​The end is important. Get it right. 
 
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize winning behavioral economist, proposed a theory that an event is not usually judged by the entirety of the experience but disproportionately by how it ends (‘When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End’). 
 
He provided multiple evidence to demonstrate this effect. In one such experiment, participants had one hand immersed in ice water at a temperature that causes moderate pain. The first trial lasted 60 seconds. The second trial lasted longer - 90 seconds, however in the last 30 seconds  of this trial, the water was slowly warmed by 1 degree (better but still painful). For the third trial, they were allowed to choose which of the first two trials was less disagreeable, and repeat that one. People were more willing to repeat the second trial, despite a 30 second longer exposure to uncomfortable temperatures. Kahneman et al. concluded that "subjects chose the long trial simply because they liked the memory of it better than the alternative, or disliked it a little less because of the way it had ended”.
   
Why does this happen ? That’s because the ‘remembering’ self  (the  one that recounts the experience and summarizes it for you) seems to be dominant Vs the ‘experiencing’ self  (the one that is in the moment undergoing the experience). It’s the ‘remembering’ self that governs making future choices, evaluating the overall quality of an event that you’ve undergone  and the satisfaction and dissatisfaction one experiences. 
  
With the Covid crisis, and the millions of job losses, it would befit organizations and leaders to make an earnest attempt to make these  ‘endings’ with their employees humane, empathetic, with a tangible show of gratitude, acknowledging the pain of a job loss, while offering the possibility of continued connections in the future, versus making these endings robotic, abrupt, devoid of any emotions, stripped of any real conversations or possibilities of continued connections and conversations, as seems to be the case in many instances.
 
Endings are key. What happens during these moments of ‘endings’ impacts our remembering selves and the story we tell ourselves.  The very least that organizations, leaders, & team members can do is to get the ending right; and if they can’t change the outcomes, they can at least make the ending less negative. 
 
Afterall, the memory is all people get to keep.

‘You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six’
Yogi Berra

The way a task is presented affects people's willingness to take it on and complete it (or not!) Something presented as one long task will be less likely to engage people than something that is efficiently 'chunked up' into bite-sized’ mini tasks. Used frequently in  behavioural economics, and cognitive psychlogy, ‘chunking’ involves grouping smaller, disparate elements into a sequence or categorizing a process into sections or ‘types’  to make it easier for people to comprehend, retain information, or make a sustained change in behaviour. 

An oft cited example,  by many practionioners, is one that involves applying this concept of ‘chunking’  to help people complete the course of medication  precribed to them. There  is a huge risk incurred, for example, when people fail to complete courses of antibiotics. Instead of giving people, the entire course of antibiotics and asking them to take, say 22 tablets, twice daily,it might be better to ‘chunk’ this down. Giving them, say, 10 white pills and 12 blue ones and telling them to take the white pills first followed by the blue ones, the likelihood of people completing the entire course increases significanlty. 

In FMCG, the Skin Care category has leveraged this understanding remarkably well, to help simplify an incredibly complex multi step skin care regimen by ‘chunking’ products into cleansing–toning–moistirizing–whitening–anti ageing or day and night routines, helping people make sense of an unimaginable & impossible range of products and routines to use & follow in the quest for what they deem to be great skin.

In retail, IKEA is one of the players that does a brillaint job of helping consumers navigate their almost impossible  product range by ‘chunking’  them into rooms, & themed spaces that make browzing manageable and the dwell time engaging, both online and in-store, often resulting in people leaving IKEA with more than what they had intended to purchase ! 

Chunking has also been extensivey used in the context of not just learning & communication, but also when dealing with complex goals like qutting smoking, adopting healthier meals, better financial planning , better everyday hygiene etc, by helping break a larger goal into simpler, more platable, doable, organizable & trackable smaller steps.  

In a TED video about the 'Art of Choosing'  psycho-economist Sheena Iyengar describes the ‘deer-in-headlights’ paralysis that people experience when faced with an overwhelming choice  and/or information overload. If those same choices & that same  information is organized well, and presented in a manner that people can effectively process and ‘consume’ , it leads to smoother  & more satisfying decision making.  In the midst of the Coronavirus crisis and the economic fallout, for example, some trading platforms did a tremendous job of  ‘chunking’ the various stocks contextually as ‘stay at home services stock’,‘work from home services stock’, ‘online learning stocks’ to help people make sense of the chaos and guide their decision making process efficiently. 

