Adam Ferrier on the 3 Keys to Understanding Consumer Behaviour

At Thinkerbell, one of Australia’s leading advertising agencies, the science of human behaviour is central to the business. In fact, their founder and resident consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier believes behavioural science is more important than ever.

“I think one of the reasons behavioural sciences is really important is that it helps us to unpack and organise our information”, he says.

For Adam, marketing is an ephemeral topic. With all the different things to try to get right – brand strategy, understanding consumer motivations, and coordinating communication channels – studying behavioural sciences allows marketers to apply some rigour to organising information.

“At the moment, pricing and value are very hot topics in the world of marketing,” Adam says. “Everybody's looking at their pricing strategy, and without a sense of behavioural sciences, they're kind of guessing as to what the right thing to do is. You need a structured way of testing your hypotheses against pricing. In fact, you can apply that same principle across the entire marketing communications landscape.”

The position at Thinkerbell is that the agency's marketing sciences pairs with their core tenant: creativity.

“For example, with Yarra Valley Water we looked at water consumption and how to get people to use less water in their homes. Behavioral Sciences told us the best way to change customer behaviour is to use eco-efficient objects that appear inside the home that remind you to be efficient with your energy and water usage”, explains Adam. “So we created a thing called ‘the water watches’, which are little rings that you put on the end of the faucets. They worked because we branded them. You must ensure that everything you do is brand first, and if it's not branded, then it will be a waste.”

There's a saying in behavioural science: action changes attitude, and attitude changes action. At Thinkerbell, this means testing messaging hierarchies, font sizes, shapes, and colours. But there are still challenges and debates surrounding how best to leverage behavioural science.

“I think that in the world of science, replicability of your findings is really hard. They're often so contextually specific that it's hard to know. It's hard to generalise findings. So that's one thing”, says Adam “The second thing is effect sizes. People talk about the various content biases, but it could have a really small effect size, so therefore, it's kind of insignificant in the biggest game of marketing.”

It also isn’t easy, even with the help of behavioural sciences, to come to easy conclusions. Often, it can be quite contradictory.

“There's an explanation for everything. There's a concept called cognitive fluency which means the easier it is to process, you're much more likely to believe it. But there's also a concept called cognitive disfluency. This means if it's hard to process, then you're more likely to put in the cognitive effort and therefore code it more deeply. The hardest thing to do is to run your own experiments.”

And Adam has a few rules of thumb for iterating and reiterating.

“I always think of three things. Number one, make sure that whatever you do, you brand it. Then, make sure that it gets attention. And then finally, if you possibly can, make it interactive.”

The advertising industry leverages rationality and emotion in marketing. But, fundamentally, consumer behaviour isn’t rational.

“I think it's not necessarily what your input is. It's creating an emotional reaction. I feel a sense of relief when a product helps me meet a certain goal or objective. That's one key principle.”

And most brands, according to Adam, don’t need personalisation in their campaigns.

“Most brands are mass market. A brand is something that makes us feel desire. It doesn’t create desire, we feel it, because it feels like the brand is just for us.”