The new issue of shots, issue 130, sees us tackling the sometimes thorny issue of the relationship between psychology and advertising. In this excerpt from the main feature Rory Sutherland, IPA president and vice-president of Ogilvy Group UK, talks about ‘satisficing’ punters and nervy creatives getting beaten up by bad science.
Where does psychology fit within advertising?
If you look at the ‘golden age’ of advertising in the United States, the three giants – Bernbach, Ogilvy and Howard Gossage – were fascinated by adjacent academic areas of study, partly for a need for respectability and partly due to their absolutely sincere pursuit of knowledge. In that era, there were all sorts of people looking at psychological theories and how they might be applied – you might even say it got a little excessive.
However the pendulum then swung too far the other way. We developed a model that was very simplistic, incomplete and in some cases diametrically wrong. One way you can give commercial advantage to a brand is to have better consumer understanding than the next guy.
What sort of insights can psychology and behavioural economics give that we are missing out on?
The persuasion/argument model used in most briefs today has certain assumptions. For example it assumes that attitudinal change precedes behavioural change, whereas a lot of studies show that it is the other way round. If a man says ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ he isn’t going to have an affair, it means he’s already had one. What happens is that a person gets drunk at a party, and in a desperate effort to make sense of their incongruous actions, they concoct a case against their wife. Changes in behaviour comes before changes in attitudes.
We also have to understand the kind of shortcuts we use when making decisions.
You can’t fully understand a brand until you understand satisficing – that is settling for something that’s ‘good enough’. In most decisions most of the time in most categories, we don’t try to get the very best result that we can, we want to make sure that we’re not getting ripped off. Unless we’re very anal, we don’t spend six weeks researching technological minutiae when choosing a flat screen
TV. We just want a good TV that won’t break. What brands do is they generally provide a good degree of predictability.
McDonald’s have realised that people don’t want the best burger in the world, they want one just like the one they had last time. People like predictability as it helps avoid disappointment – and fear works twice as acutely than hope.
How do you see the relationship between psychological research and creativity?
One of the things that a lot of behavioural science shows is that the creative instinct is quite good. I’ve become more respectful of creative people and creative awards since studying behavioural economics. You realise that the emotional effect of advertising is more important than the argumentative component. But creatives have to sell their work to people who don’t have these instincts. To a CEO brought up in a finance or engineering culture it’s near impossible to believe that advertising that is likeable can be more effective than advertising that is persuasive. You need to have a good vocabulary and scientific understanding to explain why it will work.
I think creatives would feel less neurotic if they understood it not only instinctively but also scientifically. They suffer a kind of neurosis because they know that they are right but they can’t always explain why – it’s a Cassandra complex.
In the battle between good creativity and bad science, bad science often wins. Creatives are fearful – they’ve been beaten up with shit science so often that they have a completely unwarranted aversion to science as a whole. We’ll never beat bad science with creativity alone, but we’ll beat it with better science and good creativity.
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