The mental map
One of the most widely admired maps is that of the London Underground – though, technically, it is not a map at all; it is a schematic diagram. Its designer, Harry Beck, was an electrical engineer and the ‘map’ owes a great deal to electrical wiring diagrams.
Beck’s genius lay in deciding what to leave out; he concluded that people were less interested in the geographical fidelity of the map and principally wanted to know how the different stations and lines related to one another. So he produced a ‘map’ that was faithful to the layout of the network, but which was a complete distortion of geographical reality.
In central London, stations are typically much closer together than in the suburbs. Beck ignored this distinction in the interests of clarity. This can cause problems: the most common tube journey undertaken by tourists to London is that between Covent Garden and Leicester Square, on the Piccadilly Line. In reality, these stations are so close that it would be much quicker to walk between the two.
The real problem emerges when people forget that it is a map of the Underground and start treating it as a map of London. When Ogilvy moved to Sea Containers, on the riverbank, almost adjacent to the southern entrance of Blackfriars railway station, I was bemused to find a few colleagues complaining that their journey from King’s Cross or St Pancras was annoyingly circuitous. “Eh?” I countered: “Why don’t you just walk down the escalators at St Pancras and sit at the front of a southbound Thameslink train? It will drop you off 100 yards from the office door.”
“I didn’t know you could do that. Are you sure?”
After three or four of these complaints, I realised that (duh!) the Thameslink line is no longer displayed on the tube map. The same is true for all of south London’s commuter rail network. The effect of these omissions on traveller behaviour is enormous – when the Overground was added to the tube map, use of it increased fourfold in the first month. Try travelling from Lewisham to Charing Cross using the tube map and you’ll add 35 minutes to what could be a direct rail journey.
There is, I think, a direct analogy here with the use of economic theory to explain human behaviour. Just as the tube map is not a bad guide to using the Underground network, economic theory is a tolerable guide to understanding purely economic behaviour. But, to achieve its simplicity, economic theory leaves out much more than Beck did. It assumes perfect trust and perfect information – so it has no room for uncertainty, mistrust or the fear of regret. It doesn’t understand status, loyalty, habit or social copying. It has no time for marketing or advertising, as it assumes people know which products they want and how much they are prepared to pay for them. It certainly doesn’t understand brands. Like the tube map, it has come to serve a role for which it was not initially intended, and for which it is wholly unsuited.
Looked at through this lens, our jobs as marketers, market researchers, designers or creative people are the same; to ask whether there is a better route than on the standard-issue map. We need to become experts on the bus routes and south London railways of the human mind, and to find when hidden networks can be used to solve problems more easily.
This is why I am such a fan of behavioural science. It is adding a few valuable bus routes and rail lines to the established economic tube map. It is now possible within government to suggest human behaviour can be changed without always defaulting to economic incentives. Within business it is more acceptable to question standard economic orthodoxy.
The research community will be vital in fighting this battle. You have early access to questions and issues at a point before the problem has been fully defined, the route decided and tickets bought. The role you can play in asking a wider set of questions early on will be decisive. Any success in widening the repertoire of mental maps that businesses and policy-makers use will be more valuable if driven by researchers than by anyone else.
Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman, Ogilvy & Mather, UK

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