John Kearon
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
The IIEX 2014 felt like witnessing the research community ditching the old models and hitching itself to a new model of human decision making. Homo Economicus is dead, long live Homo Emoticus. The equanimity of left-brain, right-brain is replaced by the dominance of System 1 over System 2. Overly rational traditional research measures are being challenged by an emerging market of techniques measuring emotions and instinctive responses. The era of persuasion-based marketing feels like it is giving way to a new era of seduction-based marketing.
Something Old, Something New
Speaker after speaker from companies old and new lined up to say traditional research was inadequate at predicting real behaviour and we needed a new suite of tools to measure people’s instinctive, intuitive, emotional, System 1 responses. We were witnessing a Cambrian explosion of suggested System 1 measures, from self-complete and automated facial coding of Ekman’s universal emotions, to neuro-research, implicit association tests and time pressured answering, to more visual, metaphoric, game-orientated techniques through to wisdom of crowds approaches to predicting other people’s behaviour. This heady mix was topped off with calls for more bravery and a request for everyone to think of a nomination for the excellent Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage Awards. The overall message was clear. We need to change our own behaviours and buying patterns to match what we’re learning from behavioural science.
The excitement of the new was rather dampened by the accurate observation that at a macro-level nothing much has changed; the old approaches remain the default and buying patterns remain stubbornly unaltered. Beyond the natural resistance to change, there was an early session with some clues as to why things remain unaltered. Mark Earls and John Willshire ran parallel sessions asking clients and agencies what was broken in MR. The answers were familiar, yet instructive. Agencies are maddened by the lack of client interest in their technically brilliant silver-bullet methodologies while clients are bored of the self-obsessed methodology debate and crave agencies that understand their business and have a real impact on it. The divide is understandable. Agencies’ business is MR and clients’ business is something else to which MR is a servant. It’s clear the most profitable direction for agency innovation is not the “methodological arms race” but as Rory Sutherland suggests in his excellent book, Wikiman, “turning human understanding into business advantage”.
The era when researchers could simply deliver an ‘insight’ and walk away is fast vanishing. Pieter Musters from Philips reminded agencies, “It’s the end of your project, it’s not the end of mine”. Researchers need to find a way to stay involved and help achieve real behaviour change. As Chris Haskins of Kellogg’s and Dag Piper of Mars both said, “If it doesn’t change behaviour, we’re not interested”. Kyle Nell of Lowes summed it up, “uncommon partners create uncommon results. Everything I do is about changing behaviour – insights alone don’t necessarily do this.”
We saw from many presentations, the industry is pretty good at methodological innovation and pretty bad at communicating and landing it. Earls & Willshire’s session threw up some terrific ‘innovation hacks’ for improving this. Stop delivering container loads of ignored debriefs. Use the report as a shooting script to make short, sharp, sharable ‘minute masterpieces’ of the most important findings. Move from ‘PowerPoint Pushers’ to ‘Behavioural Insight Dealers’ and tell a good story. A good example of this was from Martin Blom (ATAG), Tom de Ruyck (InSites) and Denis Ghys (10-Advertising) who told a great story with enormous passion while letting the details of the methodology emerge rather than hold up the entire case study. Another came from Peter Van Hende (Belgacom), Carola Verschoor (Groh!) and Thinmon De Jong (TrendsActive) who gave us the beautifully simple, ‘revised recommended concept’ as the 1-page debrief. And we had a master class from Tim Bock (Q Research) on visualising and communicating data, showing us what the human mind instinctively and quickly recognises and how to build that into data communications. Appropriately, Pulsar Social won the DIVA award for data visualisation/presentation and Socialglimpz the Innovation award for mobile ethnography allowing people to express themselves in pictures not text.
On the business side of research, a suggested hack for the prohibitive cost and complexity of dealing with big company procurement was for large agencies to act as aggregators/representatives for smaller innovative agencies. Big companies get the benefit of the methodological advances coming from the fringes and the large lumbering research groups get an injection of fresh ideas and inspiration. The biggest cheer of the day was reserved for the cheeky suggestion that procurement might itself be next best logical cost saving for large companies.
Clients complained of boring jobs, dull research, a loss of involvement in some areas of company information flow and agencies not helping them have the impact on the business they’d like. There were three suggested hacks to help. The first was the theme that ran through the conference of applying Behavioural Science to increase marketing success. Daryl Travis summed it up nicely when he said the key question to be answered was the title of his new book, ‘How Does It Make You Feel? Why Emotion Wins the Battle of Brands’. A second suggested hack was to set ROI objectives for all research. Even if this proves difficult, the exercise of trying helps focus everyone on the business imperative of research. And the final hack was to build insight teams that are comfortable with acting on hunches, doing ‘day in the wild’ research and embracing ‘fast, good-enough’ research to aide company decision making. Gone are the days of being the methods-police and ensuring marketing aren’t doing stupid things. It’s now about agile research, hunches, experimentation, creativity and better interpretative frameworks for making sense of the findings. The conference’s collective adoption of behavioural science bodes well for better understanding and greater business advantage.
No conference write up would be complete without a comment on Google Consumer Surveys. There is something delightfully modern about the look and feel of Google’s bite-sized surveys but the questions themselves feel incredibly old-fashioned. In the end it feels a new way to present old thinking and feels unlikely to change much except providing a new target for the industry to aim its ire at.
Something Borrowed.
Intellectually, the presenters borrowed liberally and successfully from behavioural science. For the party, Research Now borrowed the spectacular SkyLounge for the Research Club, allowing conversation and cocktails to flow as the conference throng moved gracefully down through the mental gears from our high-octane day to a fun evening.
Something Blue.
Those brave enough to try it were left holding their breath from LRW’s Virtual Reality Experience. Participants had to navigate a thin gangplank suspended above an apparent and rather alarming 30ft drop. It was a memorable and pulse raising experience, rather like the conference itself. A big thank you to Lenny Murphy and his brilliant IIEX team for a great event, to the 80+ speakers for generally good, non-salesy presentations, to the session chairs for their energy and expertise and to the sponsors, Research Now, Lieberman and InSites for making it possible.
Thanks everyone. It was emotional to hear everyone talking-the-talk on behavioural science. Let’s hope by next year we’re witnessing everyone walking-the-walk.
John Kearon is Founder, CEO and Chief Juicer at BrainJuicer