Brands are constantly striving to be more relevant and meaningful in the lives of people they want to engage with. In this endeavor they often end up overstuffing their audiences's, media & screen environment that is already bulging at its seams. If they truly want to matter to their audiences, it might be important for them to classify, organize, categorize, collate, and chunk all that content & solutions into manageable, palatable, portions that uniquely & culturally make sense to people they are serving it all to.  
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A book with its thoughts clearly organized into chapters is, after all, easier to make sense of,  than all the discrete 61000000 words that go into making it . 

Making a commitment publicly, or to another person (ideally, someone you respect & whose validation matters to you) seems to reduce the gap between our intention and action, and help overcome the possible temptations that could detract us en route to our goals.  The more public our position, the more likely it seems we are,  to follow through with it.

We are all familiar with perhaps one of the oldest commitment contract, aka marriage, where people gather together to raise the stakes of the vows being made, and make it more binding for the involved parties to avoid easily ‘backing off’ from the commitment made. 

Wharton behavioral economist Katherine Milkman and her collaborators tested the efficacy of ‘pre commitment strategies’ in prompting people to get vaccinated. It turned out that specifying & committing to someone the exact time and place when and where they will get vaccinated resulted in measurably better follow-through.

Dean Karlan, a Yale economics professor, teamed up with his colleague Ian Ayres to create a online business based on the concept of making a public contract to achieve goals. They call their platform, Stickk.com and it gives people the option of making a public commitment, financial or nonfinancial. With financial commitments, an individual puts up money and agrees to accomplish a goal by a certain date, also specifiying how to verify that s/he has met their goal. If the person reaches the goal set, s/he gets their money back. If they fail, the money ether goes to charity, or is dsitributed amongst people who reach their targets, or is sent to the sports team the person hates (adding to the motivation of sticking to one’s goals). The nonfinancial commitments include peer pressure (emails to family or friends giving them details of your successes or failures) or making one’s journey public via a dashboard accessible to all in your circle of significant others.

Positive Labelling is another way through which commitments can be made public. Singapore, often called the ‘nudge nation’ uses  publically visible ‘labels’ to encourage people to adopt desired behaviours. A publically visible label that says ‘I am a part of the Kindness movement’, ‘or  I recycle’  or ‘I scrub my hands for more than 20 seconds while washing’  to not only adopt but also sustain the desired behvaiour change.  
 
Many marketers have the wherewithal to use this dimension of human psyshology to encourage behaviours that are both expressive of the brand’s purpose as well as bevaiours that would create a positive dent in culture.  Patagonia, for example, contributes $100,000 annually to The Conservation Alliance. They also work towards preserving lands and a life outdoors. Patagonia’s commitment is very public, and its activities to make that commitement an everyday reality, steadfast. Another favorite, REI, also walks the talk when it comes to issues of conservation, sustainablity, and equality. It publicly commits to goals, and thereby opens itself for scrutiny by the public at large.

On a more topical issue, the COVID 19 crisis, this week saws some brands getting it right. Brands like Coca Cola who have publically declared it would suspend all marketing activity in key markets in response to economic changes wrought by the pandemic, Diageo pledging 2 million litres of alcohol for sanitiser, to BBC Global News, freeing 20% of its advertising inventory for use by international health and government organisations wanting to promote public-health messages around Covid-19, Gojek CEOs pledging to donate 25% of salaries to drivers and other partners facing loss of income, or LVHM deciding to  use cosmetics and perfume manufacturing facilities to make free alcohol-based sanitizer amid global shortage.
 
As human beings, we seek to be consistent with our promises & love the applause and validation that comes from sticking to our course (and hate the flak that comes with being seen as deviating from what we committed to). Aided and abetted by various technologies that offer new ways of publicising and socialising commitments, brands should make the right public commitment to become more meaningful in the lives of people they want to build a relationship with. And stand the scrutiny of delivering against it, and be rewarded for it. Or bear the consumer’s wrath of falling short, and be held accountable for it.
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The lesson, in short? Make it public!

