Campaign

This is worth 20 minutes......

The best kept secret of the Internet for Brits may be American Public Radio. The initials NPR usually are taken to stand for National Public Radio, unless you are right of centre (in which case you claim they stand for National Pinko Radio) or perhaps Zionistically minded (in which case it's known as National Palestinian Radio). Which said, regardless of your politics, the quality of the best programming is spectacular and an instant riposte to Europeans who see Americans as unintellectual or even sometimes a bit thick. 

Think Radio 4 times ten.

 A lot of the best programming seems to be produced by WGBH in Boston, KQED in California and WFMT and WBEZ in Chicago. Much of it is podcasted. Including this fascinating fifteen minutes (start from 8'45" in) which I heard in the car on the way to Bluewater this morning (I love the disjointed feeling you get listening to overseas media when driving). In this segment, the daughter of Julian Koenig (he of Papert, Koenig Lois) celebrates her father's genius (and rather disparages that of George Lois). In the interests of balance, I should point out that Sarah Koenig is a Producer of This American Life for WBEZ, and it seems a bit odd using your employer's airtime to settle old family scores. On the other hand I never knew JK invented Earth Day or thumb-wrestling (in its way just as great an achievement as writing Think Small).

200 years after his birth, will marketers discover Darwin?

The great Drayton Bird once related a rather damning criticism of advertising once made by a client of his. "You advertising people.... you go very deeply into the surface of things, don't you?"

It is of course true. Yet half of me feels no need to apologise for this bias. The importance of the superficial is hugely underrated. As Matthew Taylor remarked last week at the IPA's 44 Club, we can talk about quantitative easing as much as we like, but Gordon brown's electoral fate has been sealed not by his macroeconomic policy decisions but by a tendency to display bizarrely demented face movements which appear like some early failed attempt at Supermarionation.

Yet there is one form of shallowness in our business that does pain me. The fact that, as I remarked in my IPA inaugural speech, our models of human behaviour and persuasion are so pathetically shallow and make no attempt to place our discipline within any evidence-based scientific framework. "Rather like astrologers," I said, quoting my colleague Alasdair Graham, "we use a language which is convincing to fellow converts but sounds suspiciously like bollocks to anyone else."

 Or, as I wish I had said, "Marketers still use simplistic models of human nature that remain uninformed by the past twenty years of research into human nature - research by evolutionary anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists..... as a result, they don't have access to a good map of the human mind, or of the brave new semiotic world in which it dwells. What marketers need is Darwin." 

The reason I did not quote this sentence - along with many others by its author - is simply that they had not been published when I made the speech. This needle-sharp assessment (though I would add behavioural economists and information economists to his list) comes from Spent, by Geoffrey Miller, a Darwinian Professor of Behavioural Psychology who has decided to investigate (with a healthy mixture of fascination and horror) the deeper origins of consumerism.

 Alongside Steve Harrison's, this in the one book on marketing and advertising you should read this year. (In fact it is interesting that Steve Harrison's book also includes a plea for better human insight and cites both Alex Bogusky's and Bill Bernbach in their preference for anthropologists over trend-spotters and other surface-skaters).

Now, in our defence (and Miller acknowledges this), it is only in the last few years that economists and psychologists have been prepared to speak to marketers. For years, the right wing within academia (often economists) didn't like to acknowledge us because we disturbed their neo-classical model and the idea of the perfectly rational agents who operated within it. So much so, that The Economist for years employed an advertising correspondent who seemed to despise advertising. On the other hand, the Left (usually social scientists) didn't like us because they thought we manipulated people into buying Hummers. It is only in recent years that a few people outside marketing have been prepared to overcome their initial distaste to discover that our job is an area worthy of study.

But in my view it is vital that we extend a hand of welcome to these people. Not least because we have quite a lot to contribute, as well as even more to learn. But also because it will be impossible for us to preach the value of marketing beyond the choir if we continue to speak only Marketingese - a language unintelligible to outsiders - rather than finding a shared vocabulary with people whose frame of reference stretches a little further than ours - and which is grounded on some solid scientific foundations rather than on mere marketing case-law. 

  I should reveal a few prejudices here. I am a bit right wing, and also a bit Anglocentric. If I am asked to connect what we do to the world of big ideas, for me that means Adam Smith not Marx, Darwin not Freud, Dawkins not Derrida. I would be perfectly happy to accommodate testable theories from elsewhere. But we must realise that, while we may be obsessed with the superficial, this does not mean that what we do is trivial or should driven by the fleeting whims of fashion.

