Using consumer buying behaviour to improve your marketing
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Turing Fest 2020
The Science of Persuasion
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The children now love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers.
Now who was it who said this? Was it the great lover of Victorian values, Jacob Reesmog? Was it what about French firebrand right wing MP, Marie Le Pen? Or everybody's favorite new worldwide bad guy, President Bolsonaro of Brazil? It was none of those people actually.
It was Socrates about two and a half thousand years ago. Now, you might be thinking, who is this guy? And why is he giving me quotes from two and a half thousand years ago when I've come here to watch the Turing Fest? That's a very good point. My name is Andy Jarvis.
I have an MSc in marketing. I run a company called Eximo Marketing. And I host a podcast called The Strategy Sessions. There's a reason why my logo in the middle there looks like a person. And that's because I believe marketing is a human centered discipline.
We're about the market. That's why it's bold and underlined there. About the people who are going to buy or consume your goods. And I think a little bit of that is being forgotten in marketing at the moment. We see graphs like this about billions of devices gonna be connected to the Internet of Things, all that AI is coming to take over copywriters jobs and big data is gonna change marketing and programmatic ads are gonna rule the world.
And you'd be forgiven for thinking that the robots are taking over. It's not just tech, though. Right? Marketing has a lot of stuff coming from the good old days. Somebody once told me innovation was old or new ideas delivered in an old or new way.
I wish I could remember who gave me that quote. I can't, and I'm sorry. But it's true. Sometimes if you look back to the good old days, you can find examples of how things used to work, and you can find examples then of how you can use them now to improve.
And this is particularly true of marketing because as that quote from Socrates showed, people haven't changed a huge amount in thousands of years. And if you understand the principles of persuasion and influence, you can actually use them now to improve your marketing. As British cycling talk about, they're calling the phrase marginal goals.
They're looking for those one and two percenters that can help take them in front of the competition. Now when everybody's using the same tech, when everybody's using the same platforms, and when everybody's buying their their products from most of the same factories, How do you stand out?
You understand the principles of how humans behave and you use them to nudge them into buying your product instead of someone else's. So what I want to do is talk to you about three principles of persuasion: authority, scarcity and social proofing that will help you understand how this works and how you can use it for your marketing practice.
So let's start with authority. But first, I want you to join me on screen like this. So put your hands up like this, and hopefully, we're gonna do a little social experiment. Now you probably sat there thinking, I've seen loads of Zoom calls, I'm a bit bored of them.
I've sat through loads of presentations like this and I'm not gonna join in because I can't be bothered. Which is why I spoke to Erin and Brian and the team at the Cheering Fest. And we're gonna turn somebody's camera on in about ten seconds and you're gonna join me live on screen to do this.
So quickly, tidy up your background and get ready. All I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick somebody at random, and we're gonna turn their camera on in five, four, three, two, what I'm just kidding. It's prerecorded weeks ago. We can't do that. Don't worry about it.
But now you're paying attention, please do just join me on screen. We're gonna do this little experiment. All you have to do, like the emoji shorts, put your hands together and then cross your fingers and keep them crossed. That's all I need you to do. Very painless.
Now have a look. If you've got your right finger over your left finger, sixty three percent of people who do that would make better leaders. If your left finger is over your right finger, you're a bit of a weirdo. No, I mean ninety one percent of you are going to be better at detail.
And I just wanted to show you that little thing just to make sure you're listening and paying attention before we get started. And to assert my authority over the presentation. Now, authority works because we teach our children from an early age. I don't believe it's an innate thing that we have as people.
I think it's something that we teach people at an early age. When children are born, they see their parents as authority figures. We take them to nurseries and schools where they see other people as authority figures. We then have, even in my daughter's school, have a section called people who can help us, Where they bring in the police, the fire brigade, ambulance crews, lifeboat crews and people like that, and show them that these people are authority figures who should be listened to.
But if you understand why they're seen as authority figures, you start to understand what elements make that up. And there's three things that can tie up authority. And I'll show you what they are and then explain how you can use them. So to show authority, you generally need three things.