In 2010, the popular New York eatery, Serendipity 3’s introduced a $69 hot dog called ‘Foot-Long-Haute-Dog’ with Exotic dressings & gained plenty of publicity when the Guinness Book of World Records certified it as the most expensive wiener of all time. The true purpose of this overpriced item, however,  was to make the next most expensive item on the menu seem cheaper. Customers who were drawn by the Haute Dog’s publicity ordered the menu’s $17.95 cheeseburger in droves, driving record sales for the store.

Some years earlier. Serendipity 3 offered a $1000 ‘Golden Opulence Sundae’ that was only available with a 48 hour-notice. They sold only one Sundae per month. Nevertheless, it intrigued customers who then, compared the $1000 sundae to 'less expensive options' such as the $15.50 'fruit and fudge' confection or the $22.50 'Cheese Cake Vesuvius' and helped drive their sales, all the while completely convinced that they were getting a great deal, with the most expensive item acting like an anchor against which everything else seemed ‘reasonable’

The assumption that people carefully weigh all pros and cons, and make decisions rationally, is one the biggest myths that existed in the field of economics and marketing. The reality is that more often than not, people unconsciously latch onto the first fact they encounter, basing their decisions on that first fact, irrespective of its accuracy, in a demonstration of a phenomenon called Anchoring Effect.

In 1974, psychologists Tversky and Kahneman published 'Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases' documenting the first clinical evidence of the Anchoring Effect. They described an Anchoring Effect experiment which challenged two groups of high school students to complete a lengthy multiplication problem. One group was given 5 secs to estimate the answer to  1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8. The other group was given same time to solve this : 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1. The Anchoring Effect led the students whose problem started with lower numbers to estimate lower. While the students who solved the problem in reverse anchored to the higher numbers, resulting in a higher estimate. Each group was unduly affected by the first numbers they saw.
 
The Anchoring Effect has been extensively used to influence response to pricing, promotions, subscriptions, negotiations, customer service training. Telling a customer, for instance, that a wait time to get a table is 30 min, and then saying that it is available in 20 mins. makes them happier than if you were to tell them that the wait time is 15 minutes, and then having to tell them to wait another 5 minutes. In both the scenarios, the final wait time is the same, but the customer satisfaction levels widely different.
 
Anchoring Effect is a significant reference point, guiding & effecting our decisions way more strongly than we’d like to accede. While anchoring has often been used to drive profits & sales, one of the strongest & most sustainable, anchoring points to use in marketing, is the Brand’s Purpose & the values it stands for (should stand for).  As people get bombarded with information in this overstuffed, over communicated media environment, keeping the Brand’s Values and Purpose, front, back and Centre, as a constant, will help audiences, follow these values, through their path to purchase.

​Remember that when it comes to decision -making, it’s often about the first thing people see.

​The biggest fallacy in marketing is assuming that people are rational and their decisions, logical.  If it were so, the feelings invoked by losing something or gaining something (of equal value) should be the same. We should feel as pleased with a $100 gift as we feel bad that we have lost $100. But this is never the case .Psychologists have found that we feel a loss about twice as severely as we experience a gain. Feeling the pain of loss more acutely than feeling the pleasure of gain leads to people trying to avoid a loss more than trying to pursue a similar gain, a behavior called Loss Aversion.  Or as the Psychologists, Kahneman & Tversky, said, “Losses loom larger than gains”
 
Loss Aversion in the service of Environmental Protection. Tatiana Homonoff, from Decision Lab, UK, tested the theory of loss-aversion by assessing whether charging a tax of $0.05 (penalty) had a bigger impact on plastic bag reduction than offering a bonus (reward) of the same amount. Her results show that plastic bag used declined by 42% after the tax was implemented but did not change in the bonus treatment, evidence consistent with a model of loss aversion. Loss aversion explains why penalty frames are sometimes more effective than reward frames in motivating peopl, and encouraging desired behaviours . 
 
