Behavioural science as self awareness
Hey – Rob here.
When you’ve been doing strategy work for a while, your worldview starts to morph in strange new ways. Sometimes this means you think in presentation headlines. Others, in short quips that you might want to share in your social network of choice. These days I notice three frameworks tend to take up a lot of my mental space when trying to unpack things:
From X to Y
X because Y therefore Z
X as Y
Mental filters
From X to Y is the classic strategy shift slide. From “competing on price” to “demonstrating value”. From “selling the solution” to “spotlighting the problem of not having the solution”. You know what these slides sound like, and smell like. It’s a nice sound and smell, for me at least.
“X because Y therefore Z” is something that’s been living rent free more often in my head because of Nish Shah’s workshop for the Salmon Crew (upgrade here to access it). Basically the idea there is you find a link between a symptom, and cause, and an implication. For instance:
“People don’t buy us” (X) “because they think we’ve sold out” (Y) “therefore we need to back to our roots as a brand and show we’re on their side” (Z)
“Kids don’t eat vegetables” (X) “because they don’t want to be lectured about how good they are” (Y) “therefore we need to position them as villains they need to defeat instead” (Z)
Once you see this pattern, you can’t un-see it. It’s a core part of the strategy story behind every good effectiveness paper, and even some mid ones. It hits the right beats for you to show a clear understanding of the problem but also an intelligent re-articulation of it so it becomes solvable.
“X as Y” is a much simpler framework that’s all about creating an analogy between a thing and another thing. And for that I want to share my recent favourite example, which I picked up from our panel on behaviour change campaigns. A big takeout for me was: if you get behaviour science, you get yourself more. It’s a device to maximise self-awareness, which in turn helps you maximise awareness of others and how they do things.
Let’s unpack this.
Useful nerdery
When we think of behaviour science, we think of (largely non-replicable?) studies and clever counter-intuitive implications that make for great LinkedIn fodder or “well actually” moments in a comment section. But to study the academic workings of behaviour is also a way to better know how we respond to events. If we get social proof or loss aversion, we’re much less likely to fall for predatory UX mechanisms like when you’re trying to book a hotel room in Southeast England (“Only 4 left!”).
But to study behaviour is also, naturally, to study the behaviour of others, including those we work with. The most voted question for us to discuss was around how we can talk about behavioural science when briefing creatives, who famously a) are more visual b) are more single-minded c) get bored quickly and yes that includes getting bored of you yapping.
Interestingly, the real question here isn’t “how do you get creatives to give a shit about your behavioural science”. It’s to make the principles feel like not principles, but just plain common sense. The real moment of truth is when you turn all this nerdery into useful nerdery, which is to say you make it feel part of a good conversation vs lecturing people on "science".
Some good examples of plain common sense approaches that could be overloaded with academic jargon, but aren't, are Savlon (kids don’t wash their hands in school, so let’s solve the problem by putting our product in the chalk they use instead) or Sport England (women are afraid of being judged when doing sports, so let’s normalise doing sports however suits them best). This is the stuff that cuts through with creatives. It’s backed by behavioural science. But it’s interesting. It's nerdery. But the useful kind.
People pleasing
Creatives care about people (well, good creatives do, annoying ones just care about winning an award without solving a problem) so our job is also to care about people. When you care about people, you start paying acute attention to what really drives behaviour, plus the fact that demographics are probably not as big a factor as life stage or psychological state.
When we opened the panel, one of my little “let’s get warmed up” games was to get us share "fun" (my definitions of fun may be very different to yours) behavioural facts. We talked about the Batman Effect, the role of framing in event prices, or how the brain doesn’t like to think because it’s an inefficient use of energy. One I shared was around how students who are primed for fear respond more to social proofing, and students primed for love respond more to scarcity. Fun, right? But it's also more than that.
What this tells me is that the exact same demographic – students! 18-24s! Gen Z! – can have fundamentally different responses depending on how they feel about things. There’s also good evidence to this from other behavioural studies and IPA data about how the role of how people feel, and how different media makes them feel, directly affects their responses.
This should be a balm to the soul for the next time you get frustrated by only having "tech savvy young audiences" to work with. The job is to go deeper by filling the next step of the logic flow (”who [insert how they feel today or what they do today]”) before finding ways to address that problem, perception or lack of action. And getting good at understanding behavioural science, and therefore people, helps this part work better.
Again this isn’t about being too clever but about being super clear about what people are going through, and how we might get to them based on that mental state. This can work at a macro level (cost of living crisis core!) or at a micro level (social makes people more anxious than pods). No one’s impressed by all our knowledge, probably not even our mums. What people want is what they can do with it next. Sorry to bear the news.
Friction is sexy
Another good theme we discussed was the strategic use of friction to help people get things done, but also to help them feel what they’ve done packs some sort of meaning or value. This last part is the crux of the question, because it challenges the assumption that all people want is to have easier access to things and then boom, everyone's happy and we can go home.
