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Richard Chataway explains why every marketer is in the business of behaviour – and how 60 years of scientific progress in understanding human behaviour helps marketers better demonstrate the value of what they do

The business of behaviour

There’s no doubt a lot has changed in marketing over the last sixty years. The internet, mobile technology, media fragmentation – the modern marketing world would be unrecognisable to a ‘Mad Men’ era marketer. The number of channels and tools available to marketers is exponentially greater, and the landscape is far more complex.

But one thing that hasn’t changed is people. Evolution doesn’t work that fast.

The good news is that in the last 60 years we have also learnt more about how, and why, people behave as they do than in the previous 6,000. As with advances in medicine, technology, and computing, the growth in knowledge of behavioural science has been exponential. It has been driven by academic disciplines like behavioural economics, social/evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, and the work of dedicated practitioners – including Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler.

Why is this important? Because if you are in business, you are in the business of behaviour.

Unless a business – and by extension, its marketers – influences behaviour it will not succeed. A business needs people to buy and use its products and services to generate revenue. It needs people to make and deliver those products and services (or to program the machines to do so).

This much should be self-evident. But there are lots of things businesses do that fly in the face of the latest evidence on how, and why, people behave as they do. Worse, businesses are often not even trying to change behaviour, but merely perceptions or attitudes – wrongly assuming that behaviour will follow.

If there is one thing to learn from behavioural science it is this: what people do is frequently not the same as what they say, or intend, to do. If a business does not employ this understanding of how people make decisions – that they are frequently driven by subconscious, external factors they are not aware of – they are wasting the business’ money (and that of any shareholders).

Importantly for marketers, we have also learnt that these methods of influence are more powerful than many realise.

Customers are people too

For example, just two years after The Marketing Society launched in 1959 the psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted his experiments into ‘authority bias’ at Yale University. These involved an ‘experimenter’ in a white coat instructing participants (‘teachers’) to administer increasingly high electric shocks to a test subject (‘learner’) in an adjacent room whenever he gave incorrect answers to a test. If they protested, they were given verbal prods to continue and reassured by the experimenter. In reality, the learner was an actor and no shocks were administered, but teachers heard his (fake) reactions and protests, unaware that it was staged.

'Authority bias – our tendency to be influenced by those with perceived authority – is so powerful people can be influenced by a man in a white coat (whose qualifications aren't explained)' Richard Chataway, BVA Nudge Unit

Despite this, the first set of experiments found 65% of teachers administered the maximum 450-volt shock – a fatal dose. The experiment is controversial, both on ethical grounds (preventing it being fully replicated more recently) and due to questions over validity, but it remains one of the most cited, and (in)famous, social psychology experiments. What Milgram showed was that ‘authority bias’ – our tendency to be more strongly influenced by those with perceived authority – was so powerful that people could be influenced by a man in a white coat (whose qualifications were never explained) to deliver fatal electric shocks to someone they did not know, and could not see. Less than twenty years after the end of WWII, Milgram wanted to demonstrate how normal people could be compelled to commit horrendous acts.

How is this relevant to marketers? Because when making our everyday purchase decisions, heeding relevant authority figures is often necessary – and advisable. Brands often operate as heuristics (mental shortcuts) to help people make these decisions, and they will seek to maximise authority by association, relevant to the context. Toothpaste brands include white coated individuals in marketing to communicate how to prevent tooth decay, whom we assume to be authority figures (i.e. dentists). But if they want to communicate how great it makes your teeth feel, then the best authority is an ordinary member of the public.

This is just one of the more than 200 different heuristics and biases that behavioural science has uncovered through experimentation. The importance of this work to marketers is twofold: one, we have chronically under-estimated just how much of our decision-making is this instinctive type; two, that only by understanding these heuristics and biases can we effectively explain, influence and change behaviour.

Using evidence, not intuitions

Armed with this knowledge, what does the future hold for marketers? My hope is that marketers use more evidence and less intuition in understanding the behaviour of consumers. Any business that wishes to avoid common problems like fictional post-rationalisations and inaccurate predictions by customers in market research should simply stop just asking people to account for, and predict, their actions. Or, at least, stop using this as the only (or default) source of insight. Instead, marketers should supplement this with data on actual, observed behaviour, along with methods that look at more implicit, subconscious influences. In the world of business, there are huge competitive advantages to using more sophisticated techniques to understand what is really influencing your customers – rather than just believing what they tell you.

In the case of purchase decisions, this might mean literally recreating the physical environment. PRS IN VIVO is a shopper research agency that has created ‘ShopperLabs’ around the world – replicas of actual stores complete with aisles, tills and signage – as well as performing ‘shopper studies’ in real-life stores. The advantage of these lab studies over field studies is that it is much easier to change the variables in the test environment (shelf configurations, alternate branding and so on), making it easy to implement (what I call) ‘test tube behaviours’ and to test and learn. Experimentation is the foundation of science, after all, and as with Milgram and his subjects, it is the most effective way to find out what is really influencing your customers.

Milgram Experiment (Derren Brown)

Being in the business of behaviour also means understanding that purchase decision-making depends on the subconscious (as well as conscious) associations of your product or service. We now have relatively inexpensive digital-based techniques that get to these drivers of behaviour, as well as eye-tracking and facial recognition technology that tell us what people are really looking at – and what they are ignoring. If marketers want to truly influence behaviour (i.e. get people to buy goods and services), then they should be using both the scientific evidence-base and the latest technology and techniques available to do this.

The findings of behavioural science as applied to marketing (aka marketing science) give us a new set of laws and guidelines for ensuring effectiveness and growth. Understanding that brands operate as largely subconscious heuristics and that consumers are not primarily driven by rational aspects like product features, benefits or brand purpose does not undermine the role of marketing. Quite the opposite.

'If you believe that brands are mental shortcuts, and the world is becoming more complex, then brands become more, not less, important' Richard Shotton, author of The Choice Factory.

This is because brands help us to choose based on our natural tendency towards loss aversion, and the avoidance of disaster – enabling us to make ‘good enough’ decisions. And for this, customers are often willing to pay a premium, making brand-building hugely profitable.

In an increasingly complex world (which will only get more so), this is the true value of marketing. And if marketers start paying more attention to the evidence base – they can prove it, too.

Richard Chataway is a VP of BVA Nudge Unit UK, and a board member of the Association for Business Psychology. His book ‘The Behaviour Business’ is available to pre-order now.

This article was taken from issue 3 of Marketing Society members-only publication EMPOWER. Find out more here and see past articles here (please note some articles are open to the public and some are for members only.)