Loss Aversion for a Better Version of Yourself.  The website Stickk allows people to publicly commit to a positive behavior change (avoid binge drinking, save for retirement, run for  30 mins everyday etc). The goal-setting platform, created by behavioral economists at Yale University, uses a Commitment Contract, “a binding agreement you sign with yourself to ensure that you follow through with your intentions, and it does this by utilizing the psychological power of loss aversion and accountability to drive behavior change. By asking users to sign Commitment Contracts, Stickk helps users define their goal (whatever it may be), acknowledge what it’ll take to accomplish it, and leverages the power of putting money on the line to turn that goal into a reality”
 
Loss Aversion Helping Close The Sale. Leveraging Loss Aversion is how SUPREME, went from a small skateboarding store in New York to an $1 billion street-wear company with a cult-like following among teens.The retail value of Supreme's clothing isn't much, but once the items sell out, (which they always do, by design) they begin to increase in value, creatinga huge resale market and hype sparked by.
 
Looking to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates, a problem that results in lost revenue for almost every retailer, the flower delivery service, 1-800- Flowers, implemented a push notification strategy to bring potential buyers back to the app to finish a purchase.Sending promos to users over push notifications, the company was able to increase abandoned shopping cart conversions by 350% above the industry average. 
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Loss aversion is an extremely powerful tool catalyst to behaviour change. One time discount, limited offers, flash sales etc are commonly used tactics by marketers to advance sales The key is to leverage this understanding with a strong ethical compass in hand , to avoid inciting fear or plaguing on people’s insecurities, to use it to strengthen your brand’s equity and purpose, focussing on positive behaviour change, that help people achieve their goals, for their greatest good.

​Nah, that’s not me, you say?  If you’ve ever looked at reviews before buying something, or considered ratings on TripAdvisor before booking your holiday, or bought a fidget spinner for your kids, or chosen to eat at a resturant that is full versus one that is empty, or recently bulk ordered toilet rolls in the light of the coronavirus scare, you most certainly have experienced ‘Group Think’/ the Mob Effect / The Herd Effect. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the fact remains that we are deeply influenced by what others do.
 
In 2008, Professor Jens Krause and Dr. John Dyer of Leeds University conducted an experiment where groups of subjects were told to walk in a random path inside of a big hall while not communicating with the other subjects. However, the researchers told a few of the subjects exactly where they should walk.They discovered that the people who were told exactly where to walk started being followed by the subjects walking “randomly.”“We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd. But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realise they were being led by others”, said Prof Krause.In the end, they found that it took just 5% of people walking confidently to influence 95% of the other walkers to follow them.
 
While the Herd Effect has precipated unsavory behaviours (actual mobs !), and crisis such as the Dot Com Bubble and  stock market crashes, not everything that comes out of  it is bad.  It can be an extremely powerful Nudge guiding positive decisions and actions. Marketeers , have of course, understood and used this psychology to prod people along their paths to purchase. 
 
Pampers, the diaper brand from P&G, for example, drove increased consideration by showing how many other ‘mothers like you’  placed their faith in Pampers.  Olay overcome the barrier of decreased relevance at various e-coomerce platforms by demonstrating how many other ‘women like you’ chose Olay to answer their skin care problems.
 
Amazon has built up such a review powerhouse that 30% of ecommerce shoppers go to Amazon just to research products, basing much of their decision on such peer reviews. Other methods of leveraging such social proof include  ‘Best Sellers”, “Most Popular” page, “Choice of XXX people”  
 
Singapore, uses the Herd Effect, habitually, to nudge people to adopt positve behaviours. The Public Utilities Board, for example, encourages people to conserve water & electricity by having the monthly utility bills display how your energy consumption compares to your neighbours, gently nudging people to not exceed the ‘avergae’. Public Service campaigns regularly shine light on behaviours they want people to emulate by showing a ‘collective’ of people performing the desired action.
 
Human race is a herd. We find comfort in numbers, and  with people with whom we have something in common. While Herd Metality is often associaited with negative emotions & outcomes, it is a powerful nudge that can be used to accelerate adoption of postive goals.

Architecting  triggers in the consumer journey to create the desired change for Whisper to win @ commerce in South Korea.

Despite being the market leader, in a highly competitive market of South Korea, competition generated more than 20X sales from ecommerce versus Whisper, and registered higher brand affinity, and a higher intention to purchase and engagement as compared to Whisper. 

A systems approach & a thorough audit of the brand, and its competition, revealed a problem of the brand not being able to bring in new users effectively and /or drive loyalty amongst chance purchasers. While the older converts to the brand continued using Whisper, the new entrants to the category chose competitive brands, causing the brand’s share to shrink year on year. 

