Don't bother buying TNS. Buy the University of Chicago instead.

879296 — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:37:00 GMT

I suppose it's probably too late to prevent Sir Martin spending another billion or so on yet another bunch of researchers. And it's not as though we can blame him. I would imagine this old research gig is pretty much a recession-proof activity, the demand for ass-covering and self-justification being largely inelastic.

My only quibble with all this stuff is - well, this. When you consider the $15bn spent each year on research (and bear in mind that our client, CR-UK, only gets to spend about $1bn a year on cancer research), I am horrified how few really useful insights into human behaviour seem to emerge.

I am, I suppose, a bit of a behaviourist. I am not all that interested in what people claim to think, or what they say they intend to do. To be honest, I have always had a lot of time for the line in the song Brownsville Girl wherein the prophet Bob claims that "people don't do what they say they believe, they do what's convenient and then they repent."

I am therefore a bit of an adland heretic in that I am not really convinced by the idea that changes in attitude necessarily precede changes in behaviour (as opposed to the other way around). I much prefer the economic concept of signalling to the adland idea of messaging, by which I mean that what an ad says about the brand seems to me far more important than what an ad actually says. I am also bemused at the extent to which marketers seek to build brands through claims rather than telling actions.

I suppose, in a sentence, I believe that, when faced with comprehensible choices, people generally act fairly wisely, though being subject to certain biases: when questioned on the reasons for their choice, however, people will invariably spout complete and utter shite.

I also believe that the best way you can add value to a client is by first looking at things from a behavioural perspective. Indeed the advertising idea I most admire from the last 20 years is the medium sized shopping trolley. When I was a kid, there were two ways to shop in a supermarket - a vast, deep trolley the size of a Hummer (which made you look a bit Catholic) or a small basket whose handles got painful once your shopping passed six items. Some genius in the early 80s must have noticed that people on entering a store were reluctant to take a large trolley as at the point of entry to the store they only intended to buy a few items. Later, half way through the store, the basket was simply too heavy for them, and prevented them from buying any but the smallest, lightest items. The medium-sized trolley has probably contributed billions in incremental retail sales.

At a more prosaic level, if you want to increase the response-rate to a mailing or email newsletter, don't always spend your time faffing about with new propositions - generally you'll get better results by improving the design of the order form.

There is thankfully now a ton of work being done in the field of behavioural economics - yet none of it seems to come from the $15bn spent on Market Research. Instead it seems to come from academia, in particular from academics such as Dan Ariely, Tyler Cowen, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (authors of the excellent Nudge). The hottest place of all seems to be the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business: their Capital Ideas online newsletter being dedicated to decision research.

Let me give you just one example of this. In a paper unerotically entitled “The Dilution Model: How Additional Goals Undermine the Perceived Instrumentality of a Shared Path” Ying Zhang, Ayelet Fishbach, and Arie W. Kruglanski find an inherent human bias which resists something called goal dilution - ie using one thing to achieve multiple ends. For instance, it seems people inherently believe that a combined laser pointer and pen won't be as good as a pen or as a pointer than two separate implements dedicated to a single purpose. You can view the podcast here.

Now if the research industry had spent a bit of its time finding out useful stuff like this, rather than compiling endless pointless tracking studies, a whole industry might have been spared a few billion trying and failing to sell the idea of convergence. Actually, it seems we prefer watch telly on a TV and listen to radio on a radio. Combine these two devices, and you may even reduce the value of the multi-purpose item.

And if we at Ogilvy had read this ten years ago, we would have realised that selling 360 services, while sometimes commendable, is always going to be a massive uphill struggle.

For years Robyn Putter has been vainly asking research staff to explain why his father bought an automatic car having spent a lifetime disparaging automatics. Perhaps he's been asking the wrong people. I suspect a couple of behavioural economists could probably explain it over a pint.

Search results matching tag 'Goal Dilution Behavioural Economics Research'

Don't bother buying TNS. Buy the University of Chicago instead.