№ 66: Why Do We Brush Our Teeth?
The opposite of a good idea - Finding the real reason behind brushing our teeth - Let's not jump to conclusions
Leaving poker, I thought the most obvious career path was to become a quantitative finance trader.
Both professions parallel each other. They both deal with risk, probability, and strategy and require a rational mindset.
Yet, somehow, I’ve ended up in marketing and advertising. While this may seem odd at first, on closer inspection, becoming a marketer makes more sense. At its core, marketing is about observing human behaviour and understanding how people behave and what motivates them. A topic which I’ve spent my adult life unconsciously pursuing.
Another thing I’ve spent my life doing is learning how to navigate complex adaptive systems — a system in which multiple independent components work together and adapt to survive changing environments.
Human behaviour is a complex adaptive system. One of the problems when you work in a complex system is there’s more than one right answer (it’s actually a benefit). You see this a lot in business. Two opposing ideas can be both true, i.e. the best way to sell something is to either make it really cheap or make it really expensive. This is the core idea of Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy: The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea.
In psychology, human behaviour – both individual and collective – does not obey any rules. Yet, we try to treat human behaviour like it is all rational and all maximising. It’s not. I’ve witnessed first-hand at the poker table how one card could reduce the sanest men to lunacy.
Much like poker, marketing has a huge degree of uncertainty, irrationality, counter-intuitiveness and complexity.
Chris Graves, who founded the Ogilvy Centre1 for Behavioural Science practice in New York, used to be a journalist. During his years in journalism, he had a catchphrase that also applies well to marketing: Just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it’s true.
You learn this maxim intuitively as a poker player. We know when an opponent takes an action that looks like they’re betting for value, they could still be bluffing. You realise the real story is often the story people don’t want to tell you. A bad poker player would just think, “Well, that seems to make sense, right? Nothing more to see here. I fold.”
“Just because something makes sense, doesn’t mean it’s true” is a really useful mantra in marketing. Because quite often, there are two reasons why people do things: The good reason and the real reason.
Why do we brush our teeth?
Rory Sutherland gives an example of the good reason and the real reason in his book Alchemy.
Let’s start with a seemingly dumb question: Why do we brush our teeth?
If you asked people why they brushed their teeth, most would say:
To maintain dental health
Prevent cavities, fillings and extractions.
But when Sutherland looked at the behavioural data – when we choose, buy and use toothpaste – he saw patterns of consumption that entirely contradicted the rational explanation.
If you were interested in reducing the risk of tooth decay, the most logical choice would be to brush your teeth straight after finishing a meal. Yet, almost nobody does this. In fact, what the data reveals is that people clean their teeth first thing in the morning before they leave the house, before a job interview, before sex, before a date, and before they go out for the evening. So why are they more likely to brush their teeth before an important event?
Before I tell you why, there are two observations I need to point out to make the insight more obvious. The first is that 99% of the world’s toothpaste is mint flavoured. The second is that quite a lot of people don’t like the taste of mint.
So what’s the real reason why people brush their teeth?
It’s vanity.
We’re frightened of bad breath. The taste of mint makes our teeth feel clean. Hence why we clean our teeth with much more care before an important social situation.
And this is what Chris Graves meant by just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it’s true. When it comes to observing human behaviour, you have to go one step further and ask, “What’s really happening?” in order to see if there’s something more going on.
Digging deeper and figuring out the real why of human behaviour can lead to more interesting ideas for your marketing and advertising campaigns.
Let’s not jump to conclusions
Looking at data and accepting the first good reason for why we do something straightaway is like using broken binoculars — the two lenses, at various times, work but don’t tell you the whole story.
The first lens, Sutherland argues, is neoclassical economic theory. In other words, markets are moved by an invisible hand, and all actors are rational. It assumes that people know what they want, they’re trying to get it as low a price as possible, and the only way to improve something is by improving the material qualities and functionality. This way of thinking is appealing to many people because it ‘avoids’ ambiguity.
The other broken binocular lens is market research. As David Ogilvy supposedly once said, “The problem with market research is that people don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.” It assumes that people have enough introspective access to their own unconscious motivation to be able to accurately tell you both the what and the why of their behaviour. I know this sounds like an outrageous claim to make, but Henry Ford understood this. When asked about customer input in the development of the Ford Model T, Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Sometimes conventional economic theory does align with human behaviour. Sometimes in market research, people can tell you what’s wrong with their product or what they want from a product in future.
But the important thing to understand is, in many cases, both lenses may make sense, but they’re not entirely true.
— Jason Vu Nguyen
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It seems as though people from Ogilvy have had a massive impact on my thinking. This list also includes David Ogilvy and Drayton Bird.