“Choice Is Driven By Context” Says Ogilvy Vice Chair Rory Sutherland

“Choice Is Driven By Context” Says Ogilvy Vice Chair Rory Sutherland

It was standing room only yesterday as Ogilvy’s vice chair Rory Sutherland delivered a fascinating keynote at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. One key takeaway was the importance of context in relation to consumer decision making.

A lot of things that economists think are true, are hugely context dependent.

Generally, paying people for services is good. But if you pay your wife for sex, it doesn’t really act as an incentive.

Giving people gifts is good. Returning a gift isn’t an act of generosity, it’s an insult.

In human behaviour, lots and lots of things have a context dependent meaning which trumps their economic significance.

Simply observe the world and observe it’s anomalies. Find out the strange things that people do. 

Advertising and consumer marketing is the Galapagos Islands for understanding consumer behaviour and understanding consumer weirdness.

We noticed something very strange which is that nearly everybody at restaurants ends up drinking wine. And the standard explanation is because it is what people want to drink.

I’m one of the minority people who think wine is a load of bollocks. We have beer and gin and whisky – why would we drink some bottled grape crap?

The strange thing was that I realised that restaurants do everything they can to make you order wine because the mark-up is much higher. You can buy totally crap wine and charge 40 euros for it.

When you go into a restaurant, there are already wine glasses there. Then they bring you a drinks list which isn’t called the drinks list, it’s called the wine list.

The wine list has five pages of wine and only one page of beer and spirits.

And then there’s the even more ingenious nudge which is that they only bring you one wine list. That means that since there’s only one alcoholic drink that you can all share, the person with the wine list ends up turning to the table and going “red or white”?

Once you’ve said “red or white”, it’s game-over for the gin drinkers.

The point is that choice is driven by the context in which we choose. It’s not driven by preference as economists believe, it’s driven by meaning.

Every single pizza company in the world assumes that everybody wants their pizza as soon as possible.

One thing about big data that you have to be really careful of is that all big data comes from the same place: the past.

Everything you know can be rendered complete bollocks by one small change.

One of the problems with big data is that I think it might give people a false sense of certainty. As had happened in the pizza industry because 97 per cent of people asked for their pizza as soon as possible.

I said, “why don’t you try changing the context in which people choose?

“At the moment, you go to the app, what’s the default? ASAP. You go to the website, what’s the default? ASAP. If you ring up, they don’t say, ‘when would you like your pizza?’ They just assume you want it as soon as possible.”

I said “what happens if you change that? And what happens if you call it not ‘duration’, but a ‘time of day’. So the default on the app is 8:45?”

If you can get 45 minutes to an hour to a pizza being ordered and a pizza being delivered, you can put more than one delivery on a bike. You can deliver to three places before a bike returns to base, rather than just one.

This means you reduce carbon emissions and make a stack of money, depending on how right-wing or left-wing the audience is I’m talking to.

What we found was that if we changed the default to a particular time of day, if the person on the phone said, “Is 9:30 ok or would you like it earlier?” nearly everybody was totally happy to order a pizza with as much as an hour’s wait.

Weirder still, we measured customer satisfaction, expecting it to fall a bit. It went up by 50 per cent!

I don’t really know why. One possibility is that waiting for an ASAP pizza is kind of ‘stressy’. You’re spending all your time on tenter hooks.

Whereas if you know your pizza is arriving at 8:45, you can go and have a shower, get ready, relax until about five minutes before it is due to arrive. And then when it arrives two minutes early you’re really impressed.

Context is really important and human evolution has not given us sensory mechanisms which cause us to see the world objectively.

Price all depends on context.

If you had to buy Nespresso coffee in a jar, a large jar would cost about $40 or $50 for the equivalent dosage of caffeine compared to Nescafe or Maxwell House. You probably couldn’t bring yourself to buy that jar: that’s bat shit crazy.

But you don’t know what an individual Nescafe costs so when you put the 49 cent pod in the Nespresso machine, your frame of reference isn’t Nescafe, it’s Starbucks.

You think to yourself, “it’s 49 cents, that would have cost me £2.40 at Starbucks, this machine is basically making me money!”

That’s precisely why Maserati stopped exhibiting their cars at car shows, because they got really expensive. They started exhibiting their cars at yacht and plane shows instead.

At a car show, a 300,000 euro car is expensive. At a plane show, it’s an impulse buy.

