Ads aimed at changing behaviour are a waste of money

Posted on Published by Anand Damani

What an ad. Funny. Entertaining. Beautifully scripted. Well directed. Brilliantly acted. Excellent choice of music. Award-winning. And totally ineffective.

The ad not only acknowledges that bullying happens, but it also reinforces that bullying will continue to happen. Just that those who get bullied will get their revenge, even though its after 30 years.

Leave alone the fact that it got the psychology completely wrong, how exactly are such ad campaigns that get produced in hundreds every year in every country supposed to work? In this case, do the ad makers expect the bullies to remember (at the time of bullying) that their targets may seek revenge after 30 years and therefore not indulge in bullying now?

Or another example of an award winning ad seen by millions of people around the world – Smoking Kid. How many people do you think have quit smoking after viewing this ad?

Ever wondered why we hear so much talk around us, but see little change happening? So many promises, agendas, quotes, speeches, videos, ads, so much inspiration (gas) which seems powerful and emotional in the spur of the moment, but eventually leads to nothing. It’s because mere awareness rarely leads to action. We’re ruled by something that’s far more powerful than the inspirational or entertaining or factual messages we’re exposed to – habits.

But billions of money still gets spent on messaging and education to change behavior – not just by the government but also by the private sector. Such communication may succeed in creating an illusion of efficacy by changing attitude/intention, but has proven to be a highly ineffective way of changing behavior – whether of consumer, shopper, employee or public behavior. Truly, old habits die hard.

In the UK, for example, in the 1970s and 80s, the government spent millions on ads educating people to wear seat belts on TV, radio and billboards. Streff and Geller estimated that by the end of the 80s, 80-90% of British people saw these ads 8-9 times each. One would assume that showing people being launched head-first through their windscreens would make people respond. Turned out that most of the people weren’t responding, until in 1983 when the law changed along with strict policing, that most people started wearing them.

In India too, billions are wasted on behaviour-change advertising, whether it’s the ‘Swatch Bharat’ campaign or ‘Save fuel, save money’ campaign or tax payment campaigns. Regards public behavior the government has the option of making certain behaviors compulsory and punishable by law. But even when it is compulsory by law, we in India find ways of overcoming them for several reasons. For example we don’t wear helmets, seat belts, break traffic signals, sit on top of running trains, evade taxes, etc. Advertising isn’t making any difference.

The private sector does not have such legal recourse. So companies use awareness and education to change behavior, which meets with the similar ineffective outcomes. Take for example billions being spent on advertising to get Indians to change behavior and adopt products like mutual funds, breakfast cereal, mouthwash, etc. Or take the example of Colgate wanting Indians to brush at night. How many hundreds of crores and number of years do you think Colgate will take to get Indians to brush at night if it relies on advertising? While advertising is a time and money draining solution, Behavioural Design is about simple, scalable, small tweaks/nudges that make a big difference to big problems. Eg. Bleep – horn reduction system and so many other examples you would find on this blog.

It’s time for CEOs, marketers and policy makers to shed their old habit of relying on ineffective solutions like advertising and awareness-based campaigns and adopt Behavioural Design to change behavior effectively. It‘s the scientific way to change human behaviour.

Source for UK numbers – F.M. Streff and E.S. Geller – Strategies for motivating safety belt use: The application of applied behavior analysis – Health Education Research 1, no. 1 (1986): 47-59

Get more work done from home

Posted on Published by Anand Damani

Get more work done from home

Working from home means no pressure of deciding what to wear to work, no skipping breakfast due to hurrying up, no traffic jams, no wasting fuel, no pollution, no wasting time, no wasting money, no late-punching into office, no unnecessary meetings, no pointless brainstorms, no fake smiles, no sucking up, no monkey business. On the contrary working from home means having personal space, being at ease, improved focus and concentration, better ideation and greater creativity.

Christine Durst, founder and CEO of Staffcentrix and author of two books on the subject of telework, says the benefits start with basic cost savings from travel, real estate and utilities to areas such as recruiting and retention — and, yes, productivity. (Since 1999, Staffcentrix has designed and delivered a variety of training programs for such clients as the US Department of State, Air Force, and Army).

