The data, the creative tools, and the frameworks that work.
Summary:
Last year I completed the MAD//Masters programme on behavioural science and marketing with Rory Sutherland. I have decided to write three articles about the key topics (for me) that every marketer and founder should use in their marketing strategy.
Part 1 was about perception.
This is Part 2 and it covers:
Data, the attribution trap, explore vs. exploit, creativity as problem reframing, MINDSPACE, distinctiveness.
Data makes people more confident when they’re wrong
The US Air Force once designed a cockpit for the “average pilot.” They measured 140 pilots across every relevant physical dimension and built to the mean. The cockpit fit almost nobody, because being average across all dimensions simultaneously is extraordinarily rare.
The lesson? Design for average and you design for nobody.
The same thing happens with customer data. We aggregate it, average it, and use the number to feel certain about something that the underlying data would tell you is far messier.
Rory’s recommendation: print the data out. Look at it with human eyes. See how messy it is. Human pattern recognition is excellent. Humans know what it feels like to be human. Computers don’t.
The outliers, not the average, are where the insight is.
Attributable and effective are not the same thing
If someone sees an ad for something and buys it 20 minutes later, that ad gets full credit.
If they saw an equally effective ad six weeks ago, that ad gets nothing.
So we optimise for recent and unusual behaviour. We chase what’s attributable. And we under-invest in long-term brand building, because the effect is real but the credit is invisible.
Rory’s version: we make important what we can measure, instead of measuring what’s important.
The transactional parts of marketing (promotions, discounts, direct response) are easy to quantify. The relational parts (consistency, recognition, trust) are nearly impossible to tease out. So we starve the relational and overfeed the transactional.
And then we’re confused when retention is poor.
The bees know something your finance director doesn’t
Most bees follow the waggle dance: they fly to known pollen sources. Efficient. Reliable. Optimised.
Some bees fly randomly. They look wasteful and often fail.
But when conditions change (when the flower fields dry up) the waggle-dance bees are trapped. Over-optimised on a past that no longer exists. The random bees are the ones who find the new fields.
95% of those random journeys fail. The 5% that succeed pay off 1,000 times over.
This is explore vs. exploit. And most marketing budgets are almost entirely exploit.
We need both, because over-optimising on what you already know makes you vulnerable to any change in conditions you didn’t predict.
The finance people will push back on this. They always do. Push back anyway.
The creative move
A young planner was given a brief: grow Sainsbury’s revenue by several billion pounds over several years.
Impossible to visualise. How do you put that into a brief?
They divided the target by the projected number of store visits. The entire ambition reduced to one thing: every customer who walks through the door needs to spend £1.70 more per visit.
That reframe gave birth to the Jamie Oliver “Try Something New Today” campaign.
The creative breakthrough came from a better question.
Einstein allegedly said that if he had a day to solve something important, he’d spend 23 hours defining the problem and one hour solving it.
The lesson? Restate the problem in human-scale terms before you try to solve it. Most problems become easier once you do that.
Look for what competitors won’t do
Not what they can’t do. What they won’t.
Virgin handed out free choc ices on flights. In the UK, choc ice = cinema. The association was warm, slightly nostalgic, and unexpected on a plane.
British Airways could have copied this, economically, logistically. But culturally? Nope. The BA board doesn’t discuss choc ices. The employee who suggested it would be ignored.
That’s the competitive cultural advantage.
Ask it about your own brand: what could you do that your competitors would find too strange, too silly, too embarrassing to copy? That’s often your strongest differentiator.
MINDSPACE, what?
This is a framework for behaviour change, developed for government policy work. Nine variables that explain why people do or don’t do something.
Messenger. Incentives. Norms. Defaults. Salience. Priming. Affect. Commitments. Ego.
Rory spent months trying to find a message that would stop music piracy. He couldn’t. Years later he realised: it wasn’t a message problem. It was a messenger problem. The music industry couldn’t credibly say “stop pirating” because everything they said sounded self-serving. The message needed to come from a tech publication. Same words from a different mouth, with a different result.
How to use the MINDSPACE framework?
If something isn’t working (a campaign, a product launch, a behaviour you’re trying to change) before you assume the problem is the message, run the checklist. The answer is almost always in one of the nine, and almost always not where you’d have looked first.
Be distinctive
The Magic Castle Hotel in Los Angeles is ranked #8 of all LA hotels on TripAdvisor.
Old building. Unremarkable rooms.
What makes it: a popsicle hotline by the pool (call a number, free ice cream on demand) and laundry returned wrapped in brown paper with a lavender sprig on top.
That’s it. Two things, unexpected, and impossible to forget.
The brain registers unexpected stimuli more intensely than standard ones: the brain is wired to notice what doesn’t fit the pattern.
What we’ve learned
- Data tells you what (not why). Look at the outliers.
- What’s attributable and what’s effective are not the same thing.
- You need some budget that explores, not just exploits, even when it’s hard to justify.
- Reframe the problem before you try to solve it.
- You don’t need to be excellent at everything. Two or three unexpected things, done consistently, will do more than being average at all of it.
Part 3 is about: the SCARF model, what creates lasting advantage, and why marketing keeps losing the argument it should be winning.
