Burst your bubble...about 'System 1' strategies

“I'm shocked at how irrational it (emotional advertising) makes us out to be. It suggests that human preferences can be changed with nothing more than a few arbitrary images. Even Pavlov's dogs weren't so easily manipulated.”

(Kevin Simler, Ads Don’t Work That Way)

Radio 4 was murmuring in the background when I sat down to write this column. I’d already decided to write about the fallacies that drive how marketers think about and use ‘emotion’ in advertising. Then Women’s Hour caught my ear.

They had an interview with Chioma Nnadi, the new Head of Editorial Content for British Vogue. She was being challenged about the damage that the fashion and beauty industry is doing to the environment, e.g:

• Of one hundred billion garments manufactured per year, 30 billion don’t make it to shops and are incinerated or go straight into landfill!

• Fashion contributes 8% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and

• Nine percent of microplastic pollution in our oceans.

Confronted with the evidence, Nnadi was keen to emphasise the importance of ‘supporting the brands who are doing the right thing.’ Above all, she stressed, ‘it is really important to be intentional about what you buy’…

Of course, this is also a familiar narrative in ad land. ‘Intentionality’ is central to the idea of ‘conscious consumerism’ and the feel-good stories that marketers tell themselves about ‘purpose.’ But marketers are also obsessed with ‘System 1’: i.e. the idea, picked up from Daniel Kahneman’s blockbuster, that effective advertising needs to appeal to people’s dependence on intuitive and automatic modes of thinking. I’ve written before about the pitfalls of this ‘emotional turn’. Decades of diverse scholarship (that we now brand under the catchall ‘behavioural science’) has been reduced to a series of pejorative soundbites about people being slaves to their emotions and ‘biases.’

What fascinates me is that few people in our industry see the fundamental contradiction in these two dominant marketing narratives. Or how resolving this contradiction may hold the key to the commercial and social impact marketers seek.

In March, experts gathered at the Economist’s Sustainability Week events emphasised that the ‘say-do gap’ is as wide as ever. Much of the blame for the lack of progress focused on brands and their failure to support people in making better choices.

Closing the ‘say-do gap’ (on sustainability or any other goal) depends on the amount of thinking people put into it. But brands' over-reliance on System 1 strategies means they are doing little to encourage the kind of conscious and, yes, rational decision-making that is necessary to drive real behaviour change around the world’s most pressing social and ecological challenges.

The challenge for marketers is that their story about emotion and System 1 is partial and out of date. It hasn’t kept up with the science or with the increasingly complex socioecological context in which brands now operate. As long as ‘emotion’ remains the answer to every question in our industry, ‘conscious consumerism’ will remain little more than an elusive ideal.

Read more in my latest column for WARC.