Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

To err is human. But we really hate being wrong, right?

Kathryn Schulz spent five years of her life studying how we react to being wrong. Or better yet, how often we assume we’re right when we have misunderstood the signs around us.

It’s brilliant work, and in the latter part of her talk, she outlines some of the dangerous assumptions we make when we are challenged on what we believe.  When someone doesn’t think we are right, we first assume the opposition is just ignorant, and needs to hear the truth from us. If that doesn’t work, we assume they are morons, and can’t grasp what we have learned. If all else fails, we assume they are evil, since they have heard the truth, and are intelligent enough to understand it but are choosing not to agree. Sound familiar? Rather than reconsidering our position, we are much more likely to decide to attack, which makes being wrong (or, more accurately, believing that we’re right) a source for much cruel treatment in the world.

But there is beautiful symmetry to this behavior as well. While we resist being wrong, we love our books, movies and games to mislead us with plot twists and surprise endings. In the abstract, and in fantasy, and the stories we tell ourselves, we recognize the essential humanness being wrong, and embrace it. It pulls us in, because we all share it and can relate.

In the coming week, I challenge you to do 5 things differently to take advantage of the new perspective being wrong can give you:

1. Strike up a conversation with someone who has a different political affiliation from your own. Examine the assumptions you have made about their views (and their sanity or goodness).

2. Think about the last big argument you had. What ideas were you not willing to reconsider? What about the other person?

3. Take a look at the competitor to your Brand and think as if you were them - what would they say is wrong with your Brand and its view of the world?  Are you a stubborn Brand?

4. Find a piece of your Brand’s story where you can reverse the plot, and make a new discovery because of being wrong.

5. Take a fresh look at your consumers.  What data are you ignoring because it doesn’t fit with what you believe to be true about them?  What if you were wrong?  How could you find out?

Be wrong a little this week. Or at least consider the possibility!

Via TED

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Leo Burnett Worldwide CCO Mark Tutssel sent us this inspiring video today. Jay Denhart also blogged about this from a semantic point of view here a few weeks ago, but I felt like talking about its relevance to the study of human behavior and brand management.

In this TED talk, research Deb Roy talks about an amazing project in which he recorded every word and image in his house, as his newborn son grew to learn how to talk and walk. Every bit of human behavior recorded, tracked. He has also found ways of visualizing this data in interesting new ways, unveiling patterns that may not have been apparent before.

Taking this approach the connected mass media world, he has used the tools available to him to show how people, mass media, content and contexts can be interlinked in 3D models, so that we can observe human behavior in the form of new social and interaction structures.

As a creative agency that has declared people and their behavior as the starting point of all our work (and with it behavioral planning), the sheer amount of MIT Media Lab computing power, long-term research vision and prowess to study human behavior makes me drool in envy. But also, as we move away from the brand era of mass media messaging to the people era of connected experiences, the work of Deb Roy reconfirms that continuous and deep study of human behavior - and the endeavor to create tools that help us understand it - is a worthwhile cause. Simply finding out about people’s attitudes and values, and inferring their preferences, just doesn’t cut it anymore. Rather, not only does behavioral planning unveil new patterns and types of insights that we wouldn’t have seen before, it also inspires us in ways to help brands make a qualitative difference in people’s lives that the tools of the TV and Brand era could never have.

While unfathomably complex to unravel and to look at, behavioral insights are much more substantive than traditional “consumer” insights, as they do not express an inferred interpretation about what people think or say about a brand (and how we then may be able to manipulate their perception) but rather, behavioral insights are building blocks to people’s journey through different product categories that paint a much more complete picture of how they actually live, and what they actually do. In other words, finding out what people say or think isn’t nearly as interesting or inspiring as what they do. Not only because those two things are rarely the same, but, more importantly, because today brand management and creating brand engagement isn’t so much about saying something to people but doing something with or for people along their whole customer life cycle. Observing behavior and understanding the drivers of behavior (as beautifully visualized by Deb Roy) therefore leads to not only to a completely different way of creating communications, but also to more purposeful interactions and experiences that allow brands to play a meaningful role in people’s lives.

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Pretty interesting video on human behavior regarding our tendency to act in conform ways. Human Behavior is so much more interesting than simple attitudes. Always blows my mind.

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In this TED video, Deb Roy talks about how by taping almost everything that is said or done in his his house, he assembled a rich dataset that captured (among other things) deep insight into how/when his son learned words.

