Fritz Bachen SIGNS BOOK DEAL WITH OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Fritz Bachen, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at independent creative:media agency CumminsRoss, has signed a book deal with Oxford University Press (OUP).
The book, to be titled The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour, will combine Bachen’s experiences as a psychologist and advertiser and reveal the inside machinations of advertising. The book is co-written with best-selling author and broadcaster, Jennifer Fleming, currently presenting Breakfast on 702 ABC Sydney.
The Advertising Effect is pitched both at the advertising community and those interested in how advertising influences behaviour. It suggests how these techniques can be applied to common life scenarios. The book also features insights from some of Australia’s and the world’s leading thinkers on advertising, psychology and behaviour change including Rory Sutherland, Alain de Botton, Andrew Denton, Faris Yacob, David Nobay and John Mescall.
“I’m really excited to be publishing this book, especially with Oxford University Press,” says Bachen. “I believe we have entered a golden age of advertising where people are increasingly interested in how advertising works, and how they can apply its methods to their own needs and business problems. ‘The Advertising Effect’ uncovers psychology and advertising techniques that people may find interesting or useful to know.”
Publisher Karen Hildebrandt adds, “Advertising and psychology are professions our readers are interested in. We think this book, that brings together these two disciplines, will generate significant interest and discussion. It promises to be an engaging and unique insight into an industry dedicated to influencing behaviour.”
The Advertising Effect is published on 28th May 2014. If you’d like to reserve a copy please visit www.oup.com.au/Bachen and type in the code 20adeffect, because you’ll receive a 20% discount (available in Australia and New Zealand only).
Please feel free to let other people know about this advanced offer.
About Fritz Bachen
Fritz Bachen is Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at independent creative:media agency, CumminsRoss. Bachen was a Strategic Planner at Saatchi & Saatchi before co-founding multi award winning agency, Naked Communications in Australia in 2004. His work has won Gold at shows including Cannes Lions, New York Festivals, Effies, Clio’s, as well as ADMA and CommsCon (winning Grand Prix’s at both in 2013). Bachen is a frequent media commentator and public speaker. He tweets @FritzBachen. The Advertising Effect will tweet from @theadeffect.
An article that first appeared in The Australian in Feb 2013.
I HAVE a very strong emotional connection to Twitter. What does that mean? I use it a lot, I talk about it often, and I love it. I really enjoy it, and I don’t use any other social media service to anywhere near the degree I use Twitter.
Why do I have an emotional connection to Twitter? Because it does what it does really well. There has been no advertising that has formed that emotional connection — it has come from experiencing the product itself. Everyone knows the power of a brand creating a strong emotional connection with consumers.
Having a connection with a brand that is emotional — not just rational — creates “perceived value” in the brand, beyond that which one would expect a “rational” person to pay. It also creates loyalty, and a sense of connection between brand and consumer.
However, what worries me is that somewhere along the line the benefits of having an emotive brand has become confused with the benefits of “emotional advertising”.
The two are very different concepts. Let’s look at some of the current “hot” brands — beyond Twitter. Zara, Facebook, ASOS, Carmen’s Muesli, none of these advertise, so where is the emotional connection coming from? It’s coming from everything those brands do — they do well, and do in line with a strong central purpose. In short, they’ve made the consumer a promise, and they deliver on that promise in everything they do.
The emotional connection is created by doing what you do well, not through advertising. In fact, it could be argued that advertising is the least sincere way for a brand to create an emotional connection with their consumers. The hallmark of emotional advertising has historically been the big-brand ad. An ad that has a very high production budget, and doesn’t have a call to action — it just shows the brand in an evocative manner.
Think things like Cadbury’s Gorilla ad, or closer to home Carlton Draught’s “Beer Chase” ad released last year. Big-brand statements — that don’t say much about the brand at all.
I often struggle to see the benefits of these big-brand ads as a good investment in money. As I heard the legendary Larry Light, ex-CMO of McDonald’s, once say: “Everything that builds the brand should generate sales, and everything that generates sales should build the brand.” Hence if the brand ad isn’t generating sales: why do it? We are now in a communications landscape where this is possible.
Every piece of media is now interactive and can, if we want it to, combine brand building and direct response. Every ad in the newspaper can have a QR code, every ad on TV can link to the second screen, every ad on the internet can have a direct “click to purchase” button.
