End of year report!

We've just put together a summary of Rory Sutherland's Behavioural Economics activities to try and gauge what impact his agenda has made on the industry so far. Relative to other presidential agendas it makes impressive reading:

- 160 out of 270 IPA member agencies have been involved in IPA events with over 2000 visits to the BE section of our website

- in addition Rory has spoken on 25 other industry-related platforms including TED and the Marketing Society and written copious articles and columns

- 15 major clients are now pursuing Behavioural Economics with IPA roster agencies

- the Behavioural Insights team in Government have called in IPA member agencies to help

- 3,500 copies of IPA BE publications have been distributed or downloaded.

By Spring of next year it looks like Behavioural Economics will be embedded in the way leading agencies think and work and we'll have live case examples to talk about.

One's relative, three's a crowd

Forget the theory of crowds.

According to Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, testing large groups of people does not guarantee you an accurate answer to a problem.  Herd instincts get in the way.

Take a jar of jelly beans. Ask people to guess the number inside. Prime one big group of people with numbers significantly lower than the real number. Prime another group with numbers significantly higher. We'll all stick close to the number first specified. Whether it's true or not. Our natural tendency is to make relative rather than absolute decisions or choices.  We're only human, after all!

Click here to view details of the IPA's Behavioural Economics programme