What 3Sixty Knows…

Jon, Laura and I attended the IPA’s behavioural economics ‘test and learn’ event last week (Monday to Wednesday).

The format of the event was a combination of inspirational and academic speakers plus four dummy briefs (supplied by Aviva, EDF, the COI and our client Birmingham Airport) to work on using behavioural economics as the framework for ideas.

The IPA will be publishing a detailed report on the three days, but here’s a quick summary of some of the things that stuck in my mind:

• Everything is relative – not exactly an earth shattering revelation, but a number of speakers put an interesting slant on this from a marketing perspective. We spend a lot of our time thinking about differentiation, but behavioural economics teaches us the importance of establishing the similarities to the competition. Keeping similar company allows us to make useful comparisons.
• Don’t underestimate the emotions and effort that go into making a decision. Our industry has become very focused on the comms part of marketing communications, and as a result there’s a tendency to assume that if people aren’t buying our product, it’s because we’re not telling them about it in the right way or awareness is too low. Behavioural economics forces us to go back a step and think about how it feels to make a purchase. Often it’s small tweaks to the way a product or service is organised that can make a huge difference. Nick Southgate gave the example of the popularity of self service that overcomes some of the possible social humiliations involved in dealing face to face.
• The tyranny of research. In our left brained dominated business world, where every decision needs a spreadsheet to support it, the influence of the right brained approach has been slowly eroded. Gut feel and intuition just don’t cut it in the board room. What behavioural economics promises is to allow agencies to come up with creative ideas and hypothesise that they are likely to be effective without having to commission expensive research every time. In other words, ideas can be based on principle, not evidence.

Rather than agonising over the ‘big idea’ that still dominates advertising thinking, the behavioural economics approach got everyone thinking about lots of small ideas that make a big difference. Hardly any of the ideas that were presented to the clients who’d supplied the dummy briefs could be described as communication solutions. In fact, many of them related to customer service, operational issues or product design. The client panel discussed the ‘explosion of ideas’ that resulted from thinking in this framework – this was seen as a very positive thing, rather than the reductionist approach of one big idea that solves all your problems.

Wouldn’t it be great if at least some of the collective brain power of the agency world could be focused on making products and services better and more useful rather than just telling people about them?

We left the event feeling really inspired and looking forward to talking to Paul Kehoe, the CEO at our client Birmingham International Airport, about implementing some of the ideas that came out of the three days.