*We are thrilled to present “The Real Why and the Hidden Who”, a joint project from Ogilvy and Kantar that was recently awarded the EOSMAR Congress Best Paper Award, authored by Christopher Graves and Jon Puleston. *

Marketers, communicators and behaviour-change strategists have lacked a powerful set of tools to boost effectiveness. They have depended on research, to be sure, but that research has been as blunt as a chisel when a proton beam is what is called for.

Through a multi-year collaboration, Ogilvy and Kantar have created, tested and deployed a completely new instrument that more effectively decodes individuals at scale, using a series of proven behavioural science “lenses” that had never before been pulled together into one comprehensive instrument.

Together, these lenses decode personality traits, cultural cognition and cognitive styles to reveal “the real why and the hidden who” aspects of individuals that truly serve as the drivers of and barriers to behaviour change. With the practical application of this instrument and its findings, we can now reinvent personas, segmentation and inform a better, more empathetically resonant crafting of message framing and content.

Just as advances have led to personalized medicine (i.e. treating individuals based on their own genome), this approach offers a novel, empathetic and much more effective way to move individuals at scale.

Read the full paper here: The Real Why and the Hidden Who: Fixing the weak links in how we measure personality to make better use of behavioural science in marketing