Our Best Blog Posts Of 2014

It’s been a busy year at BrainJuicer and on this blog, and with the end of 2014 fast approaching it’s time to take our annual look at the posts you read the most – our most popular content, as voted. Can anything beat last year’s runaway winner, “How To Eat A Sandwich (The Daniel Kahneman Way)“? As it happens, yes. Let’s count down and find out what…

10. So, How Many Basic Emotions Are There Again? Like most successful theories, Paul Ekman’s “7 basic emotions” makes a juicy target for a news story looking to debunk it. This year’s attempt spotlighted a claim that there are only four basic emotions. Bad news for Ekman? Not really – the new work identifies primal emotions that may have evolved earlier, but Ekman’s ideas are still the relevant ones to humans as we are today.

9. The Best Graduate Job In The World? Micha Dudley joined BrainJuicer in 2013 in our Behaviour Change Unit team. In this post, she offers a look at what working here is really like from a graduate perspective. (Spoilers! It’s awesome!)

8. Reclaiming Research’s Radicalism Back in May, planner Martin Weigel published a mini-manifesto about restoring planning to its radical roots. This was our cover version, looking at how well research lives up to his ideas. And in a lot of places, it doesn’t – things the industry should embrace, like learnings from marketing science, get ignored in favour of received wisdom and “zombie ideas”.

7. South-East Asian Advertising: What Works? Happiness is a universal emotion, but not every culture reaches it in a similar way. This post looks at some self-funded ad testing we ran in Thailand and Indonesia, exploring the different drivers of 5-star advertising in each country.

6. 7-1! There was a World Cup this year, you might remember. And if you’re Brazilian or German, you surely also remember the shock outcome of the two countries’ semi-final. In the aftermath of Brazilian despair and German triumph, we turned a behavioural science lens on the match: how on earth had it all gone so wrong for Brazil, and what lessons could be drawn from it using psychology and decision science?

5. Meet The Most Successful Research App Of 2014 The research industry has spent decades making trade-off analysis as tedious as possible for participants. The runaway success of a tough-decisions app for teens should make them think again.

4. 2014 Christmas Ads: The Emotional Winners Revealed This post only went up a couple of weeks ago, but with the UK Christmas ad race these days a lot more interesting than the race for the Christmas No.1, it’s no surprise it’s proved very popular. Monty The Penguin takes on raving Christmas lights, World War One soldiers, posh fairies and a kid on a chopper bike in this highlights and lowlights review. (For the full story – with over 15 ads rated – get in touch!)

3. These Aren’t The Insights You’re Looking For The second in a series of posts exploring the demise of the traditional research concept, and how to get testing new ideas right. The conceit here – what if Star Wars had been put through the research wringer? – helped make it one of our most-tweeted posts, as well as one of our most-read.

2. The Behavioural Economics Guide 2014 – A Free Behaviour Change Resource Want people to visit a blog? Give them free stuff! Longtime BrainJuicer associate Alain Samson wrote a Behavioural Economics guidebook this year, and we linked to a free PDF of it. It’s still up. It’s still free. What are you waiting for?

1. Obituary – The Traditional Concept c.1960-2014 And our most successful post of the year was probably also our most fun to write – there’s a lesson in there somewhere! A mock obituary of the traditional research concept, explaining how it can’t keep pace with a System 1 world. The interest in our proposed solution – VisiCepts – has been enormous, but the story starts here.

So that was our 2014 – how was yours? There will still be a couple of posts to go before the year ends, of course, and right at the end of the year there’s our 15th birthday (which we’ll be celebrating in January – that time of year needs a bit of cheering up…!)

Thanks for reading this blog, and have a fantastic holiday season.

Researching Teenagers The System 1 Way

Teenagers communicate all the time – every shrug, sigh and selfie is full of meaning: they just don’t necessarily want to share it with you. Which means that a behavioural science approach – where you study the behaviour, not the behaver – is an ideal way to understand and explore teens’ worlds. Because – no matter how much people sometimes class teens as a different species, or proclaim each generation to be novel and incomprehensible, teens make decisions the same way as everyone else. Their System 1 thinking responds to environmental, personal and social factors.

Teenage research through the lens of behavioural science is the topic of Thursday’s free BrainJuicer webinar, written and presented by Juice Generation Client Director, Dominique Peters.

Rip It Up And Start Again?

Tomorrow, Scotland goes to the polls to vote for or against independence. Opinion polls are close – close enough, in fact, that they make pollsters nervous. The slight advantage to the “No” (anti-independence) campaign they show is tight enough that they could be left embarrassed either way.

Scotland’s finest.

If you believe – as most of us now do – that people are poor predictors of their own decisions, voting intention is obviously a great test case. One of our favourite studies, on US elections, showed that whatever the outcome, people were exceptionally poor judges of whether they would vote at all: come the day, half the declared “non-voters” actually turned out. (And a fair number of voters stayed home).

Why Not Use Research To Offer Your Customers LESS?

Today’s blog post is by Micha Dudley, a Senior Research Associate in our Behaviour Change Unit. Thanks Micha!

Most clients use market research to find areas they can provide more value to their customers. But in some cases, it can be more beneficial to take a look at the areas businesses could stand to reduce some value.

