Behavioural Economics in the printing world

Canon Pixma: Bringing colour to life from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

About 7 tears ago I was given a brief for a major printing company about making people value their ink more. This particularly large technology company make 70% of their profits from ink, so it was kind of important. Being a big global company they had made an unreal TV ad, beautiful OOH, print and what was simple digital banners (which is all you did in those days). The concept was to demonstrate and glorify how awesome their ink could be. Then people would be willing to pay the extra 30% for it.

Looking closer at the consumer and their behaviour you could see they really valued the brands ink and all the metrics were great. But when it ran out they walked in store with little information on the product or with their previous cartridge in hand. Usually in a bad mood as the experience took way too much brain power and wasted so much time. Then the sales person in the store would say.. 'dont get that brand its too expensive. Get this one as its way cheaper'. It was more expensive as it included the driver as well, which made the prints a lot better quality but they didnt want to try and explain that as it was a quick sale.

I was in a meeting with the client and said why dont you just give out a software pack with every colour printer you sell (they had 65% of the market) that links people online to a store directly loading up the information of their ink cartridge when the ink begins to run out. Probably wouldnt cost you much to make the software and use the couple of million in the budget to pay to put it in the boxes and change the packaging to sell 'a connected offering'. I was kind of stared out by everyone in the room. Being 2003, social software and usage of sites like amazon hadnt really broken into the mainstream.

I walked away realising we are in advertising and that is it. I felt a little down because I thought it was a much simpler idea. The brand tracking had shown that they loved our ink, they just didnt buy it. So we needed to cut out the middle man. I realised in probably a very naive viewpoint that surely there was potential in this sort of thinking. More recently Rory Sutherland's drive for behavioural economics for the IPA and growth of social software / amazon style websites into the mainsteam. You start to see that the value of that sort of thinking in agency land is crucial for our survival. I guess I took the concept of agencies as 'ideas factories' a little too directly. I didnt realise we were restricted to ideas that played out in ads.

Fast forward to now and behavioural economics is the thing that everyone is talking about. But I question, is it too late? As clients have an expectation of what we do and what they pay us for. How do we open our clients expectations and the boundaries that they give us... as much as we have created for ourselves. But in order to change their viewpoints of us everyone on the frontline must believe in the future change. The thing that really worries me the most is how do we change the mentality of people within agencies who find meeting expectations and playing within those boundaries easier to get them home in time to watch The Apprentice. It is a hard thing to change people to something they don't feel comfortable doing and might cause them to miss their favourite TV show that evening as it takes a little longer to explore. Imagine how the clients feel?

Seeing this great video from Dentsu London reminded me of that same brief although slightly different. It looks awesome but is the question how do you change people's perceptions of printing or is it how do you drive people to push the print button to regain value in the tangible. Does a cool ad do that ?? I dont know maybe it will

Please make the choice for me ???

With a new TV client I have been thinking a lot about 'habit as opposed to loyalty' as well as herd behaviour. One of the avenues I have been looking into is the elements of behavioural economics which it seems a lot of people are looking into (I know I am apart of the herd). A few recent events for the IPA and APG brought up a lot of things that I have been reading and thinking about and people gave some great examples that helped to give it context.

The interesting thing is 'we are bloody lazy'. The more choice anyone is given the more you search for short cuts or ways out in general of making decisions. I remember the first time I ever walked into an Asda, I turned around and walked straight out again. No way in hell was I ever going to get through that place alive. It is an interesting perspective. Do we use the TESCO Expresses because they are just conveniently located or is their convenience grounded in their simplicity.

I have found over the years that I have gone from a direct determined decision maker to a lazy 'no you choose what we should have from the menu' and this isnt from a girlfriend either. How many times have you just surfed the TV looking for something to watch ? How many times have you argued with friends or housemates on what movie to watch 'you choose, no you'(we call the game 'Baggs Not'. Well guess what ? soon we wont have to choose. The machine will choose for us. So next year you will see the launch of youview in the UK which is an on-demand version of freeview (UK) but your EPG goes backwards as well as forwards as it is plugged into your broadband connecting with all on-demand channels from the internet right on your TV. For only like £180 (EST). But the kicker comes when as they bring out new versions of the box it will eventually turn into an amazon style recommendation engine. You watched this... so we think you'd like this. What happens when that links to your social network. Watch the video above. A friend and I came up with a similar 'media recommendation website' ingrained in one of the top portals who was a client e but at the time they didnt get what we meant. Which links quite nicely to the current book I am reading Making Ideas Happen from the guys at Behance. Which highlights why ideas fall down but that is for another post.

Is long term strategic planner over

Twins, originally uploaded by J.T.R..

Since the on take of the digital world. We have all continued to discuss whether the long term strategic process is in fact the best way to address our brands future. With things changing on a daily basis and our ability to access real time data at any point how can we take the time to wait for the next planning cycle to do address it.

Technology and our consumers are changing and we must adapt to truly take advantage before it becomes the norm. Not sit back and wait for things to pan out in our favour. Because they wont

Then while we chatted about, something special happened... we were forced to... by a simple thing like the economy collapsing. Its funny how terrible situations are often the only thing that make people wake the f$%k up.

But the truth is being truly adaptable to the needs to consumers is in fact the only way forward. Because guess what... they will change brands to someone smaller more nimble who is.

Here is a nice blog post on the differences made when Office Depot in the US adapted faster to their customers needs. Waitrose in the UK also adapted quickly by launching a cheaper essentials range that aided in it not missing out too badly during the decline of consumer confidence and drop in overall spending.

The guys at W&K also looked to adapt the old account planner brief creative brief producer do some stuff... model for Nokia for their supernova campaign. Which included a faster more nimble team including planner, producer and client. So they could continue to build content and adapt to the needs of the audience over a 3 month period.

The industry has talked about fast strategy at an IPA event. With everyone giving their tricks they have used over the years that I created a widget for here a few years back.

We need a prepared mind constantly taking in data and being able to adapt to the situations at hand. But in focusing on this too much we might in fact loose the essence of the brand and our abilities to truly identify and take advantage of future opportunities as well as the one in front of us.

So we need split personalities and split calenders. Time that addresses whats in front of us. But also has an eye on the horizon and what we need to do to keep the business at its core essence but always keep it moving forward.

IPA Fast Strategy Debate Cards Mashup

So I have been meaning to do this for a while. But I have finally made a mashup of the cards from the IPA Fast Strategy debate back in april. I hope you find it useful. You will have to download Microsoft's silverlight to view them though. Enjoy

IPA: Fast Strategy Cards on Popfly

I did a bit of a popfly mashup of the photos I took of the fast strategy cards from the IPA Fast Strategy event in London on the 28th of April.

Account vs Media Planner - the argument continues

I went to one of the IPA debates the other day. To see Simon Francis the MD of OMD Europe take on Hooper Griffin of BBH on the topic of 'Who should own the consumer insight'. Im only going to highlight a couple of things I agreed with. As it is a long an ardious fight that I believe has gone on for too long, when its quite simple

1. No one owns anything
2. Be imaginative with any information you have
3. Dont stand behind your black box of information. Stand in front of it (love that comment Simon)
4. We should share everything - across agencies
5. Its not about the people that can read and present the information. Its about those that can interpret and utilise to their clients business are the ones that are truely the most important.

One thing that really stood out was the way in which Simon discussed how even as one of the biggest media operations in the world. How they kept good talent by continuing to build small companies for them to run. To really drive that Entreprenurial spirit. The MD of the London office was sitting there. He is 32. Goodstuff, invents all there other companies. It was good to see