Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

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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A colleague just forwarded me a great online tool from Dr. BJ Fogg from Stanford about the different ways that behavior can change - expressing the subtle but important ways that change is approached - whether it is new behavior, the duration of a familiar behavior or the cessation of a behavior.

Interesting stuff, and useful for building strategies that can affect behavior through the understanding of exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.  We typically include lots of information about the behaviors we are trying to impact, but this grid assists in clarifying the comparison of the change in context of other behaviors.

Via Kristin A. Hayward

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We recently completed a multi-market user experience / usability test for one of our clients. Many hours of planning and organization, as well a design and prototype developments went into this, as this was a test for a major european roll-out, and a lot of design assumptions had to be verified.

However, there are so many smaller projects in which, due to timing and budget, usability is never really tested. Sure, for a lot of things you can rely on the empirical knowledge of a senior user experience planner, but really observing people and their behavior with your end product, always shows that you can optimize the experience. Sometimes, you even find critical issues, no matter how well you thought it through.

Therefore, the question for anyone charged with the planning of experiences always is: how do we get user experience testing set up without being on the client’s agenda or in his budget? We usually fall back onto informal testing rounds and rapid prototype development with the designers making changes as planners generate insights and recommendations. We also developed small modules on how accomplish quick turnarounds on such issues as screening and recruiting and developed special agreements with our testing partners. However, we never formalized it as a process.

Today, I came across a great article by Paul Nuschke of Boxes and Arrows and his approach to the problem. Definitely a good read for all the Experience Planners out there.

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C. G. Jung used association tests to identify so called complexes, which are located in the unconscious of psyche. The brandtags site doesn’t necessarily get in touch with the unconscious areas of people’s minds, but it provides quite nice brand insights. Everyone can take part and type in own associations of prompted brands. What you get is a survey of all brand associations - ranked by frequency. Check out the results for brands you love, hate, or whatever… Or you can do the quiz by guessing to what brand the shown words are relating.

The bottom line is: This experiment doesn’t fulfill the quality criteria for empirical studies, of course. Anyway, one might possibly get some funky brand insights.

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It seems that most video-gamers react positively to in-game ads: 82 percent say the games are just as enjoyable with such ads as without them, according to a study by Nielsen BASES and Nielsen Games on behalf of in-game advertising network IGA Worldwide, writes MarketingCharts.

Moreover, integrating dynamic advertisements into videogame environments gives brands a measured lift in consumer awareness and opinion of the products players see during gameplay, the study found (via Wired).

Post-play, there was a 61 percent increase on average in consumers’ favorable opinions of products advertised in-game, according to the “Consumers’ Experience with In-Game Content & Brand Impact of In-Game Advertising Study.”

“With young adults now spending on average six hours a week gaming, advertisers should be excited at how well their messages were embraced and the brands positively perceived,” said Justin Townsend, CEO of IGA Worldwide.

Read more select findings from the study.

Source: http://www.marketingvox.com/82-of-gamers-dont-mind-contextual-in-game-ads-039331/

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