Title, clothing and trappings. Now in marketing circles, using the title can be relatively straightforward. As this slide shows here, you've got some people use titles on LinkedIn. So the top one shows someone who's got BSC, GG, AJP. No idea what that means, but it must mean something in their industry.
MCIPD, or if you look down at the bottom, MBE. Using a title to convey authority, and a title bestowed from the Queen is one of the best you can get. If you've been listening right from the beginning, you'll notice I told you I had an MSC.
There was a reason why I dropped that in there and why it's on that slide as well. So you can use titles to convey that you have an authority in a subject. But if you match that with also having the clothing, it becomes more powerful.
This is Quincy, one of my favorite TV medics. And I spent far too long at university watching Quincy when I probably should have been studying. But there's some great studies done in the seventies where people were dressed as So just an actor given a white coat, a stethoscope and a clipboard, and sent to walk down a hospital corridor.
And they asked nurses to go and deliver a dose of drugs to a certain patient. Now that dose of drugs may well have killed that patient if they would have delivered it. But in ninety five percent of the cases, the nurse set off to go and deliver that dose of drugs.
Now they were then grabbed by the researchers and said, no, please don't do that. But in ninety five percent of cases, because the doctor in inverted commas, had a white coat and a stethoscope, they went to deliver that dose of drugs. Because the person had the right clothing.
Just as a quick aside, because I love this story, it's possibly an apocryphal tale. But my favorite story about doctor's authority, it goes about the case of the rectal ear drops, where a doctor wanted some ear drops placed in a patient's right ear.
Because doctors are in a rush, they often write in shorthand. And this doctor wrote, ear drops placed in our ear. The sharper amongst you will have already worked out where the nurse nearly tried to put the ear drops. Yes, of course. So how can you use this in your marketing?
This is doctor Bob. Well, it's not actually doctor Bob. But if you don't know, Doctor Bob invented the Aura brush. That's one of these things. And what you do is you open your mouth and you heard that and pull all of the stuff off your tongue that causes bad breath.
Now Doctor Bob is an actual doctor and had spent years developing this product and years trying to sell the product and nobody bought it. This guy, was a student who liked making YouTube videos and he decided that he needed to look like a doctor.
You'll notice the white coat and the scientific looking goggles and started doing videos of tongue scraping. What happened? Aura Brush is now sold in thirty thousand stores in twenty five thousand countries because he had the clothing to go with to create the authority.
And what about the trappings of a lifestyle? So you can see here, Tai Lopez has got the trappings of his lifestyle, of his industry. There's a Ferrari, I think, and a Rolls Royce and a private jet behind him. Let me just show you this video.
Here in my garage, just bought this, new Lamborghini here. It's fun to drive up here in the Hollywood Hills. But you know what I like a lot more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I'm a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought.
It's like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, the more you learn, the more you earn. Now I'm gonna have to stop that video there because there's only three words that come to mind when you watch a Tai Lopez video. That's what an idiot. But what you can see there is that he has the trappings of the lifestyle.
He's talking about the Lamborghini, the books, the name dropping of Warren Buffet, and things like that. But by showing he has the trappings of the lifestyle, he has become incredibly successful. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about whether that success is actually the right thing to go for, but it's worked in some element for him.
And you could see some time, I've here gone for the trappings of the lifestyle as well. I'm in marketing, I've got a podcast, I've got a madman poster behind, I've got a nice microphone here. So you can create the symbols of authority and the trappings of the lifestyle.
Now, is this always a good thing? Because the interesting thing about authority is that it doesn't necessarily have to be bestowed on you by somebody else. Not like an MBE. You can create it yourself, which can cause problems, especially in the digital world.
As this Instagram post from workout routine said, how do you become a diet and fitness coach on Instagram? Create an account, post thousands of pictures of your abs, and then start mentioning you're a coach. And that's literally it. You can create it even when you don't necessarily have it.
And just to show how that can then be subverted, let's have a look at this study that I told you about with the hands and sixty three percent of you making better leaders and ninety one percent of you being better at detail. It's utter ****.
I made it up a couple of weeks ago when I was looking at how to pull this presentation together. The one thing to be careful of with authorities, if you're going to create it, you have to use it ethically. And I'm gonna talk about the ethics of it later on.
