Think Tank: Target consumers’ 'unconscious’ and reap the rewards

It’s not quite the barbarians at the gate, but the stuccoed Knightsbridge headquarters of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising this week opened its doors to a man whose thinking is largely inimical to the industry’s day-to-day prejudices and practices.

The intellectual interloper was no creative renegade, indeed had no particular axe to grind on the business of advertising, how companies go about it, or even why.

Professor Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work debunking the myth of rational decision-making that underpins so much of the “dismal science” and, indeed, broader government policy. Ten years later, his thoughts are finally lapping at advertisers’ shores.

The implications of Kahneman’s lifetime’s work, now summarised in his best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow, are as challenging to the advertising orthodoxy as any ponytailed art director’s more intuitive pronouncements (and, note well, they actually turn out to have much in common).

Kahneman draws a simple, and winningly unprejudiced, distinction between two systems of human thought.

“System 1” thinking is the unconscious, intuitive and effort-free stuff that we aren’t even aware of, “the secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make”. “System 2”, by contrast, is conscious, effortful thought: the thinking we are aware of, indeed how we actually think of ourselves as a species: as “reasoning agents”.

System 1 answers this sum readily for us: 2+2 = ?

We call on System 2 to answer this one: 17x24 = ?

The uncelebrated System 1 thinker in us all is actually irrepressible, and runs the show without us knowing it. By contrast, System 2 thinking – the thinking that we are aware of – must pick its moments with care. It is “lazy by necessity” because it requires mental and physical effort that we expend reluctantly.

System 2 (the “slow thinking” of the professor’s title) tires easily, so usually accepts what fast-thinking System 1 tells it. And it is often right to do so, because System 1 is pretty good at what it does.

But System 1 pays a price for speed: it loves to simplify, jumps wildly to conclusions, is prone to irrational biases and interference.

Kahneman holds no torch for one or the other: System 1 “is the origin of much that we do wrong, but also most of what we do right... which is most of what we do”.

But, faced with an audience of advertisers, he couldn’t help but dispense a little impassioned advice: “You must recognise that most of the time you are not talking to System 2. You’re talking to System 1. System 1 runs the show. That’s the one you want to move.”

And it is here of course that his groundbreaking thinking butts against much ingrained marketing and advertising practice, which still adheres, consciously or otherwise, to the notion of “homo economicus”, or rational man.

Too many advertising briefs still set persuasion as their goal and modus operandi, tacitly assuming that the consumer can only be argued into desired behaviour. They spring from organisations that “think slowly” (because no one ever got fired for System 2 thinking) but should, of course, start with the consumer, who, in most categories most of the time, is making choices impulsively.

Even if they operate in categories typically understood as more considered purchases, marketeers would do well to presume they are speaking to a System 1 mindset. Because, as Kahneman has found, we tend not so much to believe arguments and reach conclusions but instead to reach conclusions and only then find supporting arguments (most house purchases are made exactly this way).

Brand owners should strive to make their brands as familiar as possible to their audience, indeed as available as possible, rather than attempting to persuade people who have neither the inclination nor the energy to be persuaded (viewed through this prism, Coca-Cola’s oft-stated mission to be “within an arm’s reach of desire” is at least as important a commercial motor as any of its advertising copy).

Kahneman’s myth-busting also lights a bonfire under many of the advertising industry’s prevailing research methodologies, especially the rigidly structured quantitative variety. The very nature of “testing” creates conditions for System 2 responses when the category will actually be shopped to System 1.

Kahneman makes no prescriptions for the advertising industry, but his provocations should be taken up and debated by all responsible practitioners.

Laurence Green is a founding partner at the 101 marketing agency. laurence@101.co.uk