Richard Shotton in seven

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1:  Has the prevalence of digital media channels dampened the ability of advertising to persuade us?

Digital tracking makes it easy to measure the short-term impact of advertising. Unfortunately, people place too much emphasis on what is easy to measure and ignore factors that are harder to measure. As the long-term effect of advertising is trickier to pinpoint, this has led to marketers investing in an unbalanced manner – too much demand harvesting, too little demand generation. That’s not the fault of digital; it’s the fault of the industry misusing the medium.

2: Is the media industry concerned with measuring the wrong things?

Yes. For example, it is unduly concerned about the trust crisis. It’s a fiction. Various reports claim trust in brands or ads is in decline. But if you look at the data – even that produced by organisations claiming there is a crisis – you see a different story. Trust in brands is broadly flat.

3: ‘Brand purpose’: essential or irrelevant?

Neither. Purpose seems to be an area where nuance gets lost. Sometimes it’s a useful tactic, sometimes not.

4: Is today’s economic uncertainty conducive to the application of behavioural science?

Yes, it’s more important than ever that we understand and align with how customers tick, so we can continue to grow – or just survive. A big shift right now is in people’s sensitivity to price. Customers are looking for deals that feel like a bargain. There are some very important behavioural biases that can help brands meet this need. For example, extremeness aversion. This essentially means that consumers, when deciding on a purchase, tend towards the mid-priced option as a proxy for the moderate pathway. The middle seems a sensible compromise: strong enough on quality without too hefty a price tag.

5: What is the most misunderstood behavioural bias?

Social proof. Not because we don’t get what it means – it’s clear that people follow the crowd. It’s more that we could be smarter about how we use the bias.

It’s fine – and effective – to use phrases such as ‘200,000 copies sold’, but even better to take a more subtle, lateral approach. For example, when Red Bull launched, it filled rubbish bins around London – next to bars, pubs, university campuses, and nightclubs – with empty, crushed Red Bull cans, creating the illusion of popularity. That’s what I would call a lateral application of social proof.

6: Behavioural science is mostly discussed in the brand-to-customer (B2C) context. How else should businesses be applying psychological approaches?

I find it fascinating that we marketers somehow think of business customers as robotic decision-makers, rather than as human as the rest of us. We’re missing an opportunity if we don’t apply the same psychological biases in B2B as we do in B2C. My favourite demonstration of this is among doctors, who pride themselves on rational evidence-based medical decisions. But a 2018 study by David Olshan, Charles Rareshide and Mitesh Patel, at the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit, shows they are as susceptible to behavioural biases as anyone.

7: If choice is an illusion, what implications does that have for how researchers ask questions and understand customer behaviour?

Consumers might think they are choosing freely, but they can never be aware of all the prompts to which they are implicitly responding, or the context that might be influencing their decisions. So, there’s a limit to what can be gained from asking someone why they chose a certain option; they won’t be able to tell you the whole story.

You need to use mixed-methods research, with a focus on observed data, rather than asking customers to post-rationalise purchase decisions.
Monadic testing is one such method. Split your customer set into groups and show the groups versions of a message with one key difference. Then observe the response, rather than showing multiple versions at once and asking them to choose.