Mistakes In Branding, Part 3: Attitude vs Behaviour

When I was working on an air-freshener brand, we discovered that sales go up in winter, and down in summer. The reason is beautifully simple: in the summer, people open the windows. In the winter, they don't. So our main competition was not a rival brand, or a faulty consumer attitude; the real competition was an incompatible behaviour. We weren't going to change people's air-freshening behaviour by changing their "attitudes" towards summer.

The big myth about advertising is that it changes consumer behaviour by changing attitudes.

Like Indiana Jones, I can't help thinking that they're digging in the wrong place.

I used to chase silly things like Brand Awareness Uplift and Preference Uplift. This came from the belief that the way to achieve our marketing objectives was to "change attitudes". In fact, it was worse than that: changing attitudes was our marketing objective, most of the time. We never bothered questioning the religious authority of this mantra.

Occasionally, some rebel would say, "What are we actually trying to achieve here? What do we want the consumer to do?"

And the answer was always, "Buy the product."

I'd often try to pin them down more. "Buy it more often? buy more of it on each occasion? Use it differently? for new things? what's the behavioural target?" And they all looked at me blankly and said, "The behavioural target is to buy the product, you moron. Stop making problems." And then the conversation would go back to the subject of attitude change.

There's no evidence that changing someone's "attitude" can change their behaviour, not when it comes to buying one brand of canned soup over another. I think this is a symptom of the fact that in modern civilisation, everything is centred around the head - the brain - or at least, the left brain, the intellectual calculating part. We all live in our heads, not in our bodies. So advertising people are convinced that you just need to work on the head.

I only really became aware of how stupid this illusion was when I started working on the British Government's Road Safety advertising. We weren't selling anything, or trying to raise awareness of a brand or a logo - we were trying to change behaviour.

Our objective was to stop people from driving badly. Now, I learned from an animal behaviour expert that the non-performance of a behaviour is not actually a behaviour per se, and so it's a pointless objective to aim for. What do you want them to do instead of the bad behaviour?

"I want them to stop doing it." Yes, I know. And what do you want them to do instead? "I don't care." Way to go, Einstein.

In the case of Road Safety, the behavioural objective was to get the driver behaving like a traffic cop: policing themselves and their passengers. We weren't going to do this by changing attitudes - we could only do it by focusing on the behaviours themselves. So we targeted each behaviour, one at a time, one behaviour per ad, ranging from telling your passengers to put their seat belts on, to slowing down in built-up areas. That was eight years ago, and the campaign is still running.

You can't see an attitude, and you can't perform an attitude. So why the hell do we fixate on trying to change attitudes? You can see behaviour, you can perform behaviour, and you can change behaviour. The ball is in your court.