What something is depends on how we perceive it because evolution has calibrated our sensory mechanisms to deliver relevant, important meaning, not to deliver an accurate picture of reality.




Latest News

It’s Friday Quiz Time Again!
  • Media

It’s Friday Quiz Time Again!

Take B&T's trivia quiz for your chance to win a $100 booze voucher and possible cirrhosis of a major internal organ.

by B&T Magazine

B&T Magazine
Big data technology and data science illustration. Data flow concept. Querying, analysing, visualizing complex information. Neural network for artificial intelligence. Data mining. Business analytics.
  • Marketing

SenateSHJ Launches New Trans-Tasman Practices

SenateSHJ has launched a new digital, data and insights capability designed to help clients tackle the growing complexity of communication challenges. SenateSHJ Digital, Data and Insights (DDI) will combine the firm’s existing Digital and Insights functions to create a Trans-Tasman capability focused on digital communication, and the generation and use of data to improve communication. […]

New BrandStory Format From Bonzai Allows 3x More Ad Space on Mobile
  • Media

New BrandStory Format From Bonzai Allows 3x More Ad Space on Mobile

Creative technology platform Bonzai has announced the launch of BrandStory – a new premium mobile ad format. BrandStory offers triple the ad space and 2.8 times greater time in view than single scroll ad formats, addressing the surging demand from brands worldwide for more real estate to drive real results by seamlessly intertwining awareness, exploration […]

B&T’s Search For Australia’s Greatest Ad Heads To Channel 7
  • Advertising

B&T’s Search For Australia’s Greatest Ad Heads To Channel 7

B&T went through the looking glass this morning, with editor-in-chief David Hovenden (above) appearing on Channel 7’s The Morning Show to get the general public involved in our search for Australia’s Greatest Ad. Hovenden chatted with Kylie Gillies and stand-in host Matt Doran about what makes a great ad and showcasing some of our favourites […]

by B&T Magazine

B&T Magazine
Opinion: The Tall Planner’s Kate Smither On The DBA Dilemma
  • Opinion

Opinion: The Tall Planner’s Kate Smither On The DBA Dilemma

The science is not in question – smarter people than I, with far more data, have codified it. The logic is not up for grabs…it makes sense that creating mental shortcuts to your brand keeps you at the top of your mind. Lead image: Kate Smither – Owner, The Tall Planner I wouldn’t even take […]

Opinion

by B&T Magazine

B&T Magazine
African woman using a cellphone in an office alone
  • Marketing

Ortto & Tall Bob Partner To Deliver Better SMS & MMS For Australian & NZ Businesses

Two Australian-born technology providers have joined forces to bring more power and choice to marketers in Australia and New Zealand with mobile messaging that is more local, cost-effective, and integrated. It’s a partnership that sees two Australian software companies come together to deliver a world-class mobile-first solution for marketers building data-driven, personalised, omnichannel campaigns. While […]

Slew Of New Hires At Snap Inc.
  • Media

Slew Of New Hires At Snap Inc.

Snap Inc. has announced a number of new recruits. B&T unaware if it positively impacted SEEK's share price.

Reddit Gets Playful Brand Refresh
  • Technology

Reddit Gets Playful Brand Refresh

This will be of interest to any Reddit fans, graphic designers or lovers of an orange so bright it burns the retinas.

Zitcha & Broadsign Partner To Drive Global In-Store Retail Media Market
  • Advertising

Zitcha & Broadsign Partner To Drive Global In-Store Retail Media Market

Zitcha and Broadsign have teamed up to integrate the Broadsign out-of-home (OOH) advertising platform with Zitcha’s retail media platform. The collaboration empowers retailers to maximise and monetise in-store digital display networks and enables advertising partners to easily view and book available in-store inventory and review campaign performance alongside the retailer’s other media channels. With the […]

Double Rainbouu & 7-Eleven Launch Exclusive Summer Fashion Label
  • Marketing

Double Rainbouu & 7-Eleven Launch Exclusive Summer Fashion Label

Today, 7-Eleven has announced a one-of-a-kind collaboration with the popular Sydney-based anti-resort wear label Double Rainbouu. Dropping tomorrow, December 1, just in time for summer, this limited-edition capsule will infuse the fashion brand’s rebellious spirit with a distinctly iconic 7-Eleven flavour. The unisex collection features five must-have styles comprising two signature Hawaiian shirts, a peaked cap, a bucket hat […]