Copy
Join the Behavioural Design Academy and get skilled as expert in human-centered thinking.
Behavioural Design Digest
May 16th, 2019

Dear reader,

Last week I had the honour to speak and lead a data science hackathon at the I-com conference in Malaga. I have never been surrounded by so many brilliant people in my life. What fascinated me was how much behavioural designers and data-scientist have in common, and yet, how little both disciplines know about each other, or even collaborate with each other. 
 

Why I fell in love with data-science

What data-scientists do is they look at data sets, look for patterns in that data and use that understanding to build a model that could predict behaviour. Their models predict things like: "What products will new mums buy more or less?" or "when will you watch what kind of content on which device?", or "in which region can you stop distributing product catalogues, without hurting sales?". I saw teams in the 24-hours hackathon come up with mindblowing predictions. And I felt really stupid for not understanding a single bit of how they build their models. But the thing is: I don't need to because the computer simply calculates the predictive power of the model, so there's no cheating or bullshitting possible. Fascinating stuff. 

The blind spot of data-science


There is, however, a very big limitation to this approach. And that's the fact that we're dealing with humans. It's not because I can predict to a certain extent your future behaviour, based on data-analysis, that I wouldn't be able to influence you to make different choices. After all, our choices are heavily influenced by how choices are being presented to us. 

I can make you reconsider the choice of buying a camera, by letting you choose between three, instead of two models. If I present you with three models, you are far more likely to chose the middle one. And you wouldn't have chosen it if I only had shown you two. If I play loud music in a restaurant, you will buy more unhealthy food. If I would prime you with images of Italy, you will buy more Italian food. If I add urgency and scarcity to buy the last items of a sales promotion, you will probably choose differently. The means for screwing up the behaviour that is predicted by the model are endless. 

 

Meaning versus Reach


The challenge with the classic behavioural design method of interviewing and observation is that it's very rich on meaning but poor on reach. And data science has exactly the opposite problem: the insights are scalable, but they are not rich in meaning. The fact that new mums buy much more housecare products, but buy far less mouthcare products , doesn't explain why they do that.  If you can understand why people do the things they do, you can easily figure out new ways to optimize your marketing. 

 

How Behavioural Design and Data-Science should make sweet love?


The answer is simple: Design a creative process that leverages the best of both worlds. I would always follow these steps: 
  1. Let the whole team do interviews to develop a deeper understanding of how the target audience thinks, feels and behaves. This helps them to overcome their own biases, assumptions and prejudices and helps them to build interesting hypotheses
  2. Analyse the data you have with the hypothesis you've just formed. Try to figure out which hypothesis actually predict behaviour. But also: dare to go back: if you find interesting other patterns (e.g. non-parents buy way more deodorants than new parents), try to see if this insight could help you to revise your deep understanding of the drivers of the behaviour of your audience 
  3. Once you've developed a predictive model, based on qualitative and qualitative results, use Behavioral Design principles to come up with ideas for improvements of the customer journey
  4. The fun part: Prototype, test and measure. Design experiments, measure results, improve your overall plan. Aggressive experimentation is what sets apart the truly innovative companies from the laggards. 

This is such an interesting time to really make a measurable impact. But everyone's struggling with the HOW-question: how to turn a deeper understanding of behaviour into business value. The creative method is the answer. 

PS: Our Behavioral Design Method is one of the ways to do this. It's a fast-paced highly-structured process to turn hypothesis into ideas and to prototype and test what works and why it works. You can learn the method in our Behavioural Design Academy or apply the method to solve a business challenge in a Behavioural Design Sprint

#justsaying :-) 
Have a great day, 
Tom 

Do a sprint or get trained by SUE | Behavioural Design


If you want to learn more about how influence works, subscribe for the two-day masterclass of the Behavioural Design Academy. In this masterclass we deconstruct the science behind influence and teach you a powerful method to nudge people in to positive choices and how to apply it to change citizen behaviour, team behaviour, customer behaviour or your own. 

Do you consider hiring SUE? Book 60 minutes with SUE. Get to know the people behind SUE / Behavioural Design Academy and get a Behavioural Design perspective on your challenge. Who knows where it could lead to...

Book 60 minutes with SUE
That's all for this week, we hope to catch you next week!
 


Copyright © 2019 SUE | Behavioural Design, All rights reserved.


You can always change how you want to receive these emails.
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.
We'll treat your data with the utmost respect, you can read all about this in our Privacy Statement.