[5 Links] Adam Ferrier on psychology, advertising and behaviour change

The author of The Advertising Effect: How to change behaviour - and opening keynote speaker at the upcoming 4A's Strategy Festival 2015 in NYC - unravels the psychological principles in play behind successful behaviour change interventions, and points us in the direction of works that pick apart the orthodoxies of rational/emotional messaging and brand loyalty.

// Previously in [5 Links] :: Matthew Willcox on understanding human nature and making brands natural choices //

1. A Lesson in Cognitive Dissonance

AF: Many years ago I came across this amazing study by Leon Festinger who was the father of the power of cognitive dissonance. It's rather remarkable, completely counter-intuitive, and proof that 'action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action'. If you want to understand human behaviour you need to roll around in the social psychology of the 60's and 70's - this is where all the interesting work was done by American Jewish psychologists trying to make sense of the holocaust.

2. Low Involvement Processing - The Robert Heath Interview

AF: The Hidden Power of Advertising is perhaps the most important, and least read book on advertising published. My boss at Saatchi & Saatchi made me read it. Fundamentally the premise is that we don’t pay attention to ads, and they only work because they create "mental availability" (not Heath's but Byron Sharp's words; see next link). The beautiful thing about LIP is that it helps account for the fact that most of the variance of effective advertising is due to whether you advertise or not, rather than good or bad advertising (perhaps that’s why it remains relatively unread?)

3. How Brands Grow: A summary

AF: Then along came Byron Sharp and he really put the nail into using advertising to build motivation. He expands on Heath's work by explaining that we don’t desire brands, we desire category benefits. Then it’s the marketer's job to have mental and physical availability (e.g. I want chocolate, oh a Snickers bar is in my head, and there is one on shelf – that’ll do). Please read this book, even if the author's tendency for hubris, and stretching of applicable principles gets annoying. It’s excellent.

4. The 'As If' Principle

AF: So let's get back to the power of action and cognitive dissonance. This 90 second argument by Professor Steven Johnson is brilliant.

5. Existential Psychotherapy - A general overview

AF: So to change behaviour either make it Easy (for example create mental and physical availability), or increase Motivation by getting people to act (or creating social norms – not covered here). These are the principles covered in my book. The last link is something a little different but always stays with me in this hard core behaviouralist world. It’s to a book called ‘Existential Psychotherapy’. When I was half way through this book I went and changed my name by deed poll to ‘Max’ (years later I changed it back to Adam). No behaviouralist intervention has ever had as profound an impact on me as this existential tome.

Adam Ferrier is a consumer psychologist and Global Chief Strategy Officer at independent creative:media agency Cummins & Partners. Adam began his career in forensic psychology, before completing his clinical masters thesis in ‘Identifying the underlying constructs of cool people’. He subsequently became a cool hunter, before joining Saatchi & Saatchi as a strategic planner. In 2004 Adam co-founded Naked Communications Asia Pacific. The agency was later sold, and in 2013 he joined the team at C&P. Adam is the author of ‘The Advertising Effect: How to change behaviour' and has won several Effies, Cannes Lions and a Cannes Chimera.

[5 Links] Matthew Willcox on understanding human nature and making brands natural choices

The author of "The Business of Choice: Marketing to Consumers' Instincts" asserts that marketing practitioners can be more successful if they understand the instinctual motivations of human nature and shares a starter kit of links to set us off on that journey.

// Previously in [5 Links]: Jason Sperling on Building Brand Attraction in an Age of Brand Aversion | Faris Yakob on Paid Attention //

MW: For someone who has just written a book about choice, choosing these five links was more difficult than I would like to admit. A bit like choosing your favorite and most meaningful tracks for Desert Island Discs. But here we go. These five all deal with human nature and how it affects our choices.  So often in marketing we focus on differences between groups, or on the effects of the latest cultural theme or meme that we don’t pay enough attention to the timeless and universal aspects of human nature and how these affect people’s behavior and how we make choices…

1. Dan Ariely on how our intuitions fool us
MW: The energetic, charismatic and unashamedly human Dan Ariely has done more to get the field of behavioral economics known outside of academia than almost anyone else. His books are great, but he really comes into his own with his talks. Attending one of his talks at the 2009 Society of Judgement and Decision Making conference was an inspiration to me to attempt to apply the findings from behavioral science experiments to something I cared about — reducing cheating in football. This particular link is to one of Ariely's best talks — it may be nearly 18 minutes long, but I’m pretty sure you will watch the whole thing.  I meant to watch the first 30 seconds of it to make sure it was the right talk, and ended up watching it until the end, even though I’ve probably seen it 20 times before (one thing I can see time and time again are the visual examples he uses to show how our intuitions deceive us even when we know they are deceiving us!)

