What consumers do when making choices about brands is often different from what they say they’ll do, and the decisions they make are complex and unconscious. Last week the IPA launched a new Behavioural Economics Think Tank (BETT) to help with this, with the aim of changing the way the industry operates and to challenge current thinking.
Led by IPA President Rory Sutherland, it will be multi-disciplinary, across the agency and marketing community. Members so far include COI’s Mark Lund, the Work Foundation’s Will Hutton, Agency Assessment’s David Wethey, Saatchi & Saatchi’s Richard Huntingdon, Partners Andrew Aldridge’s Kate Waters, and Mark Earls, Herdmeister.
Biographies.
The discipline of behavioural economics is the focus of Sutherland’s IPA Presidential agenda as he believes it can transform marketing effectiveness, it has made great strides in understanding human behaviour based on rigorous scientific experiments.
The IPA has published a topline report on seven key principles of behavioural economics that already demonstrate its relevance to adland. It is free to IPA members and £25 for non-members, and can be
downloaded here. A full report, based on the findings of the Think Tank will be published January 2010.
BETT was launched at the IPA’s first seminar on this - ‘Behavioural Economics - Red Hot or Red Herring’ - at the RSA today, and marks the beginning of an exploration and educational process involving workshops and training sessions for member agencies starting in November which will be fed into the Think Tank. If you would like to take part in the workshops please contact
victoria@ipa.co.uk Dr Nick Southgate, ex-Grey planner and consultant has been commissioned to do the R&D and the Think Tank will act as a sounding board and advisory committee to these activities.
Says Rory Sutherland, IPA President, “Behavioural Economics provides a floodgate of inspiration to our industry. Our challenge is to ‘chunk’ it down, and apply it in ways which make a meaningful difference to client agency dialogue and communications planning and execution. It’s just the sort of breath of fresh air we need to stimulate our intellectual juices and rise above conversations about time sheets and schedule. It gets us back to the core of what we do and why we do it.”