Metrics are not always the marketer’s friend.
It’s the message from ad agency luminary Rory Sutherland, vice chair of Ogilvy in the UK and cofounder of its behavioural science practice.
He and his team of psychology graduates are charged with unearthing unseen opportunities in consumer behaviour, suggesting contextual tweaks of all sorts that have the power to transform the way people think and act.
He invented the discipline, which combines marketing, behavioural science and creativity.
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“I think the most valuable thing you can do as a marketer is often to notice something and come up with a very small intervention which can have a very big effect,” he explains on Inside Marketing, the industry podcast hosted by dentsu chief strategy officer Dave Winterlich.
It’s a belief that arose out of his recognition that, both in business-to-business and business-to-consumer communications, “the decision to do something is very heavily influenced by emotion”, says Sutherland.
He started out in direct marketing, and still loves it because of the ease at which its effectiveness is measured. However, that strength is also the industry’s weakness. “The only downside to direct marketing was that you weren’t ever allowed to do anything you couldn’t measure,” he explains.
As an industry, he believes marketing has made “a naive mistake. That is, if only we become more accountable, and better at quantification, people will give us the money we deserve, because we’ll be able to justify it,” he explains.
“Unfortunately, the obverse of that particular coin is we created a situation where no one will give us any money unless we can measure it.”
Rational man
It’s not just advertising. Business and indeed life in general has become overly target driven, metric, bureaucratic and “too rational”, he feels.
“We have created a kind of culture, which I don’t think was there in the 1980s or early 1990s, which is really about everybody having to mathematically justify their own existence in the short term every month,” he explained.
“It stems from fear and leads to a kind of bureaucratic mentality which is, you don’t have to do anything great, but whatever you do, don’t mess up.”
Just as consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, a relentless focus on metrics stifles creativity. But successful marketing is not in fact so easily measured.
Sutherland believes there will always be large aspects of what marketing does, and should do, where the effects “even if positive, and known to be positive, will never be fully quantifiable or attributable”.
He suggests fame, by way of example.
“If you are famous, loads of positive opportunities are brought to you, which would not happen if you were not famous. People think of opportunities to partner with you or work with you. People come and work for you for less money. They return your call. All those things are a product of fame but actually putting a cash value on that is never going to be possible,” he explains.
He blames the tech industry.
“I think the IT industry has sold us on the idea that eventually, it’s just a matter of time before the whole world becomes knowable and everything becomes calculable, and every penny you spend is optimal. And it’s never going to happen,” he says.
In fact, he suggests, there are only limited conditions under which big data really works, “and marketing and human behaviour probably aren’t among them”.
Shoot for the moon
One way that marketers can add value is by focusing more on moonshots, a term Google parent Alphabet uses to describe certain innovations – penicillin-sized discoveries – which are both significant in themselves but also because they create the potential for even further innovation.
Sutherland argues that psychological moonshots are much easier to achieve than technological ones. For example, it’s difficult to make a train go 10 times faster, but a few tweaks to existing train journeys could make them 10 times more enjoyable, driving passenger growth.
“Putting wifi on the Eurostar train would be a more important innovation than spending £6 billion making the journey 35 minutes shorter,” he argues.
Despite the obvious gains that stand to be reaped from psychological moonshots, Sutherland doesn’t believe we are looking for them.
Intelligent life forms
Of particular concern to Sutherland right now is artificial intelligence and its impact on decision making. “If I get done by a speed camera for effectively avoiding a lunatic, I feel resentful, because no policeman would have arrested me,” he points out.
Blithely following our SatNav system, even though we know that it is biased towards reducing journey time “and against looking at the scenery”, is another example.
“I’m looking at wider contextual things that I know it doesn’t know about. For instance, if I want to catch a plane, I want the route with lowest variance, not necessarily the fastest route,” he explains.
It’s why the human must be kept in the loop when it comes to creating advertising campaigns. “The narrative of tech is that the technological solution is better than what it replaces, and therefore, it needs to replace it completely,” he says.
“AI works better in collaboration with people than it does in replacement of them. No one in business will listen to someone who says my instinct tells me this would be much more effective. But they will listen to it when a computer tells them to do the same thing, even when the computer is stupid and has no awareness of what it’s like to be a human,” he adds.
It is human behaviour that is central to marketing success, which is why it’s so important not to reduce the discipline to data.
Most people only collect data to average it, he points out, but “in marketing, the information you want is the outliers”.
It’s why he prefers anecdotes to data. “We generally yap about the things which strike us as surprising. That thing we do in business, or as statisticians, of rejecting things as being anecdotal doesn’t, I think, fully understand the environment in which the information occurred,” he says.
The reason it survived as an anecdote, in Darwinian terms, is because it is sufficiently surprising or interesting to deserve retelling. “Nobody runs into camp and says, ‘nothing is happening outside’. But if someone says, ‘there’s a funny noise in the bushes’, you pay attention, because your survival may depend on it,” he explains.
It’s that kind of focus on behaviour that should inform our marketing, he suggests. Ironically, it was the data-driven world of direct marketing that led him there.
“Direct marketing is the gateway drug to behavioural economics,” says Sutherland. “It keeps throwing up these anomalous findings which you have to explain, and neither market research nor economic logic can actually explain them.”
To hear the Inside Marketing podcast click here