Under the influence

The core techniques of advertising, unchanged for decades, are tired. Agencies are having to turn to sophisticated psychological methods in order to find out what makes consumers tick – and, more importantly, buy. By David Reed

Disneyland is a wonderful place. If you have visited with a young family, you will know the pleasure that your children get from being there. From the Magic Kingdom to Pirates of the Caribbean, it is like living inside a cartoon fantasy.

While the rides are the main attraction, the moment everybody remembers is the big parade at the end of the day. A grand procession goes by with floats featuring some of the best-loved characters – Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck.

Disney has perfected the art of creating an emotional impact with its theme park. Everything is carefully engineered to maximise customer reaction, including ensuring a 20-minute wait for each ride – the company has discovered that waiting actually enhances the experience. And it also knows that children who visit are likely to return as adults with their own offspring.

Most brands do not have the opportunity to create such a fully formed customer experience, or to work through a 20-year customer cycle. They need to achieve an instant emotional impact that will translate into a sale. That means getting into the minds of consumers and working out how to trigger the appropriate response.

Back in the Fifties, advertising guru David Ogilvy made the point that, “the greater the similarity between products, the less part reason really plays in brand selection.” Since that time, marketers have focused on understanding the subconscious motivations that drive consumer choice.

Packard’s alarm bell

As long ago as 1957, these techniques were described – in shocked tabloid tones – by Vance Packard in his book Hidden Persuaders. Packard detailed the way in which psychological techniques, such as depth interviews, could identify associations and barriers within consumers’ minds. At the root of most emotional responses were deep-seated, socially defined issues such as guilt, fear, shame or the need for peer group approval.

Consumers were ashamed that they only cleaned their teeth once a day, so toothpaste manufacturers began to talk about 24-hour protection, for instance. They still do. And this lack of change is why there is currently a crisis around consumer insight and its application.

As Sean McIlrath, a creative partner at Heresy, says: “I have noticed from endless consumer focus groups that people nowadays talk about being able to see the marketing strategy. They can see what an ad is trying to do. They even say things such as: ‘I’m not in the target market’.”

Marketers have strip-mined the consumer subconscious for 50 years and the seam is now exhausted. The tried-and-tested techniques that were once used covertly are starting to fail. “The Vance Packard idea – that we can sit in ivory towers and manipulate consumers – is not working,” says McIlrath.

Evidence of the problem is provided by one of the major providers of insights into consumer psychology. NOP has recently relaunched its consumer market research under the new name of Three-Dimensional Research.

Announcing the switch, the company noted that: “Some people feel that traditional research approaches are simply not delivering the degree of insight, the ability to predict future trends, or the contextual angle needed to keep their brand, product or service fresh.”

In response, the company has turned to ethnography, pure observation, “person-centred” psychology and elements of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). “This approach can reveal a considerable degree of insight into who and what influences behaviour, how people really make decisions and seek information, and what comprises their ‘world’,” says NOP.

NOP’s move reflects a trend in the marketing industry – approaches to consumer psychology are changing. This trend is apparent in direct marketing (DM) although not everyone in the sector goes along with it.

For instance, Richard Bush, managing director of business-to-business agency Base One, says: “As a business-to-business marketer, I would prefer to start with data and test different propositions against the database, rather than use market research.”

And Thomas Adalbert, managing director of The Preference Service, which gathers consumer data via postal and online surveys, claims: “The insight into consumers that this type of information gives is the closest to mind-reading that direct marketers will get.”

Altered perceptions

Yet there are many DM practitioners who do believe change is necessary. They doubt that conscious statements made by consumers, and the behavioural data that can be gathered on past buying behaviour, reveals the true triggers of purchasing.

Instead, many are now looking to practices derived from therapeutic psychology for more effective and practical ways of influencing consumers. The most influential of these is undoubtedly NLP.

First outlined in The Structure of Magic, written by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in 1975, this theory is based on observations of the techniques of a number of psychiatrists who seemed to be particularly effective in helping their patients. Bandler and Grinder outlined linguistic structures that reveal the individual’s world and what stimuli have the strongest influence upon them.

NLP is certainly powerful: psychological illusionist Derren Brown, who draws on elements of NLP for his performances, has persuaded shoppers in a mall to raise their right hands on cue by applying some of NLP’s linguistic techniques, for instance.

To be of value to marketers, however, the insights provided by NLP need to be consistent, performable and capable of being applied on a large scale but at an individual level.

Jim Brackin, director of insight at psychological marketing consultancy ESP, is a former creative director of Amherst Direct Marketing as well as being a registered hypnotherapist. At his former agency, he developed a technique called Motivation Attitude Profiling (MAP) which identified people’s values in a particular context.

“If you know those values, you can predict what they will do and what advertising will drive that,” says Brackin. MAP accounted for 70 per cent of new business at his former agency, and he founded ESP in order to extend these techniques and offer other agencies a service that discovers gaps between how they are communicating and what the customers’ underlying motivations really are.

MAP aims to provide recommendations that can form a new creative brief. “But where companies fall down is in the application. We’d spoken to 300 advertising and marketing companies. They’d all used our research. But had they ever applied it?” says Brackin.

He believes the problem is that describing consumer groups’ values does not expose the motivations that create those values. This is where NLP comes into play, because it allows practitioners to identify those drives by studying the structure of language used by individuals. Copy and visuals can then be aligned with those deep-rooted structures. “We can research messages to ensure they suit the target market,” says Brackin.

Beauty of context

A similar technique has been developed by agency KLM, which calls it Contextual Matching. (The seminal work for the importance of context is Ray Birdwhistell’s Kinesics and Context, published in 1970, which also gets a name-check from Derren Brown.)

For ten years, KLM provided trade marketing support for Sky, encouraging call centre agents working for cable distributors Telewest and NTL to offer their subscribers premium Sky packages. Since KLM could not do face-to-face interviews with agents, the agency had to evolve a technique that would allow it to identify the “VAK” – visual, auditory, kinaesthetic (emotional) – profile of agents quickly and easily.

“In general, customer services people have a strong auditory bias, which makes sense. But when we looked at telesales people as a group, they tended to be strongly visual,” says KLM chairman Jon Derry. Changing Sky’s communications to reflect this helped to overcome the barriers.

Alongside this VAK profile, the agency also deploys a linguistic and behavioural (LAB) profiling technique that groups consumers into one of 14 patterns. “These are the source of their motivation,” says Derry. The 14 patterns comprise seven opposing groups, such as internal and external, or towards and away.

The final – and most difficult – profile the agency tries to build is based on the information sequence used by an individual. “Subsconsciously, we process information in a particular order in one of four ways – ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘how’ or ‘so what?’. The real goal is to find out which comes first, because then you can write your copy headline to appeal to the appropriate people,” says Derry.

This new understanding of consumer psychology is slowly spreading through the marketing industry. The critical thing is how to make it work. At KLM, for instance, all of the creative teams have been trained to interpret LAB profiles from raw transcripts themselves. At The Values Company, which allocates consumers to one of seven key value types, the profiles have been mapped onto the Claritas database of 43 million consumers.

An important strength of the new techniques is that they do not just explain the target market’s mindsets, they provide the tools to influence them. While marketers shy away from the idea that consumers could be persuaded to buy products they may think they do not want, at its heart this is precisely the job of marketing. Sales people have been doing this for years. And Derry admits that: “You could use it aggressively in theory. The potential is quite marked.”

It is possible to manipulate consumers, even to implant false memories. Take a look at that second paragraph again. Had you noticed that Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros character and so he would not be allowed into Disneyland? It is as easy as that.