Behavioral Economics in the workplace

Today we had some very important clients in the building, and in the time honoured way we were encouraged to be in early to create the impression of a busy, thriving agency (which is just what we are, but it's possibly to tell at 9am on a Tuesday). So yesterday the note went round asking what time we thought we would all be able get in for the following morning. The options were as follows:

(a) Usual time (ie before 9.30am)
(b) Early (before 8.45am)
(c) Early with FREE breakfast thrown in
(d) On holiday / out

Guess what the most popular option was? Option (c) certainly looks like a whole lot better than option (b), and probably better than option (a) too once other factors are taken into account. I doubt this would have happened were it not for the lesser value option (b) being on the menu. So not only did we have the agency humming by 9am, it was full of genuinely happy, contented people. Let's hope it runs off on the client!

You can read more more about this other behavioral economic theories at the excellent Dan Ariely's blog. Or you could simply read Predictably Irrational. Business books are often high on theory and low on practicality, but when you can see things brought to life by your own workforce,you know you must be on to something. I'm off for breakfast.

Behavioural marketing in Canary Wharf

Amongst all the debate around Phorm and the like, last night witnessed the return of good old fashioned stealth marketing in the bars of Canary Wharf. As the usual groups of bankers downed Kirin whilst braying about the latest act of deleveraging in that strange kind of Euro language they use (Esperanto?), small groups of attractive young women moved seamlessly from table to table. They lingered no longer than a minute with each group before moving on. A few minutes later, those 'lucky' enough to have won favour found a free pass to Majingo's Gentlemen's Club in their pocket.

Later, I asked one of those handing out the tickets what criteria she used for selecting her guests . The answer was simple - they had to have a "twinkle in their eye". I pondered what kind of behaviours one might use to identify likely customers of alternative brands and found myself returning to the notion of the "killer question" - the one single thing that marks out their potential Sheba cat food apparanetly did it years ago by defning their audience as "those who buy their cats Xmas presents".

All of which reminded me that more often than not we dumb down our targeting strategies by looking at what audience characteristics we can readily measure, rather than what makes them unique.