Decoding Humans to Effect Real Change in 2021 Description

David Ogilvy started in research. He said, no doubt in great frustration: “They don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.” While we all pursue that head-slappingly brilliant creative execution based on deep human insights, we have used blunt if not faulty tools. Behavioural science has humbled us. So much of what we thought about how humans make decisions and make sense of things was wrong. We created personas—cartoon-like generalizations of complex humans with cute, alliterative titles like “Cautious Caitlin,” or “Bold Ben” that were based on irrelevant factors like demographics, as well as real crumbs of behavioral clues that tell us the “what” but not the “why.” And when we ask people why, they will tell us. The problem is, they themselves don’t really know why. What if we could reveal the “Real Why” of the human sensemaking genome? A set of hidden building blocks that filter, distort and guide each individual’s choices, behaviours, and even how they react to our creative and our word choices?

With recent proprietary advances, we think we can.

In Conversations That Matter–Decoding Humans to Forge a New Frontier for Marketing, Ogilvy Consulting’s Christopher Graves and Ritesh Patel will host a special guest panel to discuss how to reinvent personas and inform a better, more precise, more effective and more empathetically resonant crafting of message framing and content.