Getting to know the tribes: Couplers.

Moving Minds is a groundbreaking study that groups home movers into tribes according to their move motivations. It explores what these motivations tell us about each tribe’s mindset and investigates the behavioural psychology behind how this impacts decision making and purchasing behaviour.

We’ve been spending a lot of time getting to know these eight tribes. Recently we headed to the home of Joe & Hope, our Couplers from Coventry... 

Couplers are individuals who are ready to take the next step in their relationship. They’re committing to their first home together and to creating a new joint identity.

Mostly unencumbered by kids, they enjoy travel, socialising and styling their new home as an entertainment hub. A hub where they can show off their ‘couple life’ to friends and family.

While this is a hugely exciting time, they do have some mild trepidation about what the future holds. After all, can anyone ever be totally sure that the reality will match the promise?

What are their behaviours?

With a huge amount of emotional capital being invested into a new relationship, decision making is firmly focussed around building their interconnections – interconnections they need to bring them closer together as a couple and to make them harder to pull apart.

But the strength of these ties isn’t simply rooted in the act of shared ownership. It is rooted in the shared experiences and memories derived from the decisions they make. So, if they believe a decision will help bring them closer together, they’ll prioritise it.

How does this drive their purchase decisions?

We worked with Professor Richard Crisp, The Head of the Department of Psychology at Durham University to explore what might drive Couplers spending habits and purchase decisions.

“Couplers are coming together to create something new. In a psychological sense, this is really quite true. Studies have found that, over time, couples can unconsciously confuse their partner’s personality traits with their own.

 Based on the ‘Investment Model’ of relationship building, Couplers will be all about cementing their relationship with psychological bonds. These psychological bonds enable rapid merging of personal identities into the new social identity – ‘we’ as a couple. 

For instance, you’ll often hear new Couplers talking primarily of what ‘we’ like rather than what ‘I’ like. All this means that Couplers will likely be attracted to purchases that affirm and strengthen this new shared identity.

In a direct sense this means beds and bedroom furniture, and more generally anything that can fill a newly co-habited environment. There’ll be a tendency to go ‘out with the old’ (from former single lives) and ‘in with the new’ – anything that can be refreshed and redefined as a shared symbol of The Couple.

More generally, Couplers are all about creating a psychological investment that makes exiting unpalatable – so products and experiences that create shared memories may well appeal.

In sum, Couplers appear very much focused on building a new identity, but just as much for the internal satisfaction as external expression. They seem to have some spare time to think about how to do this.”

 

Download the full whitepaper to find out more about Moving Minds and our seven other tribes.