Bernbach was convinced that the fundamentals of human nature don't change much; in fact they may be even older than he thought. In a passage that will fascinate Mark Earls, many herd animals (including dogs) exhibit many of the personality types of humans, as do most higher primates, cats, ferrets and (weirdly) hedgehogs. This stuff is older than us. 

As if that wasn't enough, Miller also socks it to demography and that old planner's crutch Maslow. Not before bloody time.

 Buy this book.

Another book recommendation

Open source brief number one. Solve the "problem" of saving.

I have just been reading Animal Spirits. Subtitled: How Human Psychology drives the economy and why it matters for global capitalism.  It's a surprisingly readable book - and coauthored by George Akerlof, a man who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001 for a 1970 paper entitled "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism".

Akerlof's Lemons paper should be interesting to marketing folk on two counts.

For one thing, the article spawned a discipline known as information economics - along with useful concepts such as signalling, this field has created an area of study invaluable to anyone who wants to present the economic case for building brands.
 

The second interesting thing about the Nobel-prize-winning paper is that, before it was finally published, it was repeatedly rejected by academic journals on the grounds that its subject-matter was too trivial to be worth printing. Which suggests that, just as advertising does, high-level academia has that category of work which somehow straddles the line between infantilism and genius. I suppose Compare the Meerkat, Shake 'n' Vac and (greatest of all) www.rainhamsheds.co.uk would all be examples of this kind of work. A magical type of work which, incidentally, the planning function in advertising, with its tedious reliance on logic, tends to destroy. But I digress.

Reading the  book above, I came across this interesting paragraph, in which the authors ask why, if we are all so driven by rationality, personal rates of saving in China are nearly 20% of GDP while in the US they are near zero.
 

"The Governments of both the United States and China have wanted to promote personal saving for many decades. Since the early 1950s the US has promoted saving with special tax incentives, such as individual retirement accounts, 401(k) and 403(b) plans and savings bond campaigns.

"In communist China, where there was no income tax, efforts to spur saving took the form of propaganda campaigns.... A 1953 paper shows a group of happy, smiling workers turning in cash for government bonds at the People's Bank of China. A 1990 poster shows a smiling Lei Feng...writing the word 'save' on a money box. In the 1990s big red banners were hung in the streets: 'Saving is Glorious'. These campaigns, which made saving everyone's patriotic duty, set the stage for today's high savings rates."

This raises a few questions. First of all, why - other for psychological reasons - do the Chinese save more than even fairly wealthy Americans? If logic were the driver, would it not be the other way round? After all, perhaps more than 50% of Americans have more material possessions than they can possibly need, while many of the frugal Chinese are living in meagre circumstances. This is a massive behavioural difference - it drives the entire world economy - and yet it is not merely affected by "animal spirits", it is exclusively driven by them.

A second question.  Why is it considered ethically acceptable for the government to use tax-payers' money to create tax breaks for savers, whereas it would be considered wasteful for the government to spend a fraction of this money advertising the virtues of saving? Especially when the Chinese approach seems to be many times more effective at changing behaviour.

But another, more important question: what is behind this staggering behavioural difference, and is there anything you can do to change it? To make Americans and Brits save even adequately.


It may be that there is nothing we can do. That the whole Chinese behaviour is rooted in Confucianism and hence is impossible to replicate without a few thousand years of cultural indoctrination.

Or it may be a very different reason: one theory I have even seen advanced is that, because the Chinese are indiscreet about money (you can routinely ask someone their salary without seeming rude) they don't need to buy expensive goods in order to convey their wealth to other people: you don't need to buy a BMW when you can just go around like Harry Enfield's Brummie character telling people how rich you are.  Or is it perhaps a question of choice architecture - that Westerners are faced with so many competing investment opportunities they just can't be bothered to choose between them? Or is it simply that their dictators are more trustworthy than our bankers?

Whatever your answer, the difference is psychologically driven, and could submit to marketing-led approaches?


There may even be a very simple stimulus required to change things.... Tesco letting you save at the checkout? Social networks making your savings visible?

The fact is that indidual savings levels are amazingly arbitrary. And marketing is good at influencing the arbitrary.


You're a marketer. What's your answer?