[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:07] DC: Welcome to B2B Marketing BS.
[0:00:11] GR: Where BS stands for Behavior and Strategy.
[0:00:15] DC: I’m Deborah Corn, the founder of Print Media Centr and the Executive Director of Girls Who Print.
[0:00:21] GR: And I’m Gee Ranasinha, Founder of KEXINO and a Behavioral Science and Marketing Strategy Consultant. Most marketing conversations focus on what people do, not why they do it. In this podcast, we’ll explore marketing through the lenses of behavioral science and strategy.
[0:00:39] DC: Each topic unfolds over three conversations, examining human behavior, business behavior, and the real-world consequences that follow. Together, we’ll challenge assumptions –
[0:00:52] GR: Question conventional wisdom.
[0:00:54] DC: And explore what actually works in the marketplace from behavior and strategy to results with no BS.
[EPISODE]
[0:01:05] DC: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse. I am Deborah Corn, your Intergalactic Ambassador. We are here with the B2B Marketing BS series, which means I am here with my co-host from the other side of the pond, Gee Ranasinha. How are you doing today, Gee?
[0:01:24] GR: I’m doing very well. Welcome back dear listener. We’ve missed you since the last time.
[0:01:29] DC: We have.
[0:01:30] GR: I’m glad you’ve chosen to join us again and hopefully, will join us for many more.
[0:01:36] DC: Excellent. As I explained in the introductory podcast for this series, we are taking one topic in three sections. This and our first topic is Known Beats New. In our first episode, we explored why people are naturally drawn to what’s known, recognized, and remembered. In the last episode, we discussed what it means for businesses trying to stand out. Today, we’re going to look at what happens in the marketplace as a result. Over time, industries develop patterns. Companies begin following the same conventions, using the same language, making the same claims, presenting themselves in very similar ways. The result is often a marketplace filled with businesses that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another. Let’s dive into that, Gee. Why do people remember some businesses and forget others?
[0:02:39] GR: I think, and this is probably going to be a little bit of a controversial answer.
[0:02:44] DC: Oh, I love it.
[0:02:45] GR: Oh, yeah. I thought you would. Is that memory doesn’t reward competence. It rewards contrast, okay? As evolutionary animals, we’re predisposed to notice differences, contrasts, right? If all we do is everything by the book, we do everything correctly, we follow every convention, we match every expectation that’s set for us, then all we’re doing is optimizing for the conditions that the human mind is absolutely worst at retaining, because there’s nothing that stands out. There’s no contrast, there’s nothing to stand out to be different. Memory is built to notice what breaks a pattern, not what fits in with a pattern. The only way we can be remembered is by standing out, right?
In behavioral science, there’s this thing called the isolation effect, but it’s also called the von Restorff effect, because it was named after a German physicist by the name of Hedwig von Restorff. Basically, the von Restorff effect is saying that an item that differs from everything surrounding it gets remembered dramatically better than something that blends into a similar set. It’s not exactly Mensa stuff, right? We can imagine that something that clearly differs from anything else surrounding it is going to get remembered more.
[0:04:19] DC: We see this all the time, by the way, in stock art, when you say differentiation, or standing out, they’ll show you a rule of balls and one is red. They’ll show you a rule of light bulbs that aren’t on, except for one, that is on. That is supposed to be the thing that makes it different.
[0:04:35] GR: Yeah, exactly. The von Restorff effect, they did a research experiment, right? They showed someone a list of words, and all the words had to do with furniture. So, desk, chair, table, dresser, stool. What they did is they added one unrelated word on that list, which had nothing to do with furniture. Say, fish. Then they asked the people who were doing the subjects of the survey, they asked them to remember as many words on the list as they could. To the surprise of pretty much no one, I would imagine, more people remembered fish. They don’t remember any of the other words. It’s not remembered, because it was more important, it was remembered, because it broke the pattern of everything else that they were told to remember. This experiment was done in the 30s, but it’s been replicated many times, and it’s got the same result.
