Nudge Marketing: How to Use Behavioural Science in Your Advertising
How can missing a few missing letters lead to 24,000 people donating blood? It might be hard to believe, but it's behavioural science applied to advertising.
Unless you're lucky enough to have a household consumer brand with a dominant market share, getting people to notice, remember, and act on your brand can feel like an uphill struggle. It’s tempting to take the shortcut of following the next social trend, targeting a poorly defined audience. And if you do, like 9 in 10 marketers find out, this will likely lead to creative burnout.
But knowing how customers react to marketing and advertising is critical to harnessing marketing effectiveness. There is a better way. It’s easier to implement than you think, and it explains the letters and blood conundrum.
Thinking about Thought
“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” - Plato
From the earliest stages of human society, people have wondered how and why they make the decisions they do.
We know from our own lives that we pretend, even to ourselves, to make decisions based on logical conclusions. But this would be exhausting. Imagine if you thought about every item you place into the trolley when grocery shopping. You’d be there forever!
This insight led to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's breakthrough discovery of several decision-making concepts, which came to be known as behavioural science.
Cognitive bias is one such concept. This process allows us to make quick decisions based on past experiences and personal preferences. Did you really think about what yoghurt brand you added to your basket? More likely, you picked the brand you found really tasty before, because that’s a much easier decision than considering the 20+ options available.
Another is heuristics. These are rules-of-thumb that we apply to the information we have available, which again allows us to make quicker decisions. Most people consider buying a car a major decision, so you would think they would consider all the financial implications. Yet, the “20/4/10” rule is a popular heuristic that ignores factors like other debt and expenses, depreciation, and variable or high interest rates on the car loan.
Crucially, these concepts and others allow us to make decisions in ways that we feel ‘make sense’ to us, even if, on evaluation of the facts, they wouldn’t stack up.
But why is this important to marketing and advertising?
Nudges in Marketing
Consider the following:
Marketing and agencies both agree that personal opinions have a significant influence on decision-making. This is despite the conventional wisdom that most decisions should be ‘data-led’. This applies to both customers and marketers themselves!
Consumers are overwhelmed by content, regularly flipping between up to seven social media platforms alone.
70% of marketers struggle not just to reach audiences, but even identify the right audiences.
Behavioural science answers these challenges by providing empirical evidence of techniques that guide consumer behaviour.
This guidance, or ‘nudge theory’, is advocated by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book Nudge as a way to subtly encourage consumers to adopt the desired behaviour without restricting their freedom of choice, which is crucial in a world where people are increasingly aware of the use of personal data.
To benefit from these nudges, marketers need to identify the contexts and touchpoints where they can reach audiences to guide them. This is also likely to be a more practical way to target consumers than relying on personas and ideal customers, which marketers often find challenging to work with.
The results of applying nudges to advertising can be dramatic.
NHS Blood and Transplant exploited the ‘generation effect’ by omitting As, Bs and Os in campaign messaging, mirroring the blood types needed from donors. The effect works because people instinctively fill in the missing gaps, actively engaging with the campaign in the process. The campaign inspired 24,000 new blood donor to register at a lower cost per registration than any of their recent campaigns.
Let’s look at how to go about this.
Finding Opportunities to Nudge in Advertising
For customers already in your funnel, mapping the journey and finding pain points is the best way to quickly zone in on opportunities for nudges. This can help reduce abandonments, increase average order value, or encourage social sharing, among many other positive outcomes.
For new customer acquisition, this is more challenging because the occasions to reach people might not be so obvious. This is where another framework can help.
Jenni Romaniuk in How Brands Grow Part 2 introduced the concept of Category Entry Points, or CEPs. The idea is surprisingly simple: list everyday situations where your offer might be relevant. Unless a marketer has been in the sector for a long time, they likely won’t completely understand their customers. It’s best to ask customers themselves through panels and surveys, as well as gather feedback from frontline staff, such as customer service teams.
Armed with this wealth of audience insight, you’re well placed to identify many opportunities to experiment with nudges. Let’s take a look at an example.
Using Category Entry Points and Nudges for Creative Ideas
A list of CEPs for a new local Italian restaurant, which has opened very recently, might be as follows:
People looking for a cosy place to celebrate a birthday.
Couples seeking a romantic setting for their anniversary dinner.
Sales teams wanting a special experience to entertain clients.
Diners looking for gluten-free eating out options.
Marketers should then focus on those opportunities that a) are likely to yield the biggest return, and b) they can offer a compelling solution for.
This is where behavioural science comes in.
If the marketer identifies the couples as the best opportunity, they can use several nudges to inform the advertising execution:
Social proof – In images and videos, show the restaurant full of couples with no empty tables, and clearly state the restaurant's locality. This will convey the restaurant as a place where many local couples go for special occasions.
Media context – Couples want to visit more luxurious restaurants for anniversaries. One way to signal is this in the type of media used for ads, because people perceive some advertising channels to be more costly than others and make an inference of the restaurant’s quality based on this (“only a company with lots of capital could afford to waste money on ads and provide a luxurious experience”). Advertising in high-visibility, high-quality out-of-home locations, such as a train station, would be a great choice, whereas ads in the local paper would not be as effective.
Adding friction – A restaurant might consider reducing capacity, which adds friction to the booking experience by requiring a reservation list and advanced booking. By conveying this limited supply in advertising (“Exclusive”, “Limited Booking Still Available”), consumers infer that the restaurant is in demand, which evokes the fear of missing out. This also enables the restaurant to enhance the service quality with the same staff headcount and can easily justify higher prices.
Nudges lend themselves to ad experimentation, so marketers can, and should, continue to test different nudges. This can be as simple as pitting different ad variants against each other in a paid social campaign, all the way up to geo-holdout testing if the budget and scale allow.
Applying Nudges to Your Campaigns
Leveraging behavioural science and nudge theory in marketing can significantly enhance the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
Marketers can design strategies that resonate with consumers by understanding cognitive biases and heuristics. Identifying Category Entry Points allows for targeted and relevant messaging, ensuring that brands are top-of-mind during key decision-making moments.
As you continue to experiment with and refine these techniques, you can achieve greater success in reaching and influencing your target audiences.
Adding behavioural science to your toolbox might be the edge you need against both less-informed and larger but less dynamic competitors.
If you want to implement these powerful strategies in your marketing and advertising efforts, I can provide expert services to help you design and execute paid social, PPC, and omnichannel campaigns which exploit nudges tailored to your needs, driving meaningful and incremental results.
