Consumer Research Ate the Free Market
‘…health is worsening throughout the life course (...) That is, the nation’s health challenges have reach historic proportions.'
The above quote is from a report published last week by The Commission on Health and Prosperity[1]. It confirms the UK as an outlier among G7 nations in terms of obesity, life expectancy and avoidable mortality. Only the US does worse, coming a distant last in every metric.
I don’t imagine for a moment that this will prompt any soul-searching among the purveyors of processed food brands high in sugar, salt and fat. On the contrary, any attempt to address these appalling outcomes through regulation has already been attacked in the press as the ‘nanny state’ encroaching on our civil liberties and skewing the free market.
As I have argued throughout these posts, this is the opposite of the truth. It is the ability of branding to add value which skews the market and entrenches inefficiencies. And understanding this is the key not only to tackling the nation’s deteriorating health, but a whole raft of additional anti-social and uneconomic outcomes.
In my last post, I discussed how marketing earns its price premium by providing consumers with an emotional connection, extending the customer experience beyond the momentary satisfaction of consumption. I said this could now even be accounted for in neuroscientific terms. Dopamine, the chemical released into our bloodstreams when we anticipate a pleasurable reward, enables brands to grab our attention, to ‘cut through,’ in the cluttered media environment.
I ended by saying that this flight from objectivity wasn’t a conscious process, part of some grand design. How can I be so sure of this? Because I was there at the beginning of it all, over forty years ago. What’s more I questioned it from the start first as a copywriter, then director, of the most influential agency in the world. Why were we suddenly getting creative briefs that made no mention of tangible product benefits, in favour of gushing about how the product supposedly made the customer feel? Why were we making the sort of ‘feel-good’ US-style commercials that we used to believe sceptical British audiences would never buy? Nobody seemed to be responsible, or know the answer, but it kept on happening nevertheless. In this post I'm going to explain how this happened in a bit more detail, and why it matters.
The first thing to reiterate is that the role of emotion in decision-making was not understood, or even a subject of debate, in Soho in the 1980s. It wasn’t until over twenty years later that the implications of advances in neuroscience and endocrinology began to filter through to the general public. I remember reading the following, from a book by a prominent neuroscientist, and feeling an overwhelming sense of revelation and relief; as though I’d finally found the answer to a problem I’d been puzzling over for decades:
The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions.
Given the importance of emotion in guiding attention and behaviour wasn’t known about, I repeat: how were advertising agencies able to create brands so meticulously and purposefully designed to take advantage of this fact?
To answer this question, we have to ripple dissolve to the 1970s and a quiet revolution that occurred in UK advertising: the advent of a new discipline called Account Planning.
To this point advertising agencies consisted of two main departments: account handling and creative. The client would come to the agency with something they wanted to communicate to their customers: there was a new line, a new recipe or a lower price, that sort of thing. From this the account team would agree a business objective and an advertising budget. Creative teams would be briefed to generate ideas. Selected executions were then presented to the client for approval in the form of scripts and storyboards.
If it sounds crude and unscientific for a billion-dollar industry, that’s because it was. Even Lord Leverhulme, who built a multi-national marketing business, confessed that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, he just didn’t know which half.
Well, Account Planners promised to tell him by making the process more objective and accountable. And their primary tool for achieving this was consumer research.
Whereas the old arrangement took it on trust that whatever the client wished to convey was motivating to their customers, now Planners were on hand to check this was genuinely the case. And where previously the criteria for judging creative work had been largely subjective, Planners were able to use research to help adjudicate between competing creative ideas in order to determine which campaigns were more engaging and more likely to result in a purchase. Thereby introducing – at last! - some empirical data into the notoriously uncertain creative process.
The agency that pioneered this new discipline in the UK was called Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP). In the 70s and 80s BMP was responsible for a string of famous TV campaigns. In an industry poll of the top 100 commercials of the 20th century, 16 were produced by BMP – an unprecedented strike rate. This success was also a great advert for Account Planning, of course, and the practice quickly spread across London and the globe.
