News Corp's Cannes Young Lions winner in the marketing category, Nate Kwok, is the portfolio marketing manager at Commonwealth Bank. Sydney-based Kwok is part of a team representing Australia at the 62nd Cannes International Festival of Creativity and shares his views below...
When I told my friends and family about winning the trip to Cannes, they all sported the same excited reaction. ‘You get to hear Pharrell speak? And Al Gore? So amazing, you’re going to get so inspired’. I shared in their excitement and believed that I’d learn the most from these big personalities and their stories of creative excellence.
How wrong I was. Today I geeked out over a talk from a neuroscientist and a CEO, all about why our industry should use cognitive neuroscience to understand consumer choice. And without jumping the gun, I reckon this talk will stand out for me all week.
The key message? Real world consumers think, feel and decide very irrationally - but as an industry we continue to think of them as purely rational beings.
These dudes believe that marketing and advertising folk need to start thinking about how we target the certain parts of the brain influencing (irrational) choice. To do this, we need to understand what happens in consumers’ brains when they make - not just what they ‘think’ happens to as defined by customer research.
I’m no expert, but I think these guys are on to something. Marketers have always found it difficult to distinguish what consumers do and what they say they do. While I’m personally not ready to throw my campaigns to neuroscience – there are two big actions from this talk I’ll take home with me.
- 1. Challenge what I know from research: Innovators tell us all the time that ‘consumers don’t know what they want yet’. I’m still on the fence about this philosophy, but I do see value in challenging what customers tell us they want.
- 2. Start thinking about ‘the customer ask’ as more than a rational action: Tap into the wellspring of emotional context sitting behind each ask. Consumers will remember a single emotional experience over a thousand logical messages.
I encourage you to check out this talk by Dr. Itiel Dror and Nir Wegrzyn when it’s available to stream on the Cannes Lions website. It’s called ‘Nailing jelly to a tree & other wild goose chases’, and it’s fantastic.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog, from my Young Lions partner Jemma Wong.