[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]
[0:01:04] DC: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the first episode of B2B Marketing BS, where BS stands for Behavior and Strategy. Before we dive into the topics we’ll be exploring in this series, I wanted to start by introducing my co-host, Gee Ranasinha.
[0:01:21] GR: Hi. How are you doing today, Deborah?
[0:01:24] DC: I am lovely. Gee is the Founder of KEXINO, a B2B marketing agency and behavioral science consultancy. He has spent decades helping companies understand how customers make decisions and how businesses can communicate more effectively. Gee and I discovered that we share many of the same views about how marketing is discussed. And too often, the conversation focuses on tactics and trends and platforms and promotions without actually addressing the behaviors and motivation that drive decision making in the first place. That is what led to this podcast. Our goal is to explore marketing from a different angle, one that helps business owners, marketers, sales teams and industry professionals better understand the people they serve, so they can sharpen their messaging, strengthen their positioning and communicate with greater impact.
[0:02:26] GR: Well said. I think behavioral science and actually understanding the emotional drivers that influence purchase is becoming and will become more important as we move forward, especially with AI. The way I look at it in terms of AI, I like to think of behavioral science as being the missing link between the technical capabilities of AI and the actual practical value of AI. It’s almost like behavioral science is the instruction manual. Because if we can understand how humans react to a particular stimuli, we can build better communication, more relevant, more resonant communication which is going to convert better, which is obviously the reason why we’re doing all of this stuff.
[0:03:24] DC: Yeah. You’ve had a very unconventional career path. Let’s tell people more about you, about your journey and what point did you realize that marketing really wasn’t about marketing?
[0:03:37] GR: Firstly, I think speak to anybody even vaguely in the printing industry. They’ve all had some really convoluted way to get where they are today. It’s really weird. For me, it was convoluted, coming at it from tangents. Let’s start from pretty much the middle, where I was an advertising photographer.
[0:04:05] DC: Did not know that. I love that.
[0:04:08] GR: Yeah. I was an advertising photographer for five years. We had a small company working primarily with ad agencies, though we worked directly within house marketing departments as well for various bits and pieces. It was press ads. It was annual reports, calendars. One point I directed a TV commercial, which I was very proud of, because in those days, you could jump over particular areas of responsibility, right? The account executive for that particular client was very confident in my abilities on the still side, so it didn’t take much to persuade the client to get me onboard with that.
Anyway, I was working in a particular way and I didn’t realize it at the time. It wasn’t something conscious, or deliberate. The way that I was working, the way that I was interacting with the people that I needed to interact with to get a good job done wasn’t conventional. It wasn’t the way that everybody else did things. Let me give you an example. See, the thing is, what I haven’t said so far, honestly, I wasn’t that good a photographer. I mean, I was competent. The stuff was in focus. The stuff was usable. We didn’t have many reshoots. But I wasn’t Richard Avedon, right? I wasn’t Patrick Demarchelier, right? I was okay. But some of my peers were like, did stunning work.
Like I said, it wasn’t a deliberate action, but I felt that I needed to compete across a measurement that other people weren’t willing to do, which in essence is a facet of marketing. You’re positioning your value and you’re articulating it in a way which is measurably different and is valued by whoever’s paying your bill, which for marketing cases, obviously, the end user, the customer. Because the customer paid all our bills.
[0:06:09] DC: Yeah. No, I completely understand.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:06:13] DC: Print Media Centr provides printspiration and resources to our vast network of global print and marketing professionals. Whether you are an industry supplier, print service provider, print customer, or consultant, we have you covered by providing resources and strategies that enable business marketing and creative success, reporting from global events, these podcasts, Project Peacock TV, and an array of community-lifting initiatives. We also work with OEMs, suppliers, industry organizations, and event producers, helping you connect and engage with our vast audience and achieve success with your sales, marketing, and conference endeavors. Visit Print Media Centr and connect with the Printerverse. Links in the show notes. Print long and prosper.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:07:07] DC: What are some of the most costly misconceptions businesses have about their customers?
