Festival of Marketing 2020

The 2020 conference went online and was a bigger event than ever, attracting a stellar line-up of 84 speakers and an attendance of over 5,000. Helen’s talk, ‘Signs, not science’, took aim at marketers’ yearning for certainty in a fluid world, and their enthusiasm for the fashionable discipline of behavioural science. What they ignore, she argued, were simpler observations, often in plain sight. As for the vaunted concept of ‘nudging’, she had this to say: ‘It’s time we dropped the hubris of trying to nudge consumers, and started paying attention when they nudge us.’ Her session achieved the highest overall score of the conference.