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Battling with Spock and Homer

By Peter Mills 20 May 2010.
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The social marketing industry is frantically broadcasting messages that are in the blender with the other thousand marketing messages that bounce off us daily. Stop smoking! Drive carefully! Drink wisely! Do your tax return! Get some training!

Day in, day out, messages crafted to change our minds are pumped out – hoping we are in ‘receive mode’. The amps are turned up to 11 but is anyone listening?

The days of large-scale broadcast campaigns are over. Rapidly changing media consumption, stretched budgets squeezing out traditional big media spends and citizens’ lack of trust in government mean that public services need to embrace innovative ways of achieving more with less.

The good news is that social policy makers and communicators can rummage around in their kitbag for greater social insight, deeper human understanding and more evidence of consumer habits than ever before.

We should embrace one simple truth sitting at the heart of all social policy challenges: the ‘Knowledge-Action’ gap needs closing. This is the clash between what psychologists call our automatic and reflective brains – or put more simply, the Homer Simpson (automatic) aspect of our personality and the Spock (reflective) side.

Our inner Spock knows we should go for that jog, pay more money into our pension plan, set the alarm clock 15 minutes earlier, spend an extra hour at work, learn about something new. It’s sensible and logical. But our inner Homer resists. These things will be difficult, take too much time, might result in personal failure and, importantly, aren’t any fun. So inner Homer tries to ignore Spock and does fun things instead like watching telly, lying in as long as possible or going to the pub.

The art of solving the ‘Knowledge-Action’ gap is twofold: Helping Spock be more persuasive so that Homer can’t ignore him. Then making the act more appealing for Homer by making it more fun, taking less time or money, or reducing the fear of failure.

Read more about Spock and Homer in Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein.