Behavioural lessons from Brexit

The Leave campaign used behavioural science to great effect, particularly the importance of emotional versus rational decision making, writes Tom Laranjo, MD, Total Media

Finally, Brexit has landed. Whether we’re commiserating – which, as most of the ad industry did not endorse Brexit, I would assume we are – or celebrating the result, media and politics are so entwined that it’s certainly worth looking at the campaigns to see what worked and what did not.

One of the things we strive for as an industry is to understand consumer behaviour through a host of research and social listening tools and audience measurement. We do this to understand what people care about, because this is key to a successful campaign. However it appears that Remain weren’t able to gauge the beliefs and pressures of the UK population as well as the Leave camp.

The Leave campaign used behavioural science to great effect, particularly the importance of emotional versus rational decision making. This is predominantly evident in areas likes Wales where despite the fact that they depend more on the EU than any other region, they still voted for Brexit.

From a behavioural point of view, there are two tactics that have been prevalent in this referendum:

Confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories. In other words, people know what they want to believe so interpret information they’re given to fit their pre-existing beliefs. We’ve seen that time and time again in this referendum with facts that have been widely misunderstood.
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One such controversial message from the Leave camp was that the UK pays £350m to the EU each week.

While the UK does pay a membership fee it’s a hypothetical figure when we factor in the EU rebate, and therefore is clearly wrong. Without getting into the technical financial details, the point is that the Leave campaign have been able to distort those facts to suit their own narrative.

The framing effect, where people react to a particular choice in different ways depending on how it is presented to them. The Brexit campaign put information in a context that played on people’s instincts and fears.

Leave’s leaflet campaign that stressed Turkey was imminently joining the EU is one such case in point. The leaflet displayed a map that highlighted Turkey in red, nestled between Iraq and Syria – no other European country was featured, despite Turkey sharing borders with Bulgaria and Greece.

This is a classic framing tactic that worked just as would be expected – people tend to avoid risk when a positive frame is presented but seek risks when a negative frame is presented.

What Leave did very successfully was find disruptive, tweetable, debatable points – whether they were true or not – and created conversations which resonated with people. This is where the In campaign crucially failed.

In a YouGov poll measuring people’s recall of key campaign messages, Jeremy Corbyn’s message on the NHS had a 24% recall. This is by comparison to a fake message that David Cameron and Boris Johnson appeared on the same platform together on TV insulting each other which resonated with 21% of voters. The fake event got almost the same amount of recall as Corbyn’s main message.

The ‘Don’t F with my future’ video series can be compared to Cancer Research’s “F*ck you, Cancer” campaign in terms of message and tone. Whilst Cancer Research’s campaign resonated in its emotional appeal, by the time the Remain campaign started to ramp up its emotional narrative, it was too late.

The selection and promotion of certain celebrities both in the advert and the campaign was a mistake not just in hindsight but at the time – it was useful for the opposition to frame themselves as the everyman.

Press was very divided on partisan lines – with each paper talking for their own audience – but the bigger issue has been that this hasn’t felt like a nationwide debate, it’s felt like a blue on blue fight and the absence of pluralistic, wide-ranging viewpoint has been deeply felt.

For the press, the blue on blue action was far more engaging and dominated conversation rather than focusing wholeheartedly on the issue at hand.

Whilst the Brexit result came as a surprise and was one that our industry in large did not endorse, I don’t believe the result will be disastrous. The advertising industry’s great strength is being outward looking, creative, inclusive and bold and I don’t see that changing.

It might make some of the administration more difficult, but I don’t see the ad industry pulling back from those values. Despite Brexit, we will still have the breadth and depth of talent to deliver fantastic services and results for our clients.