Let's move on now to scarcity. Scarcity is something that you may be using and you may be familiar with, but let's talk again about how it was used in the good old days. So if you have a certain vintage much like me, you'll probably remember what these things are.
If you're a bit younger, I'll explain. They're called a telephone. And what you do is you have to pick the handle up, move the number around, and then it would come back slowly and keep going until you got there. I'm gonna show you something else from the good old days, Concorde.
Now if you wanted to fly on Concorde from Heathrow to New York, you could either go to a travel agent or you could pick up the phone and you could ring and make a booking. Now what they would do is they would use scarcity to make you book.
So you would ring up and you say, want to fly from Heathrow to JFK on Friday the first and there's two people. Now they could be looking at Friday the first flight list and know that there's absolutely nobody on that flight. But what will they do on the other end of the phone?
They would go, okay. Can you just confirm how many people is you wanted to travel? Well, two people and go, okay. Let me just check. And can you just confirm the date again? Okay. Let me just check. I go, alright. So two people. Okay.
I think we can find you two seats. Now what they've done during that phone call is create scarcity without doing anything wrong, without telling you any lies. They've created scarcity in your own mind. They've created four more, fear of missing out. By the way they use their language and the way they frame the questions, they made you think that you had to book that seat right now.
If they'd have said, oh, the plane's empty. You'd have said, oh, I might book tomorrow. Let me see if I can get a better deal. Can I haggle on price? Can I have an upgrade? But by the way they phrase the questions, they created FOMO and you decided you had to buy that flight now.
Now scarcity doesn't always work really well in every industry. This is my lovely other half looking radiant in the dress of the year from a couple of years ago, Hot for the Spot, which was Zara's breakout dress that was so popular, it even got its own Instagram feed.
Now they had a scarcity problem that it kept selling out. And because it kept selling out, it was a supply chain problem and they kept trying to get more and more and more, but it was a real success. On the other side of that, you've got retailers like the Outnets, whose business model is built on scarcity.
They get short runs of high fashion products and when it's gone, it is gone, that's it. But what that means is when they send the email out to say we have this product in, there's a stampede of people trying to buy the product.
It's an amazing business model. If you've tried to book accommodation online, you'll be familiar with how the principle of scarcity can be used. I know none of us have done that in the last nine months, but you'll remember from the good old days.
Seventy one percent of places are unavailable for the odd dates. Two other people booked in the last ten minutes. Only four left on our site. Scarcity. Scarcity. Scarcity. What they're doing is using that ticking clock in your mind to create scarcity and force you to nudge you into taking an action as quick as you can.
You see it in events marketing all the time. Flash sales or early bird discounts creating scarcity. Flash sales and lightning deals, sorry, on Amazon, Groupon on Living Social. These are all industries where their whole model is built around the principle of scarcity. And as you can see from some of the examples I've given, again, it doesn't even have to be real scarcity.
Digital products, things that don't have scarcity can be created by adding time limits to them or price discounts to go along with them. And what about social proofing? Well social proofing again is something you're probably already familiar with, but why does it work?
One of the earlier examples I could find actually came from Paris. In the 1820s, a theater there started to employ clocks. Clacks were people who were paid to go and sit in the audience and laugh or cry or start clapping at certain points in the show.
Now, there was even a hierarchy. The emotional woman who could cry on demand was the highest valued clack and was paid the most. Amazing, yet true. And why did this work? Because actually if you think, it worked all the way through TV companies one hundred plus years later, so that they put in candle laughter on TV shows.
Why? Because when there is uncertainty, we need social proof. So when we're unsure of ourselves or when there's a situation that's unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we look to the actions of others to see how we should behave. And that's why social proofing works.
So how does that work in ecommerce? What we tell people, someone else near you has just bought this product. Or we have trust pilot reviews. What do other people think of this? It's also why brands are spending millions, possibly billions on influencer marketing.
So people, not just celebs, but also micro influencers will tell other people what they think of a product. Now, what happens when if you think about it can be done authentically as is the case lots of time. Like the Parisian theater, sometimes these are planted.
And what happens when this is done unethically? The Fyre Festival. The greatest party that never happened. This was a masterclass in social proofing, in using persuasion and influence, but also about putting these things together. If you haven't seen the deck that the Fire Effect Fest produced, there's a link later on in the presentation.