[0:07:15] GR: Some of the most costly misconceptions. I would say, if we keep giving customers what they say they want, they’re going to keep on buying. Because a customer is actually a lousy determiner of what they want. Because if you ask a customer what they want, they will tell you what they want today. Because that’s their problem. Their problem is what’s in their inbox today. They’re not thinking about tomorrow, because tomorrow doesn’t exist. The mistake sits in treating a customer stated preference as being a fixed thing. While in reality, what it is is a snapshot of where they happen to be that day. If you are someone where their pain point is today, you’ll get an answer. Ask tomorrow, you’ll probably get a different answer. Or maybe you won’t get an answer.
The frame of reference is moving, while our – as in the people who are doing the marketing. If we’re not careful, our frame of reference stays put. The example I always use here is the VHS example.
[0:08:21] DC: Wait, you’re going to have to explain what that is to people.
[0:08:24] GR: Yeah, yeah. Anybody under the age of what 35 to 40 doesn’t know what VHS is.
[0:08:29] DC: I don’t know. I had a millennial yesterday say she didn’t want to date herself. I was like, “Okay.” All the Gen Xers just fell off their chairs.
[0:08:38] GR: Okay. If we go back to VHS video cassettes. Now, imagine you were a company deciding to build the best VHS recorder in the world. You had every scrap of customer research confirmed and extrapolated that people really want to have a better VHS recorder. They are prepared to pay for a better VHS recorder. Because the VHS recorders that are available today suck across various different measurements. That all sounds great in terms of having a new VHS recorder right up until Netflix showed up.
[0:09:21] DC: No, DVDs were first.
[0:09:23] GR: Yeah, absolutely.
[0:09:25] DC: And Bluetooth before that.
[0:09:27] GR: Blu-ray.
[0:09:27] DC: I mean, Blu-ray. Yeah.
[0:09:30] GR: The point is the whole category evaporated instantly, okay. The customers who said, “We really want a better VHS recorder,” they weren’t lying when they said they wanted a better VHS company, when they did the surveys, right? They were answering the question that we asked them. That’s the problem. We asked the wrong question. What we asked them was some kind of variation of how do we improve the thing that you already have?
[0:09:55] DC: How do we make the VHS better? Exactly.
[0:09:58] GR: Well, the real question we should have asked them is how do you want to watch a movie?
[0:10:03] DC: Mm-hmm.
[0:10:05] GR: I really believe that customers don’t care about our product. They don’t care about our roadmap. They don’t care about our quarterly sales targets, or any of that crap, right? What they care about is getting a problem off their plate with the least friction possible. Now, today it might be what we’re selling, but there’s no guarantee it’ll be the same thing, what they want tomorrow. Asking customers directly what tomorrow looks like isn’t the way that we find that out, because honestly, they don’t know.
[0:10:37] DC: Correct. You’re right. Consumerism is an ignition of little moments of choice. I need this now. Okay. There’s only so many options of how that can happen. I have been on this customer convenience kick, because it is my jam. I realized that I function this way. If I function this way, I’m not the only one who functions this way.
[0:11:03] GR: Absolutely.
[0:11:04] DC: I would say, one of the most costly misconceptions businesses have about their customers is that they want to follow their process, instead of a process that makes sense to them. Whether that’s understanding all the different types of finishing applications on a piece of print, or whether that is buying cat food from Chewy, or Amazon, or Petco, or something, which I had to do the other day. I went on this, where honestly, right now, I’m like, what’s the best deal I can get? Because it’s the same cat food. You know what I mean? I went for Chewy, everybody, and I did the auto ship and now I don’t have to think about it at all.
[0:11:49] GR: Chewy. It’s funny you should mention Chewy, because they are one of my marketing heroes.
[0:11:54] DC: Yay.
[0:11:55] GR: I don’t think they exist in Europe. Or if they do, they’re branded something else. But the way Chewy do things is absolutely stunning, absolutely marvelous. I don’t know if you know a story about what happens if you have a subscription and your pet passes on. I don’t know if you know what the process is at Chewy.
[0:12:17] DC: No. Do they send your card, or something?
[0:12:21] GR: The first thing you do, you email them, or you call them up, or whatever you need to do and say, “Look, I need to stop my subscription, because this thing has happened.”
[0:12:30] DC: Rover’s gone over.
[0:12:32] GR: They say, “Okay. Whatever you’ve got now, you keep. Give it to your friends. Give it to whoever you wanted to. You won’t be charged for the last delivery.” Then, yeah, it is. As you say, a week later, you get a bunch of flowers and a card. Now, in terms of a financial expense, it’s washers, right? It’s a rounding error. It’s nothing. But in terms of the customer experience.