2. British Psychological Society Digest —a gem of a resource
MW: This one might be bending the rules of “5 Links” a little, because it is not an article but a blog/digest of research.  But I find it really helpful. Often I’m looking for research that casts some light on how people reach decisions in a specific area or in different circumstances, and this is a great tool to keep up to date with interesting research and finding out who are the interesting researchers behind it.  The bonus is that it is edited by Christian Jarrett who is a psychologist who has written two excellent books for non-psychologists like myself — “The Rough Guide to Psychology” and "Great Myths of the Brain”— both of which I leaned on heavily in writing my book, "The Business of Choice”.  His style is accessible, always scientifically accurate and never dumbed down.

3. Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence in just over 10 minutes…
MW: Many of you will know the work of Robert Cialdini – an academic who has cast light on the power of influences such as social proof and scarcity on our choices.  A number of experiments he has devised or advised on — like the famous hotel towel  study — are classics.  This simple and approachable video gives you potted definitions of Cialdini’s six principles of influence, with some great practical examples along the way.  Steve Martin — not the comedian, but one of Cialdini’s partners and  co-narrator of the video —  told me at a conference recently that they expected the video to get maybe 10,000 hits.  So far it has just under 5 million.

4. Steven Pinker on Psychology and Human Nature
MW: So this is a little heavier, but there are so many great quotes in this video that I have picked up and recycled. Pinker is a cognitive psychologist who has brought evolutionary psychology to the fore of discussions about behavior, our motivations and how we make choices. For example, Pinker describes the brain here as a “naturally selected information processor”, meaning that our brain has evolved, just as the rest of our body has, through natural selection. The cognitive processes or shortcuts and biases that drive our choices are the mental equivalents of physical developments like opposable thumbs that have helped us prosper as a species.

5. Homer Economicus or Homer Sapiens? (PDF)
MW: While we are on the subject of evolution, I was blissfully unaware that Homer Simpson was a reference to Homo Sapiens until a couple of years ago, when, embarrassingly, I used the similarity of the names as a gag at a talk I was giving. Jodi Beggs, who writes a blog called “Economists Do It With Models” has actually taken the time to comb through episodes of The Simpsons, to find examples of cognitive biases at work in the story lines, and shows how our friends from Springfield are textbook examples of human nature.  It’s a fun and informative read.

BONUS LINK: “I’d like to give the world a Coke…"
MW: The “Peak End Rule” was famously illustrated by an experiment by Daniel Kahneman that showed people that colonoscopies that ended with less pain as being significantly less unpleasant overall.  This tells us the importance of a happy, or certainly less painful, ending, as it defines how we remember and feel about the entire experience.  So I am ending with a little shot of joy — the ad that brought Mad Men to a close, the 1971 classic “I’d Like to Give the World a Coke”.  This ad is a great example of what happens when you capture what is happening in culture and blend it with a behavioral principle.  When the commercial aired, American troops had already been fighting in the Vietnam War for six years with no end in sight, and the Cold War was dividing almost the entire world. The commercial became a rallying message of tolerance and hope. Although the commercial’s message of tolerance and the cultural impact it had made it a much-loved ad, the behavioral engine that made it effective may lie in its brilliant and positive use of social proof. By finding an artful and meaningful way of showing so many people holding Coke bottles, the commercial didn’t just remind viewers that Coke was culturally current, but that it was something many people with whom viewers could identify were buying and drinking. By marrying the connections that culture allows with the instinctual motivations of human nature, this joyous commercial made Coke a natural choice.

Matthew Willcox is Founder and Executive Director of the Institute of Decision Making at FCB. The Institute is a think tank that was set up to bring the findings about how people make choices from behavioral science and neuroscience — a gold mine of knowledge that marketers have paid astonishingly little interest to —  into marketing practice.   His book, "The Business of Choice: Marketing to Consumers’ Instincts” which show how starting your marketing from a scientific understanding of how people intuitively and naturally make choices, can make your brand a natural and instinctive choice was recently published by Pearson/Financial Times Press.

[5 Links] Jason Sperling on Building Brand Attraction in an Age of Brand Aversion

The RPA ECD and author of  "Look At Me When I'm Talking To You" - currently unfolding one page a day on Instagram (@lookatmebook) - shares links on fostering brand loyalty in an attention-scarce world.

// Previously in [5 Links]: Faris Yakob on Paid Attention //

Letting Consumers Control Marketing: Priceless
JS: I was especially taken with this quote in the New York Times by an SVP at Walmart, “Today the customer is in charge, and whoever is best at putting the customer in charge makes all the money.” This simply conveyed what I had been witnessing in recent years—consumers, rather than advertisers, are now doing the interrupting. 

