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.