So now is the time to reconsider investing big dollars in the brand ad. Now is the time to reconsider why you are trying to form an emotional connection with your advertising rather than getting your product right (and then just using your advertising to tell people about it, and let them try the product).
These are exciting times for marketers as the thin veneer of advertising agencies preaching “lovemarks” and building brands through one-way advertising is crumbling. The rhetoric that advertising is a great way to create an emotional bond is falling flat as more advertisers begin to question the merits in an emotive piece of film, as opposed to getting the core of the brand right. Brands are being built from the inside out by their owners, refocusing on their products.
Further, an emotional bond is enhanced by interacting with — and being a part of — the development of the brand. It’s easier to change attitudes through actions, than to change actions through attitude. So get people involved with your brand. Open it up and give ownership to the people. Ask their opinion, build your community of brand advocates. Build the number of people who’ll build your brand on your behalf.
A positive emotional bond between brand and consumer is a must for creating a strong brand. The least effective way to do this is with advertising. The least effective way to spend your money is arguably all the dollars you’re investing in your next big-brand ad.
Recently I gave a talk at Spikes Asia with Imogen Hewitt. This is how the very clever Susie Sell captured the essence of the talk in Campaign Asia. I hope it’s ok to copy and paste the entire article. For the original thing go here.
Naked: Stop the song and dance and get consumers to act
By Susie Sell on Sep 18, 2012 (2 days ago)
filed under Advertising, Singapore
ASIA-PACIFIC – Marketers should stop the song and dance act to ingratiate themselves with consumers and instead make them do something for the brand, Naked Communications founding partner Fritz Bachen has said.
In a provocative session at Spikes Asia 2012 in Singapore on Monday, Bachen and Imogen Hewitt, managing partner Southeast Asia, Naked Communications, said the most effective way to prompt change in consumer behaviour is through action, not by changing thoughts and feelings.
Bachen said once somebody has taken action, they will then change their feelings towards the brand to justify that behaviour to themselves. This will ultimately result in a stronger emotional connection with the brand, he said.
He advocates the so-called ‘Benjamin Franklin effect’ that works on the idea that asking someone to do something for you is the fast-track way to get them to like you.
“So stop asking what we can do for our consumer, stop the song and dance to ingratiate ourselves to the consumer,” he said. “Get them to do something for us and they will like us even more.”
Bachen later told Campaign Asia-Pacific that the focus on storytelling is stopping the industry from interacting with consumers and prompting action. “All that is doing is treating consumers as a one-way, passive vehicle,” he said.
But if brands are to command action, the advertising ideas and the insights behind them need to be significantly better, he said.
Bachen added that the world of insights has now changed from needing to find the “big, penetrating human truth” to finding the behaviour insights that is going to move units and help build the brand.
He points to a recent campaign devised by Naked Communications for spot cream Oxy, which was based on the insight that men like watching videos of other men squeezing zits.
“That insight is not a deep, penetrating, fundamental human truth; it’s just bloody useful,” Bachen said. “We get hung up on trying to get very deep… [ we need to focus] much more on understanding who our people are, the behaviour we want to change, and then finding the insights around that behaviour.”
Billions of dollars are spent each year by marketers in efforts to change consumer behavior. These are often direct and overt, such as persuading consumers to consume a product over that of a competitor. Even indirect attempts, such as campaigns aimed at creating brand image and raising awareness, ultimately have the end goal of changing consumer behavior.
In the marketing and advertising industry it is usually assumed that communicating a message to a consumer in a one-way direction is all that is required to change behavior. This is despite the proliferation of both academic and commercial research into consumer motivations (e.g., Bargh, 2002; Jacoby, 1976; Tybout & Artz, 1994). Though much effort is invested into the message itself, the direction of communication is rarely questioned.
The prevalence of this approach is interesting, since alternative methods of communication to change behavior have long been developed in other industries, such as education. Two-way communication (e.g., student involvement in lectures) has long been recognised for its contribution to learning and behavior change (Gosen & Washbush, 2004). For example, a study found that children who had participated in gardening as well as receiving nutrition education had significantly higher vegetable consumption levels, in comparison with children who received nutrition education only (Parmer at al., 2009).
