In a low-lit room within Shoreditch House, our latest Digital Leadership Dinner played host to a captivating discussion where

John Kearon, Founder and Chief Juicer of BrainJuicer got emotional about marketing. We think much less than we think we think. Theres a new understanding of how we really make decisions, coming out of Behavioural Economics and its rewriting the way we thought marketing worked. It seems our higher order powers of mental deliberation which we rightly praise and prize, turn out NOT to be our Oval office of decision making but more our press office of post-rationalisations. In short, the vast majority of people on the vast majority of occasions make decisions emotionally and instinctively and marketing needs to drop its belief that rational messaging is an equal player in the secret sauce of successful brands and get much more emotional about marketing. However interesting that sounds, I promise its even more interesting when you start to explore the detail of this new science. But a word of warning: though each brilliant, counterintuitive example startles and illuminates, if you dont have a map by which to navigate and connect things, you can quickly lose yourself in a forest of examples. So heres a simple way to explore this exhilarating new world of behavioural understanding (thanks to LBi for the metaphor). Think of it like the London Underground map but with three zones; Psychological, Social and then Environmental. In each zone there are distinct stations representing the different but related heuristics. And all routes pass through the three zones to the same ultimate destination of a consumer decision. Zone 1 is Psychological, through which all decisions must pass. There are many heuristics to learn here but the most important is System 1 and System 2 thinking which describes the two mental processes we use to make decisions. System 1 is the instinctive, intuitive and emotional part. Fast to react, automatic, associative, effortless and learns gradually over time. System 2 is the cognitive, analytical, clever part. Slow, effortful and deliberate and learns in insightful leaps. The rub for marketing is these systems are far from equal. The impressive, cognitive System 2 would be the equivalent of 50 bits of computing power versus System 1s instinctive, emotional 11 million bits of power. It turns out, our capacity for System 2 thinking is very limited and we make the vast majority of decisions using intuition and emotion. The long version is beautifully set out by its inventor, Daniel Kahneman in, Thinking, Fast and Slow and we have Kevin Duncan to thank for a terrific 1-page summary. One major marketing implication is that advertising does not work as we thought. The most commercially successful advertising doesnt work by punching you with a fist of a brand proposition, wrapped in a velvet glove of emotion. Instead the most successful adverts have almost no discernable rational message but seduce you with pure emotion which becomes part of the brand. This explains the success of campaigns like the John Lewiss Christmas advert, Cadbury Gorilla, Compare the Meercats.com and Stella Artois Jean de Florette campaign, all of which failed traditional pre-testing methods. Zone 2 is Social. As social animals, one of the things we do best is copy. The cult of individualism in the West has made copying a dirty word and something that gets you into trouble at school or as a journalist. Yet, copying is a brilliant evolutionary strategy that with occasional variation enables us to spread good ideas and work successfully in unison. We copy much more than we think and certainly more than we care to admit. Everything from iPods white ear buds, to Amazons rankings and people who bought this, also bought this, to Mexican waves and regrettable fads and fashions like the success of Crocs which surely

prove we largely copy blindly? The long version of this is compellingly set out By Mark Earls and his professorial co-writers in, Ill Have What Shes Having and again the short version kindly provided by Kevin Duncans 1-page summary. Zone 3 is Environmental. This is the science of choice architecture, where the way things are presented or framed can have big effects on behaviour. These ideas have been popularised by Richard Thaler in his book Nudge and enthusiastically embraced by the government through their No. 10 Nudge unit, given the potential for encouraging the population to make better decisions to improve health, wealth and happiness. This includes everything from the life giving effect of making organ donation an opt-out rather than an opt-in option, the slimming effect of smaller portion sizes and the opposite of course in the case of Super-Size-Me, through to the off-licence that tripled sales of French wine by playing French music. Little nudges can have big effects. With the Psychological, Social and Environmental map in your head, I hope you enjoy delving deeper into this fascinating subject, through books like Predictably Irrational and the Upside of Irrationality, industry thought leaders like Rory Sutherland, sites like the Farnham Street blog and if youll forgive me, our own BrainJuicer papers.