In order to enable their commercials to be researched, BMP also developed a technique of producing animated storyboards called ‘animatics’ designed to convey not just the factual content, but the feeling of the creative idea. In spite of their crudity, animatics proved extremely effective at eliciting responses from consumers which accurately predicted the impact of the finished commercial.
This meant that in research between competing creative executions, each incremental escalation in emotional volume could be diligently conveyed to consumers in focus groups. Guess what? Respondents reacted more positively to big smiles than small ones. Grins worked best of all. Major chords elicited better feedback than minor ones, and so on. Whatever the other merits of one campaign over another, the underlying lesson was that emotion triumphed over rationality in the numbers game of mass communication.
There was a towering irony in this, one that fundamentally altered the course of advertising, and mass-communication more generally, in the last quarter of the 20th century: the introduction of a rational basis for the evaluation of creative content ensured the increased reliance on emotion.
OK, so this dash through recent marketing history identifies one of the main factors behind the lurch towards emotion in mass-media advertising and its unintended negative consequences. In the case of the epidemic of obesity, most obviously, capturing children’s attention with emotional exhortations to consume high-calorie snacks, helped to tip the balance against self-restraint. It also created the necessity, and the means, for brands to ride out public health concerns, for fear of losing billions of dollars of trapped brand equity. But even in the knowledge of this dire consequence, it’s still difficult to say who did anything wrong and, more importantly, what can be done about it now.
To address this let’s take the case of two commercials for the same product being researched among consumers; one informing them of a substantive benefit, the other content to create an arbitrary positive emotional association. And assume that research shows the second execution to be more memorable and engaging and likelier to increase respondents’ propensity to consume. Allowing that in these circumstances this increase in projected demand can only be attributable to exposure to the (emotional) advertising, what is research actually measuring here? Bearing in mind the product is the same in each case, and the emotional execution makes no attempt to convey any functional advantage, this increase in demand can only be the result of a change in the emotional disposition of the consumer to the product, or, as I would say, to an increase in emotional utility created by the advertising itself.
But with only an orthodox monolithic conception of utility to work with Planners, in common with everybody else, were constrained to interpret this uplift as a straightforward increase in potential demand which it was their duty to maximise. Although the campaigns they were testing were now exclusively concerned with maintaining emotional connections with consumers, the marketing community nevertheless interpreted the increased sales that resulted as rationally motivated, and so consistent with the standard economic model.
The incoherence of this position may seem obvious now, but remember that at the point at which products first became brands there didn’t seem to be a great deal at stake in this confusion because, initially at least, emotional utility was a mere adjunct of functional utility. The fact that this created the potential for emotional dissonance to occur in future was a theoretical issue. And the misgivings of copywriters like me were easily dismissed as special pleading, because our more old-fashioned ‘product orientated’ approach was losing out in research.
Account Planners, in contrast, had no vested interest in any particular creative execution emotive or informative – they were doggedly ‘blind’ watchmakers; honest brokers simply ensuring the consumer’s voice was heard. They didn’t put their thumbs on the scale because they didn’t need to. And when the increasingly hysterical campaigns they helped to validate duly resulted in genuine sales, there didn’t seem to be a case to answer.
There surely is now. Now that ‘the nation’s health challenges have reached historic proportions!’ Calorific processed foods may still be promoting themselves with ever more joyful exhortations to consume – but they are doing against a background of an epidemic of ill-health, much of it caused by obesity and diabetes. Indeed, go figure, every dysfunctional market category is dominated by emotionally dissonant brands incongruously celebrating self-defeating consumer behaviour. The same toxic triptych of studied ignorance – account team, planner, creative - the same milking-stool of doom, is still hard at work churning out ‘feel-good’ campaigns not just for processed foods, but for gambling websites and credit cards and even political parties[2]; for everything, in short, that leaves us feeling, well, bad.
[1] Our greatest asset: The final report of the IPPR Commission on Health and Prosperity | IPPR
[2] More commonly political campaigning attempts to saddle opposition parties with negative emotional associations. See my second post for details.