Fancy a Marshmallow? BE vs Digital
Behavioural Economics has been a force for change in marketing, advertising and to an extent market research over the past 10 years.
It's educated us about decision making science, concepts such as framing, and a whole load of mental biases. I'd assumed - perhaps naively - that it would be a force for good.
And where are we today, at the start of a new decade, maybe 10 years on from when BE went mainstream in Europe at least? All good? Well....
A snapshot from my recent digital "engagements" made me ponder:
- online subscription service for a major national UK newspaper: the email to de-subscribe is curiously not working, you have to ring up…..and the lines are constantly engaged.
- airline or hotel booking online forms - red ink telling me that only 2 seats available at this price
- conference invitation emails: hurry, only a few seats left.
- sports app that only has an e-mail query address open for subscribers, not for non-subscribers.
- A bank that doesn't manage a New Years or Xmas greeting message in any form, but wants to sell some new investment opportunity.
Curiously retro experiences - neither easy nor generating value for me as a consumer.
Sadly reminiscent of the pre-digital selling cliches of sales folk trying to sell to gullible takers, establishing asymmetrical relationships, with the power firmly in the hand of the seller. Ot put more bluntly: taking the money and running.
How many marketers have read and take on board BE learnings - what about the famous marshmallow test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment) that suggests the ability to delay gratification as a good predictor of longer-term success?
There increasingly seems a whole gulf between companies and the people they are selling to - with short-term effects the overwhelming driver.
Maybe the learnings outlined in Binet and Field's 2013 seminal marketing work The Long and the Short of it (https://www.amazon.com/Long-Short-Balancing-Long-Term-Strategies/dp/085294134X) have been overlooked or ignored.
Does BE play any role in this, for better or for worse? It would seem to be often subsumed by a digitally-driven commercial rapaciousness with extreme short-term focus, however packaged.
Consumer-centricity sadly remains a lip-service concept in many companies - despite repeated articles on the value of this approach, such as this very recent one in the HBR (https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-the-best-developers-keep-customers-front-of-mind).
Can MR help? Even with the best storytelling in the world, not if companies only choose to see what they want to see: marshmallows, now.
Let's hope the roaring 20s aren't fuelled just by sugar-rushes.
Curious, as ever, as to others' views.