Marketing Needs a New Science of Human Behavior: MRSI Webinar, ET BrandEquity

The field of behavioral science and behavioral economics is often filled with unsubstantiated chatter, with complex terminology and buzzwords that distort the perspective of interested audiences. MRSI webinars aim to cut through the noise and bring clarity to the field. Speakers will demystify the concepts and applications of behavioral economics by delving into examples and real-life examples. At the heart of the discussion is one intention: to inspire deeper reading and exploration, according to seminar organizer Mukul Gautam, vice president of Purple Audacity.Speakers at the seminar included Biju Dominic, Chief Evangelist, Fractal Analytics, Geetika Kambli, Managing Partner, Centre for Behavioral Research, Future Factory, Kartik Sharma, Group CEO, Omnicom Media Group India and Varun Arora, CEO, Behavioral Insights, Architecture, and Strategy.

Leveraging neuroscience

Dominic began the session with a theme, “Why Marketing Needs a New Science of Human Behavior.” Dominic began by reviewing some of the highly successful businesses he has launched in the past, including Morgan Stanley Mutual Fund, Sundaram Mutual Fund, Axe Deodorant, Nestle, Kinetic Scooters, and Reliance Infocom. However, Dominic said that after decades, he has finally realized the truth: “Anything that has to do with human behavior has a high failure rate.” “That is, traditional theories that explain human behavior with a rational human at the center are not working. Market research methods, communication strategies, and understanding of human behavior are not working.”

He argued that neuroscience is in fact the truly new science of human behavior, and that neuroscience offers a vast amount of new insight into human behavior.

“For example, of the 11 million bits of processing that we have, only 77 bits – yes, only 77 bits – function at the conscious level. This is a fact. No one can believe it, but this is a biological truth.”

Biologically, it has been proven that the unconscious emotional self is the dominant factor and this new understanding of human behaviour is revolutionary and intriguing in equal measure, he said, citing Shankar Vedantam's book 'Hidden Brain'.

“New understanding clearly requires new tools. Traditional research methods such as focus groups and in-depth surveys cannot understand the vast unconscious processes of the human brain. For my team, for example, a lot of knowledge about the unconscious processes of the human brain actually comes from the field of sports. If you really try to understand what is actually going on in the brain of a batter when he is facing a ball coming at him at around 90 miles per hour, it can tell you a lot about human decision-making.”

“The yellow sleepers painted on the railway tracks in Mumbai and lines painted at strategic points on various arterial roads in the country have gone a long way in mitigating many human behavioural problems. We have been able to reduce deaths due to being hit by trains, which is the leading cause of deaths in Mumbai, by 75 per cent,” he continued.

Deviant behavior

But what is behavior in behavioral science? What solutions are we talking about? Or rather, what is the ecosystem that needs to be built? Arora brought these questions into focus through the definition of different types of behavior.

“You're supposed to brush your teeth twice a day, but you only brush them once,” he began. “There's a deviant behavior, a negative behavior: you forget to brush your teeth twice. What about a neglectful behavior, where you don't believe in brushing your teeth at all? What about a positive deviant behavior, where you go against all odds and prejudices and brush your teeth in a positive way?”

Relying solely on what people explicitly say and using “conscious techniques” like FGDs and discussions no longer works, Arora said.

Arora's team created a new dating app to understand the behavior of Gen Z. Arora explained that there is a critical need for tools that don't rely solely on explicit data collection methods, but instead get answers from revealed choice experiments. Relying solely on communication-based solutions is not effective. Arora revealed that AI can be used to capture these unconscious behaviors.

Record your experience

Kambri explained that the reason most new innovations and new products fail is because they start with technology. “You have to start with the human experience, understand where that experience is failing, and then think about incorporating a technology, idea or feature into the solution,” she said.

Kambli revealed that the team calls this “user backwards,” inspired by the fact that you have to start from the user and work backwards to see what your technology or product can do.

“So how can a product build trust in fintech when a customer is likely going to hand their PIN over to someone they trust to enter it for them?” Kambri dived into projects done for fintech companies to understand how their products would be adopted and used in communities that had never been exposed to similar technology. She brought up the word “trust” in relation to money, surmising that a money product in an urban environment would be similar to a CAPTCHA, UX, or some kind of cybersecurity. But in a rural environment, trust in money is about people.