[0:13:03] DC: Loyalty retention.
[0:13:05] GR: After the fact, the pet has gone, right? It’s not okay. 50% of pet owners, when a pet dies, they get another one, right? If they do, which pet food are they going to buy?
[0:13:18] DC: 1000%. Just by you telling me this, I’m never buying it from anywhere else ever again, because I support that process and that relationship that they want to have with their customers, who they know are passionate about their pets.
[0:13:35] GR: Yes. Exactly. It’s the brand voice. If you have that conversation with finance people, with economists, they’ll say, “Well, what’s the ROI on that? I mean, how do we know we’re going to get?” It’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Sometimes there isn’t an ROI that you can draw a direct line between an action and an outcome. That, unfortunately, is the messy middle of marketing, and which is why from a bigger aspect, which we’ll discuss, I’m sure, in another episode, is why finance and marketing are often at loggerheads with each other, because of the way they define success.
What I wanted to say about what customers think and what they end up doing, there’s a thing in behavioral science called the intention-behavior gap. Sometimes people call it the say-do gap, because it’s easier to remember, okay? To simplify it, it’s customers say one thing and do something else. It’s something like 30% accuracy, right? Methods that observe actual behavior, instead of asking about it, they’re quite far away. Online shoppers were surveyed and then they looked at their buying behavior and they found pretty much 40% of people said they were going to do this, but they actually did something a lot more boring.
[0:15:01] DC: When I was thinking about this podcast, it was important to me that we covered topics without skimming the surface. I mean, I understand about people and time management and there’s a way that you want to be able to pay attention to things, but not have it rushed, or have to do additional research after the conversation to really expand on the ideas. We decided instead of covering a topic in a single episode that we would create a topic and then have it unfold over three different conversations.
[0:15:38] GR: It’s like a Netflix mini-series.
[0:15:40] DC: It is like a Netflix. And a limited mini-series, because there’s only three episodes. The first, we’ll look at the topic from the human behavior lens. The second, we’ll look at it as from the business behavior lens, and the third podcast, we’ll wrap it up with the real-world consequences.
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[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:17:01] DC: Gee, let’s talk about what listeners can expect from the human behavior conversations.
[0:17:10] GR: From a human behavioral standpoint, the human behavioral standpoint is based upon the individual, the person sitting across the table, the person who is reading the email, reading our ad, reading our social media post, right? The person who’s being exposed to our brand and our product before any organizational chart, or budget cycle has got involved. It’s what happens inside somebody’s head. When they choose, usually it’s a choice between a familiar option and a new option. It’s when they trust one salesperson and not another salesperson. This type of stuff is where the actual biopsychology lives, when we start talking about things like heuristics, which sounds like a great word if you’re in biopsychology, or neuroscience, but heuristics is just basically a mental shortcut, so that we don’t have to think about what option we need to do. Heuristics, you can call it as a gut feeling. What’s worked for us in the past that we’ve used as a metric and we can do again?
[0:18:24] DC: Kind of like, “this good, buy it.”
[0:18:27] GR: Right. It hasn’t let us down before. This is a shortcut, because of the way the brain works, which again, we can talk about, I’m sure we will talk about in a future episode. There’s heuristics to take into account, which influenced by behavior. There are things called cognitive biases. We are not neutral and unbiased in the way that we make choices, even though we like to think we are. We are conning ourselves. These biases, these heuristics, our shortcuts are because thinking everything through from scratch every time would be exhausting and would be so slow.
There is a thing in behavioral science called the mere exposure effect. It was first documented in the 60s. The experiments have been repeated many times and they’ve always confirmed the results. Basically, what it’s saying is that people develop a preference for something purely because they’ve been exposed to it before. It’s not new. The most famous study of this effect was in the early 90s. What they did is, imagine you’re in a university lecture class, you know, those tiered ones, those huge, big ones, right?
[0:19:43] DC: We call it stadium seating.