That sounds good on (an economics) paper, but it falls apart once you realise that listening to Taylor Swift on Spotify just isn’t as meaningful, memorable or impactful as watching the Eras Tour live. A bit of effort builds a lot of meaning. And signalling is still far too under-discussed.
To get this, it helps to understand the concept of sludging, a distant and dirtier cousin to the white sheep of the family, nudging. Nudging is all about making something easier to think about and do. Sludging is about creating friction where it doesn’t exist. Toxic examples of sludging include needing to call a newspaper on the phone to cancel your subscription when it would be much easier to do it online. But there are good examples too.
For example, a few weeks ago in the Salmon Crew there was a quite useful exchange about the nature of the APG’s training courses. One critique by a member was that they were useful but it was a shame that they weren’t recorded and available on demand for future consumption or perhaps reference. It felt like a big faux pas when it comes to accessibility.
But then, another community member, who’s a famous CSO in the London scene and has been involved with APG training in the past, offered an interesting reason about what that might be. The training modules were designed to facilitate deep work, personal access to mentorship, and the irreplaceable energy of tackling problems together.
Once you see things through that lens, it doesn’t discard the fact that some people would prefer to have access to content and that’s the end of it. But as with the Taylor Swift example, more content is cheap, and a sense of connection through tight and live team work grows the perceived value and meaning of a course. It also probably helps you remember stuff better.
Once you realise there’s this pattern of useful friction – not “toxic sludge”, but “meaningful sludge” – it’s hard to not notice it everywhere. Guinness takes longer to pour, so good things come to those you wait. It’s harder to write notes by hand, but you’re more likely to remember what you wrote. Reading a physical book boosts memory retention in a way that a Kindle never could (sorry Kindle, love you still). It’s everywhere. And it matters.
Rationalisation machines
Another topic that led to useful discussion was to what extent behavioural science principles come in handy to rationalise ideas. And the answer is, to a great extent. Especially when you’re either dealing with quite logical clients, or operating without a huge deal of actual evidence in the guise of market or audience intelligence, either qual, quant or a mix of the two.
In those cases, pulling a little bit of academic jargon (let’s say 10% jargon for 90% of substance) may not be a bad thing, because it gives the whole exercise an aura of credibility that just saying “trust us, it’s really good and it’s gonna work” doesn’t quite achieve. The other thing we forget is that sometimes we’re not convincing the client in front of us, we’re giving them the ammo to convince someone else who doesn't get marketing.
The counter to all this is that you don’t want to try and become better at the logic game than people who have mastered it decades ago. Sometimes, the best way to tackle these things is not to be better at playing the game, but to change games. Essentially, to hijack the flow of the conversation in a way that feels subtle but makes a big difference in how clients respond.
A quick example from some work I’ve been doing this year. We were trying to sell some scripts for a largely conservative and logical business (btw, largely conservative for the right reasons), and trying to show the importance of interesting writing. Logic after logic, rationale after rationale, argument after argument, nothing was really cutting it.
Spot the problem? We were trying to out-logic the logic masters. Instead, we tried something different. We showed them another ad that had been made, and had quite interesting writing. Then we put that script as it was written on one side of the page. Then we put a stripped back version of the same script on the other side of the page. Same content. Different style.
Suddenly, the difference was striking. One of them made you feel nothing, while the other provoked a smile in the mind. At no step in the process did we go, “oh you know what, we should do some script anchoring exercises to demonstrate the relative value of interesting writing”, but that is exactly what we did. And it worked. Clients bought the work. Feeling beat logic.
Proof of humanity
All of which brings me back to my thesis about self-awareness as a gateway to know others better and get them to do things. Hopefully, the right things. Once we know more about these psychological mechanisms, including how they might affect us (not just others), it’s like finding a new level of the matrix. Things get weirder, but also weirdly make more sense.
And given all the debate we’re now seeing about cognitive atrophy and the growing doubt of what is true in the age of AI, this sort of stuff is more than interesting. It’s verging on the existential. Knowing the basics of behavioural science helps us understand how to ask better questions, which means we ask AI more interesting questions. And as you and I know, the quality of the question often dictates the quality of possible answers. As always, garbage in, garbage out. Plus ça chance.
But this whole self-awareness thing is also another building block on what you might call the “proof of humanity” paradigm. In our panel we barely scratched the surface of the role of behavioural science in events, but one thing they have in common is they both offer a more visceral lens of what drives people beyond simply “having more information” about a thing.
So we return right back to one of the mental models at the start, don’t we? There’s a new “if X then Y therefore Z” emerging here, where suddenly we’re overwhelmed with information and need the right mental tricks and the right physical spaces to make sense of it. It’s something I want to explore deeper in a future newsletter, this role of events as proof of humanity, because all the data I’m seeing suggests this is far more important than simply nailing your AI prompting skills. Or at least it’s more meaningful, and that’s ultimately the main thing that we solve for.
Keep swimming,
Rob
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