For instance, this week an article was posted in The Wall which shares the excitement we all have about the potential of wearable tech and gives loads of interesting possibilities for wearable tech firms. Can tech companies work with jewellery companies? Can they bring out beautiful smart bracelets? Can they make wearable tech cool by offering more?

 

Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne would have them offer less instead.

One of the insights from their international bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy is that focussing your value on few attributes at the expense of others, can lead to success.

THE BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS GUIDE 2014 – A FREE BEHAVIOR CHANGE RESOURCE

In the Northern Hemisphere at least, the Summer holidays are upon us. So for a lot of us it’s time to pack our bags and get somewhere we can relax, put our feet up, and catch up on some reading.

Ordinarily we’d do a post listing the best psychology and behavioural science books to have come out in 2014, but this year we’ve got something a bit more exciting to talk about. Our academic advisor Alain Samson, a psychologist and consultant who works with the LSE, has put together The Behavioral Economics Guide 2014. It’s a free up-to-date introduction to behavioural economics, with contributions from a bunch of companies who are putting the science to use for commercial impact.

OK, we admit it. It’s not really beach reading. More like a gentle workout for the mind once you get back from that well-deserved holiday and need some inspiration and ideas. The short book is in four parts.

7-1: Eight Behaviour Change Points From THAT World Cup Semi-Final

Have you been enjoying the World Cup? We have. And last night’s remarkable Brazil v Germany semi-final got us thinking. What do psychology and behavioural science tell us about the result, the pundits, the fans and the players after a shock event like that? So here are seven behavioural points about the Germany-Brazil game… and one “consolation goal” as a bonus!

Paths, Pirates And Pachyderms

A few years ago, file-sharing was a massive problem for content owners. At its 2008 peak, a third of US internet traffic was through file-sharing networks. Six years on, that’s down to 8%, according to this Mashable story.

The elephant does not acknowledge your warnings.

Since internet traffic is always increasing, that doesn’t mean the absolute amount of piracy has diminished, but it certainly hasn’t kept up with the net as a whole. So where did the pirates go? Streaming services, apparently – streaming video, particularly Netflix, now accounts for a massive proportion of online traffic where file-sharing has sharply dwindled.

It’s interesting to look at this story through a behaviour change lens. At BrainJuicer we talk a lot about “building a path for the elephant”. Human decision making is like a rider and an elephant. People think they can influence it by persuading the conscious rider, but ultimately the rider has little control over the mighty elephant – and the best way to change behaviour is by building a path that the beast automatically follows. So with that in mind, let’s look at file-sharing.

Fair Weather Friends

Does warm weather make us copy other people more?

If you’re reading this in the Northern Hemisphere, then Summer is on its way. It may not feel like it right this second – it certainly doesn’t here in London – but it’ll get here eventually. And in the Summer, behaviour changes.

OK, that’s not a startling revelation. Marketers, like everybody else, are well aware people do different things in Summer. Why do they behave differently? Because it’s hotter. We’re two-for-two on stating the obvious, here. But some things aren’t quite as predictable as buying more ice cream or taking holidays.

Practically Irrational

Some of you might remember that we got quite excited when Dan Ariely – the economist author of the best-selling Predictably Irrational – ran a Coursera course on Behavioural Economics. A bunch of BrainJuicer people signed up for the course, and loved it.

So we’re excited to see Ariely’s new startup: Irrational Labs, a nonprofit consultancy pledging to use behavioural economics for good. Part of the Irrational Labs offer is a series of behaviour change workbooks, which they are selling as a PDF bundle for $60. This post is a review of said workbooks.

Spot the nudge.

Full disclosure: Irrational Labs asked us for a review and sent us the workbooks free. Even fuller disclosure: Irrational Labs might be, in some circumstances, a competitor, though when it comes to behavioural science we feel a rising tide floats all boats – anyone spreading the word gets a thumbs-up from us.

So with those disclosures out of the way, let’s review.

The Best Graduate Job In The World?

Micha Dudley joined our Labs team in September as a graduate. In this post, she writes about the experience. (The title is Micha’s suggestion not mine!)

The first thing I’m struck by, as Hugh from IT sets up my new computer, is the daunting piles of behavioural economics books on Pete and Orlando’s desks. Whilst I’m writing down all my passwords, Pete pauses from an email, looks at his book towers and pulls one from somewhere in the middle. He’s flicked to a page in seconds and is double-checking a quote he has already typed out from memory. I’m torn for a moment between feeling intimidated by the steep learning curve ahead of me and feeling excited that I clearly have highly-informed teachers to guide me.

Everyone has been very welcoming all morning, and we’re about to head into a Labs strategy meeting with the management team. (Who stand in a row and are introduced to me as John, Jim, James… and Alex. I congratulate myself on being able to hold Alex’s name to his face, but then they all move away and I realise with dismay that if John, Jim and James don’t continue to stand in the same order, my name-crowded brain will let me down.)

The strategy meeting is an inspiring way to kick off my first day. Everyone truly cares for and loves BrainJuicer – it’s their baby they are helping to grow. The future looks exciting for the Behaviour Change Unit; the first few projects Orlando and Pete have run as founders of the team have been very successful and expansion is the next step, with lots of exciting big projects on the horizon.