[0:19:44] GR: Okay. You’re in that lecture hall and there’s at least a 100 students in the class. It’s a kind of class where nobody really knows everybody, those types of classes. What they did, they did this experiment and had the researchers. What they did is they had four women sit in the class, each one sitting there for a different number of times during a semester. Some of the women attended the class 15 times, some of them five times. I think one of them didn’t show up at all. Now, none of these women spoke to a single student, okay. They just turned up to class, sat there, listened to the lecture and left.
Now, at the end of the semester, they asked the class a question. They showed them photos of these four women and they asked the class to rate how attractive they thought these women were. Now, they didn’t know these women. They didn’t consciously know these women, but unconsciously they did. Now, the women – I think it was just one. There may have been two who showed up most often, like 15 times, was rated more attractive than the woman who didn’t show up at all, or didn’t show up as often. Now, nobody in that woman could tell you a single thing about this person. They’d just seen her consciously, or unconsciously enough times to feel like they already knew who she was, and that feeling was enough to create trust to the point where they could make a decision about that person. The point of this is nothing to do with –
[0:21:19] DC: A choice.
[0:21:20] GR: Right. It’s that recognition can operate with zero content behind it. Nobody’s had a conversation. There’s been no sales pitch. There’s been no case study. It’s just showing up. It’s just repeated presence; simply turning up again and again consistently is enough. How crazy is that?
[0:21:42] DC: I think that is completely crazy.
[0:21:46] GR: The brain is hardwired to notice what’s different, not what’s the same. This is evolutionary. For example, we learn not to eat those berries, right?
[0:22:00] DC: But that’s only because the other cave person died in front of you from doing it.
[0:22:04] GR: Exactly. Right.
[0:22:05] DC: Right. You get a study about the berries.
[0:22:09] GR: We learn about what’s common and we learn about what’s uncommon. Again, think about cavemen. If you’re walking through the forest, or the jungle and you see something in your peripheral vision that catches your eye, you’re in fight, or flight mode, right? You don’t know whether it’s a little pussy cat, or whether it’s a saber-toothed tiger. But you need to make that decision quickly, because otherwise, your genetics stop right here.
[0:22:36] DC: Right. You are the catching dinner, or your dinner, one or the other.
[0:22:40] GR: Exactly. The thing is nowadays, firstly, there aren’t too many saber – I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but I haven’t seen a saber-toothed tiger walking down the street for a long time. It must be the weather. I don’t know what it is. The thing is, we’re still shaved monkeys, right? We’re still reacting in the same way. As marketers, we can either utilize these reactions to create greater, more robust memory structures, so that when a buyer is ready to buy, they think of us as well as obviously the competition, but at least we’re on that list. Because otherwise, if we’re not there, then we might as well not exist.
[0:23:21] DC: Yeah. To your point, fear-based marketing is real. It’s if you don’t buy this, you’re going to die within your car, because you don’t have the right tool to break your window. The life alert things and the fold down if you can’t get up. I mean, I’m not saying they’re not based on reality, but they certainly prey upon, oh, my God, I don’t want that to happen to my mother, or my grandmother, or me, or anybody else.
[0:23:48] GR: Exactly.
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[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:24:26] DC: The next aspect we’re taking of our topics is to look at them from the business behavior lens. What is that going to entail?
[0:24:39] GR: The next level is taking the same underlying humans, let’s call it software code, but now, instead of being in an individual, it’s now sitting inside an organization, an organization that has a budget cycle, a reporting structure, and –
[0:24:57] DC: A messaging calendar.
[0:24:59] GR: And incentives that don’t always point in the same direction as maybe judgment does, right? It’s where any individual behavioral insight disappears. Because the corporate structure rewards, well, the corporate structure rewards different things and it says it rewards, right? But ignoring that. If we think about, as an example, things like brand building, if we look at long-term category presence, that stuff doesn’t show up in a quarterly spreadsheet, because the return on that thing is over years, can be over decades. As a consequence, it’s the first thing that’s cut when a quarter starts looking soft. The last thing to be funded when things looking healthy again, even though nine times out of 10, it’s the thing with the biggest long-term effect on sales pipeline. But we’re forgetting all of that because we’re looking at things from a finance lens, instead of a sales lens. Why is it?
I mean, what we’re talking about is personal branding. Why is it that if we use LinkedIn as an example, people are happy to follow employees of a brand, but nobody bothers with a company page, do they? Because it’s been sanitized.
