fun

Heard the one about good comedians and behavioural economics?

Heard the one about good comedians and behavioural economics?

This past week I have been reading How I Escaped My Certain Fate by the fascinating and innovative stand-up comedian Stewart Lee. The book – a kind of autobiography – is extremely funny, but it is also remarkable in another way.

Perhaps more than any other art form, it has become axiomatic in comedy that ‘you can’t analyse humour’. A joke is believed to be a living thing – so ‘once you dissect one, it dies’. Yet almost every page of Stewart Lee’s book contradicts this. Just because the audience shouldn’t over-analyse jokes, that doesn’t mean that comedians can’t.

Lee deconstructs, reassembles and analyses his own (and other people’s) material with the precision of a watchmaker. As an unintentional guide to the creative temperament, the book is fascinating. The same analytic streak is found in other comedians. Jimmy Carr has co-authored (with Lucy Greeves, a copywriter and friend) The Naked Jape, a superb investigation into the nature of humour. The great Douglas Adams, when writing his Hitchhiker’s Guide series of novels, took individual sentences written by PG Wodehouse and spent hours picking apart every word to work out what made them so funny.

The analysis of comedy appeals to me because humour, like advertising, is something that can only properly be judged behaviourally. A successful joke results in a human response – a laugh or smile – which is in many ways involuntary and automatic. Most likely the audience cannot explain why they are laughing. But that very inability to explain what is funny is irrelevant to the value of the joke.

The mistake many conventional marketers seem to make is to require of any communication that the audience can explain how it works before it can be considered effective. This is an extraordinarily restrictive approach. When researching any message, the act of asking the audience to explain its workings somehow destroys its effect.

Creative people sometimes react to this absurdity by adopting a position at the opposite end of the spectrum – claiming that great creative communication is incapable of any meaningful analysis, and that it can arise from an Amadeusstyle outpouring of genius. This doesn’t help much either. Just because something may be apparently illogical does not mean that nothing is gained through attempts to explain it.

And it is for this reason that I find behavioural economics a more promising line of enquiry for marketers than the conventional marketing approach. It is a much richer source of insights that the ‘go on, tell me why it’s funny’ approach of pre-testing, because it encourages us to seek out those very stimuli that achieve their effects without the necessary intervention of conscious logic.

Behavioural economics shows us something that successful comedians already know. Social proof really matters. Whether people laugh or not depends massively on the reactions of the people around them. Context really matters too. The nature and appearance of the joke teller really matters. Seemingly trivial executional details can make or break a joke.

It seems to me that the best marketing ideas have something in common with the best jokes. They have a powerful behavioural effect for reasons the audience may not be able to explain. Behavioural economists find these aberrations fascinating and worthy of study precisely because they defy the logic of the conventional economic model of human preference. Here are a few examples which particularly fascinate me.

  • Did Red Bull find it easier to charge three-times the regular price for a carbonated drink because it made the can smaller?
  • Why do people prefer to receive four Boots Advantage points on every £1 spent than to receive a 4% discount?
  • Why, when telephone call charges have dropped by more than 70% overall, do we remember none of these price drops – but we all remember Friends & Family, which gave us 10% off just ten numbers?
  • How many people would buy fabric conditioner if there wasn’t a special drawer for it in their washing machine?
  • Why is it much easier to spend £40 on a tie when you have already spent £80 on a shirt?
  • Why do we pay so much for cinema popcorn?
  • Would Spotify be more successful if it limited the number of songs it allowed you, rather than offering unlimited downloads?
  • Why is Amazon Prime more effective because you have to pay for it?

No focus group will ever answer any of these questions. Behavioural economists and good comedians, with their access-all-areas pass to the unconscious mind, can. Next time you have an NPD project, why not hire some of both?


Rory Sutherland is executive creative director and vice-chairman of OgilvyOne London and Ogilvy Group UK[email protected]

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