You can click and download it. Honestly, it's amazing. It's an amazing piece of work. You should go and have a look at it. Quite good fun. But look at what they've got here. The next few slides are from that deck. Six million unique impressions you can see on this page.
You go to the next page, get Borg, Elle, Cosmopolitan, PopSugar, social proofing, social proofing. Three hundred million social media views. Look at the next page, Fyre starters. We've got Kendall Jenner, Marcus Butler. I have no idea who Marcus Butler is. Jen Seltzer, no idea who that is either.
But some people in this industry must know who they are. They've got millions of followers. They get thousands of likes. And what they did successfully at the Fyre Festival, they were stacked these benefits. They put authority together with scarcity and social proofing. Because at the end of the day, we're just chimps in shoes.
Right? You put these things together, you persuade people and use your influence when you put these together and it becomes like catnip to us. There's nothing we can do. Kind of hardwired to go oh we've got to get involved in this before we miss out.
Which does lead us to an important discussion on ethics. What are the ethics of this? Should we be doing it? Or to quote from Jurassic Park, you were so occupied, preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think if you should.
So should we as marketers be using the principles of authority and scarcity and social proofing? Should we be using persuasion on our influence to nudge people into buying our products? I had a chat on the podcast with Mike Winnett. Mike is a YouTuber and we talk about episode eight, if you're gonna go and listen to it on the podcast.
We talked about it on the strategy sessions. Why did I talk to Mike? Well, produced this video series called the Contrepreneur Formula Exposed. And what this is, is Mike went to a series of events where people were selling things that were too good to be true generally.
And he started to look at how they put it together. And it's no surprise to find out that they use lots of these principles of persuasion and influence to be able to get people to buy their product. But what I believe is that if the product you're selling does what it says it's gonna do, and if it does it at a price that is sensible for that product, and if it behaves in the way that you say it's gonna do, I think it's ethical to use these nudges to separate your
product from the others in the market that are doing the same thing. If your product doesn't, if you're selling a lie, if you're somebody like Tai Lopez that's selling a Ponzi scheme, if you're using hired Lamborghinis to fake your trappings of authority, if you're selling pyramid schemes, I don't believe that's ethical. I think that is a con.
Now conning's nothing new. Someone tried to sell the Eiffel Tower two or three times over one hundred years ago. People have been running cons since time began. But the advent of digital has lowered the barriers and made it easier for people to fake a lot of these trappings.
But just because there's an industry of people doing it incorrectly doesn't mean that we shouldn't use it ethically as marketers. And the principles of authority scarcity and social proofing I believe have an ethical framework to use them. I would recommend this book, which I'm holding a copy of here, Inside the Nudge Unit by Doctor. David Halpin.
The nudge units or the behavioural insights team work in government and create, use the principles of persuasion and influence to nudge people into behaviors that are seen as being suitable. Now you might think that sounds quite Machiavellian, but it's things like how do we get people to pay their tax on time?
How do we get people who've missed an appointment to actually turn up at that appointment? Because all of these things cost money and have an impact elsewhere. Now the nudge unit, by adding lines such as most people pay on time to a tax letter, social proofing, they have the authority and they put them in there that got a sixteen percent increase in people paying their tax.
Now you might think sixteen percent and go okay is that good is that bad? When unpaid taxes is six hundred million pounds per year problem, sixteen percent increase in people who pay their tax is actually quite significant. Now the one thing to take away from Doctor David's book and his team and from this whole presentation is that you have to build a test and learn approach to what you do.
The Nudge unit is based on doing randomized controlled trials. It's not junk science. It's not marketers doing ****** studies and having done a Twitter poll and deciding that that is a scientifically rigorous study. It is not. Use the proper principles of social science to be able to look and test at these.
Now, just as I wrap up, I'm always happy to share my sources. I'll just pause for a second while there's a groan. These are the books that I talk about in the presentation, Influence by Inside the Nude Junior and The Contrapreneur Formula and The Fyre Festival Pitch Dog.