[0:26:19] DC: If you want to tag them, you have to.
[0:26:20] GR: Right? It’s been sanitized within an inch of its life. It’s gone through so many different approval cycles. It’s had all of the edges sanded off. At the end of the day, it’s not saying anything. Most corporate LinkedIn pages are just – it’s visual muzak, right? It’s just crap. It’s that nonsense. If you’re following even a person who’s not particularly high up in the pecking order of the organization, you’re speaking with a person, a real person. Of course, like you say, they’re not going to be lunatics and say crazy stuff, but you want that authenticity, which you don’t get with a behemoth of an organization. There are a few exceptions who’ve learned how to play the game, but they’re very far and a few and far between, unfortunately.
[0:27:15] DC: Definitely. That’s why they make such a difference when they’re out there and creating amazing content.
[0:27:23] GR: You need two parties. You need to have the agency that’s brave enough to travel the road less traveled, right? Then you need a client who can actually see the bigger picture.
[0:27:34] DC: Okay. We have really been talking about this whole time. But if you could extrapolate what we’ve been saying and how our third – for how we’re going to wrap up our little series, is our arc, is to talk about the real-life consequences of these behavioral – human behavior and the business behavior coming together, and how does that affect the real world? We talked about it in a Red Bull sense. We talked about it in Chewy. We talked about it just now for Coca-Cola International, but it’s bigger than just these three companies and three successful things that they’ve done, although Coca-Cola does that all the time.
[0:28:16] GR: That’s why it gets interesting, because it’s where it stops becoming theory and it starts becoming, so what actually happened? What was the result? Maybe our market share moved, or maybe it didn’t move. Maybe we closed a deal, or maybe it went to a cheaper competitor. Maybe a rebrand landed well, or the sales team stopped using the new materials within six months and didn’t tell anyone, right? That’s the section of each topic where the audience gets to see the validation, the receipts, right? The actual outcomes that businesses lived through once the human behavior side of things and the business behavior side of things collide with reality, with paying the bills, with generating pipeline, with closing business and generating that revenue. It’s where the rubber meets the road, really, I think, the real-world consequences stuff.
[0:29:13] DC: Our first topic that we’re going to explore in three episodes is called “Known Beats New”. What is the central idea behind that?
[0:29:22] GR: If you asked most people whether they prefer new things, right, new products, new ideas, new opportunities, nine times out of 10, you usually get a positive answer, saying yes, okay? That’s the story people tell about themselves. More importantly, it’s what they want us to know about them. The thing is, if we actually watch what they actually choose in a decision that matters, okay? If we’re talking about commodity stuff is a different matter, right? I don’t care which brand of paper clips I buy. I don’t think you do either, right? It’s commodity sale. It doesn’t matter.
[0:30:04] DC: Not paper clips.
[0:30:06] GR: Not paper clips. I don’t care. But if we think about what people actually choose in a decision that matters, what they say is, what they do is often the opposite. The familiar wins over this new novel product, or service. What’s already been known has an advantage over what is, in essence, what is still unproven. Known doesn’t win because of any particular objectively better metric. It’s just because trust, which is what all we’re selling, right? At the beginning of any customer interaction, any business anywhere on the planet is selling the same thing, trust. Because if I don’t trust you, I’m not going to buy from you, am I?
It’s that trust runs on recognition way, way, way before it starts running on things like evidence. Recognition is something, as I mentioned before, from that experiment, it’s something the brain gets for free just by having seen the thing before. It doesn’t need any arbiter proof of quality.
[0:31:14] DC: Yeah. I mean, it’s like, you go to the grocery store and you see new packaging, same great taste, because they have to tell you, we redesigned our package. But what’s in there, you can still trust as being the thing you used to look for in green and white, and now it’s red and green. Well, no, you would never do red and green. White and green.
[0:31:34] GR: Right.
[0:31:35] DC: It is fascinating. I am looking forward to our series. I want to thank all of you for joining us for our first episode of B2B Marketing BS. Please subscribe to Podcasts From the Printerverse wherever you’re listening, so you never miss an episode. Everything you need to connect with Gee and his companies and his knowledge, anything he wants to share is in the show notes. Until next time, everybody, market long and prosper.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:32:06] 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 broadcast. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long and prosper.
[END]
