Influx

Planners are a fickle bunch and they are often searching for the next new thing to help them find the magic bullet to make real change. Suddenly planners worldwide are rushing headlong into a search to understand the world of behavioral economics; they are inviting economists to lunch, having them attend client meetings, building conferences around them and they are sending their planners all over the world to attend meetings on the topic.

Today, The Behavioral Economist is the Cabbage Patch doll of the Planning world.

Anyway, being a skeptic I was intrigued when I read the headline to Felix Salmon’s recent Reuters column “Can Behavioral Economics Cause Real Harm”. I thought Felix might have stumbled on a reason why the FDA might need to get involved or at minimum, there would be a senate committee hearing on the topic. Sadly, I was wrong on both counts, he was merely describing the apparent interest in the area from new British PM, David Cameron, who’d been looking at some US experiments to reduce energy consumption.Mr. Salmon discovered that the behavior change in these experiments wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Of greater importance, was his concern politicians might resort to behavioral economics as an easy fix for problems that require more complex solutions.

Wanting to learn more about these “experiments”, I checked out a NYT piece about the thing that got Cameron interested. It was nothing startling, or entirely surprising; when a Sacramento utility started sending customers comparison data to their customers, which compared their usage to that of their neighbors and the most efficient neighbors, consumption went down.

While this might being heralded as a startling insight; gaming and social effects should hardly be new news to most planners. If you aren’t actively thinking about how to use both these as behavioral levers for your brands, something is wrong.

Of course, Behavioral Economics is a lot more complex than I am making it out to be, but hiding behind a sexy new discipline isn’t a panacea, nor is it an alternative to doing the stuff you’ve always done even better and with more rigor than ever before.

Chances are, if you do this and do it well, you will stumble across the very same thing that the Behavioral Economists with their years of research and academic study have found.

Posted by Ed Cotton