I'm Andy Jarvis. As I said, I host the Strategy Sessions podcast. And if you'd like to sign up to my email, I talk about this stuff and you get the podcast every fortnight. You can use that link there, xmlmarketingstrategy dot com slash signup, or point your phone at that really funny thing that's making a bit of a comeback this year called a QR code, and it'll take you there.
I'll be in the q and a now. I hope you enjoyed the presentation. Thank you. Great stuff there from Andy. So we're gonna we're gonna jump back back in with him straight away. He's standing by. He's already been in the chat. Some of you may have seen. So Andy, you back in.
Great to have you at Turing Fest. Thanks for thanks for joining us again today. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Left finger over. Oh, dear. You said you mentioned old is new and and new is old. And I love the the QR code there at the end.
Yeah. QR codes, they were they were gone. They were they were done. It was all over and they're they're they're in you can't go to a shop without using them now. Yeah. It it's, it's one of those pieces of technology that never really worked as it was supposed to do when it when they were launched as far as I can tell with QR codes and they were just dying and now now they're back.
But yeah II think it's kind of generally the story of marketing isn't it that we we forget about all the old stuff and we like all the new shiny things and then forget about the old things until they come back and and and make a comeback and realize.
Oh yeah all that stuff used to work and it still works now so whether it's QR codes copywriting all that sort of stuff is not copyright never went out fashion, but you know, like headers and how you format, direct mail now becomes email.
All that stuff's all just as popular again, really. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it it it like you say, it all goes back to people and people technology changes and and but we maybe don't change that much. Although it does feel like we're getting a bit rewired by technology at the moment, but that's maybe a whole other conversation.
You mentioned marginal gains in in your talk, and Team Sky and all that kind of stuff. From your from your experience with with your own clients, and your own marketing, what where have you seen, where have you seen people focus to get the best results on on in those marginal gains?
I think the easy way certainly in digital to to focus on those marginal gains. You see in the ad world, performance marketing with Google Ads, Facebook ads, where you can run relatively robust trials relatively easily. So you know, in the old days of doing direct mail.
I grew up my first job would did about a million direct mail shots a year, which I thought was huge when you get to know the direct mail industry you realize it's not very many. You could test different things, different titles, different colored envelopes and stuff like that.
We did. But actually if you think of the scale, can run that now across digital ads. Where you can change words, headlines, formats, images, using text, using no text. You can test all of that at a scale and for a price that was probably unattainable ten, fifteen years ago.
So that's a real area and I think performance marketers have understood that quite quickly. I think what they do though is tend to take that from a data perspective, a numbers perspective and try and test based on that instead of bringing a little bit more psychology into the copy.
But certainly, think they do the testing really, really well. On the the question of psychology and technology and and changing, changing technologies, it seems like in the in the wider world at the moment, we've we've maybe gone from a world where things that were in the news.
So if it was on TV, or if it was in a newspaper, everyone just believed it to be true. And, you know, a lot of the time probably was. And now we have we have a very different world, and we've got very different platforms.
And how do we how do we manage the question of authority of social proof, in a world where it's increasingly hard to know what to believe and who to trust? It's really, really difficult. And if you look at, I hate the phrase fake news because of the person who popularized it.
But if you look at that and you think why do so many people spot, don't spot obvious hoaxes? Or why don't, why do people keep sharing the same memes which are you know, often right wing stuff but still left wing stuff. But you see ones where share if you agree that migrants shouldn't get twice as much as ex service men in benefits.
And it's all rubbish, And a quick Google search will tell you that it's all rubbish. But people don't know how to interrogate that because there's many a generation I've grown up where they just believe in what they see. And it's actually getting harder to see because you can spoof social proofing.
You can make yourself look credible quite easily online. And actually the speed that things move as well is something I didn't really discuss. But the speed that things move can make checking hard because you think I need to do something quick with this information.
So it's really, really tough. And I look back at media studies. I never studied media studies. But it was a course that was always flagged up by politicians as being this symptomatic of the declining education. And going well, media studies is terrible. Get kids back to reading, writing and arithmetic.
Actually, media studies is probably the thing we need to reintroduce to the curriculum really, really quickly. So people can understand and kids coming through can understand what questions should they be asking. How do they interrogate this information to find out if it's real or not?