Durst says that telework programs can reduce absenteeism and tardiness, and even curb stress-related illnesses. But the one thing she hears again and again from remote employees is that they simply get more done.

Yet very few companies encourage their employees to work from home. We understand its natural for employers and bosses to wonder if you are really working or dozing off at home. But as long as you deliver quality output in the timeframe agreed, should it matter?

However like any other change, it’s going to be met with resistance by your company. So in order to lower the resistance, we think companies could do with 3 helpful interventions. One, companies need to have a clear formal policy on remote working, so that all employees know what’s appropriate and what’s not. Two, they need to provide employees with proper tools for remote working (laptop, internet connection & mobile) not just to ensure smooth work, but also so that managers can communicate with employees in a variety of ways and three; they could start a pilot by choosing result-driven individuals with good communication skills (and perhaps no kids), working remotely for 1 day per week and test it, rather than rely on conventional ways of decision-making i.e. over-analyzing whether it’s a good idea or not and not testing it.

Do also read Richard Branson’s take on it here.

Fairness is interpreted differently around the world – Part II

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Fairness is interpreted differently around the world - Part II

Here’s the second in the series on how fairness is interpreted differently by people around the world.

Joseph Henrich conducted a money-splitting experiment amongst UCLA students. He decided to use $160 for the experiment, which translated to 2.3 days worth of work. The rules – a student was given the money and was supposed to share a part with another undisclosed untraceable student. But if this student rejected the offer, both would walk away with nothing.

The most common split offered by students to another was 50/50, which the receiving partner always accepted. The participants said, “If I offered less than half, my partner wouldn’t accept the offer.” When asked if the recipients would accept an 80/20 offer – all of the partners scoffed, “that would be unfair”.

Then Henrich took the experiment to one of the most remote places on earth in the Peruvian Amazon – the Machiguenga tribe – that live in small villages, each family being self-sufficient, making its own tools and gathering its own food. Using a sum of 20 Peruvian soles that came to 2.3 days worth of work, Henrich conducted the same money-splitting experiment.

The Machiguenga participants offered incredibly low sums to their partners. Most offered an 85/15 split favoring the person making the offer. And the partners nearly always accepted them. Explained Henrich, “Several individuals made it clear they would accept any money, regardless of how much the proposer (splitter) was getting. They seemed to feel it was just bad luck that they were responders and not proposers.”

Some tribe members did offer 50/50 and when Henrich interviewed them he found out each one of these people had spent considerable time living among modern Westerners and felt that 50/50 split was the fair thing to do.

In the Amazon jungle it’s finders keepers, unlike US, Japan, Indonesia or Israel for that matter. It will be fascinating to conduct this experiment in different parts of India to find out what Indians from different states, castes and cultures deem fair.

Source: Does culture matter in economic behavior? Ultimate game bargaining among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon – Amercian Economic Review 90 (2000): 973-79.

 

Fairness is interpreted differently around the world

Posted on Published by Anand Damani

Fairness is interpreted differently around the world

Indian audiences of Kaun Banega Krorepati (Who Wants To Be A Millionaire) almost always help out contestants whenever contestants use the ‘ask the audience’ lifeline, regardless of his/her apparent abilities or background. As per our observation the answer is mostly correct and only sometimes wrong. And since we’ve been born and brought up in India, we could safely say that the intention is almost always there to help the contestant win.

Americans too help out contestants, when they use the ‘ask the audience’ lifeline. In fact using this lifeline results in the correct answer more than 90% of the time.

Here’s the fun part. In one of the game shows of the French version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, a contestant named Henri was faced with the question – What revolves around the earth? A. Moon B. Sun C. Mars D. Venus. Henri opted for the ‘ask the audience’ lifeline. No one voted for Venus, 2% voted for Mars, 42% voted for Moon and the biggest chunk 56% voted for Sun. Was the audience ignorant? What do you say French friends? Say Ori and Rom Brafman, authors of Sway, “the French audience deliberately chose the wrong answer because it didn’t seem fair to them for Henri to progress in the game with their help, when he couldn’t even answer such an easy question.”

