Even though they might not realise it, people have an implicit theory about how advertising works – often based on long held assumptions about human behaviour. New research is challenging these assumptions and turning the way we think about how advertising works on its head.
Communications tools and theories often originate in the social sciences. The theory still underpinning much of our communications modelling is one favoured by the social scientists of the last century: that people are generally rational and their thinking is normally sound. Social scientists liked it as an implicit rejection of the crazy chaos that had led to millions of American and European fatalities in two world wars. Without realizing it, our ways of working, from seeking proof points to positioning statements to concept testing, tend to assume a stable and ordered view of the world. Underlying is the tacit assumption that because people respond to rational orderliness, if we persuade them with motivating facts, they will come.
The last century’s communications theorists were desperate to prove that advertising can be disentangled into a science. This started with Claude Hopkins and his book “Advertising Science”. The baton was passed on to Rosser Reeves and his demand for a Unique Selling Proposition. He believed that in fact “advertising is simply a substitute for a personal sales force”.
The trouble is that advertising does not in fact work like this, or hardly ever. It has been left to a succession of new thinkers in the twenty first century to explain why this is.
Byron Sharp, building on Ehrenburg’s original work, has conducted research at the Ehrenburg-Bass Institute demonstrating that successful brands are in fact primarily a function of physical and mental availability. Robert Heath’s research into ‘low involvement processing’ has shown that the best advertising actually works through emotional processing, not persuasion; that emotional content is processed most efficiently at low levels of attention, not high. Therefore, brand-building is best achieved through emotional advertising that generates positive feelings and gets associated with a brand through simple repetition, not rational persuasion.
Meanwhile, Les Binet and Robert Field interrogated the largest database of advertising case studies in the world: the IPA Effectiveness Papers from the last 30 years in the UK, 2000 in total. Their conclusions are stark. Campaigns that contain little or no product message but work instead by appealing to our emotions turn out to be significantly more effective than conventional ‘message’ advertising. Famous advertising generates even better returns. Most telling is this statistic: 28% of the case studies featuring campaigns based on emotional involvement reported very large effects on profitability; for rational campaigns, the figure is only 13%.
However, it is to the Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, Daniel Kahneman, an academic outside the world of communications entirely, that we must turn to understand why.
Over a lifetime of academic research, Kahneman has arrived at certain conclusions. The key one is that people are comfortable and competent at ‘fast’ or ‘hot’ thinking. We can work out what someone is thinking, feeling and how they are likely to behave from glancing at their face for literally two seconds. This is a great skill, and has been honed by the millions of years in which we have evolved to cope with sudden danger, but during which rational analysis was relatively far less important.
Consequently people really struggle with ‘slow’ or ‘cold’ thinking. To prove the point, here is a mathematical sum: 17 x 24. How does it feel working it out? Nearly everyone, bar the odd outlier, has the same experience. They either give up or get to an answer (often wrong) after great mental toil. It’s simply not what our brain is built for.
So, where are we? Essentially with a system of flow charts, slides and mental industry that funnels towards carefully wrought solutions that are then consumed unthinkingly and fast. Or “hot”.
Which is, by the way, not to say that there is never a role for rational communications. Sometimes this is what consumers are in the market for. But, if there is no emotional connection to the brand, they will fall on deaf ears. And even with rational advertising, as Binet has shown, it is far better if it is packaged to encourage a “hot” response – for example encouraging an immediate call to action: ring a number or click on a web address.
There is a fundamental mismatch in what we do. We generally serve cold advertising propositions to hot thinkers. Our basic model of how advertising works is therefore based on an error, and we have been working within it for the last fifty years.
Needless to say, this has major implications for all of us.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Nor do our communications solutions have to be vacuous. On the contrary, finding the right instinctive trigger in people’s minds that they can viscerally and immediately respond to is the task we’ve always had, and the challenge we need to grapple with for the future as well. We must deal with “unchanging man”, as Bill Bernbach once said, who remains the same after millions of years of evolution.
Here, then, are some examples, of recent advertising that understand how consumers respond immediately and enthusiastically to profound human insights. Sounds straightforward. However, the alternative in each case would have more been far more seductive, a more rational message – in fact messaging that each of the categories in which these brands operate is traditionally dominated by.
The first is “The Long Wait” for the retailer John Lewis in the UK The successful results by their wholehearted adoption of tearjerking Christmas commercials have been nothing short of phenomenal, resulting in a Grand Prix for effectiveness.
Secondly, Lindeman’s wine – a lovely demonstration of “The brighter side of life” for the wine, free of any hard sell.
Thirdly, Westpac’s home loan offer provides an insight into the strong undercurrent of conflicted emotion that accompanies the classic Aussie setpiece of the auction, rather than extolling product detail.
Ian Forth
Executive planning director
DDB Melbourne
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