Often, it's a Google search will tell you, but it gets more and more complicated. Boris' famous, interview car crash interview where he talks about, he likes to paint buses. The rumors are that he did that for SEO reasons so that if you search for Boris Johnson and bus, you will see pictures of him talking about painting buses instead of the big picture of him stood in front of the three fifty million pounds a week back to the NHS bus.
You still, you know, so you have to know what you're looking for. So, it's really, really difficult but I think I have to start by teaching people the basic skills. And that goes back to an education question, not a marketing question. Yeah. Yeah. No.
It's there's definitely a lot of challenges around all of that. Even for those of us that are, I guess, pretty familiar with with the way the internet works and the way marketing works. I've read something recently by another former TuringFest speaker, Patrick Campbell.
I don't know if you know Patrick, he's in the, he's in the b to b pricing space with with SAS profit wells, his his company. And he there was something you mentioned where we're talking about relatability that if you in SAS pricing, if you use the right local currency for that market, you'll you get thirty percent higher conversion because people just think, this is a local company with that.
Therefore, it is relatable. It's phenomenal. I mean, relatability, like, how do you think that plays into, everything that you were talking about in your presentation about social proof, for example? Yeah, absolutely. I think companies have cottoned onto that. In a consumer space influencer marketing is probably the way many of them look at relatability.
How do we get more people who look like our customers into these campaigns without without spending a fortune in a lot of cases. So they still sometimes go for the big model to to lead the campaign. Whether that's a Holly Willoughby or whoever else that might be.
But then they can get huge reach and huge breadth of that campaign by using influencers who look like the people that try, that look like the people they're trying to sell to. It's relatability, social proofing. It's trying to connect with people. I think in the B2B world where I probably do maybe a little bit more in B2B now than I do in B2C.
They don't necessarily call it influencer marketing. They look at testimonials for that type of thing. But I think there's probably an angle to maybe build more of that. But it's it's no surprise and I've not heard that figure before thirty percent increase. But it's no surprise people think they want to work with local companies.
They want that local pricing. They want to believe there's a local you know, customer support should they need it. And it's all about just making sure that people think you are the product for them. And all those little bits, I mean thirty percent is a phenomenal increase.
I mean, you talk about marginal gains often you're looking for just lots of little two percent to try and make you a ten percent. So if you can find a thirty percenter, it's a no brainer, really. Yeah. Yeah. It certainly is. Talking about influencers and influencer marketing, do you think there's a danger that as we're bombarded by more and more information and more and more platforms, are we gonna start just disregarding everything?
Are we gonna start filtering everything out? Or do we are we still gonna come back to, oh, that person is, you know, resembles me in some way that I can relate to, and I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm still gonna pay attention? Or are we you know, is it just all gonna dilute through overuse?
I think there's an awful long way to go yet with influencer marketing. I think it's an industry that's only in its infancy the way it's now. So influencers and celebrity endorsements are nothing new. But if you look at how a lot of influencer marketing is now built or when it's done well, it's kind of multi layered.
And I spoke to a lady called Seth Beswick on the on the podcast. Yes, it feels like it's now turned into an advert for the podcast. But she runs an influencer marketing agency. And we talked about this quite a lot. So it's not just about having a Lewis Capaldi or a Kardashian or somebody at the top now.
That's still part of it. But influencer marketing's tiered and there's maybe sort of less, slightly less famous people. And in a lot of campaigns, a lot of micro influencers, nano influencers, whatever you want to call. And they are often people with following in the low thousands, two to five thousand followers maybe.
But when people see those recommendations. Oh, Brian shared this new soft drink that he's having that helps give him energy to get him through in the cheering fest. It feels like a much more personal referral than seeing some celebrity or some sports star who who you have no connection with.
So I think the growth of the influencer markets has still got a lot to go. And I think the other reason behind that is it's still relatively cheap compared to normal media TV press that sort of thing. So I think there's a huge growth still to go in that.
And I think when it's done right and when brands unhook some of their authority and let the influences take control of what they want to write about the thing they want to write about. That will help them create better content, which will engage better with their audience.
So there's still a long way to go and still some learning to do, but it is quite early stages in that industry. Andy, I would never do product placement for any soft drink that helps me get through TuringFest, just so just so you know.
