As is perhaps par for the course in ‘think pieces’, this one starts with the fact I came across a study recently that got me thinking about what ostensibly is a fairly simple question.
Think back to the person you were five years ago. Now imagine yourself five years from today. Which of those two people feels more like you?
My instinct was that the person in the past would feel closer. After all, I know him. I can remember what he did, what sort of things he cared about and some of the decisions he made. It is concrete, or at least salient. The future version is, by definition, imaginary.
Apparently, most of us see it the other way round.
The study published this summer in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin looked at this across 12 studies involving more than 11,000 people in nine countries. Participants tended to see their future selves as more similar to who they are today than equally distant versions of themselves in the past.
Can you see the nice little trap in that? We can see how much we have changed because we have the evidence: jobs we once thought were perfect, clothes we wore, things we spent money on, opinions we would now rather prefer not to have quoted back to us. But when we look forwards, we tend to start with the person we are today and extend the line out, it is a line of betterment and the past shows the iterations from a more inferior you.
The researchers found something else too. People expected their future selves to be happier with decisions made today than they themselves were with equivalent decisions made by their past selves.
So I can look at a decision made by 2016 me and think, “Well, I wouldn’t do that now”, while remaining pretty confident that 2036 me will appreciate the excellent judgement displayed by 2026 me.
And, happily for someone in my industry and sphere of work, there’s probably quite a lot of consumer behaviour tucked up in there.
Psychologists and economists have studied a related phenomenon, projection bias, for some time: our tendency to assume that future tastes will resemble current ones more than they really will. Some of the evidence is charmingly mundane. People buy more cold-weather clothing when the weather happens to be cold when they order it, and are subsequently more likely to return it. See also portable aircon units this summer.
The same effect appears in much bigger decisions. Research covering tens of millions of car transactions and millions of house purchases found that the weather at the time of purchase affected choices including convertibles, four-wheel drives and, in a rather obvious reveal for where this study took place, how much buyers appeared prepared to pay for houses with swimming pools or air con. It’s self evident that a hot day can apparently make a swimming pool look like a more enduring feature of the life you want than it will seem in February.
All of which is mildly amusing when such a mistake is an unused coat. It becomes rather more interesting when the thing lasts a decade or more.
Consider buying a new kitchen. You are choosing it for a household that will change while the kitchen remains literally and figuratively unmoved. Children get older. People work differently. Parents become less mobile. The person who currently enjoys time consuming or otherwise elaborate cooking may not always do so. The huge island designed around a convivial bunch of people eating together may eventually accommodate two laptops a week’s post and an abandoned bowl of bananas.
Yet most kitchen-buying journeys quite reasonably concentrate on establishing what you want now and in the near term. How do you cook? What do you like? Which finish? Which appliances? How much storage? Sensible questions all, but they nevertheless assume that the customer answering them is a reasonable proxy for the customer who will still be living with those answers ten years down the line.
It’s a problem we wrestled with on AGA as an even clearer example. It is an unusually emotional purchase with an unusually long physical life. Someone can be buying a particular idea of home as much as an appliance, while making assumptions about how they will cook, entertain, use energy and organise their household many years into the future.
Cars too compress the same problem albeit into a shorter ownership cycle. A customer configuring a £70,000 car measurable can spend a remarkable amount of time deciding on wheels, trim, seats and tech while making shakier assumptions about the things that will more reliably determine whether the car actually suits them: mileage, commuting, children, dogs, mobility, where they live or whether they can charge at home. In which circumstances a configurator is very good at helping them specify the car they desire today. It is less interested in whether the car makes sense for the life they are likely to have whilst owning it.
Perhaps then the broader problem is that businesses are generally better at designing for differences between customers than for changes within the same customer. We segment people, research their needs and optimise journeys around what they tell us. Then, at the point of purchase, we implicitly freeze them in place.
Now, that lens becomes particularly interesting when the organisation, as most of course do, measures success at the point of conversion. In the examples above, the customer has ordered the kitchen, signed the finance agreement or placed the deposit, so the data point shows the journey worked. But that only tells us that the system was effective at producing a transaction. It says nothing about whether the decision aged well.
By way of a thought experiment then, imagine putting the following question halfway through a checkout:
“Under what reasonably foreseeable changes in your life would this stop being a good decision?”
Reader, your optimisation or conversion teams may reasonably object and, asked literally, it sounds like the business has decided suicidally to introduce doubt at precisely the moment it should be trying to remove it. But it is not a literal suggestion but rather a usefully provocative question for the people designing the whole purchase system.
What future changes could make this purchase wrong? Which can reasonably be anticipated? Where should the customer be helped to think about them, and where would that simply create needless anxiety? Can the product or service adapt later if those circumstances change?
A kitchen company might instead therefore help someone consider how a space works as children grow up or mobility changes. A retailer of high-end cast iron stoves might talk honestly about seasonal use, running costs and how people actually live with the product over many years. A car journey could surface likely changes in annual mileage, charging access or family use before somebody has spent a Sunday morning deciding between two varieties of tan leather.
This is less a matter of adding another clever question to the website than deciding what a good outcome actually is. Sometimes removing uncertainty will help the customer. Sometimes the same uncertainty is telling you something useful about the decision. For an expensive, long-lived purchase, someone who has never seriously considered whether the thing will continue to suit them may be very confident at checkout and considerably less confident six months later. Whereas someone whose reasonable doubts have been explored and answered may take slightly longer to decide, but they may also be less likely to cancel, regret the purchase or feel they were pushed into it.
That may be commercially useful in ways a purist conversion dashboard struggles to see. The sale still matters, obviously. But how can we ensure also continues to look like a good one once the customer has become somebody slightly different?
AI: I used AI to do some research to freshen up my knowledge of the specific behavioural biases at work and to stop me circling the point too many times. It produced an extract of the post and the tag list. The words however are therefore mostly mine.
John Gibbard 