B. Listening: Unlock Your Audience with Behavioural Science

In this episode of B.Listening, we discuss behavioural science as a powerful tool for insight driven marketing and brand experiences with Lea Karam, Consulting Director at Behave. She dissects how we can create audience centred brand experiences by creating better buyer segments that go beyond demographics and have predictability over the unpredictable. 

Lea Karam is a multi-award-winning marketing leader and Behavioural Scientist named a ​“pioneer in the field of Behavioural Science” by Campaign Magazine and a director at Behave working with clients such as the Financial Times, Investec and Amazon to layer behavioural expertise with artificial intelligence.

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Highlights from the episode

Can you give some background on how behavioural science is essential or has been for brands to better understand and therefore change their messaging to connect with audiences?

“Yeah, of course. I always give the example of King Charles and Ozzie Osbourne. They’re the same age, same gender, they’ve got the same socio-demographic profile, but they’re very different behaviourally. You can’t speak to them the same way. So essentially what would resonate with King Charles wouldn’t resonate with Ozzie Osborne and vice versa. So that’s essentially the study of behavioural science.

It’s looking at those patterns and nuances that group a certain community together and understanding that enables you to go beyond those broad factors that are sometimes, especially nowadays, very, very ineffective because they don’t give you the full story. They don’t give colour to a certain strategy. So the study of behavioural science enables you to spot patterns, it enables you to spot nuances, it’s growing a lot at the moment with the use of technology because technology enables to find those new nuances. Essentially behavioural science enables you to gain more predictability over unpredictability.

Another example that I always love to give is, and you know the visual is really funny, but it’s like, when you look at Spock, Spock was very rational, versus Homer Simpson that’s just chilling there and just like going on with life. We’re Homer Simpson. We’re irrational, we’re driven by emotional factors, we’re not always rational people and rational beings. More often than not, we’re just not rational at all. So it’s kind of tapping into that human irrationality and actually understanding what drives that irrationality to be able to predict that a bit better and connect with people in a way that’s human instead of connecting with them in a way that’s very much in a box because no one actually lives in the box. We evolve, we change, and it enables that agility and real understanding of people”.

What are some tangible ways event managers and marketeers can implement behavioural science?

“There are tangible ways in different senses. So essentially, one way to do that is through segmenting differently. So an example that we did with one of our clients is they tried to grow their brand, they’re huge, they’re like a business communication platform. They tried to grow their client base by using trade classification. So you’re in tech, you’re in finance, you’re in … which could work in some instances, not when you’re trying to put up, so it’s a strategy, not when you’re trying to grow that kind of brand in the market as a new way, as a new behaviour. So essentially what we told them was at the start, you should go by psychological profiles, not trade classification. So for instance, looking at the personality model, the ocean model, so openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Looking at, for instance, those that score high in openness to experience and conscientiousness, and finding those profiles regardless of the trade. So for instance, finding those decision makers or your early adopters, you know, in that kind of adoption trend curve but in tangible ways using personality profiles. That’s a tangible way to bring the kind of trend adoption curves that we all learned in business school in tangible terms. It’s actually finding those people with those profiles based on the signals that they communicate with. And those people within the personality type are the ones that provide a lot of recommendations, their networkers, because openness to experience, word of mouth, et cetera. So it’s a strategy to be able to really put yourself out there, raise awareness on something using personality types. And there’s a tangible way to actually drive that using behavioural science within your marketing strategy. So that could be one way to do it.

I think obviously like a second way to do it is you’re talking about events here. So for instance, you found those people, it’s important to capture that data. So to capture the people that interact with you. That’s for example, we call it zero party data. So zero party data is any data that your consumers give you consciously. It’s not first party data. It’s not second party data, surveys, et cetera. It’s zero party data where you add choice architecture and prompts, for instance, on your newsletters, on your website, et cetera. You really study the journey to get them to give you information on what they want. People that have high openness to experience are twice more likely to respond to that because they want to give you their advice. They want better experiences. And those people, and we found that, actually respond, 80% of those people actually said on the website what they wanted. You then retarget them using newsletters, tell them about the event, and at least 20% will come. So really understanding how to find your early adopters, for instance, when you launch something, getting them there. Then building a strategy based on personality profiles and psychographic profiles. Then understanding on social, for instance, using predictive AI, what they really want during that event is a perfect way to start developing that appeal instead of starting in very traditional terms. So that’s the beauty of behavioural science. It’s clever, it’s very interlinked. You start somewhere, you don’t stop. It brings you towards an ecosystem that’s more effective and that gives you better ideas to innovate”.