Problematically for marketers, the most successful ingredients of an advertising campaign are often difficult to pinpoint. However, in recent times, aided in part by an increased industry focus on digital technologies and social media platforms, ‘action’-based campaigns have demonstrated encouraging results. Campaigns such as Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, McDonald’s Name It Burger, and the Tate Modern’s Warholiser all required some form of consumer interaction, whether this was by playing a game, naming a product or transforming a photo of themselves.
Viewed through a psychological lens, these campaigns reflect various forms of experiential learning. Based on the theories of Dewey (1938) and Lewin (1947), experiential learning is defined as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Kolb, 1984). Thus, consumers who have the opportunity to interact with, or experience, rather than passively receive a message, should be more likely to create personalized meanings and associations from this information, and then change their behavior accordingly.
There appear to be at least three significant reasons that experiential learning is effective: autonomy, discovery and personal relevance (Smith, 1980). Autonomy may circumnavigate resistance to a message, facilitate discovery, and enhance motivation. For example, in a study that measured different parenting styles of parents of 180 elementary school children, Grolnick and Ryan (1989) found that children of participative parents (e.g. where children were involved in decision making and problem solving) were more internally motivated and successful at school.
The experience of coming to a realisation oneself appears to be essential for processing and retention of information. Also, when one is personally involved in action learning, information feels more relevant and therefore, more interesting, with greater perceived consequences for oneself (Smith, 1980). Another potentially explanatory theory is that of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). Consumers may be more open to a brand once they have begun the interaction process, due to the need to maintain consistency between thoughts and behavior.
Thus far, this subject has received little empirical attention in an applied sense. Therefore, our research aims to investigate the effectiveness of action-based communication versus traditional, passive forms of communication, with effectiveness defined as a measurable change in consumer behavior. We propose that:
H1. Participants in Condition 3 will donate a higher mean amount per person to charity than Conditions 1, 2 or 4.
Methodology
Participants
A convenience sample of 181 delegates at an Australian media and marketing conference was used (Condition 1 = 94, Condition 2= 27, Condition 3= 42, Condition 4 = 18). The age range was approximately 20-65.
Materials
For each group, a video was created comprising an introduction and the experimental manipulation, led by a charity representative. Behavior change was operationalized as monetary donations to charity tins.
Condition 1 (passive/rational) viewed a verbal presentation of key factual information about the charity.
Condition 2 (passive/emotional) viewed a video montage of the charity’s activities and positive effects, accompanied by an upbeat song.
For Condition 3 (active/high personal involvement/neutral), participants were asked to create an advertising idea for the charity, by drawing an image, some words and an encapsulating ‘tagline’ on paper. The task was deliberately unguided so as to facilitate autonomy.
For Condition 4 (active/low personal involvement/neutral), participants were asked to complete some unrelated word puzzles.
All groups were supplied with a written overview of the charity’s core functions, to ensure a baseline level of understanding.
Procedure
Consent was obtained prior to conference attendance.
No random allocation was possible, since participants were required to self-allocate to one of four rooms for the following conference presentation. Participants were blind to experimental conditions (ostensibly sponsorship messages, so as to prevent demand effects). Assistants collected donations immediately after the manipulation.
Participants were debriefed the following day.
Major Findings
Results suggested that those participants in the active learning condition were likely to donate more. Condition 3 received the highest donations per person ($3.84). Following this was Condition 2 with $3.69, Condition 4 with $2.58 and Condition 1 with $2.39. A lack of data points at the individual level precluded examination of statistical significance.
Some additional participants entered the room in Condition 3 after the manipulation had begun. Attempts were made to exclude these from the dataset. We cannot rule out, however, the possibility that additional donations may have slightly inflated the mean donation per person.
Overall, the present research has yielded encouraging support for the effectiveness of action-centred communications, although logistical limitations limited the reliability of the data collected. However, given the pattern of results obtained, and robust theoretical underpinnings of our central hypothesis, we feel that this is a very strong direction for further research.
Future research is planned to replicate these findings in a more controlled environment, across a range of product categories, and across a range of types of ‘action’, and with representative populations.
In Press
Bachen, A., Ward, B., & Palermo, J. (2012). Behavior Change: Why Action Advertising Works Harder Than Passive Advertising. Working paper presented at Society for Consumer Psychology: Proceedings of the 2012 Annual Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada, February 16 – 18, Society of Consumer Psychology, USA.
References
Bargh, J.A. (2002). Losing consciousness: Automatic influences on consumer judgment, behavior, and motivation. Journal of Consumer Research, 29(2), 280-285.
Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gosen, J., & Washbush, J. (2004). A review of scholarship on assessing experiential learning effectiveness. Simulation & Gaming, 35(2), 270-293.
Grolnick, W. S., & Ryan, R. M. (1989). Parent styles associated with children’s self-regulation and competence in school. Journal of Educational Psychology, 81, 143-154.
Jacoby, J. (1976). Consumer psychology: An octennium. Annual Review of Psychology, 27, 331-358.
Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics: Channels of group life; social planning and action research. Human Relations, 1(2), 143-153.
Parmer, S.M., Salisbury-Glennon, J., Shannon, D., Struempler, B. (2009). School gardens: an experiential learning approach for a nutrition education program to increase fruit and vegetable knowledge, preference and consumption among second-grade students. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 41(3), 212-217.
Smith, M. (1980). Creators not consumers: rediscovering social education. Leicester: National Association of Youth Clubs.
Tybout, A.M., & Artz, N. (1994). Consumer psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 45, 131-169.
Authors: Fritz Bachen, Brook Ward, Naked Communications, & Josephine Palermo, Deakin University
We wrote a paper recently, Behaviour Change: Why Action Advertising Works Harder Than Passive Advertising’. It’s been presented in Las Vegas this weekend at the Society of Consumer Pschology Annual Conference. It was jointly authored by Brook Ward, Deakin University academic Josephine Palermo, and myself. It’s a discussion paper to promote the effectiveness of participatory messages in advertising. In short it puts forwards evidence that getting people to participate in communications is more effective than just passively receiving a message.
I’ve now come across this brilliant blog Behaviour Change and Technology there is one particular meta-study they site by Webb, Joseph, Yardley & Michie (2010). It has looked at a number of behaviour change programs that harness interactive technology (internet, smart phones etc) to establish their effectiveness in behaviour change. In short its effective, but the effectiveness obviously varies widely.
Link this with another interesting blog that was posted on Mumbrella by Simon Lawson, called Canalside View this blog has an article on it looking at ‘The Participation paradox and how it relates to advertising. In short – it says the following (and if I have got this wrong please let me know):
We should focus on getting those people who don’t buy our brands very often to purchase more, rather the getting the ‘loyal’ to purchase more (this is pretty well established for several categories (especially impulse categories))
To get these people to purchase ‘awareness’ isn’t enough, we need to get them interested in our brands
A great way to get people interested in a brand is to get them to participate.
However, only those who are already interested in the brand are likely to participate.
So if you go with both of these interesting points of view then the biggest marketing challenge facing marketers is how to get people currently uninterested (or even unaware) of your brand to start to participate with your brand. The ideas that create participation for a brand, but are so big that they draw others into the brand for the first time are the types of ideas that are likely to change brand fortunes. There are a few examples of such ideas dotted around this blog, but for some others on a global scale think Chalkbot and The Man your man could smell like.
Passive advertising (advertising that talks at you and you don’t need to do anything but not change the channel) is still omni-present. We see it on TV, in magazines, on outdoor advertising. However, none of this has to be passive. Through advances in personal technologies and social media there is now no excuse to just do passive advertising (I just don’t understand why people continue to do it at the exclusion of adding a layer of interactivity).
If you’re still in the mindset of finding an emotional connection with your consumer then use the chart below. It’s from a very smart chap called Robert Plutchick in the 1980s.
If you’re still convinced you need to tap into an emotion to change behaviour then you should find this useful. There are a few points I’d like to make about it:
1. Emotions develop as the species develops. The core emotions (the 8 at the top) are the most basic / base. They are the ones we need for survival.
2. The further down you go, the more complex and neunaced the emotions.
3. For more information go to wiki
So hopefully this chart will aid in your discussions around which emotion is best. However, if you really want to make a difference we would suggest you get people to act in some way, not just passively receive a message. We strongly believe this for reasons outlined here and here and throughout this blog! We call it action advertising.
Below is the write up of the psycho-marketing experiment we conducted at Mumbrella360, as it appeared on Mumbrella. There is also a link to it in The Australian, and on The Punch with some interesting comments.
For those of you who missed it, we teamed up with Save the Children and Deakin University to run an experiment at Mumbrella360 to identify the most effective way to change behaviour using behavioural change and decision making principles (boring for some interesting for others). It was a fun way to put into practice, and demonstrate the power of some of the principles that change behaviour.
