures such as surveys.

Accessing the hidden. To understand the 95% of unconscious thought, marketers need methods that go beyond conscious self-report. New techniques are emerging from psychology and neuroscience to tap into this hidden realm.

Implicit Measures:

• Response Latency (e.g., Priming, IAT): Measure the speed of association between concepts, revealing implicit beliefs and attitudes that consumers may not be aware of or accurately report. Often better predictors of actual behavior than explicit measures.

Neuroimaging:

• fMRI, fDOT: Directly observe brain activity while consumers process marketing stimuli. Can reveal emotional responses, memory encoding, and conceptual associations at a neurological level.

Complementary tools. These methods are not replacements for traditional research but valuable complements. They provide insights into how consumers process information and the unconscious reactions that drive behavior, allowing for a more complete understanding of the mind of the market.

12. Managers Must Adopt New Thinking Habits.

The difference between creating an idea and imitating someone else’s is the difference between a Picasso and graffiti.

Beyond the box. Understanding customers deeply requires marketers to challenge their own conventional thinking and embrace new ideas from diverse disciplines. This isn't about magic, but about disciplined imagination and adopting new cognitive habits.

Cultivating creativity:

• Favor restlessness: Continuously seek improvement and question the status quo.
• Wonder about anomalies: Look for irregularities in data and consumer behavior.
• Play with data: Actively explore and rearrange information to find new meaning.
• View conclusions as beginnings: Use research findings to generate new questions.
• Get outdated: Actively seek out new knowledge to make current practices obsolete.
• Nurture cool passion: Balance emotional engagement with reasoned skepticism.
• Have courage: Stand by convictions, even when challenged by "Yeah, buts."
• Ask generic questions: Explore fundamental human/social processes relevant to marketing.
• Avoid premature dismissal: Evaluate ideas based on potential consequences if true.

Organizational climate matters. These habits thrive in environments that value curiosity, encourage experimentation, tolerate errors, and actively seek knowledge from outside the marketing silo. Leaders must model these behaviors to foster a truly innovative culture.

Last updated: June 21, 2025