Advertising’s fundamental error

Do advertisers over-estimate the importance of audiences and under-estimate the importance of targeting people by situation or context? Richard Shotton looks at the evidence.

A trainee monk hurries along a cloister on the way to deliver a sermon. Striding along the passageway he sees a man in obvious pain slumped against the wall. The sight causes the monk to hesitate: should he help or keep going?

This isn’t just a hypothetical question but part of an experiment engineered by two Princeton psychologists, John Darley and Daniel Batson. In 1973, they recruited 40 theology students to help them understand what factors would encourage people to help a stranger in distress. In particular, they wanted to discover whether personality or situational factors had the biggest influence.

First, they gauged the students’ personalities by questioning them about whether they were studying theology for their own personal salvation or to help others. They then asked the students to deliver a sermon in a nearby church. This was when they introduced a situational variable.

As the students set off for the church they were either told that they were running late or that they had plenty of time to reach the venue. The final step was to record which students stopped to help the suffering man.

The results may come as a surprise.

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The findings

Most people think that personality explains behaviour. It’s such a common, but misplaced, explanation that psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error.

This experiment, like others, showed that personality had no noticeable effect on whether the participants stopped to help. Instead, the biggest determinant was how much of a rush they were in. This seemingly small variation had a tremendous impact: only 10% of those who were late stopped, compared to 63% of those who had plenty of time.

How can marketers apply these findings?

This is an interesting experiment for brands for two reasons: one tactical and one fundamental. The first point is obvious: beware targeting consumers when they’re in a rush because their attention will be elsewhere.

The more important learning, however, is that situational or contextual factors are often more important than personality in determining behaviour. This undermines one of advertising’s most deeply held beliefs: that brands must identify and then focus their communications on a core target audience. The data from this experiment suggests that brands should focus as much on target contexts as they do target audiences.

However, the final question that this experiment raises is which specific context an individual brand should focus on. This is not straightforward as a twist in the experiment demonstrates.

Darley and Batson told half the participants to give a sermon on their job prospects, whilst the other half were told to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s hard to think of a topic better designed to increase the chances of someone helping than the Good Samaritan. Yet the sermon topic made no difference to the likelihood of a student helping.

While it is critical for brands to reach their customers in the right target context, finding the right context is not a matter of intuition. Brands need to test, rather than assume, which context their message will be best received in: whether that’s when their target are in a good mood or a foul one; distracted or attentive; in public or private.

Brands that take the time and effort to do this will surely be rewarded, on this earth, if not necessarily, the next one.

Richard Shotton is head of insight at ZenithOptimedia

Twitter: @rshotton