Eaon Pritchard talks to Richard Shotton about his new book, The Illusion of Choice, and the application of behavioural principles on marketing.
Why should marketers care about behavioural sciences?
I always say there are 3 good reasons why marketers should get to grips with behavioural science. First, what could be more relevant? It’s the study of decision making — and every marketer is aiming to influence decisions. Whether that’s a decision to buy or not, to switch brands, or to stop doing something. All of these involve switching your customers’ behaviour from what they’re doing now, to what you want them to do.
Second, it’s robust. In the past, I’ve felt frustrated at the finger-in-the-air approach to marketing, where we do things simply because they seem plausible. I love the fact that with behavioural science, we have decent evidence to go on. We should all be making marketing decisions based on the work of leading scientists and Nobel laureates rather than the loudest voice in the marketing team.
And third, range. There’s such a huge breadth of research that you will almost always find something to help solve your challenge. For all of these reasons — if you base your marketing on behavioural science, when you get into that meeting, your ideas are more likely to be heard, and more likely to work.
What’s your favourite practical application of a behavioural insight?
One of the biggest ideas in behavioural science is price relativity. We are really terrible at judging the value of something without having some kind of comparison. And this has been applied beautifully by Nestle, with their Nespresso coffee pods.
If they’d launched this coffee in half kilo bags, and charged the same price per gram as they do now, those bags would cost £40. Who would spend that much on coffee? It would feel like a barely legal rip-off.
But that’s not what Nestle did. They sold Nespresso in pods. And since each pod gives you a one-cup serving, the comparison set changes to a cup of cafe coffee. So customers judge the price in relation to a cappuccino from Starbucks. Suddenly, 50p for a pod of Lungo feels remarkably good value compared to £3. But 50p for a pod or £40 for a half kilo bag are the same per gram price.
Nestle have made billions from applying a behavioural tweak to their design — changing the comparator. I’ve seen a similar thing going on with alcohol-free gins. These are essentially herbal soft drinks. But call them non-alcohol “spirits” and market them as gin alternatives, and people are happy to pay ten times more than they do for a bottle of say, Ribena. It’s marketing genius really.
Why do you think that behavioural science principles are not being applied more widely?
I think there is still a degree of scepticism. Because sometimes, behavioural insights might suggest trying something that seems to run counter to what people say influences them when in a focus group. But the real issue lies with the research.
Often, market research relies on claimed data — and this is unlikely to reveal the significance of psychological biases for the simple reason that people are not aware of them.
An excellent demonstration of this is a study by Adrian North, a psychologist at the University of Leicester.
Over a two-week period, North alternated the ambient music in a supermarket wine aisle between German oompah and French accordion-style. The results were significant: when French music was played, wine sales were 83% French; with a German soundtrack, 65% of sales were German.
But crucially, when asked, just 2% of buyers attributed their selection to the background music. Even when prompted, 86% of people were certain that the music had no impact.
It’s not that these customers were lying — they were just unaware of their motivations. The reasons they gave for their decisions were post-rationalisations. With a traditional market research survey, you’d have received a lot of spurious data which could easily have sent you in the wrong direction.
So, if we continue to rely on claimed research, behavioural biases will appear to be insignificant influencers — and therefore not necessary as part of a campaign.
I would urge every marketer to try some research for themselves. Make simple tweaks in your customers’ decision-making environment and observe the difference in response across different settings. It can be a cost-effective way of uncovering people's real motivations. And it will reveal the potential of applied behavioural science.
What’s the most counter intuitive finding you’ve come across?
I particularly enjoy learning about and applying biases that seem counterintuitive at first, and there are a few that fall into that category. The most obvious of these is the pratfall effect.
Brands tend to show off, listing all the reasons why they’re brilliant. But some brands appear to do the opposite — the ones that immediately spring to mind are Guinness, VW Beetle and Avis.
They have respectively admitted they’re slow, ugly and unpopular. It makes a refreshing change.
Harvard psychologist, Elliot Aronson, suggests that they’re harnessing an interesting psychological bias to make themselves more appealing. It’s one that he demonstrated with his most famous experiment, in which he recorded an actor answering a series of quiz questions. In one strand of the experiment, the actor — armed with the right responses — answers 92% of the questions correctly. After the quiz, the actor then pretends to spill a cup of coffee on himself (a small blunder, or pratfall). The recording was played to a large sample of students, who were asked how likeable the contestant was.
However, Aronson split the students into groups and played them different versions: one with the spillage included, and one without. The students found the clumsy contestant more likeable.
Aronson called the insight that flaws make us more appealing “the pratfall effect”. An idea that VW, Guinness and Avis have brilliantly exploited. Admitting a flaw makes you appear self-effacing and perhaps more honest and trustworthy. Counterintuitive, but clearly it works.
What do you think makes your book stand out amongst all the others out there?
As you can tell, I am a strong advocate of behavioural science and the benefits it can bring to marketing. I really would love every marketer to apply it more systematically — my books aim to help them do this. There are other books discussing behavioural science, but none that are so easy to read, and with real world applications to learn from for every bias.
Both The Illusion of Choice, and my first book The Choice Factory — which covers a different set of biases — are designed to be super practical, and written so that you can dip in and out. So keep a copy of these books on your desk for frequent reference.
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