Kambri emphasizes the importance of capturing the human experience in its natural form, with photos and videos (what people are doing) rather than what people are saying.

“We all know that you have to run multiple experiments and it can take months of work, and frankly brands and businesses often don't have the patience. And I would say to everyone in this room, AI is going to help solve that problem in some way,” Kambri said.

Behavioral Economics Experiments

Sharma talked about his media career and revealed that when he was studying human advertising, he was troubled by the idea that “it's not just numbers, right? There are many factors such as reach and cost. There must be something more.” Driven by this curiosity, Sharma started to read a little bit about what was then called behavioral economics.

“Behavioral science in advertising and media has been around for a very long time, loosely understood as psychology,” Sharma said, “but as I started to look deeper, out of curiosity, I found a whole host of new research methods and new fields.”

In the first example Sharma cites, he introduces the concept of ego depletion, which refers to when people give in to temptation when the parts of the brain responsible for reflective thinking become stressed.

He took the case of an impulse-buying food brand that wanted to find new opportunities to become users for its products. Its target group was college students. Sharma and his team recruited around 200 college students and gathered them in two groups at a central location. One group, the control group, was given a two-digit number. They then went to another room and had to repeat the number without writing it down. If they got it right, they would be given $200. While giving them the $200, they were given a choice between healthy and unhealthy foods. The students had to spend a minimum of Rs 100 on their choice. The other group was given a seven-digit number. The second group, who had a larger number to remember, took that extra deliberation effort to heart and as a result, they made more impulse purchases.

“They came, they made their money, they made their choice,” he said. “And there's something implicit in this: we're not asking questions, we're just asking them to take an action. We're not asking them which brands they're going to buy, we're just observing and recording. So the second group, who had to remember the larger numbers, chose more impulse purchases.”

Sharma continued that the food brand is installing mass food dispensers in colleges at select locations and increasing stock during exam periods. He highlighted that food is the number one category for low self-esteem.

The second is social proof, he explained. “Social proof is actually pretty self-explanatory. It's the phenomenon where people justify their own behavior by mimicking the behavior of others,” Sharma continued. “Or the simplest one we all know is a testimonial. You want to buy a product, and you see happy customers saying great things about it. Hotels use this very cleverly when getting reviews.”

Social media, trust icons, data numbers are also social proof. All of these methods are ubiquitous, especially in the digital world.

After social proof, Sharma spoke about the halo effect, a cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person is based on how other people feel and think about them based on certain traits. “So, for example, if we see a person around us who is unique, and we believe that he is a sportsman, that he puts in effort and scores runs, in cricket for example, he is a batsman, he is a great player, we tend to look at only those traits and try to generalize from them.”

“The only thing to be careful about with this approach is that if you overdo it, it becomes too repetitive,” Sharma warns. “So you have to be smart about choosing your spokespeople and not overdo it. Unfortunately, in India today, seven or eight out of 10 adverts are celebrity-based.”

Sharma began by talking about framing, “If I say this is 75% fat-free, then I frame the product. Take a burger for example, saying it's 75% fat-free is different than saying, 'It's only 25% fat.' And we've found that framing it as 75% fat-free produces much, much better results.”

“Consumers have more to lose, so focus on the losses,” he argued. “Use nouns over words. For example, for an OTT player, instead of saying, 'Thank you for signing up,' you can say, 'Thank you for signing up.' Just that subtlety of subtlety is what will start to see some bumps.”

The last and most important, Sharma believes, is context. He cites a famous experiment performed by violinist Joshua Bell: Bell went into the subway and performed like a street performer. Thousands of people passed by, but no one realized who he was. In contrast, on a normal day, he would have earned thousands of dollars as the most popular violinist. But in the context of a subway, rather than an auditorium, people did not recognize him, and so he was ignored.

“Recently, we have spent a lot of time studying attention across a few markets globally and we have found that the role of context is very important. For example, even with digital programming, attention increases or decreases depending on the programming context in which it is presented. Attention also impacts the ultimate purchase of the product,” Sharma concluded.