how can brand-lend social ideas drive sustained behavioural change?

this is my thesis in its entirety. i have taken the concept of social ideas, or movements as scott goodson would call them, as a means of communication and have explored how they can be used in order to affect the choices we make. in turn i explore how brands can and have effectively utilised this.

i would very much appreciate your thoughts and comments.

rory sutherland

seen by many as the stephen fry of advertising, well - maybe just me, but certainly the man who makes behavioural economics accessible beyond the confines of the classroom; rory sutherland is someone that i have held in high regard from the moment i first came across one of his ted talks.

image of rory pinched from his wiki man page

when i decided to write my thesis on the topic of behavioural change it made sense to ask the wiki man himself if he could spare the time to answer a few of my questions. to my surprise, he very kindly obliged and we had a lengthy conversation, conducted from his holiday in santa fe last week. here are a few of the brilliant anecdotes from our chat:

"you’re more likely to get a job through someone you know vaguely than through your best friend. someone you’ve known for twenty years may be less likely to find you a job or give you references than people you’ve met five or six times. don’t forget there are a lot more of them."

i cheekily piped in with the fact that we only know each other vaguely; ogilvy here i come...

i have been particularly interested in herd mentalities since reading herd, nudge and the wisdom of crowds. rory elaborated on how difficult it is to quantify this way of being and how far we have come from the neo-classical economic model of human behaviour:

"we’re sort of a herd species in that we outsource a lot of our cognitive processes to other people. if we’ve got a choice of two cafés; one café’s empty and the other one’s heaving, even though it is more pleasant to go to the empty café we might have a certain anxiety about it because if it’s any good why is nobody there? what’s interesting and significant about this is not so much that we do it but that we do it unconsciously and therefore the effects of this kind of thing don’t evolve in the conventional market research."

following a discussion about the contagion factor of the boris bikes (the fact that they are odd looking makes them stand out and you think that a lot of people are using them and "if lot of people are using them, shouldn't i be too??" there you have it; contagion,) rory offered up this other contagion gem:

"there’s a very known affect that around car dealerships you always get a pocket of sales of a particular brand of car and one of the reasons for that is that people simply see a lot of fords and are more likely to buy a ford. that’s simple contagion."

i feel that i have come away from the conversation with a stronger understanding of advertisers' uses of higher-order benefits, the factors that affect people's behaviour and decisions as well as what rory described as target moments (as opposed to target audiences).

our conversation ended with the following statement, which succinctly affirmed the reason why i am interested in behavioural economics:

"there are lots of factors in human decision making that affect our decision making without us being consciously aware of them and knowing what those might be at different times, in different people, at different places is a really really useful thing to do."

i was really honoured to speak to someone with rory's expertise and humbled to find that no matter how high-up or busy a person you may be, giving time to impart your knowledge to help someone starting out is possible and hugely valuable. i will be sure to remember this as i climb the ranks.

baa baa h

sheepish

i always thought that i would be better suited to a smaller agency. i remember being deeply skeptical when faced with the statement that to work at bbh you need to be good and nice but from the 4 days that i was there everyone, bar none, was lovely and clearly very in tune with what they were doing.

on the first day of our strategy workshop we met ross and adèle who ran us through bbh's work, from that levi's ad to the recent british airways home advantage campaign. they passed on to the legendary jim carroll who talked to us about insight and the different places that it can be found.

"advertising shouldn't be a perfect demonstration of human behaviour."

jim reiterated that strategy is about story telling and that you need a narrative to take people on journeys. the process of condensing thought, distilling down and being concise are core skills for being a strategist. this compression will allow the creatives to think big. this advice was really useful as we were then briefed by agathe on our task for the week, which was to write a creative brief for axe and then discuss it with a creative team at the end of the week.

we then heard from carl and priyanka about their experience planning at bbh and tips on how to brief creatives. carl believes that natural curiosity and emotional intelligence makes someone worth listening to. i particularly liked this idea of the creativity within an agency:

writer        poet        painter

suit        planner     creative

priyanka advised us to get feedback on our brief from the creatives and not from another planner, to not be precious or defensive but to see it as a starting point. she emphasised the importance of always having a north star of the direction in which you want to head.

this was the first time that we were presenting to creatives rather than as if it were to the clients and dropping our guards to make it an informal chat was quite a challenge but we were given a lot of guidance and structure to get us there. going on the hunt for 13 year old boys was one of the mini adventures that made up a fantastic worksop week. bbh was not at all what i had been expecting, it completely lacked the holier than thou pretention and instead felt like a well constructed, exciting place made up of fun and interesting people. it is definitely a place that i would love to be a part of.

we're frukt

last week was spent at communications agency frukt, working on a live brief over the space of four days. on the monday we were given an introduction to the company by their one and only creative planner, flo page. she explained that her role is to harness peoples' passions and to give brands a meaningful role within their lives. the objective is to tell brand stories in interactive, immersive and entertaining ways that will live through channels and over time. frukt's mission statement is 'to entertain the world' and the brands on their books certainly reflect this ethos; from coca-cola to nokia to southern comfort, the heart of frukt's expertise evolves around music but with a definite digital edge.

flo said her skills are weighted differently for different clients, with one being mostly strategic whilst another may be more heavily creative. i felt that she finds it rewarding to have this variety and mix and i think that although we inevitably have to label our job, i hope that my role will allow for a certain level of diversity as well.

jim robinson, who is in charge of client services, and dom hodge, frukt's planning director, ran us through the structure of the agency and emphasised what i find to be true of many of the smaller agencies; the championing of mixed skills from everyone. their reasoning being that ideas can come from anywhere (even occasionally from the client).

the brief we were set had to be big, brave and long-term. each group was given their own creative starting point to work around, which was helpful and interesting because when we came to present we all had different approaches. our challenge really lay in trying to describe the feeling of the brand rather than the service.  our group spent the first day simply trying to define our audience and one of the most useful pieces of advice that i received was to consider it as one audience and then focus on one or two segments that won't alienate the other segments.

flo's top tips for presenting:

• clothing - don't wear any statement pieces that will distract your audience
• stand - it gets air to your head and gives you more presence
• be as visual as possible
• put no more than 3 bullet points on each slide
• don't use full sentences
• print stuff, stick it on the walls
• get clients up and moving around the room
• provide a hand-out so they have something to take with them

a lot of time was given to thoroughly running through the strengths and areas of improvement for each group, certainly the most detailed we have had so far. it was really helpful and we had the chance to ask lots of questions to flo and creative director and founder, jack horner. flo was really generous with her time as we were aware of the pitching that was going on and our student ability to get under people's feet. it was a fantastic chance to get a feel for the day to day of their agency and another steep learning curve.