Through an understanding of the consumer and all her context cues - cultural, competitive, connections, category, communications, community, we identified all possible sources of insights that could help embed the right triggers in the consumer journey to create the change in the direction desired. Brand Communication was changed to reflect an understanding of the motivations of the target audience, while nudges, guided by how people makes choices, were embedded along the path to purchase to engage the consumers and help close the sale.
 
Some of the Nudges* @ Commerce 

1. Defaults. All things being equal, consumers are more likely to choose options that are presented as a default. A default is defined as a choice frame in which one option is pre-selected so that individuals must take active steps to select another option. This insight was used to drive recurring purchase with a  monthly delivery opt in at e-commerce when you bought the pack online, the first time. We also embedded  an option to personalize the ‘cycle’ of recurring delivery, such that once opted in, a pack of pads arrived at your doorstep in sync with your cycle, month after month.  Given no one loves shopping for sanitary pads, this was a simple nudge in the direction of efficiency & in eliminating consumer discomfort. Of course, opting out as a choice was always clearly and obviously extended to all consumers.
2. Categorization Attribution & Driving Complementarity. Whisper was being shelved and stocked in the same space and next to household cleaning products & ‘mom buying’ categories. Little wonder that the younger audiences saw little relevance and felt no affinity towards the brand. We corrected this by decoupling sanitary protection from household cleaning & mom space. Additionally, we drove complementarity with recommendations that included stocking the special ‘occasion’ packs alongside fashion wear, outdoor sports wear, next to active lifestyle, travel sections – all in a bid to drive heightened relevance.
3. Mappings to Own the Cycle not just the Period.  Instead of technical talks on ‘absorption’, cues like specially created  travel packs, party packs, with tailored packaging and messaging was used to cue occasion specific product superiority. Recommendation included ‘Owning the cycle, not just the period’ with always-on year round online events that gave the lonely and stressed Korean teens an opportunity to bond over shared interests, with conversations  & support groups to boost their wellbeing. The work also helped inform the creative idea. The support of other women is sometimes all that is needed to give a woman the confidence boost to achieve what she desires and recognize just how unstoppable she can be. The communication focused on women enabling other women to voice their frustrations & be helped through overcoming some of the period-related challenges they had.
4. Reducing Choice Overload by enabling quick and easy comparisons by grouping products & visually presenting value communication.  
5. Trust = Person like me. People trust ‘real’ people. This insight was used to create peer recommendations. The insight was also the cornerstone of the strategy to use Power Claims on the storefront using consumer reviews, rewarding loyal customers who chatted real time with potential customers to inform them of their own product experience. This was all about driving trust using real stories and experiences of people. 

 
Result The human experience centered choice architectures, reimagined & recreated E-commerce Experience to create an online model for growth for Whisper in Korea that tripled the business from ecommerce within 12 months.  This approach was reapplied across all other developing markets, and called out as Best in Class Consumer Experience Design by P&G. Brand desirability registered a positive rise for the first time in 3 years.
 
*A nudge, as explained by Robert Thaler, the Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist,  is “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.” (Wikipedia) 
 

A nudge, as explained by Robert Thaler, the Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist, is “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.” (Wikipedia).

Nudging builds on the fact that people do not always make rational and informed choices. In fact, most of the choices we make are done automatically and intuitively (Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011). This impulsive behaviour is difficult to change by arguments. What appears to work, are small changes in the physical environment. A subtle hint can have a significant behavioral effect.

THE BEGINNING OF A NUDGE FOR ME.
In a country like India, and more so in a less developed place like Haryana, with less than desirable hygiene and sanitation practices and infrastructure,, people would sometimes dispose their garbage in front of other people’s homes. We would often find garbage strewn next to our gate every morning (the act was usually done in the night when no one could pin the culprit down). The proper designated place to dispose the garbage was at the end of the lane that we lived on. After months of frustration, at first, by putting up signs requesting people politely not to throw rubbish & then graduating to increased levels of anger, resulting in threatening people that they would be handed over to the police or even worse be cursed with bad karma, my parents had had enough. Their final solution? They dotted the boundary walls of our house with pictures of Gods and Goddesses 
The garbage nuisance stopped immediately ! I guess, it is a fact that in India, Gods do wield immense power! The fear of offending Gods was a subtle nudge that caused a shift in a hitherto stubborn behavior. Soon after, the entire neighborhood adopted this practice. Garbage stopped appearing in front of people’s houses and the unknown culprits (!) started walking to where they were legally required to responsibly dispose the garbage.

