Nudge Theory-
Orwellian Nightmare
or Websterian Pragmatism?
I was entirely ignorant of this topic until a few days ago,
when I attended a meeting with a member of the Prime Minister’s Behavioural
Insights Unit, also known as the ‘Nudge’ unit. The invitation arose from
another meeting to which I’d been invited, this time of the Department of Health’s
Policy Research Programme chaired by the government’s Chief Medical Officer.
The theme of both was UK alcohol policy. The CMO, Professor
Dame Sally Davies, is trying to build a consensus around evidence-based alcohol
policy through the PRP, drawing on the expertise of a wide range of people. In
the meeting I attended, it was health policy academics and professionals, along
with some Home Office and other government officials. I was, as far as I could
tell, the only academic present as a researcher in advertising and branding
strategies with an interest in policy. The other 20 or so academics were all
working in health policy and related areas.
It was a very well-informed and interesting discussion. All concluded
that ‘more research is needed’, which is fair enough, although there is a lot
of pertinent research in the marketing literature of which some people seemed unaware.
I pointed some of this out. I also pointed out that the marketing industry does
not apply the same standards of evidence to its strategies that government committees
seem to do to health policy. This means that industry lobbies can often level
devastating criticisms at the evidence base of policies to which they object.
The cleverer parts of the marketing industry understand well the limits of
empiricism.
Marketing strategists operate on insight. This is subtly
different to evidence. They don’t have to build cross departmental consensus
for policies in the same way as governments. They get two or three weeks to
flesh out their intuition about cultural currents and human behaviour, then
they go to production and launch, sometimes with profound effect. So there is a
risk that while policy makers are wheeling out the big guns of social research
and consensus building to try influence behaviour, marketing strategists could
be running rings around them by using nimble urban warfare tactics.
In the CMO’s meeting, I related my experience of alcohol
marketing, the tone of which changed dramatically in the 1980s. Legendary BMP
DDB Madman John Webster created the Hofmeister Bear to re-position light beer (’lager’
to me) as a fun, cheeky and cuddly consumer choice with great appeal to young
men and children. Webster, who was also responsible for the Smash Martians and
the Sugar Puffs Honey Monster among many other iconic advertisements, realised
that he could sell alcohol with the same branding panache as he could instant
dried potato or breakfast cereal.
Webster’s actor-in-a-bear-suit shtick was swiftly followed
by more campaigns by Foster’s, Castlemaine and many others that tapped into a
vein of subversive, youthful fun. In short order, countless new branded spirit
mixers appeared, nicknamed alco-pops by the press for their child-friendly brand
positioning. They were marketed like Rowntree’s fruit pastilles with vibrant
colours and tacit promises of sensory ecstasy. Not only did alcohol marketing assume
an air of youthful frivolity hugely out of step with the pedestrian and deeply conservative
tone of alcohol ads before the 1980s. Suddenly, kids’ first introduction to
alcohol was made much more agreeable. Instead of having to negotiate the bitter
taste of traditional beer or the throat-clenching fumes of neat spirits, they could
cut their drinking teeth on fruit flavoured alcopops or tasteless fizzy lager. And
they could buy it from the mini market to drink down the park. A cultural
revolution had occurred, through marketing, and no-one seemed to notice.
Naturally, the alcohol industry would demur from taking all
the credit for this revolution. Marketing operates within wider cultural
currents, and marketers fulfil their obligations to shareholders professionally
within a strict regulatory framework. Nonetheless, it seems clear that
marketing and branding strategies can, at the least, magnify and deepen behavioural
changes that are already occurring. As my own research with top international agencies
has taught me, they form their strategies not through social scientific evidence,
which is merely a tool to reassure (or to bluff) clients, but through insight
earned from a fluid and creative engagement with consumer cultural knowledge (a
fifty minute talk I did on this was put on youtube, if you’ve the stomach for
it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLT0jAAR0B8.
Which brings me to ‘nudge theory’ and the Behavioural
Insights Unit. I discovered, with the help of Google, that the idea of nudge is
credited to Professor Richard Thaylor, a behavioural economist at the
University of Chicago. Nudge theory has gained influence in Barack Obama’s administration,
as well as David Cameron’s. I also
discovered that media coverage of the BIU has been, well, mixed. Just today
(July 13th 2012), a piece in the Daily Telegraph is followed by many
reader comments http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9392224/The-nudge-nudge-unit-has-ways-to-make-you-pay.html#
expressing suspicion or hostility toward the idea that government might use behavioural
control methods that fall outside the areas of parliamentary debate and legislation.
This response seems entirely understandable to me. Consumers
have been suspicious of marketing techniques since Vance Packard alerted the
world to the uses of depth psychology and ‘subliminal’ persuasion in Hidden Persuaders. People don’t like the
idea of being manipulated, but their fears are often directed at the wrong
object, in my view, as I argue in this op ed piece in The Psychologist http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=20&editionID=150&ArticleID=1228
I am phlegmatic about nudge initiatives. My view is that our
‘choices’, and our very subjectivity, are culturally framed, by marketing
agents or other influences. This is human existence. Freedom is something we find
in the interstices of life. I reserve my view on behavioural economics- from my
very sketchy understanding of it I can’t see any theory there. Indeed, its main
virtue seems to be that it is a-theoretical. Neither behaviourism nor economics
have a great track record in explaining human behaviour, so they seem to be odd
bedfellows. But if a plausible label legitimizes the use in policy formulation of
the kinds of pragmatic and fluid consumer cultural understanding that drives commercial
insight, then I can’t see any ideological problem with that. To me, it just
seems to be good administration to think about the behavioural consequences of
framing something this way, or that. People are suspicious of marketing
techniques. We don’t like to feel manipulated. But ‘nudge’ initiatives are, at
least, transparent, unlike the marketing strategies to which we like to feel we
are immune.
I happen to be writing a new book for Palgrave MacMillan that
will explain my views on the role of marketing insight in the cultural framing
of behaviour, drawing on my ad agency research. Watch this space! Meanwhile, I’m
happy to contribute to policy nudges if I can.
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