About Ogilvy Consulting

Founded by Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy Consulting's Behavioural Science team champions a unique combination of science and creativity.

With over 10 years’ experience bringing Behavioural Science insights, ideas and interventions to life, we are experts in blending Behavioural Science, Data and Creativity to solve some of the world's trickiest business challenges. 

Rather than lowering the price of their OLED TVs, Samsung challenged us to use Behavioural Science to sell more TVs without giving any price discounts or incentives. We created two CRM campaigns, each using different behavioural principles, and sent the emails to audiences of around 6 million customers.

Compared to their control emails, our Behavioural Science emails increased click-through rates by 800%, and increased OLED TV sales by 54%.

Most campaigns target the perpetrators of misogyny. But those perpetrators typically don’t listen. By analysing the social context, we discovered that it’s the bystanders - the friends - who really hold the influence.

Friends and peers are often motivated to call out misogyny, but they don’t want to appear ‘woke’ or ruin the vibe. So, we created and seeded a piece of language into culture to make it easier. Arming men with one word they could use as a powerful tool to help tackle misogyny: MAAATE.

Odeon (AMC) are one of the biggest cinema chains in the world. Their loyalty programme is free to sign up, yet customers were still checking out as a guest each time they bought cinema tickets.

Rationally, customers would tell us that they need more discounts, points, and rewards to get them to sign up as a member. But, thinking instead like a behavioural scientist, we simply changed when we asked people to sign up: not at the point of purchase, but after they've just been to the cinema when they're in a 'warm' or receptive mindset. By telling people that their points from their recent visit were ready and waiting for them, we generated a 2.7x increase in loyalty programme signups. 

It’s not just what you sell, it’s how you sell it. KFC tasked us with boosting the perceived value of their $1 chips promotion, without changing the price and without changing the product. Using 18 behavioural lenses, we developed over 90 different ways to frame their “$1 chips”.

The winning strategy highlighted what had previously been hidden in the terms and conditions: that the offer is limited to a maximum of four packs per person. The campaign based on this simple anchoring strategy led directly to a year-on-year sales increase of 56%.

Over 300,000 children living in isolated communities in the Ecuadorian Andes suffer from chronic undernourishment, with almost no periodical medical visits. To help, we took inspiration from the simplest of solutions: the Sikinchi, a blanket that mothers use to carry their babies securely.

We created the 'Mother Blanket': a sikinchi which features the OMS Healthy Growth chart, directly sewn into the design, printed in local dialects for mothers to easily understand. As a result, over 15,000 new cases of chronic infant malnutrition were identified and addressed.

Each year, the Christian Aid charity hand-delivers over 7 million donation envelopes to homes all across the UK. However, donations had been steadily declining for the previous 5 years. To reverse that trend, we created 6 donation envelopes, each using a different behavioural strategy, which were distributed nationwide.

The most effective envelope was using the strategy of 'affordance cues' - simply rotating the orientation of the envelope, and counterintuitively leaving all other information exactly the same. This one small change increased total donations by 17% - which equates to £500,000 extra for the charity when scaled across all their donation envelopes.

Sometimes, the right words at the right time make all the difference. We tackled the challenge of customer churn by rethinking how Adobe approached their subscription cancellations. On their call centre scripts, instead of opening with the expected question of why the customer wants to leave, we shifted the focus with a simple yet powerful unexpected question: “Why did you choose Adobe in the first place?”

This reframed conversations to prime for positive experiences and highlight original motivations, making it much easier for the call centre agent to help the customer find another solution rather than quit. The result was transformative, leading to an 8.8% increase in retention rates, delivering multi-million-dollar savings.