How do we spot a good idea before spending tens of thousands of pounds on execution and media finding out for certain? I suppose that there are, traditionally, two ways in which this is done:
The first — and let's face it the one we use more often than not — is good old fashioned gut instinct. Hopefully all of our years in marketing have given us the experience to filter the wheat from the chaff.
The second route is, of course, to research an idea...which over the last 40 years or so has become the method most advertisers prefer as it gives a good deal of peace of mind before investing vast sums in media.
But are these traditional methods adequate for the future?
I would argue that in many cases they are not. First of all, with the explosion of technology it's getting harder and harder to rely on experience to spot a good idea. How many of us, for instance, hand on heart would have looked at Twitter and backed it?
Also, in the digital age, we can't operate at the same pace of the typical campaign cycle. We need to get ideas out there fast, and not go through months of research.
And thirdly, researching ideas not only adds time to the whole process, it also sucks money from your budget, has a tendency to produce a lot of 'me too' ideas and stifle creativity. As Don Draper put it in Episode 4, Season 4 of Mad Men:
A new idea is something they don't know yet, so of course it's not going to come up as an option.
Behavioural economics could help. Not only does it stimulate us to approach briefs from angles that may not have occurred to us (and tends to produce lots of small ideas that make a big difference rather than the single 'grand reveal’), it also gives us an intellectual framework around which we can hang our thinking. So rather than presenting unresearched ideas and saying to a client — trust us — we give a reasonably cogent basis for how we have arrived at our solution.
For example, Richard Thaler had a pretty good hunch that the Save More Tomorrow (SMT) pension would work based on his understanding of BE principles such as loss aversion and the power of now before he was proved right empirically.
Of course, you never truly know whether you've backed a winner until it's fully out there in the marketplace, but behavioural economics could really help lessen the risks.