Run faster, achieve more:
The power of the Goal Gradient Hypothesis

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The goal gradient hypothesis is a powerful psychological premise, discovered by Clark Hull in 1932.

While watching rats in a maze, he noticed they would run faster as they got nearer to a food reward at the end.

According to Hull’s hypothesis, the strength of an organism’s behaviour is determined by two things: the intensity of the reward/goal and the distance to that reward/goal. As an individual moves towards the goal, the motivation to reach that goal increases.

This means we are more motivated, and work harder, as we approach the final stages of goal completion. For example, we run faster as we approach the finish line of a race.

So, when developing content for customers, be sure to break up the content into bite-sized sections. This increases the chance of your customers getting to the end.

And if you are working on a big project, similarly, be sure to break the project into smaller stages, and watch your productivity boost as you approach the end of each stage! 🏁 🏆

Your campaign might be visible to the eye…. but what about the brain?

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Did you know that the human brain brings two types of attention to the world?

The right side is receptive to new thinking and ideas, whereas the left side brings attention to things that are already familiar. If your marketing doesn’t appeal to the correct type of attention that your audience is bringing to the world, then you’re at risk of wasting your marketing budget.

Our guide – What the brain doesn’t see… – will help you dramatically improve your marketing effectiveness by understanding how our brains really work. It even shows how the brain’s physical construction plays a role in the way customers behave, and how they respond to communication messages.

Ultimately, you’ll immediately see how you should and shouldn’t be spending your marketing budget.

Don’t risk wasting your budget on communications that your target audience’s brains won’t respond to.

Get the guide

Let’s get real about artificial intelligence

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Understanding its limitations will allow marketers to harness the opportunities.

Artificial intelligence is generating a lot of commentary right now, especially with the advent of more accessible versions such as Chat GPT.

In a way it’s reminiscent of many technological changes that have come before, where an immensely useful technology is hyped far beyond its actual usefulness, before settling down into doing what it is actually best at. Anyone remember blockchain hysteria – at its peak about 5 years ago?

AI is an incredible technology, capable of recognising and replicating staggeringly complex patterns in colossal datasets. It develops this skill by being trained using datasets of the same type which are tagged and targeted to allow the AI to learn the rules that apply.

This ability to apply complex pattern recognition to massive datasets means that AI is making a huge difference to diagnostics, drug development, engineering and probably will to many other things that we haven’t yet thought about.

The interesting thing is, that the skills that make AI brilliant at this type of work, also make it look like it’s brilliant at lots of other stuff. As Jason Lanier, interdisciplinary scientist at Microsoft aka the ”Godfather of virtual reality” or “the Dismal Optimist”, points out in a recent Guardian article, we call it artificial intelligence, but it isn’t really intelligent.

Simulated intelligence would perhaps be a better term.

A limitless opportunity? Not quite… or, perhaps, not yet.

A competent creative brief from a human user can certainly produce interesting results from both an imagery and written word perspective. But this is where the limits of AI become apparent. The AI recognises data as data. The AI’s output is correct so long as it holds true to the patterns and rules that it has learned. It has no clue about the representation of that data in its real-world form.

Once we get beyond factual writing and illustration, the meaning of words and images themselves is often an abstraction. Our reaction to them is often more about how they make us feel, what memories they stir up or what they cause us to imagine than the components of their content. Which is why a lot of AI creative output, no matter how unusual, feels flat. A huge amount of our frontal lobe gives us the power to put ourselves in the place of others, to imagine how they might feel. It also gives us the power to imagine how other people would react to our actions, words and things we create. An ability no AI possesses.

If briefed to do so by a human, an AI can create an image of Donald Trump riding a walrus whilst eating a burger in the style of Van Gogh. Amusing for sure, but it has no way of comprehending what the reaction from a human being to the image might be, or even what the image represents. All it has done, in reality, is to faithfully take the patterns of data that it recognises from its training as images of Trump, a burger, a walrus plus images created by Van Gogh, and combine them into one single dataset which we then see as the requested image. This amusing ability is a side effect of what AIs are good at, even though, at the moment, most commentators seem to be focusing solely on this aspect.

Apply human expertise to artificial intelligence and you’ve got a powerful marketing tool.