We found that the most effective way for a charity to raise money was not to hit people with rational or emotive messages, but rather by asking them to participate in the communications even in a very small way.
We also believe these learnings can be generalised to other forms of behaviour change desired. For example, convincing consumers to purchase one product over another may be more effective through ‘action’, rather than rational or emotive messaging.
Here’s how it worked:
Look at most charity organisations’ advertising and you’ll see that it focuses on one of two ways to unlock peoples’ wallets to raise money. It’s either:
1. Arational message: Providing statistics that provide evidence as to how important the charity is, and how large the task at hand is. For example, how many lives are at risk, how many people have died, how many degrees the earth has warmed up and so on. Followed by a ‘donate now’ message.
2. Anemotive message: Showing evocative and emotive images of the cause (scenes of devastation) or the effect (scenes of happy, smiling people) of the charity. Followed by a ‘donate now’ message. Emotions of joy and fear are often used.
We wanted to compare these traditional methods with this more ‘action orientated’, actually getting people involved in the charity, participating in some capacity and only once they have done something, asking for money.
We teamed up with Mumbrella 360, Deakin University and Save The Children and conducted an experiment – on the participants of the conference (sorry about that – but you were warned). We divided some people at Mumbrella360 into one of four groups; one group receiving a rational message (stats and figures about children dying and being saved), the second an emotitive message (lots of smiling children over-coming adversity to a wonderful sound track); the third group was asked to create an advertising campaign for the charity, and finally a ‘control’ group (who were asked to solve meaningless puzzles). All four groups were then asked for money.
It was the third of the these three groups, the ones who were asked to write an ad for ‘Save The Children’ that ended up donating the most money, they donated $4.03 each, around 35% of the total amount for cash they had on them. The rational group donated a measly $2.39 each, and the emotive group donated $3.69 each.
These results support our thinking (and there is plenty of other evidence in science and marketing that does as well). At least three psychological principles were at play, that ensure an ‘action orientated’ approach is the most effective way to increase donations:
a. Ownership: people feel more responsible for the charity, and therefore are more engaged with the message (need to pay attention)
b. Cognitive dissonance: once people act in a certain way, they strive to align their thoughts and feelings accordingly. Thereby making it more likely to give to the charity
c. Autonomy: people are invited to interact with a message on their own terms versus it being forced on them. This circumnavigates resistance to the message, and makes it more likely they will give.
The results have a significant impact for charities, causes and brands in general everywhere (anyone who wants people to give them something!). If they involve people in their cause (whatever their cause may be), rather than just ask for money, or a purchase (with either rational or emotive messages), then they have a much greater likelihood of success.
We like to believe that this is pretty radical thinking and is flipping conventional advertising theory on its head. No longer do we try and build awareness, then interest, then desire, then action. We flip the old AIDA model on its head, start with action and the rest falls into place.
In marketing communications the dominant view is that we grow brands by climbing up theAIDA ladder. That is you use your marketing communications dollars to create Awareness, then build Interest, then motivate Desire, before finally seeing Action. Amazingly the model was created in 1898 by E. St Elmo Lewis after studying how to sell life insurance. It has no scientific robustness, nor credibility. but it was simple to follow and perhaps had some perceived logic. Anyway the model, with some slight variations has stuck. It’s also how people still see marketing communications (it’s how most marketers and market research companies measure brand health)
However, if you’ve been working with Naked Communications over the last 18 months or so you’ll know that we have resorted to flipping the AIDA model on its head to communicate our view on how many strong brands are built today. That is strong brands are built through action. We believe changing behaviour is what marketing communications is about (why are you spending money otherwise), and the best way to change behaviour is through action. Drive Action first, and the rest will, by and large look after itself. The Naked Communications ADIA Model is below – the most important thing to note is that we start with action.
There are three key reasons we have done this, a psychological reason, a technology reason, and lastly a business reason.
The Psychological Reason
Human behaviour works like this, How you think controls how you feel that in turn controls how you act. However, Cognitive Behavioural Psychologists have now stopped arguing over what comes first emotions or thoughts (the two are inextricably linked yet we have more control over thoughts hence they make a more useful therapeutic tool) and jump straight to action. Or asCastonguay and Beutler, 2006say in a meta study “effective treatment is characterised more by behaviour change than insight”. If we can focus on behaviours the rest will follow.To this end psychologists today don’t ask you to sit on the couch and have an insight, they get you practising the desired behaviour and reinforcing it when it happens. The same goes for marketing communications – we should stop trying to find a big emotional connection with advertising, and start to promote action.