If you think of that experiment, you could see how it describes the majority of B2B categories, especially print, right? A buyer encounters, I don’t know, half a dozen vendors that look functionally similar, and they say functionally similar things. The ones that are remembered aren’t the ones that are most competent, the ones that deliver the best quality, the ones that offered the better turnaround time. The ones that are remembered are the ones that broke this pattern, a visual pattern, a verbal pattern, a conceptual pattern that everybody else had settled into, right? Compliance is a secondary effect. The competence gets us into the consideration set. But it’s the reason why we’re recalled isn’t because of how good we are at doing what we do. It’s because we’ve set ourselves up in contrast with everybody else, or not every set necessarily, everybody else, but certainly everybody else that the customer was considering.
[0:06:45] DC: Yeah. Well, this is a very loose example, but when I was working in advertising and the vendors would send gifts to the agency for the holidays, and it wasn’t to me as a buyer, because that would be illegal. It was for everybody. But there were two vendors who never sent it during Christmas, because everybody was sending gifts for Christmas, or the holiday season. One of them made Valentine’s Day their holiday.
[0:07:14] GR: Brilliant. Brilliant idea.
[0:07:16] DC: Instead, sent everybody gifts for thanking them on Valentine’s Day, instead of the holidays. It was the usual stuff; a basket of cookies, usual stuff. Then, out of nowhere comes somebody for five years, we referred to as the cannoli guy. The cannoli guy. He sent us a kit for all of us to make our own cannolis. Now, let me tell you, for years, for years, Gee, everybody would be like, “Call the cannoli guy. He’ll know what to do.”
[0:07:49] GR: Yeah, exactly.
[0:07:52] DC: I couldn’t tell you his name now. I couldn’t even tell you what he did. All I know is that I will never forget that gift and the results that it had with everybody referring, locking him to this, to standing out in a gift space.
[0:08:10] GR: Fantastic. Fantastic story. I love it. I absolutely love it.
[0:08:14] DC: Excellent.
[0:08:15] GR: This is probably a good time to talk about something that we call framing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term. The concept is that an identical offer can produce hugely different levels of memorability, depending on how we frame it. The best example I can use is there’s a restaurant chain in the UK that has a very interesting way of price framing, which they call a Macto game. It’s a common problem. Imagine a restaurant, okay? The big problem with restaurants is there’s huge dead time between the end of lunch service and the beginning of dinner service.
[0:08:56] DC: 3 to 5. They close it on.
[0:08:57] GR: Right. I mean, it’s no man’s land, right? I mean, it’s like tumbleweed, right?
[0:09:01] DC: Exactly.
[0:09:02] GR: Everybody’s looking at a way to get bums on seats during that time. What this restaurant does is a bit of game theory to drive diners to come during those down hours. If you go to have something to eat during this slow time, what happens is once you finish your meal and you get your bill, you get given a dice in a little pot and a little board, okay? What you do is you have to throw a six. If you throw a six, your entire meal, food and drinks are free.
[0:09:39] DC: Bonus.
[0:09:40] GR: Right? If you look at it finance-wise, what does that mean for the restaurant? It’s the same thing as giving a 16.7% discount for everybody who comes through the door. Now, is 16.7% discount going to get people coming through your door? Maybe a few, but it’s not going to set the world alight, is it really, right? But the diners, they go freaking crazy, right? Even if they lose, it doesn’t matter, because the reaction is not disappointment. The reaction is because they were already planning to pay for their meal. Rolling something else other than the six just puts them – they’re not down on the deal. They’re just paying what they were going to pay. The server does a bit of theatre and they make it a big event when they bring out the dice and all that stuff. Everybody films it, sticks it on their Instagram reel and it goes viral and all of this sort of stuff. I mean, it’s tailor-made for the TikTok, Instagram type guys, right?
[0:10:48] DC: Right.
