Knowing that this was the case, this is exactly what Jez set out to do when launching a behavioural science practice within Ogilvy, the global advertising agency.
“Why should I care about behavioural science?”
The year was 2011 and Jez was an Integrated Strategy Director. Having worked closely with Rory Sutherland, who was Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, together they wanted to launch a team whose sole purpose was to apply behavioural science to advertising. They’d settled on the name Ogilvy Change and now needed to get their colleagues as excited about behavioural science as they were. In order to get the rest of the company to embrace behavioural science, they needed to capture their colleagues’ imaginations.
One option would have been to spend an hour lecturing about various heuristics and biases. They could have told them about how in America there is a wonderful ‘Save More Tomorrow’ programme developed by academics,1 which found that behavioural economics could be used to increase people’s savings from their salary from 3.5% to 13.6% over 40 months.
Alternatively, they could have talked about how The Economist had engineered its subscription choice architecture in order to generate more print and digital sales. Would-be subscribers had the option of a $59 digital subscription, a $125 print subscription, or a $125 print and digital subscription. Who would choose the print-only subscription, when for the same price you could get online access? Indeed, Dan Ariely found that with this decoy option, significantly more people chose the more expensive package.2 But without the print-only option, significantly more people chose the cheaper, digital-only option. Proof, right there, that our decisions are influenced by choice architecture and that behavioural science can have big impacts on business outcomes.
If they’d taken this route to convert colleagues into behavioural science enthusiasts, they might have got through to a couple of them at best. And this, in the early days of the field, is where it often fell down. Many of the learnings from behavioural science are theoretical and the challenge in a business context is bringing the application possibilities to life.
Similarly, it’s ironic that books such as the New York Times Best Seller Thinking, Fast and Slow,3 written by one of the forefathers of behavioural economics, was specifically written to appeal to an academic audience. The book was published with small, hard to read text, and very few pictures. Who knows how many more copies it may have sold had it also been published in a more populist format? Chunked into several books, with a bigger text size and plenty of pictures, this would have conveyed the virtues of behavioural science to a lay audience in a more engaging way.
The Year of the Rabbit
Instead of a lecture, Jez and Rory set out to conduct a series of playful studies in the agency to bring the applications of behavioural science to life. It was the Chinese Year of the Rabbit and so their experiments were all tied to this theme. Could they make people eat like rabbits, move like rabbits, bounce like rabbits and copulate like rabbits? Whilst these studies were inspired by findings from academic journals, their versions were far from being academically robust. But for their purpose this didn’t matter. The point was to bring the theories to life and to demonstrate the ways in which behavioural science could be used to nudge behaviour.
Eating like rabbits
Their first experiment was conducted in the agency canteen, where they set out to nudge their colleagues to eat more carrots. We are more likely to choose healthy foods if they are easy to reach, or first in line. For example, one study found that the location of desserts had a significant effect on whether customers in a hospital cafeteria chose the healthy or unhealthy options, with people more likely to choose the dessert that was easy to reach.4 In order to nudge their colleagues to eat more carrots, therefore, they moved the carrots earlier in the canteen line and doubled the quantity normally available. They also changed the description of the carrots to “Succulent Carrots”, knowing that sensory adjectives on restaurant menus increase both sales and satisfaction.5
The results? Before their intervention, there were always carrots left over at the end of lunchtime. As a result of their intervention, twice as many carrots were eaten, they went more quickly and they were all gone by the end of service.
Speedy like rabbits
When compared to tortoises, rabbits are fabled to move very quickly. How could they nudge people to walk faster than normal? A seminal, yet hard to replicate, study found that participants primed with elderly words left the room slower than a control group, aligned with the stereotype of elderly behaviour.6
To translate this into an advertising agency, they held two fictional briefings for airlines. In one of these briefings, they talked quickly and excitably about short-haul holidays to Magaluf or Tenerife. In the other, they talked slowly, this time about long-haul flights to visit grandparents in India. Crucially, they were interested in how quickly their unwitting colleagues returned to their desks after these fictional briefings. Whilst this experiment was crudely measured and would certainly not hold up in the hallowed halls of a university, they observed that their colleagues primed with the short, speedy and energetic trips moved back to their desks faster than those primed with slow, arduous and long-haul trips.
Bouncing like rabbits
How could they use behavioural science to get their colleagues jumping like rabbits? At the time Jez had small children and so had watched a song called ‘Wake Up Little Bunnies’ about 272 times from a TV show called Fun Song Factory. In this infamous lyrical hit, the narrator encourages us to “see the little bunnies sleeping,” whilst everyone sleeps. This is shortly followed by a rousing “Wake up, little bunnies!” upon which everyone jumps up and around like bunnies. Children, it seems, are very happy to shamelessly join in with this bunny jumping. But how could they get their adult colleagues to adopt this behaviour, in an office environment?
Being part of a social group involves following a set of unspoken behaviours. This is known as conformity and was famously demonstrated by Asch in 1956. Jez hypothesised that if enough people in a room bounced like bunnies, then the rest would follow suit. In addition, they recruited the CEO and Group Planning Director who, as figures of authority, their colleagues would be more willing to copy. They invited people from the company to take part in some workshop training, telling them that they’d be learning how to energise a room full of depleted workshop delegates. A control group were given a sheet of paper with instructions, which told them to press play on the bunny video before joining in by following the actions. Unsurprisingly, everybody stayed glued to their seats, muttering “There’s no chance we’re doing that.”
And what about in the other room? Jez was there to lead the session, with his two stooges in tow.
“So at this point,” he began, “we all need to lie on the floor and sleep like bunnies.”
Everyone obediently complied. There they were, all adults aged between 30 to 45, lying on the floor and sleeping like bunnies. The song played and as it said “Wake up!” they all woke up, assumed rabbit shapes and bounced around the room like bunnies. Having three people engaging in the behaviour was enough to encourage the rest to conform. It’s likely that the stooges’ seniority enhanced the others’ readiness to do so.
Copulating like rabbits
For their fourth and final in-house experiment, could they alter their colleagues’ answers to a survey about sex? One study found that sexual arousal had an impact on several areas of judgement and decision making,7 such as sexual preferences and willingness to practice unsafe sex. Whilst advertising agencies are renowned for being audacious, they couldn’t completely replicate this in their office.
A control group were surveyed in a cold room at 3pm, answering questions such as “How often do you want to make love?” and “How many partners have you had?” The other group completed the same survey