Norm to be honest, in the in the normal two, three day pandemonium that we have at EICC, there's normally a lot of Red Bull involved. From regarding back to the science of persuasion and any any examples that come to mind of how in your career where you you feel like you've really, you've really nailed some of some of the practices that you mentioned in the talk, Or or not even your own career, any any great examples out there that you can think of?
So I for my sins, I came relatively late to the the psychology element of of marketing. I studied an MSC again, as I mentioned, and there was a whole module on psychology and I realized it was where I was really, really weak. So I've spent a lot of years since then spending a lot of time talking, researching and exploring that.
So some of the examples are relatively new. I always have a copy of Inside the Nudge unit to hand. And there's some brilliant examples here that Doctor. David Halpern talks about in terms of stop smoking cessation, getting people to pay the tax, avoiding debt collectors coming around and taking all the things out of people's homes by text messages or changing the wording on text messages.
And where I've started implementing this is in copywriting first of all. There are probably many other places you could test this out. But certainly working with a client where we are writing letters, good old fashioned letters, direct mail, which is something that people think has gone out of fashion but hasn't.
And we're sending them to chief executives. And we're writing the letters in different ways and we're changing so some positives and some negatives. So this product can help you increase sales or this product can save you money. And we're testing whether the positive or the negative approach works.
And when we found out which one did, we then started to play around with that letter based on, well, if we change this, if we make a bit more social proofing, people like you do this type of thing. You bring those in and it's still quite early days.
It's actually a live case study at the minute and it's still quite early days with it. But some of the things that we're finding have been quite interesting. The positive letter for example is working better than the negative letter. When all the reading you see in blogs and people who are experts talking about it suggests that during pandemic and COVID crisis, the negative letter of saving money might actually help people more.
So sometimes you start with an assumption, you start with a hypothesis and then you test it and but you go where the results are. And another book I always keep to hand, Bad Science by Ben Goldecker, another doctor. I mentioned about junk science in the presentation and just if I can just get this off my chest while I've got the microphone live.
So many markets as I see building assumptions based on Twitter polls, based on really bad data sets of we asked six people and now we're doing this. Proper rigorous approach to the science of it. And I will admit, we're probably not getting it right.
But the better you can be at that, the more you can understand the principles of research, the better you will be at being able to test these things. Yeah. I've I've seen that in product and in marketing where you get a small you get a small sample size, it tells you what you wanna hear.
So so you make the mistake of, you know, wishful thinking, and then you end up finding out six months later that you were wrong, and now you're broke. And you mentioned ethics, and I think, you know, it's it's so central to to the to marketing in general, but particularly the type of marketing that you're talking about with persuasion.
How far you mentioned FOMO, which is obviously very powerful tactic. How far can we go? Where where are the lines? Where? What's okay? Where does it go too far? I think it's different for each brand. And you've got to understand what your brand values are and how far you want to push it.
And there there are some ways where you can say, is it ethical for a digital conference? Not this one, but I spoke at another digital conference where they were doing free tickets. If they start trying to create formal to make people buy before a certain date, so they can then sell that data to sponsors.
You think, is that ethical for them to be doing that? But if all they're doing is, if the product delivers on the benefits they're selling to it, that's the thing that I keep coming back to. So can you use four more to drive sales and to get people to take an action before a certain amount of time?
Yes. If it's a digital product and there's unlimited of them, you're trying to say there is a limit. Now then you're getting slightly down into a darker alley. But I think fundamentally, does the product do what you say it's going to do? And if it does, then I think you can use those tactics of persuasion to help drive sales and to help drive your business forward.
It's when the product doesn't live up to the expectations that there's an issue. But I would always connect it back to brand values. Value based marketing and people talking about purpose and all that sort of stuff become became a hot topic for a while still is I suppose.
But you've got to understand what your purpose is and what your values are. So if you are honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, you've got to be really careful how you use formal. Because you can't say we are honest and we are trustworthy. And then we only have twenty five of these products left.
When it's a digital product and they're unlimited. So as long as you connect, does the product deliver on what you say it's gonna do? And does it connect to your brand values? I think there's no problem implementing formal and pushing it as long as those two things you've got to tick in both boxes.
