What makes us tick?
12 Jul 2011
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Consumer Insights
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TV Advertising
They’re age-old questions: what drives human beings to do what we do? Are we driven by reason? Or is it desire and emotion that are running the show? So age-old are these questions, in fact, that they’ve been rattling philosophers’ braincages for well over two millennia.
Some, such as Plato, saw desire and reason at loggerheads. He paints a picture of a chariot drawn by two horses, one the dark horse of passion, the other the white horse of reason. And they don’t always get along.
If Plato ran a creative agency – let’s call it Republic Advertising – he would probably produce ads that appealed to both reason and emotion without getting them tied in a knot, say by identifying the customer’s presumed needs and then offering a suite of features that satisfy those needs – all the while avoiding any negative associations that might trigger conflicting emotions or presenting conflicting facts.
Others, such as Descartes and Immanuel Kant, emphasised that it’s reason that really wears the pants, with the passions amounting to a distraction from pursuing our well-reasoned ends.
Ergo Sum Creative would probably run something more wordy and feature-led. They’d demonstrate the clear advantages of their products over the competitors in a cool and calculated way, expecting the customer to be convinced purely by the weight of numbers with a level head. After all, the facts speak for themselves.
Then there was David Hume. He suggested that, at the end of the day, it’s really desire that steers the ship. Reason only helps figure out alternative actions, but it’s the passions that motivate us to commit to one action over another. In fact, Hume suggested that reason without desire is empty, although, conversely, desire without reason is a loose cannon.
Hume Communications would likely have gone straight for the emotional buttons, stirring the passions, creating positive associations, using strong imagery and sound, talking benefits over features. Reason would take a back seat, only showing the customer how to act once the passions had been triggered.
But where the beard-and-toga brigade resorted to armchair speculation about how humans were motivated in their behaviour, modern times have seen the lab-coat brigade (bearded and non-bearded) lend a hand.
And the empirical chips are largely falling in Hume’s camp. With a bit of a twist.
It turns out that most of our decision making is, indeed, fueled by emotion, with the reasons we give for making a particular decision amounting to little more than post-hoc justifications. Which is not to say such justifications aren’t important; they help reinforce the decisions we’ve made, and help us communicate them to others.
As such, Cognitive Creative would not only aim to engage the emotions of the consumer, it would offer reasons that can help that post-hoc justification process. A new V8 with improved environmental credentials, a pay-TV contract with dozens of channels that saves you going out to see expensive movies at the cinema, or a tasty treat with only 4% fat are typical examples – the first element engages their desire, and the second makes it justifiable.
Probably the most interesting thing about all this is that advertising agencies have often been at the vanguard of such insights into human behaviour, often without even knowing it. While it took until the late 20th century for scientists to really discover the potency of emotion and paucity of reason in decision making, creative agencies have been effectively motivating people – along Humean lines, at least – for well over 50 years.
However, modern psychology still has a role to play in informing how to move consumers to pick up their wallet or purse. The key question now is not whether it’s emotion or reason that’s important, but how to stir the emotions. That’s a topic I’ll be writing about in future blog posts.
So stay tuned! The upcoming posts will surprise, shock and entertain you! And give you an insight into human behaviour! (See what I did there?)