‘Brands spend far too long asking customers how they behave’ /

In 2023, Contagious spoke to behavioural scientist Richard Shotton ahead of the launch of his second book, The Illusion of Choice. Two years on, he’s back with a third: Hacking The Human Mind: The Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World’s Best Brands.

Co-authored with MichaelAaron Flicker, his fellow co-founder of US consultancy The Consumer Behavior Lab and co-host of the Behavioral Science for Brands podcast, the book distils 36 behavioural biases into lessons for marketers. Unlike Shotton’s earlier work, it anchors these biases in the real-world strategies of 17 brands that succeed by layering multiple principles at once. As Shotton puts it, ‘Often, when you look at the best brands, it’s this layering of one or two biases together that makes them really potent.’

Here, Shotton discusses why marketers should focus on the unchanging man, why the industry’s approach to testing needs a rethink, and how simple tricks can shape perceptions of price.

The full interview is free for Contagious IQ subscribers here.

The book spotlights brands using multiple behavioural science principles, rather than tackling them one by one. What drove that shift?

Whenever I do talks about behavioural science, it’s always the examples that really land the point, people can get lost in the abstract experiments. Sometimes, if you just talk about experiments, the role for marketing doesn’t seem quite clear. But if you talk about a brand that has demonstrated one of these principles, it’s much, much easier to understand. And one of my frustrations is when behavioural science is talked about in this academic, abstract way because it it reduces the probability marketers use it – and there’s so much more opportunity to boost the effectiveness with behavioural science.

The other way was to think about how marketers learn from best practice, because it sounds really easy at first, you find out who’s doing really well in your category or adjacent category. Look at what they’ve done, you copy what they’ve done. But the problem with that is, if you’re talking about a company the size of Dyson or Red Bull or Snickers, they don’t just do one thing at a time. They’re often doing hundreds of things concurrently. So it’s very hard to know whether an action a brand has done has contributed to their success or detracted or made no difference.

So what we did was look at 17 of the world’s best brands, look at all the different tactics they’ve deployed, then overlaid those tactics with the behavioural science lens.

You warn that many brands lack distinctiveness because of the wind tunnel effect. What is it, and why does it matter?

The wind tunnel effect is more of a hypothesis. I think it was Jim Carroll [former UK chairman at BBH] who first came up this idea. He used the analogy of cars originally. Somewhere around the 1980s what you notice is, you had this huge divergence of car shapes and sizes and looks, but over the next few years, they all settled on a very similar styling. His argument is, well, they all adopted the same testing mechanism. They put everything through a wind tunnel. There are certain physics of aerodynamics, so you’re going to get cars that look remarkably similar. With too rigid a focus on testing, with too rigid of a focus on slightly facile customer insights, you end up with the same situation in marketing. And lots of brands start to look remarkably similar.

The problem with that is, even if those approaches are sensible in and of themselves, the Von Restorff effect suggests you’ve got to think about the context you’re operating in. An interesting example is Skittles. During Pride Week they used to say, ’We’ll give back the rainbow’, and they had completely black-and-white packaging. Now that makes them stand out brilliantly in the sweets aisle, because they are surrounded by loads of packaging using Day-Glo colours.

There’s too much testing in isolation, too rigid a belief in what customers tell us as the reasons why they purchase.

Are there any different approaches to testing that you think brands should be taking more often instead?

Brands spend far too long asking customers how they behave, so surveys, focus groups and from a behavioural science perspective, that’s problematic. The University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson says we are strangers to ourselves. He makes the argument that people don’t have introspective insights about their own motivations. So if you ask someone why they bought a particular pint of lager, they will give you a very small subset of their actual motivations. They’ll talk about very sensible, logical, rational things that they could defend if they were questioned. They’ll talk about the refreshment, the taste, the price.

What they won’t talk about, and probably don’t even realise might motivate them is that they may have heard what the person next to them was ordering, or it was the first thing that caught their eye when they walked in. Now there’s all these small, fleeting factors that have a huge impact that we don’t quite even admit to ourselves influence our purchasing. If you take it at face value, because people don’t have this full introspective insight, it will often send you off in the wrong direction.

Is enduring human behaviour more important for marketers than shifting trends?

A central argument of the book would be, human nature doesn’t change. There’s that wonderful [Bill] Bernbach quote about how it might be fashionable to talk about the changing man, but as communicators, we should be concerned with the unchanging man. What these experiments show is often what influences that unchanging man.

If you think about evolutionary psychology as the driver of human nature, you realise it’s ludicrous to think anything should change in five to 10 years, because that’s just a blink of an eye in the hundreds of thousands of years we’ve been around.