So the line is different for every company. Personally, I've got no problem trying to roll out formal and social proofing in these things for clients and, you know, to help drive sales forward. Yeah. Yeah. I I I know what you mean. I mean, even at TuringFest, for example, we do use pricing tiers.
And I think most conferences do. But they're based on a real thing that, you know, at this point, the price will change. If you're not in a rush, buy it later. If you want to get the best price, buy it now. So I think I think that's probably fine.
Interesting, though, talking about brand values and in the world of the world of social where everything is faster and more transparent or we've we had Nandini Jami talking about brand safety at Turing Fest last year, and we have a friend of hers, Katie Martell, who is going to be speaking in a few weeks.
And she, again, the same sort of thing and talking about the way the world is shifting. And it feels like in a lot of ways, the world is going into this darker place. And we'll find out more about that in the next twenty four hours perhaps.
But the the it also feels like there's a lot of there's an opportunity, I suppose, for brands that are that do have, what you might call positive values to to leverage that and in of a genuine way. And is that something you've been involved in?
Is that something you see a lot that's that's gonna be happening a lot? My view on purpose is that it's brilliant to use when it's it is your purpose. Trying to sort of reverse engineer a purpose because you think that's what millennials want to hear.
That's twice I've done that during this interview isn't I? I do apologize. But reverse engineering purpose because you think it's right for millennials or you think it'll just be a nice slogan for your marketing campaign. It really annoys me. Cadbury's, I mean Cadbury's a company that have purpose from their inception.
You know the whole Bonville village and the whole backstory of Cadbury's is a perfect example of how you use purpose. Yet in India they suddenly managed to decide they were gonna release the unity chocolate bar which had a row of, I'm not kidding about this by the way.
It had a row of white chocolate, a row of milk chocolate, a row of slightly dark chocolate, and a row of really dark chocolate. And it was brought out in India as part of their their use of purpose based marketing to talk about unity of people.
Funnily enough they drew it from sale quite quickly when people in India were like, so why are we all segregated then? Is this the best you can do? And when you see purpose based marketing like that which just looks like why did this ever get out of the room?
It amazes me and it really annoys me. And often I think business leaders see things like that and can then go this purpose based marketing is rubbish. But when it's authentic when it actually comes from within when it's driven by what you stand for as a firm.
Then it can be really really powerful and you look at the companies who do purpose based marketing well. Patagonia are always shouted out as a company that do it really well, but they get real value from it and that can go all the way down to small firms when you have a real clear sense of identity.
So if you've got that, use it. If you can find it, which every company can by by asking the right questions, use it. But don't make up. Because when you make it up, it becomes really easy to see when it's going wrong and when it can fall to pieces.
And the favorite thing, my favorite workshop just quickly that I run, I call set the dogs on it. So whenever I'm working with a client who wants to talk about using purpose in their marketing, we have a session. Before we ever let it go, We have a session where we just go in and ask all the questions that we think may get asked on social media or people if they were being hyper negative about this would ask.
How do we rip this to pieces in a way that the people once it gets out of this room are gonna do? And if it's still standing at the end of that after we've set the dogs on it and asked all those daft questions, ripped it to pieces and said, does this stand up to scrutiny?
If it still works, then we can move it to the next level. If it doesn't, then it just dies at that point. And I really love that workshop because it's great fun to kinda tear into people. It's kind of like a scene from Perry Mason where you have to rip into them, fire them questions, and they have to defend what their product is and what their service does.
So that's good fun. But, yeah, that's it for now. Andy, that's that does sound like good fun, and good to get some customers in the room for that as well with them. That's probably a good a good, note to end on. So thanks very much for being here.
Fantastic presentation and good to chat with you. Lots of lots of great stuff there to dig into and to to mull over. So good to have you, and we'll see you again soon, perhaps in person next year. Who knows? But that's that's been great, Andy. Thanks.
Thank you very much for having me. And hopefully, we can do it in person next year. I'll keep everything cross for it. That's it. Okay. So that's that's the end of part two of our our three part day. So we're going to take a quick break now and we're back at four pm with Itamar Gielad talking about products.
So see you in a minute.