“Idle mind is devil’s workshop”, they said. True in my case, I guess, as I tread towards the place least expected to apply my concepts on consumer behaviour. It is a part of office life to visit the loo everyday – most people do! But then how many of us do realize that there is a trend in our reactions, a specific sub-conscious direction that we tend to follow when we push that door open to enter…

I happened to notice this when I realized that I had a tendency to constantly visit a particular loo-compartment almost every time I went through the routine. That was ‘my’ compartment – there was this belonging I felt when I entered that area; a kind of feeling that makes you feel at home… I decided to intentionally drag myself once, to another compartment to understand if it was just plain inertia, or a bunch of signals my brain sent across, when I pushed that big door open. No! Things seemed different. You suddenly feel you are in one of those simulated environments and suddenly they changed the landscape! A logical question that came to my mind was “Am I just reading more into things?” – the answer came when I started noticing some regulars at the loo follow a similar practice. Each one of them had their own favorite compartment, which they would go to blindly, if they did have a choice.

The bigger issue I can smell out of the loo-exercise is the familiarity that our brain develops to landscapes, abstract items, objects that actually never consciously attract any customer preference… Well this article has a two-pronged approach – (a) my logic relating the human mind and the land and the environment, and the bigger issue related to more of deciding on the perfect landscape / environment for the marketers. This article deals with the former. Loo-compartments and the case of the subconscious sense of belonging The first thought that came to my mind also led me to try to understand more about the so called “regulars”. Afterall, if I wanted to draw any correlation between their thinking and their habits, I would need to know more about them in the first place! Before we start off on this bizarre journey into my idle mind, let’s get the loo-geography into place, so that our minds can talk on the same levels.

The first person (henceforth A) was typically a shy person at work, not the kinds who would be boisterous and loud and make his presence felt on the floor. A bit low on confidence at times, but a decent worker nevertheless.

Loo compartment preferred – 1.

Second preference – 2.

The second person I studied – loud, laughing, making jokes – a person who tried to look macho, and tried to make himself heard all around the office floor. Preferred compartment – 3.

If you notice carefully, you’d realize that there is a peculiar pattern in the way we decide where we want to go, once we push open the door. The guy in the center would use the center compartment even if all others were vacant. At the same time, there are the “busy” ones, who would prefer compartment 4 or 5, mainly because maybe their mind triggered signals – “its Personal, and also closer to the door – go for it!”

Reasons may also depend on the kind of tool the person owns – feeling shy and secretive is so often seen in public urinals, where while some just don’t care if the gay guy next doors peeks, some try to cover and get as much privacy as possible. I also decided to accept that in addition to some mental reservations for their preferred compartments, the users certainly are also guided by inertia and are habitual users of their zones – much akin to what we do when we enter the store….you enter a supermart looking for a toothpaste – how else do you think that red pack of Colgate locks automatically to your focal radar? What I seek to project through this article is that perhaps the human mind makes a preference map even for those things where preference ideally wouldn’t matter consciously – you don’t wish everyday that Ramu brings the milk, but one day when a stranger arrives in the morning, you do feel that “change” in the routine, no matter how sleepily shut your eyes are!

Generally marketing theory has always assumed that consumers would have a preference map in their mind that would lead them to ask specifically for Brand A, when the market would have hundreds of “me-toos”. My theory just tries to extend the theory to claim that the preference map always exists – consciously for some items, subconsciously for others. The subconsciously triggered ones almost always happen as a ritual with the person not even realizing that he is doing such a thing. However there needs to be some starting trigger that would have led to creating the first prints of such a preference map in his/her minds – which may be both internal or extraneous to the user.

I used the innermost compartment because I am not proud of my tool….or maybe its just that the initial times when I came to this place, that was the only compartment available to me – a sort of habit that forms, and continues. Or maybe its just that there is some issue, such as cleaner bowls, proper water-flow etc., that led to the initial decision making process. Similar issues extend to what continues in Part 2 of this article, where we actually flush out the loo-tales and get down to business! (to be continued…)