Marketing Needs A New Science Of Human Behaviour, Stress Experts

It is common to see brands breeze towards striving for long-lasting and deeper connections with their consumers, that eventually help them savour better sales and loyalty. However, as technology advances and consumer choices change, a brand’s real worth rests on how well it understands and drives human behaviours. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that this human behaviour has become an indispensable aspect of successful marketing strategies. It not only allows for fostering genuine connections and enhancing the consumer experience but also aids businesses in adapting to changing market dynamics, overcoming barriers to conversion, and ultimately thriving in a highly competitive landscape.

Having said this, experts believe in a revived approach to human behaviour in marketing that will resurrect the traditional techniques and push meaningful communication.

Convinced that marketing needs a new science of human behaviour, Biju Dominic, Chief Evangelist Fractal Analytics, Chairman FinalMile Consulting, goes back to the ‘90s and early 2000s when he launched brands like Rexona deodorant, Nestlé milk, Morgan Stanley Mutual Fund, and Sundaram Mutual Fund in India. It was during these decades that he realised that anything you do with human behaviour will have a huge failure rate, almost 75-90 per cent of the time. “This means, that the traditional theories that defined human behaviour are not working. Hence, the communication strategies we developed through this are not working. This humongous failure rate is why we need new science to influence human behaviour better,” he explains.

Quoting Shankar Medantam, Dominic reiterates that all human behavioural practices that have been revolving around the conscious rational man have ticked him away, and we will have to create new ways of looking at things, and understanding the human brain is the first of them. 

The Human Factor

Steve Jobs once mentioned, “Technology is nothing. What's important is that one has faith in people. And if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. Tools are just tools. They either work, or they don't work.”

Taking a cue from this, Future Factory’s Managing Partner, Centre for Behavioural Research, Geetika Kambli, asserts that when we are looking for a change, we are often tempted by the potential of technology. “However, a great start is always with human experiences, understanding where those human experiences fail, and then looking at plugging technology or the ideas or the features. We call it user-backwards at Future Factory,” she comments.

At the company level, Kambli’s approach is always towards human experience in its natural form. For her, context remains important from two perspectives: cognitive and physical.

“Behavioural science comes into play when we know something is missing. And the time for it is really right,” she adds.

Mitigating Media Decisions

Although behavioural science has made its way into most areas of marketing, its adoption within the world of media planning and buying has been limited. This is concerning because we need to use cognitive biases to our advantage and design media experiences in the same way we design UX, products, or creative experiences.

For Kartik Sharma, Group CEO, Omnicom Media Group India, what bugged him as a student of advertising was that it can never be always about ‘numbers’. That led him to dive deep into the world of behavioural science. 

“In advertising, it was historically called psychology. Today, new research techniques and new branches of behavioural science allow marketers to work with newer frameworks and experiments,” he shares.

Sharma, from his experience working with several brands, shares five techniques that typically work in media: ego depletion, social proof, halo effect, framing and context.

Solutions & Systems

Varun Arora, COO & Member of BMB (BIAS Management Board), Behavioural Insights, Architecture & Strategy (BIAS) looks at behaviour in five ways: sub-optimal, deviant, absent, positive and as intended. For him, solutions hold no value unless there are business outcomes or the necessary impact. “We can not only rely on communication-based solutions. One needs the expertise of social and behavioural communication to change the phenomena at a societal level,” he says. 

Arora further stresses creating an ecosystem that augers both the demand (learning curve acceleration) and supply side (generating jobs), agreeing that new ways of research are the need of the hour.

Even in media, new research approaches are needed for creative/media deployment. And we do see some early signs of convergence between behavioural science behaviour and other research techniques, inform experts.

*The experts were present at MRSI's webinar

Soumya Sehgal Bhutani

BW Reporters Soumya is the Senior Editorial Lead at BW Marketing World. She extensively writes on the Indian media, marketing and advertising ecosystem in India.