[0:10:49] GR: The thing is there’s various psychological factors involved which are interesting. I don’t know how deeply we want to get into this, but one of them is –
[0:10:56] DC: Well, I mean, I’m already going to this restaurant, I’m checking my watch and I’m like, “If we wait 20 minutes, we can go roll the dice at this place,” or I look at my watch and it’s a certain time and a bit in those hours. I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to go somewhere. Anyhow, I might as well go there, roll the dice and have some fun.”
[0:11:16] GR: Exactly.
[0:11:17] DC: I’m going already and I’m over here, Gee. Yeah, psychological.
[0:11:22] GR: There’s some psychological effects that are going on. One of them is a thing called the peak end rule, which basically means that people judge experiences mostly by the peak moment of the experience and the ending. Finish on a good ending, you’re automatically going to be up there, right? The standard restaurant ending, if we can call it an ending, is getting the bill, which is a bit of a downer, usually. It’s like, “Oh, crap. We spent that much.” You have this little game. All of a sudden, it replaces that friction point with a bit of play. That’s number one.
The other thing is it plays on an effect called the house money effect, which means that the people who come during those times, they tend to spend a little bit more. Order an extra side dish, maybe have another round of drinks, because they figure that there’s a good chance, there’s a one in six chance that it doesn’t cost them anything.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:12:23] DC: Are you looking to elevate your game, take your bottom-line customer relationships, and events to the next level? Then, I want to work with you. I’m Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. I engage with a vast, global audience of print and marketing professionals across all stages of their careers. They are seeking topical information and resources, new ways to serve their customers and connect with them, optimize processes for their communications and operations, and they need the products and services and partnership you offer to get to their next level. Print Media Centr offers an array of unique opportunities that amplify your message and support your mission across the Printerverse. Let’s work together, bring the right people together, and move the industry forward together. Link in the show notes. Engage long and prosper.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:13:25] DC: There’s also the fact that the restaurant isn’t busy, so they’re not trying to churn the tables either.
[0:13:29] GR: Right.
[0:13:30] DC: They can nurture it, they can spend more time telling about the delicious items on the menu, instead of, “Let’s go. I got other tables to take care of here.”
[0:13:39] GR: If you were the CEO of this restaurant, you would have said, “Wow, everybody who comes to the restaurant during the slow period gets a 16.7% discount.” Then traditional Chicago-style economics means that you drop the price, you’re going to get more people. It’s like, no. Because you’re competing with different sets of restaurants at that time. The point is the underlying economics are identical, whether you discount 16.7% across the board, or you give one in six people a break and have it for free. What’s different is that one framing broke the pattern of what we expect a restaurant to do. As diners, or customers generally, we have a tendency to assume the rational straightforward version of a message is the safe choice, right? When it’s actually the one that’s most forgettable.
[0:14:37] DC: Yeah. I don’t remember what this discount is if I go in that hour, which a lot of businesses have discounts in that hour, or even a pre-happy hour special. But I will always remember that damn dice. I’m never going to forget that.
[0:14:55] GR: Never going to forget that.
[0:14:56] DC: Never. I don’t care what their specials are. I’m going there for a different reason.
[0:15:01] GR: What finance people and economists constantly get wrong is that as far as they’re concerned, price is just a number. But for a buyer, for a customer, price is a feeling. It elicits an emotion based on how we present it, the context we present it, and the emotional state, and all of this stuff has an impact on that. I’m sure you could quite easily charge the same rate for the dishes and just have the offer on top of that, right? The offer could be food only, because of the drinks overhead. You’d still have a line out the door at 4.30.
[0:15:47] DC: I think it’s a different choice process people are making at that point.
[0:15:50] GR: Big time. Totally agree.
[0:15:52] DC: If they’re buying on price, then they’re buying on price. If they’re buying on possibility and fun, they’re going to go somewhere else if they’re not risk averse. I would say, do you have the discount and the game? I don’t mean a discount. I mean, even if you look at Uber Eats during those hours, you’ll see all of these specials.
