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Making Up Their Minds By Michael Krauss
michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com
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euroscience and neuromarketing became hot marketing buzzwords a handful of years ago, but thanks to people like Matthew Willcox, you don’t necessarily have to find room in your own company’s budget to attach sensors to your customers’ temples.
As executive director of the Institute of Decision Making at Chicagobased marketing and communications agency Foote Cone & Belding, chief strategy officer of FCB West and author of The Business of Choice: Marketing to Consumers’ Instincts, Willcox is on a mission to ensure that C-suite marketers and their teams apply the latest thinking in behavioral psychology, neuroscience and behavioral economics to build brands, businesses and even individual careers by arming them with the necessary tools and insights to figure out how to influence consumer choice. Willcox, a native of Ireland who now calls San Francisco home, and his colleagues constitute a global team that includes both marketing and advertising professionals and academics from institutions including Stanford University, NYU’s Stern School, Wharton and more. This cross-disciplinary team is dedicated to unearthing relevant insights from academia and packaging them in a more palatable form for the practitioner world. “We’ve found that there are a lot of insights about how people make choices that marketers were not using,” Willcox says. “Marketers weren’t even aware of them. They go largely untapped. FCB recognized that there are advances going on in behavioral psychology,
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neuroscience and behavioral economics that inform how choices are made. We invested in the creation of the institute to put these insights in the hands of our clients.” According to Willcox, three key factors in consumer decision-making can impact marketing programs:
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Consumers take shortcuts when making choices. “Consider an
outfielder chasing a fly ball,” he says. “His brain doesn’t calculate the metrics like spin, air resistance, wind and velocity. The player watches the ball and starts running. The shortcut is to keep the angle of his gaze constant and adjust his running speed.” Willcox isn’t the researcher who studied this phenomenon (he cites the primary researchers in his book), but he aims to make sure that today’s marketers apply the science when building competitive programs. “These types of shortcuts have served human beings well for thousands of
years,” he says. “As marketers, we have to realize that changing human nature is nonnegotiable. We have to be informed by it. What you can do is use what we learn from academic research to make more effective marketing programs.” The trick to influencing consumers’ decisions is to take the thinking out of it, he says. “Make choosing your brand a no-brainer. Make it intuitive. Don’t require your buyer to calculate.”
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The human mind is structured to favor short-term goals over long-term ones. How can marketers
at a financial services firm encourage clients to save more? “You can’t just preach about the benefits of a rosy future if you start saving,” Willcox says. “Our human nature guides us to think in the short term. When we look at the brain scans of someone thinking about saving for the future, the pattern actually looks very much like we’re thinking of someone else, not ourselves. Through communications programs, we have to bring that future self closer to the present. That’s why some advertisers age people’s faces in their ads. The key is to use the science to inform our marketing programs and make them more effective.”
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Academic work can help us execute our creative programs more effectively. One example is
developing effective advertising for sunscreen, Willcox says. How do you get kids to remember to put on sunscreen now to avoid skin cancer when they’re older? “In Brazil, we’ve created advertising that shows a mother, a child and a doll,” he says. “In the ad, the doll rapidly gets sunburned unless sunscreen is applied. The sunburn happens very
“As marketers, we have to realize that changing human nature is nonnegotiable. We have to be informed by it. What you can do is use what we learn from academic research to make more effective marketing programs.”
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quickly. The child sees the relevance immediately. It is a way of putting the future more in the present so we make better choices.” Willcox encourages marketers not to fight human nature, but to apply it. He points to the tale of King Canute and the waves. As the story goes, Canute, the Danish king of England, Denmark and Norway from 1016 to 1035 A.D., wanted to demonstrate his omnipotence. “He brought his entourage down to the beach and sat on his throne and said, ‘I am so powerful I can stop the tide from washing my feet and robes.’ He sat there until the tide came in and, of course, it washed over his feet and robes,” Willcox
says. “As marketers, we need to recognize that we can’t change human nature. We have to understand it. We have to build on it. … Human nature pushes us to like choices that appear intuitive. Any way that you can make the process of choice easy is a very powerful thing.” Willcox encourages his clients to keep abreast of the academic trends, even though most executives don’t have the time to do the reading and study the science. In his book, Willcox references 25 books that he personally enjoys and has found useful. He hopes that marketers will read them all, but he’s also careful to note that the reason for FCB’s Institute for Decision Making is to make this content more accessible for busy clients.
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Even dipping your toes into this space is worth your while, he says, because it’s ripe for marketers’ experimentation. “Take a small amount of budget and see what you can do,” he says. “Chunk the challenge into small, manageable opportunities. … Look for the most stubborn problems within your brand or organization where you haven’t been able to change people’s behavior. Explore whether the newest work in behavioral psychology, neuroscience and behavioral economics can enable you to look at the problems in a new way.” m MICHAEL KRAUSS is president of Market Strategy Group based in Chicago.
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