A day in the life of Pat Licy

By ZenithOptimedia’s Richard Shotton and Richard Clay.

Pat Licy is 40, he lives with his wife and 2 children in a 3 bedroom house in Guildford. He drives a Ford Fiesta and works as a manager in a local business.

At the weekend he likes nothing better than to go to the local pool for a swim and then settle down in front of the TV to watch the afternoon’s football.

We are going to follow Pat through a normal day and see how his everyday actions and decisions are influenced by behavioural science.

The morning rush

It’s Monday morning and Pat flicks through the Daily Telegraph while enjoying a leisurely breakfast. He comments enthusiastically to Norma, his wife, when he reads about Tory plans to increase welfare benefits. Norma is taken aback as only last week Pat mentioned the need for a strong incentive to work.

In fact, Pat’s instinctive support for his party’s policy is quite common as voters tend to interpret policies through a lens of their feelings for the party. If they dislike a party they’ll interpret any policy through a negative filter.

ZenithOptimedia surveyed 1,004 nationally representative voters about their views on raising VAT by a penny to fund 10,000 extra nurses. The results were then split by political affiliation. The twist was that half the respondents were told it was a Conservative policy and half Labour.

When Labour supporters thought the policy came from Labour there was strong support: 14pc completely agreed. However, support plummeted to 3pc when it was described as a Conservative policy. Similarly, amongst Tories the policy was four times more popular when it was seen to come from their party. The scale of the effect means that policy is far less influential than existing party affiliation.

The idea that our experience of an event is clouded by existing feelings, sometimes known as confirmation bias, is supported by many experiments. Most famously the psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril showed 324 Princeton and Dartmouth students footage of a bad tempered football game between their universities and asked them to count the number of fouls committed by each team. Students were twice as likely to see the opposition commit a foul as their own team. Once again events were seen through a prism of loyalty.

Confirmation bias poses an interesting challenge for both brands and politicians as it suggests that simply broadcasting messages is ineffective at winning over rejecters. Political and commercial advertisers need alternative tactics. The simplest is to accept the strength of confirmation bias and focus resources on the warmest prospects whether that’s floating voters or non-rejecters of the brand.

The second approach is to recognise that any message from an unpopular brand will be interpreted through a lens of negativity and instead use independent voices to communicate the desired messages. This could either be through editorial, celebrity endorsement or word of mouth.

The commute

Pat has spent too long at the breakfast table and is now running late for work. He jumps into his Fiesta and starts his journey to the office, as he is driving he sees an advert for a local rideshare scheme – “Commuters in Guildford are already sharing lifts to reduce traffic” – and makes a mental note to sign up soon.

Interestingly, the local copy in the rideshare message may have encouraged Pat to pay more attention to the advert. Colin Cherry, a cognitive scientist at Imperial College, recognised that whilst we only register a small proportion of the information around us we subconsciously process far more. His realisation came when he noticed that background party chatter tends to be a blur but as soon as someone mentions our name our ears prick up. He coined the bias the ‘cocktail party effect’.

[advert position=”left”]

Research by ZenithOptimedia shows that regionalisation of messages can significantly increase the impact of ads. We surveyed 500 nationally representative consumers and told them about a new energy tariff. Half the participants were told it saved the average household £100 and half that it saved the average household in their city the same amount.

When the message was regionally tailored 10.3pc of participants thought the offer was great value compared to only 4pc for the national message. This means that the regionally tailored ad was more than twice as impactful as the generic message. This is a huge change in impact for what is a minor copy tweak, particularly as it is easy to implement region specific copy to a national campaign using digital advertising technology.

Mid-morning supermarket trip

The office kitchen is full of dirty crockery because the dishwasher tablets have run out. Pat is having a quiet morning and decides to earn some brownie points by volunteering to pop to the supermarket to buy some more. In the supermarket Pat picks up the first dishwasher tablets he can see, he is about to head to the checkout when he notices they are eco-friendly tablets; he puts them back and buys some ordinary ones instead.

Pat’s reaction to the eco-friendly dishwasher tablets might seem irrational; brands are often proud of their “green” credentials. But this perception that eco-friendly products do not perform as well as their competitors is very common.

ZenithOptimedia sent two groups of consumers the same standard washing machine tablet, but while one group was told the truth about the product, the other was told it was a new eco-friendly variant. Consumers claimed the so-called ‘green’ tablet performed worse across all metrics, suggesting that while consumers may say they like eco-friendly products in principle their actions say otherwise.