[0:16:11] GR: Yeah, same thing.
[0:16:12] DC: Everybody is two for one-ing. There was a, in the beginning of the year, I’d broken my arm and it was quite debilitating. I was doing a lot of Uber Eatsing. I keep making up these verbs.
[0:16:24] GR: It works for me.
[0:16:26] DC: I was doing a lot of ordering on Uber Eats. When I started noticing that pattern, I would start ordering my dinner at 4.00. Because I’m like, I’m going to get a two-for-one, so I could have it tomorrow. Everything that’s usually $20 is, they have this $12 special going. I would just start strategizing on that. I was personally shopping for those reasons, because that was the thing I was using to distinguish from something else.
[0:16:53] GR: Absolutely. You were using Uber Eats, rather than a competitor.
[0:16:59] DC: Correct.
[0:16:59] GR: Because there was a differentiation.
[0:17:01] DC: Absolutely.
[0:17:03] GR: There was something different about the offer that stood out, and you were making an emotional decision, because that’s how we buy. Whatever we buy, well, apart from commodities, but whatever we buy, from whomever we buy, we buy from the heart, we buy emotionally. Then we subsequently post-rationalize to tell ourselves a story as to what the decision we made was logical, but it wasn’t.
[0:17:29] DC: Yeah. I think that that actually leads into the next discussion point, which is when what something businesses consistently undervalue when trying to be remembered and emotional connection might be one of them.
[0:17:41] GR: I think so.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
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[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:18:26] GR: Normally, when I get asked this type of question, most people think that I’m going to start talking about creativity or budget. I think before we even go down that road, I think we need to consistently think about the parts of the customer experience that don’t feel like marketing at all. All of the operational boring stuff that no one bothers to think about, because they think, “It’s not my job,” and so it’s not documented, and it’s not measured. So, no one thinks about connecting it back to the brand experience, even though it does have a significant impact. If you think about a customer looking at the business, they don’t think about the business as being a sales department and a production department and the operations department and the logistics and accounts and whatever. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all one continuous thing.
When we get into an actual customer interaction, all that polish that we spend on messaging is tested against things that marketing doesn’t actually control. All the things like, how long did it take for the CSR to get back with the proposal? Whether the person on the phone sounds like they actually want to help. Buyers don’t allocate credit the way that the organizational chart does. They don’t care whether the budget is spent. They think about whether it was easy to deal with, whether it matched what their inbuilt expectations were, or whether it didn’t. That matters for memorability reasons, because of how these categories behave over time. Because what we spend on the promotional visible side of marketing depreciates the moment we stop spending.
While we open the tap, all things are great. As soon as we turn the tap off, everything dries up. Customer experience, on the other hand, runs in the opposite direction. It continues. Every good or bad interaction gets noted, consciously or unconsciously, and it gets carried forward into the next decision that a buyer makes about what we’re doing. Again, it’s compounding. It’s multiplicative, instead of depreciating. It’s all very well having the marketing department say, “Well, we’ve got brand guidelines and brand voice, tone of voice documents that everybody needs to follow. But if it takes a customer two emails and a phone call to get any information when the job’s going to come back, then we’re screwed.” It’s basic stuff.
[0:21:15] DC: Yeah, it is. But there’s also something interesting in what you just said and it connected to something I’m always saying to printers when they they’re asking me about their websites and things like that. It goes to these testimonials and customer stories that they tell. I’m like, I want to tell you something that you probably don’t want to hear, but you should listen to me. In advertising, when we recommend printers to each other, we do it by how they handled our disasters, not how they handled our jobs.
[0:21:46] GR: Yes.
[0:21:47] DC: If I were you, I would put a customer disaster that was caused by you. For example, I had one where magazines had to be somewhere when they had to be there, but something, what happened with the precedent was down for a little while. In order to make FedEx, they put them in the cartons and they were not dry and they all stuck to each other.
