Words in ads that you don’t even know you’re being influenced by
RIP Daniel Kahneman, the man who uncovered our irrationality
At the end of March, Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioural economics died age 90. I felt some sadness despite not knowing him. His work alongside others shifted the way we think about psychology and human behaviour. I call him the father of behavioural economics and he really feels like it to those of us who are interested in the field.
Kahneman researched and identified that we are not the rational people economists thought we once were. He had a huge impact on how we think about sociology, behaviour change, policy and most relevant to me and this blog - marketing. He authored seven seminal books, his most famous in ad land being Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). In fact, he had such a tremendous impact on our understanding of the human psyche that he won the Nobel Prize in 2002.
Discovering behavioural science
My journey to finding out about him and this field is a very human one - a planner introduced me many years ago and I’ve been more or less hooked ever since. For those who haven’t worked in a marketing agency - a planner or strategist is the person in an agency team whose job it is to uncover insights and tactics that create the best creative campaigns. This planner was difficult but brilliant and during a discussion, he told me about Dan Ariely, a follower of Kahneman’s. 12 years ago (!) I trotted off to a talk hosted by the How to Academy with Ariely promoting his playfully titled book “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty” and I was fascinated by what I heard.
Ariely was my gateway to others who shaped the field of behavioural economics - the recently passed Daniel (Danny) Kahneman as well as Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler. Other followers include Rory Sutherland (a big dog in the advertising world and the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK) and Richard Shotton, a marketer, behavioural scientist and author of “The Illusion of Choice” - a recently released book which includes research as recent as being collected during the Covid pandemic. It is full of practical tips on how to use behavioural science to make your marketing better.
The characters in the behavioural science ‘set’
Through tinkering and testing ideas of perception and value, all these men (where are the female behavioural scientists I find myself asking?) have brought fun, intrigue and surprise to my world.
Michael Lewis’ book “The Undoing Project” (2016) is less research and more of a love story - it tells of the partnership between Kanhneman and his research partner Amos Tversky; how their geniuses worked together and how they fell apart. Such concepts as the discovery of cognitive bias, which we take for granted today but which were unrecognised by science at the time were identified and labelled by these restlessly curious professors.
If you want a light dip into the joys of behavioural science, watch an old classic - Rory Sutherland’s TED talk from 2009 on ‘Life Lessons from an Ad Man’. He is intelligent, funny and as we love to say in my family: “a real bon viveur”. The video is something of an introduction to examples of how our perceptions of intangible value have been exploited by clever people throughout history.
Framing and how it’s used to influence
Moving on to the idea of value, much of our behaviour is shaped by our perception of value. And this in turn is manipulated by framing. Framing is a concept in behavioural science that I like to use because it can make communications more effective.
To give you a taste of what framing is and how it can have an impact, I will dissect an example which has nothing to do with Kevin Bacon’s career and everything to do with what he says in a new EE ad.
“On a scale of ‘One’ to ‘Kevin Bacon advertising for EE’, how badly is your career going…?” (Reddit never fails to make me laugh, thank you r/CasualUK)
Most days I half-listen to the radio whilst I work. I happened to be listening to Jazz FM one afternoon, and because it’s a commercial radio station, they have adverts. The advert I tuned into was an EE one. Kevin Bacon (reportedly paid 7 figures by EE in case you’re wondering); says, “Switchers save more on their broadband”. A fairly innocent statement - or is it?
The key word to notice here is “Switchers”.
What is a “switcher”?
You probably already know. A “Switcher” is a label used to describe people who switch providers.
The subtext of this label is that if you’re a switcher, you’re savvy and you’re smart because you’re saving more money than those who don’t switch. EE uses the perceived positivity of this label to try to encourage a behaviour change they would directly benefit from.
If you aren’t familiar with this tactic you wouldn’t even notice the “switcher” label, but if you are, you’ll know that ‘labelling’ is a well researched language tool used in marketing to subtly influence people.
Are you going to suddenly switch to EE after hearing this ad? Probably not. But has it subliminally influenced you in some way? Possibly.
You might find that a few days later you check your bank balance and see a payment for your gas and electricity and feel you really should sit down and finally switch to a new provider because you know you’ll get a better deal, but you don’t exactly know why you’re thinking about switching in that way, at that point. Whether you go ahead and actually do it is more complicated and a topic for another day. But the seed has been planted, and the more seeds, the more likely they are to grow.
The label we want to wear
Framing or in this specific case, ‘labelling’, which is a subset of framing is just one cognitive concept that can be used to make marketing more effective to subtly influence people. And lots of subtle ‘nudges’ (see nudge theory by the aforementioned Richard Thaler) are what amounts to eventual behaviour change.
If you want an in-depth article about framing there is a good explanation on Wikipedia but for simplicity, it is best explained as you probably already understand it: framing is a concept that allows us to use oblique or overt references to give context to our reality. Labelling goes one step further - it enables us to discriminate within our frame of reference. For example, labelling allows us to distinguish between being a ‘switcher’ which is ‘good’ or a ‘non-switcher’, which is implied as ‘bad’ because of the potential loss of money.
Interestingly, this label is delivered in a factual statement rather than a question, “Switchers save more on their broadband” as opposed to “Did you know switchers save more on their broadband?”
Two things on how/why this ad works on some levels:
There is probably enough anecdotal evidence among the British public to know that this statement is true as most people know that utilities companies are terrible at rewarding customer loyalty
Could they have made this ad even more effective if they framed it as a question rather than a statement? Probably, yes.
Why are questions more engaging than statements?
If you ask a question, it invites the person to try and answer it. We do this automatically without thinking. It is harder to answer a question than it is to listen and accept or deny a statement in our minds; so the mental work involved in trying to answer commands our attention.
Unfortunately, radio ads are full of questions. So, it may be that EE didn’t want to follow suit in order to try and stand out. It may even be that they ran a pilot and the statement performed better (although if this is the case it would more likely be down to it being more identifiable than effective - but at this point I am surmising). It may be that the agency EE are paying considerable sums of money to have no idea at all about the research done on the effectiveness of questions in advertising…
In case you’re interested, research on the effectiveness of questions in advertising has been carried out by Rohini Ahluwalia and Robert Burnkrant in 2004. You can read about it in The Illusion of Choice by Richard Shotton (p.48 if you want to skip straight to it).
We also know that labelling is effective - research carried out at Stanford University in 2008 proved that using nouns (e.g. a voter or a switcher) is more persuasive than using verbs (e.g. to vote, to switch). The reason for this is straightforward - using nouns leads people to feel that the attribute is representative of their own personal qualities - it makes the statement about them.
Am I a switcher? Am I a voter? If it’s in any way perceived as positive in the internal monologue, people want to identify with those nouns and they stick more readily in their minds than their verb counterparts.
So, what does this mean for your marketing?
Combine labelling with questioning for ad magic! This technique is known in behavioural science to be effective for brands to harness because it elicits feelings of worth, it forces reflection and it builds the case for you to take action.
So next time you write your marketing copy, think about how to write it in such a way that it gives the person a warm hug and asks them if they can be the best version of themselves. Whether that is a ‘switcher’ a ‘voter’ a ‘lover’ or a ‘hater’. Remember those Marmite ads? Are you a lover or a hater? That ad first ran in 1996 and is still being referenced today - such is the power of effective labelling.