Russian audiences often give the wrong answers. And deliberately mislead both smart and less smart contestants alike. So much so that the contestants learned to be wary of the ‘ask the audience’ lifeline. Geoffrey Hosking, an expert in Russian history and faculty of UCL says, “Before the twentieth century peasant communities in Russia grew up expecting to lend one another a hand. In the industrial days, people brought the old country ways to the city. But the same interdependent community could also turn against you if you stood out or were seen as different. People who departed from the norm were regarded as misfits. Very poor were considered a burden on the rest of the community. Very rich were regarded to have made money by dubious means. From this perspective Russian audiences see contestants trying to get rich on the backs of the audience members. So they feel that they should not contribute to such unfair behavior.”

Behavioural Design talk at TEDxGateway, Mumbai

Posted on Published by Anand Damani

Behavioural Design talk at TEDxGateway

Friends, I’m speaking at TEDxGateway on Bleep and Behavioural Design.

There are lots of interesting speakers lined up. So come over to NCPA, Mumbai on 8th Dec 2013 to listen and discuss some stimulating ideas and thinking that could change the way you view the world.

All the information is here – www.tedxgateway.com.

Hope to see some of you there.

Sometimes it pays to make things complicated

Posted on Published by Anand Damani

Sometimes it pays to make things complicated

 

Simplicity in design is one of the most sought after deliverables. After all, look at the products created by Apple. The products are so simple and intuitive that my friends 4-year-old son began touching and moving his fingers over his TV screen, getting frustrated over why nothing would happen. But here’s a scenario where just the opposite seems to be working. We’re talking about Diesel’s store design.

If you have walked into any of the Diesel stores you are likely to feel that you have walked into a party. Latest house/hip-hop music. A television playing a football match. No helpful signs pointing to men’s or women’s sections. No staff members in sight. Being confronted by 35 different types of blue jeans with strange names.

While clothing retailers like Zara have standardized and simplified the layout of their stores in an effort to put customers at ease, Diesel’s approach is based on the unconventional premise that the best customer is a disoriented one.

Says Warren St. John of New York Times, “Indeed, it is at just the moment when a potential Diesel customer reaches a kind of shopping vertigo that members of the company’s intimidatingly with-it staff make their move. Acting as salesmen-in-shining-armor, they rescue — or prey upon, depending on one’s point of view — wayward shoppers.”

”We’re conscious of the fact that, outwardly, we have an intimidating environment,” said Niall Maher, Diesel’s director of retail operations. ”We didn’t design our stores to be user-friendly because we want you to interact with our people. You can’t understand Diesel without talking to someone.”

For a behavioural designer, serving customers means relieving them of frustration, of confusion, of a sense of helplessness. Make them feel in control and empowered. But to the Diesel’s sales staff, this is an opportunity to present themselves as rescuers, ready to offer assistance, to provide just the answers customers will be led to believe they had been seeking.

Douglas Rushkoff, a media critic who has written about Diesel advertising campaigns, says the company’s store design is a new take on an old trick. In the 1950’s, the shopping mall designer Victor Gruen realized that when shoppers were distracted by confusing mall layouts and grandiose visual stimuli, they seemed more prone to impulse buying.

”They realized the best way to get people to buy stuff is not to facilitate their shopping but to disorient them,” Mr. Rushkoff said. ”Diesel shoppers say, ‘I’m not hip enough to get this,’ and then in comes the hip salesperson. What makes them hip is that they know how to navigate the space.”

We think Diesel gets away with making things complicated because their clothes are popular and considered fashionable. And wandering through the store is part of the experience. But would the same technique work for other retailers?

Keeping an open mind is not easy

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Keeping an open mind is not easy

At some point in life we all have been advised to keep an open mind. Though we’re aware of its benefits, we often find ourselves having to make a conscious effort in doing so. We were wondering if we were the only ones who had to make such conscious efforts. So we got digging on it and chanced upon this interesting story.