The Guilty Truth: There’s Too Much Content
JS: We all know that there is an epic amount of consumer-related content and clutter out there, and this piece talks about how we aren’t able to absorb all that content that interests and that we’re overwhelmed by content overload. 

Permission Marketing: Internet Marketing Pioneer Seth Godin Says He Wants to Change the Way Almost Everything Is Marketed to Almost Everybody. Will You Give Him Permission to Come In and Show You the Future?
JS: Seventeen years ago, the legendary Seth Godin pinpointed that advertising is fighting for people’s attention and that “there’s too much going on in our lives to enjoy being interrupted anymore.” Fast-forward to today. Think about the advancement of technology since this article was written, including the array of smart devices that we depend on daily plus a tidal wave of social media channels that distracts daily life more than we realize.

How to Create a Brand With Values: Some Brands Are Born Good. Other Brands Need to Have Goodness Thrust Upon Them. How Can Companies Tell the Right Stories to Make Them More Values-Driven—and More Successful?
JS: One of my new rules for inspiring loyalty from jaded consumers in this day and age is to “use a magnet, not a mallet.” It is up to us as brand stewards to share our consumers’ beliefs—which will help foster a magnetic field—to validate their way of thinking. Shared values with consumers are powerful relationship builders says the Ben & Jerry’s founder in this article. 

Why Kmart Lost the Attention of Discount Shoppers: In a World Where Rivals Can Match or Exceed Its Price Promise, Kmart’s Brand Meaning Has Lost Its Relevance
JS: Many brands still live under the notion that creating a viral sensation equals marketing success. This couldn’t be further from the truth: see Kmart and “Ship my Pants.” Although this video garnered more than 15 million YouTube views, Kmart sales continued to decline even after the YouTube success.

Jason Sperling, SVP/ECD at advertising agency RPA, is exclusively posting his new book, Look At Me When I’m Talking To You (@lookatmebook on Instagram), a discussion about winning over jaded, overstimulated consumers, one illustrated, standalone page a day. Rather than passively reading the book, Instagram facilitates a shared conversation with readers. Sperling joined RPA in 2010 from Media Arts Lab, where he was the driving force behind the worldwide “Get a Mac” Apple campaign, declared Campaign of the Decade by Adweek and Top 10 of the Century by AdAge.

[5 Links] Faris Yakob on Paid Attention

This is a new series in which authors/creators share some of the ideas and inspirations that collide and recombine in their own work.

Kicking things off is Paid Attention author Faris Yakob, who shares links unravelling attention, the foundational idea of advertising, the a in AIDA, the thing we pour into the top of the funnel. But, he cautions, what it is is....complicated, like many aspects of human cognition. 

A Pickpocket's Tale

FY: It was reading this article about Apollo Robbins that gave me the idea for the book. I had been building a book of my thoughts on advertising for some time, but I didn't have a theme. Then I read this and something suddenly fell into place, 2 ideas happened in my head at the same time and became a new one: “It’s all about the choreography of people’s attention,” he said. “Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”

Exploding the Messaging Myth

FY: This piece by Paul Feldwick felt like the most important thing written about advertising in a long time when I read. It both echoed and shaped what I'd been reaching towards about communication, that our brains like to think they are rational and that this metacognitive error shapes so much of how we approach advertising. [BONUS I'm now reading his book The Anatomy of Humbug and it's brilliant.]

The Diamond Age

FY: I have always somewhat intuitively used science fiction to help me think about things - I believe to be the last remaining vestige of the "novel of ideas". SnowCrash helped me understand the internet, but this one inspired an image, which I quote in my book, of a futuristic Times Square like arms race for attention. 

Everything is a Remix

FY: I've been working on my ideas about recombinant creativity on the Genius Steals blog for years. This is a great documentary on the same. 

Zest New and Improved

FY: This ad from 1961 highlights several attention ideas in a fun, simplistic way. Endless repetition - of the mere exposure effect, and new&improved. New and improved is an attention hack - as the ad even points out something can't be NEW & IMPROVED. If it's improved it's not new. But our brains love things that we can trust - that haven't killed us before - and it loves novelty, so NEW&IMPROVED hacks it. 

Faris is co-founder of Genius Steals, an itinerant strategy and innovation consultancy he started with his wife, Rosie. He is the author of Paid Attention, April 2015, and a contributing author of Digital State [2013] and What is a Brand? [2015], all published by Kogan Page. He was named one of ten modern day Mad Men by Fast Company but hopes he is less morally bankrupt than the television show characters. Despite living on the road, you can reliably find him on Twitter (@Faris) and on his blog: www.farisyakob.com. For more information on Genius Steals head to www.geniussteals.co