Soon, I became aware of the various ‘nudges’ my mom would use to get us to behave a particular way. Instead of storing our bikes in the space behind of the house, as used to be the practice, they appeared in the hallway that we crossed to go out reminding & encouraging us to bike. 
Those were the days of letter writing. No emails. And phone calls were expensive. Mom used to put a stack of 24 Inland letters (as they were called) on my table. 12 of them for me to write to my maternal grandparents’ and 12 to write to my paternal grandparents. Part of the nudge worked (I wrote regularly to my maternal grand mom). Part of the nudge didn’t – I used all the 12 letters that were meant for my paternal grandparents to write to my maternal grand mom instead. Maybe the nudge would have worked better, had she pre-addressed the letters?

 
The Nudge Continued to Intrigue
The interest in behavior – the irrational & the supposedly rational, the inter relationship between environment and person and how one can be modified by affecting the other, led me to pursue my education in Psychology and then in Medical & Psychiatric Social Work, with specialization in Behavior Change. 

This was a time of many ‘live’ experiments in nudges to affect behavior change.
I spent a year working with people affected with chemical dependency as a counsellor & social worker. One of the interventions involved the strategic use of buddies. People who were buddied up together to do an activity of combined choice (sports, exercise, meditation, arts & crafts) stuck with the activity for longer than those who weren’t buddied together. And showed a lower relapse rate than those who were on the path of recovery by themselves. Having a buddy – and a shared activity to reinforce the connection – served as a nudge in relapse prevention.  

I spent another year as the counsellor in an Old Age home. To encourage the residents to get walk more we had lined the longer route to the cafeteria with plants and with pictures of various deities that they prayed to and left the shorter route untouched. People took the longer route to their destination and walked much more than otherwise. These simple (almost rudimentary) nudges affected a behavior change much more than any talk therapy did. 

The newly admitted residents were depressed and reeling under a deep sense of rejection & ‘not mattering’ (In India, parents expect to either live with their children or be taken care of by them in some way, and, being sent away to an Old Age home – and that too a facility that was meant for destitutes was a blow to their sense of being).  Asking them to volunteer for duties – either cooking in the kitchen, or watering the plants, or teaching children at the neighboring school, gave them a sense of responsibility – and a nudge that helped restore their sense of dignity. 

While doing my internship with in the area of mental health, at a leading facility, many of the interventions for people dealing with mental health issues involved ‘nudges’ embedded in their physical environment to drive positive behavior change.
 
Nudge. Some more?
In my 20 years of work as a Strategist, this idea of making positive tweaks in a person’s environment to enable (not force) a behavior change in the direction desired, continued to surface through my work.

• Ariel, in 1998 was the first and only brand of detergent, that did not feature a woman in its advt. The adv. showed a man washing clothes, while his wife is at work. A positive nudge in breaking gender stereotypes.
• A key part of Pampers strategy was linking it to a night of undisturbed sleep. Putting Pampers next to bath time products and bundling them together in supermarkets. An equity driving nudge in store.
• Using Testers & Male Shopping Assistants for Olay Skin care in India. A nudge that helped drive active consideration & close sale in store.
• Whisper. A monthly delivery opt in option at E-commerce, when you buy the pack online the first time. Thereafter, a pack arrives at your doorstep every 26 days. No one loves shopping for sanitary pads, so this was a nudge that helped the consumers and the brand. That, plus the fact that if you know you cycle, you can pre order the pads and have them delivered to you monthly.  A simple nudge in the direction of efficiency.
• SKII. Making the buying experience shareworthy. A nudge that drove word of mouth.
• Coca Cola Chinese New Year campaign (CNY). For our audience, ‘preparation’ is a lonely experience and lasts longer than the ephermeral CNY reunion dinner itself. They wished they could share the preparation journey with someone so they could anticipate the thrill of the upcoming celebration. This lead us to the Connections Strategy of transforming the often lonely Job of Preparation into a shared Joy of Connection. The focus of our efforts shifted to the ‘preparation’ phase – seeding the association of Coke with Happiness outsidethe noise of the celebration. And booking your tickets to go back home – a big phenomenon during CNY-  being the first nudge that Coca Cola helped amplify, celebrate, share.