Now, there’s another side effect which is just as interesting and possibly more useful. Using AI to collect information may free us (at the moment anyway) from the almost unnoticed restrictions that social media and search algorithms use to filter what we see. Ask an AI to summarise information on any particular subject and it is likely to give a different answer each time. This element of randomness mean we have to use our judgement when choosing between the options.

Going back to more core uses, particularly in marketing, AI is already proving very helpful by picking out patterns in customer purchase and behaviour data, looking for trends in market and customer quantitative data etc. Some interesting uses are emerging which involve facial and expression recognition. These are designed to look for emotional responses in video of market research respondents as they are being exposed to various stimuli. There may be applications for taking a master campaign and creating multiple executions in different formats and languages… ready for QA by a human! After all, nobody wants to see a toothpaste ad where the model has two rows of teeth, in the style of the Xenomorph from Alien. Take a look at some AI-generated imagery of human faces and you might be very surprised at how often this actually happens.

Using AI for commercial creative purposes may have more serious consequences than xenomorphs obsessed with dental hygiene. Predictably, several lawsuits alleging breaches of intellectual property rights have already been launched, one notably by Getty. It seems likely that regardless of whoever or whatever does the scraping of the source material, it will likely be the final user who is found liable for any breaches of IP rights legislation.

It is, of course, fascinating to discuss the future AI-related demise of poets, artists, copywriters, and art directors but to spend too much time doing so risks missing out on the real opportunities offered by what AI is good at right now. Whilst, of course, still having fun with the side effects.

 

 

 

So you’ve set yourself a New Year’s resolution…

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So, you’ve set yourself a New Year’s resolution… That’s great, but how do you turn this expressed desire into a real, lasting improvement? The evidence for successful adoption of New Year’s resolutions isn’t encouraging. According to Forbes overall success is about 8%.

However, before we abandon any hope of self-improvement let’s look at ways we can change our habits. Erasmus wisely said that “A nail is driven out by another nail; habit is overcome by habit”. This view is supported by our increasing knowledge in neuroscience.

Why we form habits

We form habits, essentially, to save precious energy. The brain consumes energy at 10 times the rate of the rest of the body per gram of tissue. Even at rest it uses around 20% of the total consumed energy of the human body. So, anything that automates processes and reduces that demand is of great evolutionary benefit. Habits are about short cuts. The more often we repeat them the more likely it is that we will do it the next time without even thinking about it. They are automated processes that, with each repetition, are wired further into our neurons.

So how do we form good habits?

  • Step 1:  Understand what triggers your current habits
    To change a habit, you first need to recognise what triggers that response? Does receiving a deadline for a major project trigger immediate procrastination?

  • Step 2:  Decide which behaviours you would like to become your new habit
    For example, would you like to replace the procrastination with an immediate period of outline planning? Be very specific.

  • Step 3:  Decide how you will reward yourself for each successful new behaviour
    Rewards are important. The establishment of habit is closely linked to dopamine reward, which is often how we get into bad habits. Problem gambling is strongly linked to this mechanism. Augmenting the brain’s reward system helps establish the new habit.

So, try this…

Imagine you’ve received a deadline. You’ve immediately done some rough planning and role allocation. Try going out and getting a coffee or having a 5-minute walk… or something else simple that you enjoy doing. Repeated often enough, your brain will rewire your neurons to create a new habit to replace the old one, giving you the best chance to be one of the 8% who succeed over time.

Good luck!

Even complex customers need simple stories

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When you have a fantastic brand with lots of powerful messaging and supportive data, it can be tempting to create a story that encompasses it all. But is that really the right thing to do?

Today, I’m sharing a link to a really interesting white paper by ZoomRx. It confirms what many of us already instinctively feel, underpinned by evidence from 30,000 personal sales interactions.

The key points are:

  • Focus on 3-5 key messages and keep them short (10-14 words maximum)
    • Customers who recall more than 5 or fewer than 3 messages about the brand are less likely to prescribe
  • Use data to support your messages, but don’t overdo it
    • Keep it to around 3 data points per message: more than this confuses customers while fewer can lack credibility
  • Make sure your story actually connects the messages to build a compelling proposition

Unsurprisingly, doctors care most about efficacy and safety.

Slightly more surprisingly, these findings are from oncology – an area that is traditionally seen to rely on stories built around colossal amounts of data.

To find out more about building concise, compelling brand stories get in touch with us – we do this for our clients every day.

