Are we programmed to do MORE when we are MORE busy....?

It's a question I was asking myself every time I pulled into the local fuel station at off peak hours...because it seemed to me, that it took more time to tank up when there WASN'T a queue of cars ahead of me. Now this sounds like counterintuitive logic on the face of it - it should be faster when there's no queue, not slower, right? 

But I noticed that during off peak hours, the attendants had usually sauntered off, away from the filling machines. They hung around somewhere in the vicinity, (seemingly ready for some action)...but they were not off the blocks as fast as they were during the morning and evening rush hours. Infact, getting their attention during off peak hours, sometimes took longer than the time to tank up! 

I looked for similar 'symptoms' in other service establishments, and I was amazed at the number of places where one can see this phenomenon in action. From retail outlets to restaurants, from banks to airline counters. 

Wondering whether I was seeing ghosts where their were none, I decided to investigate this with a bit of internet research....and stumbled upon the inverted U principle. While there's been a lot of discourse around high stress's correlation with low performance, it seems low stress can also lead to low performance. Corollary: a certain amount of "stress" is essential to draw the best out of people. 

So here's what was happening at our fuel station....With a steady and continuous flow of cars in the morning and evening rush hours, it was all hands on deck  - alert, attentive, focussed on clearing the rush, and shortening the queues with a military drill like efficiency. But the subsequent lull seems to dull their speed. Moral of the story - as long as the car queue is not extending all the way to the road outside and causing a jam, the petrol station will deliver faster service when you stop during the morning rush hour, than when you stop by when traffic is lean.

What does this mean for corporates?
When more resources are 'free', things should move faster, but they don't in the real world. Since we seem to do MORE (not less) when we are MORE busy, gentle pressure at the workplace is essential to get things moving. So don't complain next time your bosses give you tight deadlines - they are merely attempting to maximise your performance.

NOTE: The ‘Inverted-U’ idea has not been proved formally. Also different peoples definitions & evaluations of stress and performance would vary in different situations/ circumstances. If there were a mathematical study on this, the curve would probably not be as smooth...

The missing link...in the "health trap"

A few days back there was a piece in a leading news daily on the withdrawal of various 'better for you'/ healthy food products from the Indian marketplace. This in itself is not a strange occurrence - failure of so-called healthy food products, even from well-known, established brands happens with episodic regularity. Within companies, the steady downward sales trajectory of such products is often accompanied by some amount of hand wringing, and some wonderment at how the marketplace performance could be so different from the research performance. And thereby hangs a tale....

Some years ago, I had written about the Indian consumers’ relationship with health being rife with seemingly paradoxical situations, all with their own “consumer logic” (click here for link to article), and the wide gap between "desire" for health, and "action" to achieve that health. While all that is still relevant in understanding why many healthy products have struggled in India (and continue to be niche), today I am going to focus on just one very critical aspect of how research typically gets done, which accentuates this missing link.

Everybody is pretty much agreed that there is of course the consumers' rational mind that comes to the fore in research. But that is only a part of the story....

Let us imagine a scenario where many consumers genuinely believe that the products which are low fat, low salt, low cal, do help them in being healthy. But what perhaps gets left unsaid in research is that low fat, low salt, low cal is more of a shorthand for 'better ADULT health': because the definition of what is considered healthy for adults, and what is considered healthy for children is often two different things. For example, while the absence of ghee/ butter in a food is seen as a healthy step in the right direction for adults, its presence, it's very richness, is felt to be a contributor towards health of growing children. 

Companies tend to look at products through the lens of adults (the target respondents in research), but the bulk of Indian households look at products, and make purchase decisions, through the lens of children in the household. 

There is a very telling information table on the share of household type compiled by Euromonitor for countries across the world. Single person household and couples without children make up only 17% of family units in India. Corresponding figure for Canada is 57% and 50% for UK/US.

In sum...
Research with gatekeepers of households tends to magnify the gap between desire and action on health related products...and leads to a bigger gap in marketplace performance. 

The solution is not in what you see to to the left. Nor is it in more research or more research with children (or other segments), but in looking at the totality of what we know, see, experience about the Indian consumers' idiosyncrasies when it comes to food and health. It always pays to go beneath the surface, and nowhere is this more true than in the area of health.