For all our varying proclivities, we humans can be utterly predictable. It’s why, for brands, the key to success is understanding why we do what we do – and then triggering us to do it.
It’s something Richard Shotton knows all about. The former media planner has just produced his third book on the subject, Hacking the Human Mind: The Behavioural Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World’s Best Brands, with co-writer MichaelAaaron Flicker.
Shotton has made a career laying bare the ways in which brands can effectively use behavioural science research straight from the lab.
Almost an accidental author, his interest in the subject began when one of the first campaigns he was working on, in the UK in 2004, was for the NHS, Britain’s National Health Service.
RM Block
It was trying to encourage people to give blood, without much success.
At the time Shotton happened to be reading Malcolm Gladwell’s runaway success, The Tipping Point.
Right at the back was a reference to an old psychology experiment conducted by Bibb Latané and John Darley in the 1960s – the Bystander Effect.
It showed how people are much less likely to help out in an emergency if others are present, in part because of the diffusion of responsibility which encourages them to feel someone else will step in.
“Everyone leaves it up to someone else and nothing happens,” says Shotton. “So what you need to do is create a more personal sense of responsibility.”
That is why it is best to target people as individually as possible when making a request.
“I remember reading this in 2004 and thinking, this is exactly the problem we face with the blood service. We were going out with all these messages saying ‘blood stocks are low in England, please donate’. And, just as the Bystander Effect suggests, everyone was ignoring us,” he says.
The solution was to create a greater sense of personal responsibility, simply by saying ‘blood stocks are low’ in specific towns and cities.
“We got this lovely uptick as a result, 10 per cent more donations per pound spent,” says Shotton.
It was, he says, his light bulb moment. “It was the realisation that the academic world of psychology wasn’t anathema to the commercial world of advertising, that these researchers were going out and identifying effective ways to influence people which, frankly, is the job of the marketer,” he tells Winterlich.
Both as an author of several books on the subject, and through his consultancy Astroten, Shotton has spent the past two decades matching the right behavioural science study to the right client problem, and believes it’s something far more marketers could do.
Among the nuggets he shares on Inside Marketing is the way in which fast food chain Five Guys has thrived via its relentless focus on burgers and fries. It is a lesson the agency world would do well to digest.
That’s because, as consumers, we’re very particular about the way we ingest knowledge, including knowledge about brands and products.
Referring to 2007 University of Chicago research from behavioural and consumer psychologists Zhang and Fishbach, he points to their investigations into the goal dilution effect, using tomatoes to demonstrate a point.
One group of people was told about the benefits of tomatoes for their heart, while another told about the benefits of tomatoes for both their heart and their eyes.
They found people’s belief in tomatoes’ benefits for the heart fall significantly, once they heard tomatoes were also good for the eyes.
“By adding the second reason, you’ve diluted the credibility of the first,” says Shotton. It’s why agencies need to push back when clients, as they so often do, insist they include a myriad of messages in every execution.
“It’s not just that fewer people remember the core point. The goal dilution effect is that they are also less likely to believe it, and less likely to think it’s a genuine reflection of the brand,” he cautions.
Though concrete images can seem a contradiction in terms, they do a lot of heavy lifting in marketing. Shotton cites Red Bull as a case in point. Its marketing decision to opt for the tag line ‘Red Bull gives you wings’, rather than ‘Red Bull gives you energy’, was inspired, he argues.
A study by Ian Berg at the University of Western Ontario in the 1970s found that people are four times more likely to remember concrete phrases over abstract ones. If something is easier to visualise, it is easier to remember. And who can visualise energy?
‘You’ve got to get people trying your healthy product before you reveal the health claims, otherwise these expectations will work against you’
— Richard Shotton, behavioral science expert and author
This is something creatives and copywriters intrinsically know, and can apply brilliantly, but too often don’t have the evidence to persuade “the giant committees of marketers and decision makers” they need to back them, he points out.
Red Bull’s marketing is also effective at leveraging another piece of behavioural psychology, that people very often experience what they expect to experience. Put another way, if you drink a Red Bull expecting it to give you energy, chances are it will.
That refers to Baba Shiv and Hilke Plassmann’s famous study into how a wine’s price tag impacts its taste, undertaken at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Participants in the study expected a more expensive bottle to taste better than a much cheaper one, and their results confirmed that, even though, in one case, a cheaply price labelled bottle, and an expensively labelled one, contained the exact same wine.
Consumers look for confirming evidence. “In the world of food and drink, the food on your plate is not the only thing that drives acceptance, it’s the whole set of expectations you have built by the brand image, from the pricing to the descriptions to the serving style to the weight of the cutlery. It’s true in food and drink but you can actually make the same argument for any category,” says Shotton.
Managing expectations is therefore a huge part of any marketer’s job, no matter how small and niche, or big and successful, the brand
Kraft’s introduction in the USA of a healthier version of its popular mac and cheese product bears this out. The food giant waited three months after launching the healthier version, which had more natural ingredients, before advertising to customers that it had done so.
The reason? Much of its market, they knew, “assume that healthy food is bad tasting”, explains Shotton. This way they were able to reveal to consumers that they had been eating it for three months and never noticed a thing. “It tastes no different,” he says.
This approach deftly enabled the food giant to sidestep another consumer quirk, “expectations becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says.
“You’ve got to get people trying your healthy product before you reveal the health claims, otherwise these expectations will work against you. It’s a lovely example.”
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