We attended the Behavioural Exchange 2015 - the 'BX 2015' - conference this week in London.
Run by the UK's Behavioural Insights Team, this conference made its mark this year putting on a cutting-edge two day event, bringing together the world's leading behavioural insights experts with policy makers and practitioners from both the public and private sector to explore how to apply behavioural insights more effectively.
Who was there?
- An impressive 900+ delegates congregated in London, including people from over 20 different countries - Peru, Slovakia, Australia, Columbia, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, UK, US, Jamaica, Vietnam, Moldova, Denmark, Germany, Kyrgyztan, Namibia - incredible diversity! The first conference in Sydney last year - which our Sydney office attended - had 400 delegates so this year it has doubled in size!
- There were also many qual and quant market research agencies represented, including 2CV, Brainjuicer, Ipsos MORI, YouGov, TNS, as well as the (UK) Market Research Society.
- In terms of companies, organisations and institutions, here are just a few: Google, ASIC, Barclays, Financial Times, JP Morgan, Mitsubishi, McKinsey & Co., Ocado, Prudential, P&G, Pearson, PwC, Sage, RBS, Unilever, Swiss Re, Westpac, LV=, Cancer Research UK, Thomson Reuters - as well as many different government ministries and departments and academic institutions.
- And speakers included: Dan Ariely, Eldar Shafir, Max Bazerman, Steven Pinker, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Robert Cialdini, Shlomo Benartzi and Brian Wansink.
Soundbites:
The conference revealed a wealth of knowledge from some of the most respected experts in the field - too much for a single blog post to do justice to! However, we collected together a few of what we feel were the best soundbites and advice from the speakers:
- "Behavioural science has the power to affect millions of people." - Shlomo Benartzi
- "To have 900 people attending this conference... In five years that is unprecedented." Robert Cialdini
- On identifying behavioural barriers: "What is the obstacle in someone's mind?" Eldar Shafir
- "If you want to encourage people to do something, make it easy" - One of Richard Thaler's 'nudge' mantras
- On running interventions, experiments and trials: "Your first trial will be wrong. Budget and design for it." Aza Raskin, Firefox
- "Moving forward in behaviour change should be a mix of applying insights from literature and learning from application" Daniel Kahneman
If you missed the conference this year, BX2016 will be hosted by Harvard next June. See you in Cambridge!