Contact us

Interrupting people is way harder than it sounds.
Just ask a Boston cop.

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Here’s a little story about how hard it is to get the attention of people who are thinking about something else.

In 1995, 29 year old Kenneth M. Conley, a cop in Boston, was in hot foot pursuit of a suspect. As he chased the man, he ran past a group of his colleagues who were savagely beating another suspect. It turned out that the suspect taking a beating was an undercover cop, Michael Cox – who was so displeased with his colleagues that he pressed criminal charges against them.

Conley was called as a witness at their trial. Under oath, he stated that he hadn’t seen anything. Given that Michael Cox is black, there was a suspicion that racism was involved and the jury didn’t believe Conley. He was later convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, sentenced to nearly 3 years in jail and fined $6000.

But is it possible that Kenneth Conley was telling the truth? There is strong evidence that he may well have been.

Human beings (and other animals) seem to bring two types of attention to the world:

  • The first is a narrow-focused attention to things that we already know to be important. When in this mode we can abstract the object of our attention and ignore everything else.
  • The second is a much broader focus which is alert to the unexpected, the new or the incongruous.

The real kicker though, is that we appear to only be able to bring one type of attention to anything at once.

Why? It may be an energy-saving mechanism. Brains are expensive to run in terms of energy. They may only represent 2% of our body weight, but they take up around 20% of the energy we consume. Saving energy here would be an evolutionary advantage!

This effect has been demonstrated numerous times by authors like Chris Chabris (the invisible gorilla guy) who carried out an experiment based on Kenneth’s experience and discovered that around half of people didn’t see the fight.

Happily for Kenneth, he was exonerated in 2005 and awarded $647,000 in back pay – without ever going to prison. Michael Cox also remained a police officer and in 2022 was appointed as Commissioner of the Boston Police Department.

So, if we are trying to interrupt people who are doing other things, we need to try pretty hard. Predictable, familiar approaches are simply not going to cut it if we want people to see something new.

Beliefs and burgers

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It’s easier to get people to eat a burger than it is to convince them that eating burgers is a good idea.

Almost everyone, no matter how health conscious, will do or eat something that they know probably isn’t good for them. When we do this, we get a little uncomfortable. We have just done something that conflicts with how we view ourselves and, like Jiminy Cricket, up pops cognitive dissonance to make us feel bad.

In order to help us feel better we need to bring our action in line with our internal values, we can’t undo what’s done so we rationalise it to ourselves. “It was a one off, I hardly ever do it”, “I was hungry and didn’t have much time”. Suddenly we feel OK about it again. The interesting thing though is that, the next time we sin, the rationalisation is already available to us, so we don’t feel so bad. Now we can sin, whilst still holding on to our internal beliefs.

This effect doesn’t just apply to dietary transgressions. It’s an inbuilt mechanism to cope with situations in which we act out of step with our beliefs.

Many times in marketing we set off trying to change people’s attitudes and/or beliefs, which is a big ask. Maybe we should encourage our potential customers to try doing what we need them to, and our good friend cognitive dissonance will take care of the rest.

What can Chairman Mao teach us about optimising customer journeys?

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In 1949 Chairman Mao faced a major behavioural problem in China. Around 4.4% of the population or 20 million people were addicted to opium. His solution was brutal, those who sold opium were executed. Addicts were offered a choice: abstain or be sent to labour camps. Millions were sent to camps from which many did not return. By 1951 opium addiction had been eradicated from China. But why were so many people, under the threat of death, unable to change their behaviour?

Behaviour change is hard at the best of times. We are programmed by evolution to keep doing what we’re doing once we find something that works for us. When addiction is involved that change becomes far more challenging. This is why addiction therapy is a great place to look when considering behaviour change models.

Models in addiction have evolved from simply locking addicts away, through the religion-based 12 step programmes from the early / mid 20th century, into powerful behaviour change tools like the Stages of Change model first described by Prochaska and Diclementi in 1983.

This model has been enhanced and further developed over the decades, taking in work from other sources. Because of that it is also known as the Trans-theoretical Model (TTM). It is now being effectively deployed across many types of behaviour change, often in health-related interventions.

TTM looks not only at the stage at which the subject is currently, it also considers the barriers to progress and what needs to be done to address them. This is vital to the creation of well-designed customer journeys that reflect the behaviour change that we are trying to effect.

