The need for behavioural planning
In the first of a three-part series, Total Media’s William Hanmer-Lloyd looks at how behavioural science and emerging technologies can improve the way we advertise
Behavioural economics, neuroscience, and the accompanying research into decision-making is shifting some of the cornerstone foundations of how we understand human and consumer behaviour and how advertising influences people.
The development of this thinking doesn’t just add technical language to what we already know, but combined with a growing range of media options – that let you target by behaviour and moment in a way never before possible – challenges some of our long standing practices and fundamental beliefs.
This is no bad thing, as we are an industry that has always prided itself on staying ahead of the pack, and incorporating the latest thinking into our work.
Outdated planning
The three most obvious areas for change are the older models we use to plan, who we choose to target, and the research methods we use to understand consumer behaviour: much of advertising is still built upon a persuasion model (communicating something about a brand via brand positioning).
However, behavioural theory and research shows us that we process the vast majority of information unconsciously, often being impacted by ads we can’t remember, and that consumers change their actions depending upon the context within which they make a decision – without rational views changing.
This is why advertisers will have often experienced the difficulty of correlating brand metrics and sales – with brand metrics being a notoriously difficult input to include in econometric models.
Confused consumer behaviour
Alongside this, research shows that consumer behaviour often changes for reasons that have nothing to do with persuasion. We buy fruit over chocolate if it is near the counter, we commit less violence in front of pictures of babies’ faces, we think a cookie is more valuable in an empty jar, and we drink less if we believe others are drinking less, all without having changed our views.
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However, in all of these examples, consumers will poorly post rationalise why their behaviour has changed, to give a logical and reasoned explanation to their actions. This, alongside many other factors, is why consumers’ self-reporting and understanding of their behaviour is deeply flawed.
This is captured most starkly in one study that recorded 800 respondents who said they drank a brand daily. However, 42% of the respondents, when recording their consumption in a diary during the following week, didn’t record drinking that brand once. If consumers can’t even accurately tell us how frequently they use a brand, why do we build profiles around this claimed behaviour?
Behavioural planning
We need to move beyond simple self-reporting methods of research, such as TGI, quant surveys, qual groups, and embrace more ethnographic and digital research methods (including programmatic and mobile tracking), that capture actual human behaviour, often in context.
Finally behavioural insights allow us to develop consumer insight that is intelligent, but demographic agnostic; not based in narrow demographic groups’ attitudes (and other research, such as that which feeds into ‘How brands grow’, has shown that staying broad, rather than narrowing to small target audiences, is best for driving new customers and incremental sales).
Rather than targeting a healthy treat at a certain demographic, we can target it at anyone who is newly going to the gym, has just got divorced, or is recovering from the night before etc regardless of age and gender, as these are all good times to hit someone developing new healthy habits or who is likely to give in to the idea of a new health treat.
Growing media options means we can start to think in terms of multiple small nudges for anyone, with media and creative targeted to moments, contexts and behaviours, in a way that is designed to shift consumers’ behaviour, not attitudes.
Collective thinking
As the volume of research into behavioural science and our understanding of it grows, the important thing is not any individual cognitive bias or social psychology experiment, but collectively the story they tell about how we should fundamentally adapt our understanding of human behaviour and how we research and influence it.
It is an exciting time in our industry as behavioural science and media technology develop in tandem, challenging old conventions, and creating new opportunities.
William Hanmer-Lloyd is a behavioural planner at Total Media
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