Why – despite overt interest and positive PR – are people not buying our cardboard desk?

After seeing The Hunting Dynasty present at a conference Cardboard Futures Ltd asked us to re-position their flagship product – Paperweight Desk – using our cognitive-behavioural experience. We prepared our strategic approach: a cognitive-behavioural request.

Everybody loved the concept. Including us; who wouldn’t? 100% cradle-to-cradle recyclable desks at 1/10th of the cost of current desks. But no one was buying – not on the numbers our client wanted – despite almost universally positive comments after understanding the benefits.

Map of markets and positioning there-in based on cognitive-behavioural response to a cardboard desk

So why no move to purchase?

It looked like a cognitive dissonance problem – where potential customers’ System 1 and System 2 thinking disagree. System 1 is characterised by being intuitive, rapid, associative. System 2 is rule-governed and calculating. There are broadly 4 ways these two interact: Automatic decisions, Anchored decisions, Rational indecision, and Cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance works like this:
- System 1 decides (intuitive, rapid, associative)
- System 2 overrules input (rule-governed, calculating, reasoning)

As part of the first phase of the project we ran a session with experts in the field to map the barriers to purchase. We then went on to identify further behavioural insights, work out that behaviours by audience, and build a practical model of influences – including a behavioural marketing framework.

How do we use this knowledge?

We’ll keep the main conclusion private so our client’s competitors don’t get an edge – but we were able to map:

1. how to fix the instinctive response
2. how to reframe the instinctive response
3. how to agree with the instinctive response

The less attractive small volume markets are in the anchored space, making them relatively easy sell if you push the right buttons (utility, recycle-ability, or fashion) by agreeing with the instinctive response.

Our approach is not only communicating with words and pictures (although sometimes it is just that), some solutions involve changing the product

We’re not simply helping to market the product that’s been developed, but helping develop the product to be marketed.

Warren Hatter asked The Hunting Dynasty, along with Michael Hallsworth (co-author of the UK government report MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy), and Dan Lockton (author of Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change), and a few other people, to define a behavioural insights tool for West Sussex County Council intended to help write behaviourally-informed internal and external communications.

On the first day there were two key presentations – one from The Hunting Dynasty on fourteen different types of behavioural quirk, with examples (not available on slideshare, please ask for more about this) – and a workshop with (and based on) Dan Lockton’s PhD work into design sympathetic to our behavioural quirks.

The second day was a closed session for five stakeholders (which included The Hunting Dynasty) to shape the needs, form, and application of the behavioural tool. We provided the commercial-behavioural angle.

@warrenhatter Hell yeah! Great day spent with @danlockton, @oliverpayne & #WSCC colleagues on building #behaviourchange capacity. I have a plan now!

Launched at the end of 2011, and called ‘With The Grain’, the behavioural insights tool has been successfully launched, and is being used at West Sussex County Council.