Respondents scored the eco tablet 9% lower for both effectiveness and likability, while the number who would recommend the product was 11% lower and the number who would buy it themselves 18% lower than for the standard version. Despite eco-friendly products often having a higher price, consumers who tested the ‘green’ tablet were also only prepared to pay £4.41 on average compared to £4.82 for the standard version.

This demonstrates how important it is that advertisers who have a product with green credentials communicate efficacy messages as well.

Lunchtime haircut

Pat decides, on a whim, to get his haircut. He takes an early lunch and walks up to the hairdressers. Pat’s normal barber isn’t there so Norm cuts his hair instead. Pat leaves a big tip, despite the fact Norm had a large stain on his shirt.

Slightly surprisingly the barber’s untidiness might have actually boosted his chances of getting a sizeable tip. Eliot Aronson, a psychologist at UCLA, has shown that competent people who display a weakness become more appealing. He termed this the “pratfall effect”.

In his original experiment Aronson recorded a contestant ably answering a series of quiz questions. He then played the recording to a large number of students. Half of them heard just the answers whilst the other half also heard the contestant dropping a cup of coffee on his lap. All the students were then asked to rate the contestant in terms of likeability. The clumsy one was rated significantly higher.

Interestingly, what works for quiz contestants seems to work for brands. A brand that feigns infallibility comes across as boastful whilst one admitting weakness seems more human.

Additionally, an advertiser that demonstrates honesty in one area makes their other claims more believable. This partially explains the stellar success of slogans such as “Reassuringly Expensive”, “Naughty but Nice” or “Good things come to those who wait”. Counter-intuitively, the perfect brand strategy might be to admit imperfection.

Afternoon admin

By 3pm Pat needs a break from his work and he remembers he promised his mate he’d sponsor him for a charity fun run. Pat isn’t quite sure how much he should donate but he notices that most people donate £5 so he decides to pledge £10.

Pat’s behaviour can perhaps be explained by the Dunning-Kruger effect. The bias was identified by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, two Cornell psychologists, who were inspired by McArthur Wheeler’s failed attempt to rob a bank in Pittsburgh.

Wheeler’s tactic was to avoid detection on the security cameras by rubbing lemon juice on his face in the mistaken belief that since it was used in invisible ink it would protect him from detection. Unsurprisingly, Wheeler was caught that day and sentenced to 24 years in prison.

The psychologists were puzzled. How could someone so inept think they had the skill to pull off a robbery? More importantly they decided to test whether this lack of self-knowledge was widespread. They recruited students to take a series of maths and grammar tests and then asked them to predict how well they did compared to their peers.

Just like Wheeler, participants were poor judges of performance with under-performers systematically over-estimating their ability.

Across four studies participants in the bottom quartile tended to think they were significantly above average. Experiments have repeatedly shown that many people over-estimate their relative abilities. Interestingly, it even occurs amongst academics who should be aware of the bias. A classic study by K. Patricia Cross found that more than 90% of lecturers at the University of Nebraska thought they were better than average at teaching.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is of interest to marketers as it provides a powerful tool to change behaviour. Since most people think of themselves as above average, a brand that communicates typical behaviour should encourage people to perform higher.

Take charitable donations as an example. A survey, undertaken by ZenithOptimedia amongst 500 nationally representative people, found that 64% thought they were more generous than their peers. If charities communicated the average donation level to potential donors it would encourage them to exceed that amount. Unless donors gave a higher amount how could they continue to think of themselves as more generous than their peers?

There are commercial applications too. A bookworm could be encouraged to read more, a runner to spend more on trainers and a savvy saver to put more aside if compared to the norm.

What it means for us

So what can advertisers learn from Pat’s day? The first point is how influential subtle changes in the environment can be on decision making. The importance of contextual influences calls into question our industry’s obsession with target audiences. Perhaps brands should think of target contexts not just target audiences. Marketers need to identify the set of environmental cues that will give their message the best chance of success.

Finally, since consumers aren’t necessarily aware of all the influences on their decision making brands must be careful about trusting claimed data.

Pat arrives home at 5:34 PM, he slumps onto the sofa and flicks on the TV. Pat Licy is typical.

Richard Shotton is head of insight at ZenithOptimedia – @rshotton

Richard Clay is a strategist at ZenithOptimedia