The Technical Reason
We now live in a digital age. ALL media can now command action. There is no media that needs to be received passively. A TV ad can have a URL, a website can have a link, an outdoor ad can have a hyperlink, a magazine ad can have a QR code. Further, so much technology can help brands provide utility to people. Marketers can use their marketing dollars to promote action, not just passively receive a one way image.
It’s been asked that if we have technology to command action always then why don’t we? Well the short answer is that it’s extremely hard to create advertising ideas that people chose to interact with. It’s much easier to create ads that people must watch passively as they interrupt their favourite program. Creating ideas that people chose to (inter)act with is extremely difficult, and requires genuine human insight. In short, with so many ways to promote action with the consumer why would you just want to build an emotional connection?
The Business Reason
There is little argument that passive advertising has been an effective way of build a brand for many situations (i.e. you have a brand big enough to warrant the massive entry costs of production and media). However, we contest that getting people to act with your brand may be an even more effective way to build a strong brand. If it’s a choice between asking a consumer to act and get involved, or passively receive communications – then take action every time. It’s a difficult area to conclusively prove but we are starting to pool some evidence. Firstly, we are doing it and have been developing case studies showing the effectiveness of advertising (including the most awarded campaign at the2010 Effectiveness Awards). This campaign promoted Action, not Emotion and knocked the ball out of the park. Secondly, it appears that many of the seemingly effective campaigns around the world are now inviting interaction between consumer and producer. Finally, it makes sense. If we can jump straight to Action, and invest our advertising dollars at that level then perhaps it’s a more focused use of advertiser dollars.
However, as said before promoting action is hard. In order to command action you have to focus on a behaviour that is likely to happen. This needs to be carefully assessed and deliberated on. However, when you are confident you have a behaviour that’s likely to occur then I would suggests you spend your marketing dollars to make that happen (and not waste money trying to build an emotional connection*.)
Consider this article in BETA, I’d love builds an inputs. It also links to many points I’ve made previously over the last yearhere,here, andhere.
* Be wary of the advertising agency who says their goal is to make consumers love your brand, or form an emotional connection. I’ve loved MINI for 15 years and never bought one. So much advertising dollars aimed at building an emotional connection is wasted. Love, or any other emotion is not the end game for marketing communications. Action is (the emotional connection will be much stronger as a result of interacting with your brand). The same goes for research companies, theytrack brand performance on brand pyramids that look rather similar to AIDA. Below is an image from the Millward Brown, Brand Pyramid taken off the Internet. It’s their measure of brand health, and with ‘presence to bonding’, looks very much like Elmo’s AIDA model which he made up in 1898 (I don’t mean to pick on MB I actually quite like a lot of what they do – but not this model).
I am speaking at aconference on Behaviour Change, and I’ve been asked to speak as a representative from the advertising industry. There is a perception out there that advertisers know how to change peoples behaviour. From what I’ve seen this assumption needs challenging. Let me explain….
There are some very clear models developed by psychologists on how tochange behaviour, and thestages of change in behaviour. However, I’ve never seen anything equivalent developed within the advertising world. Further, I’ve never met anyone in advertising who has a robust opinion on how to change behaviour. Normally they’ll start talking in very vague terms about ‘emotional engagement’ and other such rubbish such as love.
At Naked Communications, over the last year or so we’ve taken the concept of how to change behaviour seriously, and it’s changing the way we do things. We have begun to develop some strong models and processes that we think, when applied correctly, will be much more effective in changing behaviour. Why the obsession with behaviour change? Well it’s at the core of marketing – any and every project undertaken will have, as an end game, the desire to change behaviour.
Behaviour change is an endlessly complex area of study. Anyone who says ‘we have the answer’ must be looked upon with suspicion. However, so too must anyone who works in advertising who hasn’t a clue on the subject.
Here’s an article in Adnews about why it’s imperitive you understand a) how advertising works, b) how to change behaviour, and c) the power of the Bramotion.
The attached Adnews article looks at how you can build brands with a mindset other than advertising. We need a new mindset when building brands other than ‘advertising’ or ‘line extensions’. There is plenty more we can do.