Why wouldn’t we use a rigorous model that has stood the test of decades of use in the most challenging types of behaviour change?

This powerful tool can be harnessed to really enhance the power of your customer journey planning.

Contact us to arrange a discussion on how using the TTM model of behaviour change could really help your business.

 

What can this joke tell us about developing communication ideas?

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A duck walks into a bar and asks the barman for a portion of fish and chips.

The barman responds that they don’t serve fish and chips and the duck leaves.

The following day the duck returns and makes the same request, again the barman states that they don’t serve fish and chips.

Each day after, the duck returns and the same scenario plays out.

Finally, in exasperation the barman tells the duck that if he asks for fish and chips one more time he’ll nail his beak to the bar.

The next day the duck walks into the bar and the barman says “what do you want?”.

The duck responds “have you got any nails?” to which the barman replies “no”.

“A portion of fish and chips please” says the duck.

Why is it funny?

I was at an event the other day watching Iain McGilchrist, (psychiatrist, philosopher and one of the world’s foremost authors on neuroscience and what makes us human) talking about his new book “The Matter with Things”. At one point John Cleese, another speaker, tells the above joke and gets a huge laugh, but why?

No part of the joke makes any sense alone, it blends the absurd and the surreal into the traditional “X walks into a pub” trope. And yet, holistically, it works. It’s also very memorable. Most of the audience would have been able to repeat that joke with all its main elements remembered. There’s the familiar “x walks into a bar… and the barman…” framework, and the absurd elements, the duck, the fish and chips and the nails.

This joke almost certainly existed this way since its creation.

At no point did anyone check if it would be funnier with a swan or a grebe, what if we switched screws for nails, should we modernise the setting – maybe a coffee shop, could it be a barista instead of a barman. What if some people don’t get it, how do we make it accessible for them?

The joke was conceived and told to an audience. Most of them laughed and this was the acid test – did the audience respond in the desired way?

Thanks to digital advertising options we are perfectly placed to do the same thing. We can conceive communication ideas (check them for gross errors/regulatory compliance) and expose audiences to them. We can then effectively gauge their reaction – did they do what we expected as a result?

If the answer is yes, then we have an effective idea. If we wish, we can optimise from there. If the answer is no then no amount of optimisation will make it effective. This is even more the case when we try to optimise an idea, often using iterative approaches, before audiences have even been exposed to the idea in a natural environment. How do we know if our starting point is any good?

Want to find out more?

If you are interested in rapid development and live testing of ideas, from overall brand concepts to interesting tactical executions, get in touch.

 

 

How being distinctive helped a new chocolate company enjoy run-away success

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You just might have heard of Tony’s Chocolonely – a relatively new chocolate company. And you might be wondering how its success relates to healthcare.

Tony’s was set up in 2005 by a Dutch journalist who was determined to make chocolate 100% free from the use of child labour. To raise attention to the issue, he even took himself to court for knowingly buying chocolate made with slave labour.

Now, with a turnover of €70 million, Tony’s Chocolonely is the biggest chocolate brand in the Netherlands. It has a market share of around 19% and growth of 27% compared to last year.

Clearly, the purpose of the company has been key to its success. For consumers, an association with a worthy cause means a great deal. But we all know that purpose alone is not enough for an unknown brand to make this scale of impact.

What else drove the success?

Well, Tony’s Chocolonely blatantly ignored the rules of what chocolate bars should be like. Their first bar was red – a colour that few other manufacturers have ever chosen for plain milk chocolate.

Furthermore, the chocolate itself is divided into a random pattern. So it looks unlike any no other chocolate bar. This unequal pattern is deliberate – it represents the inequality at play in the global cocoa production industry. The flavours are unique too – including Milk Caramel Sea Salt, Dark Milk Pretzel Toffee and White Raspberry Popping Candy.

So what can healthcare learn from this?

There are several key take-outs for brands looking to get noticed by healthcare professionals.

As with all brands and sectors, your story really needs to mean something to your audience. Tony’s did this by being authentic. Remember the old adage: No sound bites without substance.

Most importantly, however, is the need to be distinctive. Being distinctive allowed Tony’s to penetrate a mature market packed with numerous “stronger” competitors.

By being distinctive, brands in any industry can draw the attention of customers and influencers and open their eyes to the reasons to choose us over the competition.

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