Our final keynote speaker at Behavioural Design Week 2021 was Baptiste Tougeron. As a Google Research Manager, he is responsible for ad effectiveness. During his session, he presented the most read whitepaper of Google worldwide: Decoding decisions. He talked about the messy decision process and how behavioural science can supercharge the attractiveness of brands. A must-see if you work in branding, marketing and advertising.
Behavioural Design Week: Baptiste Tougeron
Purchase decision-making is not a linear process. Between the purchase trigger and the purchase, customers are exposed to much information, like reviews or social media. The Google research team tried to uncover how customers process all this information and make decisions between the purchase trigger and the purchase itself. The call it “The messy middle”.
Behavioural Design for Advertising Effectiveness
Behavioural Design Week 2021
Baptiste Tougeron: Our key take-aways
Key-take away 1: Organise the messy middle:
Between the purchase trigger and the purchase, we can identify two ’mental modes’. The Exploration Mode and the Evaluation Mode.
While the Exploration Mode expands our consideration set, the Evaluation Mode narrows down our options. People oscillate through these two mental modes, repeating them as often as they need to make a purchase decision. These two mental processes can run simultaneously or apart, but they are two distinctive processes.
Key Take-Away 2: Supercharge the brand with cognitive biases
Now that there is some order in the messy middle, we need to know how shoppers process the information. During the process of Exploration and Evaluation, cognitive biases shape their behaviour and influence their choice. In the research, six cognitive biases are prioritised:
- The Power of Free
- Social Norms
- Authority Bias
- The Power of Now
- Category Heuristics
- Security Bias
Important conclusions to keep in mind:
- Ensure brand presence, simply showing up can impact customer decision making when they are exploring and evaluating. (This is called the Mere Exposure Effect)
- Intelligently (and responsibly) employ behavioural science principles to influence the decision-making process
- Close the gap between trigger and purchase.
Baptiste Tougeron: Quotes to remember
“Purchase decision-making is not a linear process”.
“I would like to think of the messy middle as a big spaghetti plate”.
“The cool thing about behavioural science, if you put the theory into practice in different countries, the brain remains to work very similarly.”
“We are not done. We still have to explore ‘exposure’ and ‘experience’, so lookout for new research and results in 2022”.
“Playing with the six cognitive biases is not easy. You cannot choose to supercharge your brand just like that. Some biases you can influence yourself, others need to be acquired”.
Baptiste Tougeron: Further reading
Want to know more about untangling the messy middle? Make sure to read the white paper by Google, which can be found here.
Hungry for more Behavioural Design Fest?
Please make sure to check out our other videos of other 2021 Keynote speakers on Behavioural Design Week: Tim Versnel on designing behaviour for sustainability and Matt Wallaert who shares his experience in setting up a Behavioural Change Project within an organisation.
Or, check out our upcoming edition of Behavioural Design Fest.
Also, you can find all the videos of the keynotes of Behavioural Design Fest 2018 and Behavioural Design Fest 2019; watch and re-watch here to upgrade your Behavioural Design know-how and boost your inspiration.
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