People don’t make decisions rationally. According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of thinking takes place below the level of awareness. Quite simply, we often have very little idea why we do the things we do. Instead we post-rationalise, in an attempt to find the hidden logic in our decision-making, or readjust it to align with our self-image and how we want to project it.
This presents a pretty fundamental problem to us marketers. When we’re trying to understand what people will do and why (what influences that behaviour) we all too often fall to a flawed solution: we ask. We stop people in the street, call them and place them in rooms with strangers in the hope that, so long as we ask the right questions and filter the output, we’ll get the answers we’re after.
It’s hardly surprising that we fail, sometimes quite spectacularly. Just look at the polling before last month’s election.
The answer is to look to the extremes of insight gathering. Behavioural data tells us the reality of what people do. Being close to them when they do it tells us why.
Combining data sources and knowing how to mine it lets us better understand people’s behaviour - what they do, in what context and how it intersects with our brands. We shouldn’t need to ask “what”.
“Why” is more interesting. Ethnographic approaches – observing people in the moment – allow us to get much closer to the truth. Consumer goods brands have done this for years, but it’s often missed when we explore wider brand relationships. Cost shouldn’t be a barrier. Talk to people as they find that first house, as they plan their holiday or as they sort half-term with the kids.
Increasingly, techniques from behavioural psychology like Implicit Attitude Testing can help us delve into that subconscious 95% and get closer to people’s real motivations and drivers.
So look to those extremes, because the revelations lie in the marriage of actual behaviour and rich, human insight.
Darren Burnett joint head of planning at Proximity London
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