During the last week of September 1973, Egyptian and Syrian armies began massing near the Israeli border. Artillery had been moved into offensive positions. Syrians concentrated their ant-aircraft missiles at the border. From the hills of Jerusalem, people could see black exhaust generated by thousands of tanks and the smoke was getting closer. Anwar Sadat, then the president of Egypt boldly declared that the destruction of Israel was worth the sacrifice of one million Egyptian soldiers.

Meanwhile in Israel, major general Eli Zeira, director of Aman, the Israeli military intelligence agency, dismissed the possibility of an Egyptian invasion. He believed that the Egyptian military build-up was a bluff, intended to shore up Sadat’s domestic support. On the morning of October 6, when Gold Meir, the prime minister of Israel convened a meeting with top military officials to assess the situation. Zeira told her they would not dare to attack, of that he was certain.

In the early afternoon of October 6, Egyptian and Syrian armies launched the attack on Israeli positions in the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. Israeli army was taken by ‘surprise’. Egyptians tanks steamed across Sinai and captured key locations. Situation was direr in the Golan Heights. Israelis suffered heavy casualties. But the tide shifted by October 8 with newly arrived Israeli reinforcements. After intense fighting for days, the invasion was repelled. But it turned out that Israel’s military superiority was not a guarantee of safety as the country had almost been destroyed by an intelligence failure.

Why was the intelligence community so resistant to the idea of an attack? The answer pointed to Mossad and Aman’s influential theory of Arab strategy that they called ha-Konseptzia (the Concept). The Concept held that Egypt and Syria wouldn’t consider attacking Israel until 1975, at which point they would have an adequate number of fighter planes and pilots. The Concept also placed great faith in the Bar-Lev line, a series of defensive positions along the Suez Canal.

The Concept turned out to be completely wrong, because Egyptians were relied on their surface-to-air missiles to counter Israeli air forces, they didn’t need air planes. The Bar-lev line positions were mostly piled desert sand, moved by Egyptian military with pressured water cannons. But the Concept was deeply ingrained in the thinking of the Israeli intelligence.

As the psychologist Uri Bar-Joseph noted in his study of the Israeli intelligence failure, “The need for cognitive closure prompted leading analysts, especially Eli Zeira, to freeze on conventional wisdom that an attack was unlikely and to be impervious to information suggesting that it was actually imminent.”

It feels good to be certain. Confidence is comforting. The brain can analyze a problem from different angles, but that makes us insecure. Says Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust was a Neuroscientist and How we Decide, “When we analyze, we get into a indecisive disagreement within ourselves. Certainty imposes consensus on this inner cacophony. That’s why being sure is such a relief.”

But the way to counteract this bias for certainty is to encourage inner dissonance. We can take steps to prevent ourselves from shutting down our minds’ arguments too soon. Or we can create decision-making environments that help us better entertain competing hypotheses and keep our mind open atleast for sometime.

Ecommerce will soon be bigger than you can imagine

Posted on Published by Anand Damani

Ecommerce in India will soon be bigger than you can imagine

Let us tell you why we think so. Our starting assumption is that most of the shopping online in India in the future will be done via plastic card (credit or debit card) rather than cash, because of convenience. We understand that cash on delivery is convenient too, but you still got to have cash to pay, so it’s not as convenient. And paying by card is a lot different than paying by cash.

Paying by card fundamentally changes the way we spend our money. When we buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss – your wallet feels lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction more abstract and we don’t really feel the downside of spending money. As George Loewenstein, neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon says, “The nature of credit cards ensures that your brain is anesthetized against the pain of payment.” Brain imaging experiments suggest that paying with plastic literally inhibits the insula. Insula is the region of the brain associated with negative feelings. It’s the brain area responsible for making sure you don’t get ripped off. So when the insula is inhibited, it makes a person less sensitive to the cost of an item, making him/her more willing to buy.

Spending money by card doesn’t make you feel so bad, so you spend money easily. And buying stuff over an app is even easier with the pressing of the ‘Buy Now’ icon. Not to forget, the Internet is full of deals that make people end up buying things that they don’t even need.

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