Retail

"Advertising is neither science nor art; brands are using principles of decision science for years"


By Anirban Roy


Isn’t it astonishing that a function like marketing and communications and its flag bearers (marketers and agencies) who spend so much time and money investigating what will work in persuading the human mind, actually spend little time investigating how the human mind works?

Consider this: Peter Kenning, a German neuro-economist, showed people photographs of brands, in pairs, while using brain imaging techniques. The pairs either included their favourite brand or it did not. Every time the favourite brand was revealed the areas of the brain that lit up were different from the regions that lit up when non-favourite brands came up. The other interesting bit is when their favourite brand was present, the brain used less energy (what neuroscientists call ‘cortical relief’) and identified immediately.

The most remarkable part about this experiment: cortical relief only happens for the respondent’s number one brand; even the brand ranked second in their heads does not trigger this intuitive decision making. Scientists call this the ‘first-choice brand effect.’

In other words, brands matter and becoming number 1 in people’s head matters even more. Being in the ‘consideration set’ is not good enough. So how do we go about it? As always, there is no silver bullet. One way to think of this problem is ‘why should the consumer hire your product/service?’ As marketer & author Phil Barden puts it, ‘Consumers don’t buy a brand’s personality traits but its expected instrumentality to achieve a certain goal.’

For example, if you look at some tea brands in our country – Brooke Bond Red Label has built its narrative around togetherness (Swaad Apnepan Ka), whereas Brooke Bond Taaza built it around ‘refreshment’ and Brooke Bond Taj Mahal tea was built around status or connoisseurship. Fundamentally, all of them are selling packaged tea and hence fulfilling explicit goals of the category (stimulating etc), but the implicit goals projected by the respective brands help drive heuristics (mental shortcuts) for the consumer. Depending on the goal which the consumer subconsciously wants to pursue, the brand becomes the automatic choice.

Another angle of decision science is that we recognize that choosing something that isn’t the default option requires effort and we are wired to be lazy (the brain is programmed to spend minimum energy/resources to get the desired output). Look at the adoption rate of Google Maps vs Apple Maps on iPhones. Although Google Maps is widely regarded as a more popular choice, users of iPhone (whose pre-installed, default option is Apple Maps) used Apple Maps 3x as often as Google Maps (Source: Verge).

While we are on the business of making things effortless, or less effortful, Amazon seems to me to be a brand that is uniquely designed to reduce effort. Regular Amazon shoppers must have noticed how it tries to upsell and cross sell. ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ feature helps people make choices without much effort. Bundling items by stating ‘frequently purchased together’ again makes sense because it reduces effort. So, if you hunt for an Ipad Pro, Amazon nudges you to buy the Apple Pencil. These may seem trivial compared to multi-million dollar ad campaigns that we so deeply care about but decision science hinges on the idea of being trivial. As Ogilvy UK’s vice chairman Rory Sutherland puts it, ‘sweat on the small stuff.’

Counter-intuitive decision making is another bed-rock of decision science. For instance, most marketers/agencies will cringe to call out their product weaknesses, but we know that in the real world, people relate to people who exhibit a weakness (Aronson termed it the Pratfall Effect). Extending that logic, people also relate to brands who display some degree of imperfection. Take the iconic ‘Ramesh-Suresh’ campaign of Cadbury’s 5 Star. In reality it celebrates the long eating experience and lands on the creative idea of ‘Jo khaye kho jaye’. Titan Raga’s recent campaign of ‘flaunt your flaw’ is another example that was inspired by the asymmetrical nature of the new Raga ‘I Am’ collection.

We tend to think of the conscious brain as the ‘oval office’ (borrowing the term from Jonathan Haidt), whereas in reality, it is the ‘press office.’ There is a difference between how we actually make decisions vs how we think we make those decisions. We need to find a way to make brands the default choice – else most advertising will be reduced to costly signaling without much results.

Advertising is neither science nor art. Brands have unknowingly been using principles of decision science for years – it is time we became more conscious about embracing and applying these principles in our daily jobs. It will make our effort more effective, unlock creativity and drive the ‘first choice brand’ effect.

The author is head of strategic planning, South, Ogilvy. Views expressed are personal.





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