[0:22:08] GR: Ooh, not good.
[0:22:10] DC: It was for a museum. It was not good. But I called the printer, we’re on it. They drove brand new magazines where it needed to go and we worked out everything after. That was something that made me remember that printer forever and ever and ever. How really that is a very important part of the buying process, that everybody is not perfect if all of your testimonials are saying that you are. That’s fantastic. It’s great to have happy companies, but don’t think that there is no value in trying to be remembered by how you fixed mistakes and not act of God mistakes. Ones you have to admit to, because, by the way, all professional print buyers understand things happen. The truck went down. The press went down. They didn’t get the ink. I mean, the paper didn’t come.
[0:23:09] GR: It happens.
[0:23:10] DC: It’s all a part of the process. Don’t be afraid of that.
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[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:24:14] DC: Okay. How can businesses mix what is known and what is new for the greatest impact, and then we’ll get to your breakdown?
[0:24:23] GR: We need to think about the interactions and what gets noted and what gets forgotten. If we’re obsessing over – Nobody chooses a supplier, because the brand guidelines were flawless. Like you were just saying with your anecdote, right? You’re looking for a partner who’s got your back.
[0:24:43] DC: Very simple. Like I said, peace of mind goes a long way.
[0:24:47] GR: Yes. But I think there are plenty of us who walked away from a possible vendor, because the proposal we got back was wrong twice. Nobody seemed to be bothered to fix it. I think the takeaway is that brand, whatever brand is, it’s one of those wind-through-the-fingers things. It means different things to different people. But it doesn’t live inside the marketing department’s job description. It gets built and eroded every single day by everybody in the business who faces a customer at some point in time. They don’t even realize they’re doing marketing.
[0:25:31] DC: Yes, I do know. I mean, you’re blowing my mind a little here. I do understand exactly what you mean. When I’m speaking with printers and there’s a new initiative, or somebody’s calling about something, I was like, you have to make sure that that thing is clearly communicated to every single person in the print shop. Whether they’re in the supermarket and someone sees they’re wearing a shirt and they ask them a question, or whether it’s the receptionist, or whoever’s at the front desk at the minute being asked about something. They’re not like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” That clarity of everybody is a brand ambassador is what I’m saying.
[0:26:16] GR: Absolutely. Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.
[0:26:19] DC: I mean, we have a grocery store chain here called Publix, and it’s a grocery store, Gee. That’s what it is. It’s a grocery store. I’m telling you, I walk in there and every single employee asks if there’s anything they can do to help me. Do I need to find anything? Do they say good day when they’re stocking the shelves? Obviously, it’s something that they’re asked to do.
[0:26:42] GR: It’s been drilled into them. Sure.
[0:26:45] DC: However, it’s the way that they do it. It’s not like, “Do you need help finding anything?”
[0:26:50] GR: Yeah. Exactly. It’s them saying it.
[0:26:51] DC: Yes.
[0:26:52] GR: It’s not corporate saying it.
[0:26:54] DC: No. It feels authentic. Enough where I’m like, “No, but thank you so much for asking that.” You know what? Sometimes I do need help. They’ve also been trained to take you where it is. I’m like, “No, just tell me what the number is. I’ll get it myself.”
[0:27:07] GR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve been in those sort of places as well.
[0:27:11] DC: Very interesting. Okay, the BS breakdown. Gee gives us three things we can do right now to put today’s discussion in practice.
[0:27:20] GR: Okay. What I would say would be, you need to know an audit. When you do an audit, don’t just audit the brand stuff, the stuff that you think is marketing. Audit the boring stuff, like we’ve just been talking about. The things that we don’t think are marketing, but are actually marketing, okay? The way I describe it is we need to stand in our own queue. We need to walk through our own customer interaction process end-to-end, looking at things like response times and the clarity of invoicing and how the phone gets answered, usual stuff. Treat whatever we find there as seriously as a marketing message that screwed up. Because in effect, these are the places where the memory and reputation are being built. But because it doesn’t have a marketing tag on it, it’s not attributable to marketing. For some reason, it slips through the cracks. But the ones who are doing it well, they don’t apportion this artificial hierarchy as to where the problem is. It’s just sorted. I think standing in our own queue, we need to do that and have an audit about what the customer experience looks like.
