The Neapolitan Effect
So our building has this wonderfully bizarre tradition of serving a plate of jelly beans to each business unit every Friday. And every Monday morning without fail, you’ll find a bowl with a disproportionate amount of black jelly beans left over from the Friday before.
It struck me this week how strange it is that there are an equal number of black jelly beans as other flavours in each bag, even though they are the least favoured. Why don’t they put less in the bag to represent their likelihood of consumption?
As a member of a creative team, I feel we sometimes fall into the same OCD trap of needing things to be equal, or in certain combinations simply because they feel right — even though they might not reflect what our audience actually wants or needs. I call it The Neapolitan Effect: because even though it feels right to have all three flavours sitting next to each other together in equal sections in the tub, the majority of ice-cream lovers would prefer more chocolate and vanilla than strawberry.
Here’s a pretty common example. A campaign for one of our clients involves an ecommerce portal in which we list merchants in various categories.
Now, when we were first concepting, we decided each category should have the same number of merchants. This wasn’t based on any research into which category would be more popular, or which might have a greater number of merchants. We didn’t consider UX or design, because the idea came from creative. It was simply, unspokenly agreed upon because it felt right. It felt safe. It was an instinctual decision.
As creatives, we are taught to ‘trust our gut’. In my case quite literally. I was recently in Melbourne for a creative leadership workshop, in which some incredible Aussie ECDs took us through how they navigate the day-to-day challenges of leading a creative team and being a creative representative. There were a few common threads through each talk, and one of the ones that stuck with me was that often, without anyone above us to make a call, we have to trust our gut.
At face value, that makes sense; we have the experience, and the innate ability to determine what will work and what won’t. It’s an important skill to have, and our instincts only sharpen as we gain more experience.
But what if trusting your gut, blindly, without self-awareness, can sometimes mean avoiding outside opinions or data and sticking to what feels safe? Consider my example above about the ecommerce platform. It feels like such a minor thing, wanting to have the exact same number of merchants across each category. But after investigation from outside teams, we were shown our error and corrected it, realising that we could have lowered our ideas effectiveness based on nothing more than a feeling.
We work in an industry where more and more we’re asked to do things we’ve never done before. To work with new technologies and solve business problems beyond a key image and a tagline. To develop new products and services. To write industry opinion pieces to fulfil a KPI. More than ever we need to be making decisions that feel unsafe, that take us out of our comfort zone, that rely on outside opinions.
I don’t think this is a particularly controversial opinion. And I also don’t think we shouldn’t be relying on our instincts, our experience, our Spidey-sense for what works and what doesn’t. All I’m saying is that we as creatives need to be honest with ourselves about our limitations, mindful about our work and the decisions we make, and willing to cede control to others when we need help.
If we don’t, we’ll keep ending up with a cup full of black jelly beans, or a tub that loses a third of its real estate to strawberry — and no one is asking for that much strawberry ice cream, don’t @ me.
Tom McMullan, Associate Creative Director
