Last week we held a BE masterclass for the insight team of one of our lovely clients to help them, and us, demystify the mystery. We wanted to immerse, learn and walk away with at least a few practical nuggets to help us be better, right away, at understanding and influencing consumer behaviour. This isn’t the first time we’ve held such an event, second in fact, and it was a great success.
We’re not experts in BE ourselves, so we called on a good friend, Nick Southgate, to help us out. He’s one of the IPA’s BE experts and great in this area. He most definitely knows a thing or two and took us on a journey from theory, to commercial examples, to practical application.
BE is actually a very accessible discipline. We can all borrow from it to be better researchers and strategists. I might say that given my history in academic Psychology! But given we spend our days trying to make sense of consumer behaviour and put this at the heart of brands and strategy, we’d be pretty crazy not to learn and practice what ever little nuggets we can.
Our brains are amazing. Super charged hot houses of impulsive irrationality, highly dependent on context, culture and personality. Not that rational, not that consciously transparent, but something we can go some way to understand. We have the ologies, Neuroscience, Semiotics, Material Culture and BE of course, amongst others.
BE helps us to understand that:
- Common heuristics and biases pervade our thought.
- We’re largely driven by intuition and context.
- Intentions may well change in the heat of the moment.
- We can’t consciously recall all in our memory.
- We respond to things then post-rationalize and confabulate.
- Our inner miser is bursting to get out.
- Our brains couldn’t cope with making every decision rationally.
- We mentally account, often without much rationality in sight.
And as well as offering a really relevant academic framework for what we do, BE is really inspiring. It sparks the imagination and throws up different ideas for approaching proposals, developing methods, facilitating consumer discussion, analysing and interpreting what we’ve seen and ultimately helping to shape client strategy.
I’ve got some interesting ideas floating around in my mind today! I’m thinking about: defining all core objectives behaviourally; comparisons, framing and re-framing; using the bystander perspective more in methodology; questioning techniques; good examples of mental accounting in recent projects I’ve completed; the importance of point of purchase and research methods here; not to frame things as losses when trying to avoid sense of loss; how I am the world’s biggest miser and have to have things NOW; how I can better chunk pretty much everything I do… and so the list goes on…!
Thanks Nick.
Elle