Small changes in the environment can affect people’s choices and decisions significantly. When thinking of the behaviour change you want to effect, think of the environmental changes you can create to enable & accelerate that change in behaviour. That nudge could be the idea that galvanizes people into action. 

*Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, first president of Turkey, wanted to modernize the Turkish people’s dressing. He wanted people to stop wearing the veil, but knew that a ban would result in strong resistance. So he tried a softer approach, which was to make it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil. People soon stopped wearing it. The prostitutes wearing the veil was the nudge - a psychological solution that solved the problem at hand. This example is sourced from the TED talk by Rory Sutherland.

 Richard Thaler, the American economist was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017 for his contributions to behavioral economics, and in particular for his Nudge Theory. The Nudge theory (or nudge) is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. The a poster child example of a Nudge was a a fly painted on a men’s urinal, nudging them to aim correct. The idea understood human psychology (if you have something to aim at, people will aim) and created a small change in environment (the image of the fly painted on the urinal) to cause a behavioral change – that of aiming correct to reduce spills.

The world of advertising & communication has always been conscious of this truth, and has used it extremely well & with incredible creativity, often to build the brand with relevance & meaning in the lives of consumer ; and admittedly, at times to lure people into taking a certain decision.

An example of a brilliant brand building nudge is Alka Seltzer’s Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz campaign. While this nudge dates back before the formal rise of behavioral economics, Alka Seltzer’s slogan, “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz” is a brilliant case of nudging consumers via advertising. The line “Plink Plink Fizz” was written at the bidding of a psychologist who suggested that, if you could create a social norm around using two Alka Seltzer tablets at a time, sales would double.

The Coca Cola Company distributed refrigerators to shops in remote areas of India & in areas that suffered the worst summers. Since Coca Cola products were the only cold / chilled drinks in these places – it nudged people to pick coca cola versus other brands that were also available but just not chilled. A brilliant nudge that drove Coca Cola’s consumption exponentially.

Other commonly used nudges include adding the label ‘most popular’ to the product marketers want to sell on their pricing page. Telling site visitors what other people have liked in the past, works in selling a product because as much as we believe that we are unique, we tend to like things that other people like. Amazon was one of the pioneers in the use of this nudge.  

Comparison is also a nudge that been used extensively in the world of advertising. In an ingenious exploitation of framing effects, one salesman sold Rolls-Royces at a yacht show. Seen alongside a $10 million yacht, a $500,000 car seems like a bargain. Restaurant owners often use the trick of having one very expensive item on the menu to increase the average value of dishes ordered, fully knowing that while the most expensive item of the list will never be chosen, the tendency to order the second most expensive item and order more increases when people feel that they have avoided buying the most expensive stuff on the list. 

Simplifying choices is another great nudge prompting action in an environment where people are burdened with just too much information.

Using numbers, using competitions, restricting options are some of the other ways that marketers try to game people’s choice architecture. As is the idea of using limited offers and timed discounts to nudge people to make a purchase. 

These are just few examples of nudges that the world of advertising uses most commonly.  While Behavioural Economics as a discipline has just walked into the spotlight, the Madmen (and women) of the advertising community have not just been aware of its potential all these years, but have also, actively used it to drive behavior change.

And now with programmatic, adv. serving has become almost a 100% addressable – making it one the biggest nudges ever to be felt by consumers. It, of course, needs a compelling idea for it to become an equally effective nudge. 

My prediction? The next big winner in the field of marketing & communications will not be the one with the latest technology – but one who can combine the new (technology) with the quintessential (human psychology) with creativity & ideas that move people. And the super engineers of today & tomorrow? Madmen (and women) powered by technology and rooted in Psychology.
  
References & Additional resources and examples
https://www.usimprints.com/blog/7-nudging-examples/
https://enginess.io/insights/5-examples-of-nudge
https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/why-advertising-needs-behavioural-economics/949585#ypWrWhSWwX1jbLLR.99
https://econsultancy.com/blog/67941-10-nudge-tastic-examples-of-persuasive-copywriting-from-charities/