Number two, I think we need to look at the internal approval process is and where it’s deleting anything that could possibly be memorable, okay? Look back.
[0:28:53] DC: Step and repeat. Step and repeat. Step and repeat. This worked last month. It’ll work this month. Yeah.
[0:28:59] GR: Just look at the last few pieces of content that your company has produced that went through a full sign of process and look at what got removed at each stage. If when you look at that, the stuff that got removed is the part that could have provoked a reaction. That’s where you’re going wrong, because what you’re doing is optimizing for safety at the expense of being remembered. In my opinion, by doing that, what you’re saying – indirectly, what you’re saying is you don’t trust your marketing people with delivering the message in your absence. If that’s the case, you’ve hired the wrong marketing people.
[0:29:42] DC: Or they’re working at the wrong company.
[0:29:44] GR: One of the two.
[0:29:45] DC: Right.
[0:29:46] GR: The third thing I’d say as a takeaway would be to define a single axis that you think you can be genuinely new on and keep everything else familiar while you do that. Please, do not reinvent your visual identity. Nobody didn’t buy from you, because they didn’t like your logo. Didn’t happen. Nobody didn’t buy for you because they didn’t like the colors on your website, okay? Doesn’t happen, right? The reason why they didn’t buy from you is they didn’t like the meat in the sandwich. They didn’t like what you were saying. Don’t reinvent the visual identity, the tone. Choose one place where it’s worth taking a real risk, a specific point of view, a claim that nobody else, a direct competitor is making, and let it live inside a shell that looks and feels like the business that your people and your clients already recognize. It can’t be too different to what they already know. It has to be expanding on who you think you already are.
[0:31:00] DC: Yeah. There’s also a really big opportunity to, if fighting the rush of that’s not the way we do things around here is going to be too much with established channels and established audience. Okay, make the suggestion to do something new going after new business that these people don’t know who you are. To go after a new demographic, to go after a new vertical, to go after something that there is no risk at all, because these people currently aren’t even – you’re not on their radar, and get them on your radar. You could do that using the same words. But if you do it in a different way, you may be able to slowly convince those powers that be who don’t like change. By the way, never frame it as a change. Always frame it as an improvement. Everybody loves improvements. Nobody loves change.
If you go in, you say, “I want to change the way we speak to our customers.” They’re going to say, “Hell, no.” If you say, “I would like to improve the effectiveness of how we communicate with our customers.” “Ah, interesting. How? What’s going on there?” That becomes an opportunity to actually do something new. Over these past three conversations, we’ve looked at this topic of known beats new through the lenses of human behavior, business behavior and marketplace outcomes. If there is one lesson that connects all three, it’s that standing out isn’t about being radically different. It’s about understanding what people already know, recognizing what they remember and creating a meaningful distinction where it matters. Gee –
[0:32:51] GR: Exactly.
[0:32:52] DC: Thank you so much for your time, for your knowledge sharing, for your expertise and your mind-blowing statements that –
[0:33:02] GR: Very, very kind. Thank you.
[0:33:03] DC: Yeah. We’re on video and a couple of times my eyes have popped out of my head on this podcast. All of you, thank you so much for joining us as well. Please subscribe to Podcasts From the Printerverse wherever you are listening, so you never miss an episode. Everything you need to connect with me and Gee is in the show notes. Until next time, market long and prosper.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:33:28] DC: Thanks for listening to Podcasts From the Printerverse. Please subscribe, click some stars, and leave us a review. Connect with us through printmediacentr.com. We’d love to hear your feedback on our shows and topics that are of interest for future broadcasts. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long and prosper.
[END]
