I think it’s fair to say that most marketers don’t aspire to win the Nobel Prize. But there are lessons.

At least, no one I know has ever mentioned it to me sober and I have never seen it as an objective in someone’s annual review (I imagine it would raise a few eyebrows in HR). And that makes sense, or so I thought. Then I started reading about Daniel Kahneman. He is the psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics. He demonstrated that purchase decisions are not always the result of a rational assessment of self interest and utility, but can be influenced by a whole manner of cognitive biases which mean value is far more subjective than classical economics would like us to think. That this would be considered radical is a little hard for us marketers to understand, because it’s at the heart of what we do. How else do you explain the consumer who is will be willing to spend $2 on a bottle of water even though there are no discernible health or taste advantages over the free alternative? So, why is a psychologist winning the greatest prize in economics for ‘discovering’ something that marketers have always known?

I blame John B. Watson.

He was the psychologist who founded behaviorism. After an affair with his teenage research assistant (the daughter of a US senator) forced him to leave academia, he joined JWT’s research department in 1920. It’s unclear if this was because of an interest in advertising or because he thought his scandalous behavior would be more welcome. Either way, despite Watson becoming Vice President of the agency he was never able to live up to his own stated ambitions which were to take his learning’s from the lab and formulate them into a set of ‘rules’ or model for application in the development of advertising.

Enter Gallup.

Instead, the future of research in advertising was shaped by another brilliant man, George Gallup. In 1932 he joined Young and Rubicam and popularized polling over psychology. If Watson had been more successful, perhaps advertising and psychology would have developed a mutually beneficial relationship. However, it was not to be, and marketers have had to settle for Cannes in June over Stockholm in December, ever since.

The good news is that 90 years later our opportunity is coming around again. A slew of business books by behavioral economists, evolutionary psychologists and neurologists have been appearing on the best seller lists. All of them focus on recent advances in our understanding of human decision making. All of them have something interesting to say that our industry would benefit from paying attention to. However, what the authors of these books do not have is a wealth of examples to prove their theories. A common issue with much of what they write is their reliance on many of the same studies and real life examples to make their point. (The members of MIT’s MBA program seem to be the recipients of so many psychological tests I wonder how much work they actually get done). This lack of empirical evidence for their theories is where we marketers come in.

No industry is better placed than marketing to take the learning’s of the behavioral economists, the psychologists and the neuroscientists’s and build upon them with real world examples. And no group within marketing is better placed to lead the commercial application of these learning’s than direct marketers. We are familiar with the mathematical models economists use to ply their trade. We are fluent in the language of testing that is so integral to academic research and we instinctively understand the concept of value as something that cannot be understood by a simple evaluation of a products features and benefits.

Incentive: Money

Finally, we have a commercial incentive to embrace these new practices. Our client’s success is our success and many of the campaigns we deliver on their behalf and even their products themselves have the potential to be significantly enhanced by our adoption of these new theories of decision making.

So, what do we need to do in order to grasp this opportunity?

Here are some initial suggestions:

• Establish formal partnerships with the leading figures in the new disciplines: the academics and economists driving much of the new understanding of decision making have expertise but limited access to test data. We can supply the consumers and real world scenarios; they can provide the latest insight into where each field is heading.
• Admit we are not doing it right: this is probably the hardest thing of all to do (see confirmation bias). A bit like an AA meeting, the first step toward progress is admitting you have a problem. Rory Sutherland* suggests that “the job of a marketer is, to put it simply, to convert human understanding into business advantage.” Yet the skill sets that would enable us to do this are conspicuous by their absence in most agencies. Agencies need to commit to putting the understanding of human nature at the core of what they do. That means training their people to understand the latest developments in these new fields and actively encouraging experimentation in these new areas.
• Evangelize to our clients and start testing our thinking: the economic challenges our clients face need no further discussion. However, they do mean that clients are looking for every advantage their business can get. So give them a copy of Nudge or Predictably Irrational, and get them interested. Take our new found vocabulary and start talking to them about cognitive biases, framing, and priming. Then start testing them in the work we do.

Now, perhaps a Nobel Prize is a little ambitious. And, apparently, Cannes is delightful in late June. However, in an era when the latest applications, platforms and widgets consume so much of our attention, shouldn’t more of our focus go toward placing our business within a framework that is based on empirically proven scientific principles?

So, who wants to go first? Your Nobel entries are due in by September 22nd.

* Any link to between AA and Rory is completely incidental. As far as I am aware he has never been to an AA meeting, nor required their services and he maintains a healthy, British appreciation for alcohol.