Of course, this kind of research can start people thinking that “I don’t want to record everything in my life!” but I think the implications more far-reaching than privacy concerns alone.

More than anything, I’m fascinated about the possibilities of video and audio data mining in order to study human behavior.  The sheer volume of data available through continuous capture lends itself to using regression and other modeling tools to identify patterns that are too subtle for mere observation to pick up on.

1. His presentation shows what is possible in terms of re-creating the real world using very flat-looking tools like overheard video recorders.  It creates new possibilities in terms of monitoring behavior through  truly non-obtrusive means - increasing the validity of the results.  Naturally, I don’t imagine this to be fool proof, as some people might never really ‘get used’ to being taped constantly.

2. The idea of creating a permanent memory bank can be considered to be a family service - allowing families that live great distances from their younger generations to peek into developments (especially major life moments) from afar.

3.  I like the fact that he spent time talking about context for learning.  It is amazing to see the possibility to model both by location and ‘actor’ - i.e., knowing which combinations of people, situations and places encoded new information in his child’s development.

4. Naturally, as a marketer I’m fascinated to understand how conversations can be triggered by interaction with content, whether online or on TV, and being able to analyse how these different media interact with a family has my mouth watering.

Enjoy.

Via TED

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I reported on our tool development for our HumanKind Approach once in a while here and also about the development of a lexicon of human behavior that we call Behavioral Archtypes. I am glad to report the US press has picked up on it and given Carol Foley a nice write up for it.

As Leo Burnett moved from considering itself a “brand-centric” agency to one focused on “HumanKind,” it decided that it should spend some time researching just what humans do. Carol Foley, exec VP-director of research services, and her team set out on a quest to define types of human behavior. After months of digging through academic literature, they realized there really wasn’t a good model. One problem was that a lot of psychological research is focused on abnormal behaviors. That’s not what drives purchasing decisions. “Most of what we’re dealing with is just pretty normal behavior,” she said. So they created their own framework.

Read the whole thing here.

For more info on how it was done, read my original post from 7  months ago here.

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Within the pursuit of being students of human behavior, Leo Burnett researcher Carol Foley is developing a typology of human behavior, called Behavioral Archetypes (SM).

The Tool allows the classification of human behavior and the brands response behavior.
Our starting point for all explorations of behavior must be to identify and understand what people are doing right now with regard to our brand or product.

The psychological literature is full of references to specific types of behavior.

• Risk-taking
• Habit
• Altruism
• Status seeking.

Yet no one has sorted out all of these various types of behavior, nor created a schema of their relationships to one another.

Were we to be able to do this, we could begin with the behavior itself, rather than with a psychological perspective, and then allow the relevant perspectives to inform that behavior further.

Through over 10,000 interviews in multiple studies, we’ve been able to quantitatively map all of the major types of behavior into a paradigm.

• We gave people life situations as stimuli
• Asked them to rate how likely they would be to engage in a list of behaviors
• Factor analyzed the behaviors to establish archetypes
• Used correspondence analysis to map them, so as to understand dimensionality
• There are over 100 archetypes in the paradigm which collapse into 8 major groupings.

What is important about Behavioral Archetypes(SM), and what substantially validates it, is the degree to which it mirrors models of human motives and values. The model allows for spotting adjacent behaviors (e.g. the freedom behavior’s neighbours are self-interest and change) as well as opposite behaviors (e.g. the the change behavior’s opposite is preservation) as well as 40-50 sub-behaviors per behavior category. See below.

Further investigation into human behavior with this model also leads to insights (behavior tensions) regarding

1. the effects of exaggerating a behavior (e.g. an exaggerated behavior of self-interest leads to narcissism)
2. Resolving behaviors, i.e. which behaviors pop-up in situations where things don’t go as people had planned. E.g. (when exhibiting a Preservation behavior and things do not go as planned, preservation behaviors such as “Security Seeking” are replaced by opposite preservation behaviors, such as “Minimizing Impact”.
3. Defining Themes. i.e. we believe between in the tension within 2 behaviors often lie defining themes in peoples lives, i.e. the personal decision and influence over our own competing behaviors lead to defining themes, such as between Freedom and Conformity behaviors, we always seem to get the question “Who decides?”. When I am exhibiting Freedom behavior it is my will to decide by myself and reject all heteronymy. Therefore, I always battle external forces making the decisions for me.

The tool lends itself to a more structured approach to behavior investigation, spotting behavioral tensions within the people that are most important to a brand and to formulate a brand behavior response.

If you are interested in more information, please feel free to contact us.

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