Transcript

Bennie F Johnson 

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this special episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected.

We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, my special guest is none other than Nancy Harhut. Nancy is co-founder and chief creative officer of HPT Marketing. Her specialty is blending the best of breed creativity with behavioral science.

She and her teams have won over 200, we’ll say that again, 200 international and national awards for marketing effectiveness. Along the way, she’s helped to generate 68 million in incremental revenue for Nationwide, established seven controls for the GM card, and created one of H &R Block’s most successful campaigns. Recognized for her outstanding work in B2C, B2B, and nonprofit, she was named as one of the 10 most fascinating people in B2B marketing, a social top 50 email marketing leader, and a top 40 digital strategist. Special to us in this podcast, she is the 2023 American Marketing Association Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award winner. In her book, Using Behavioral Science and Marketing, Drive Customer Action and Loyalty by Prompting Instinctive Responses, which illustrates this application of behavioral principles in marketing. And Len Berry is a friend of this podcast and one of our very first guests. Nancy, welcome.

Nancy Harhut

My goodness, Bennie, thank you so much. That was a lovely introduction and I am so psyched to be here.

Bennie 

Well, we’re excited to have you as well. And we keep crossing out in the wilds talking about marketing. And so it’s really nice to be able to sit down for this moment and have the conversation. I’m going to ask this question because it’s just a fun space in the bio. How did it feel to be named one of the 10 most fascinating people in B2B marketing?

Nancy 

Say it came as quite a surprise and but but it was lovely. I mean it felt great. I was like oh my goodness. It was a an article that I appeared that appeared I think in Forbes. It was written by Ruth Stevens and for there was a stretch where every year she was pulling together the the most fascinating people in B2B and one year she decided I was one of them and then she she named me the Energizer Bunny of B2B copywriting. So I was like there are

Bennie

There you go. My goodness.

Nancy 

There’s probably no one else who’s got that moniker. So, it’s kind of cool. I’m very happy.

Bennie 

So I’m going to ask this question. You’ve done the gamut of marketing work and strategy, but what keeps you coming back to the B2B space?

Nancy 

Well, you know, I love marketing, right? I love trying to solve a client’s challenge. And it could be B2B, it could be B2C. You know, on any given year, our agency skews one way or the other. You know, we’re always doing both, but some years were, you know, more B2B, just a little B2C. Other years, we’re heavily into B2C and just a little bit of B2B. There’s always a sprinkling of not-for-profit. So it’s just, I love the industry and it’s not like I just… Gravitate towards B2B. It’s really more what my particular clients are looking for at the time. But B2B is interesting in that there’s a longer sales cycle, and we’re talking about more considered purchases, and larger budgets, and more decision makers. So there are some unique challenges to it that we have to tackle as marketers. So that’s always fun, right?

Bennie

Right. Right. Right. Right. And question, what are some of the misconceptions, though, about B2B marketing? We often see people dropping themselves in camps on B2B, on B2C. But when we really think about it, as we said before, it’s all marketing. What’s some of the misconceptions about getting into the space?

Nancy

So I think one of the misconceptions is when we’re doing B2B marketing or B2B advertising, we need to speak a certain way, right? We have to use the industry vernacular, the jargon, the buzz phrases, and we also have to…

Have big thick paragraphs of copy and long run on sentences because we’re in the B2B space and that’s what makes us look legitimate. And the truth of the matter is there have been a lot of behavioral science studies that show that people really just prefer things that are easier to think about and easier to understand. And that applies on both the B2B and on the B2C, and I should say both the B2B and the B2C camps. When we rely too much on the jargon and the industry buzz phrases, we start to create wallpaper. What we really need to do is we really just need to use language that’s going to connect with our audience, know, because at end of the day, people are people. So I think one of the misconceptions is we have to have this more stilted, more, you know, jargon filled language. We really don’t. It actually does us a disservice.

Bennie

Right. It’s one of those things that you get into the system of this is what I think, this is how I think a B2B marketer should sound. And you get locked into the space, but it has you working against your core training and understanding of what a marketer should sound like.

Nancy 

Absolutely. Another misconception is there’s no role for emotion in B2B. That emotion is all for B2C or not for profit. The truth of the matter is people buy for emotional reasons and then they later justify with rational reasons, which means in marketing across the board, we want both the rational and the emotional. I think it was the B2B Institute who ran a study and they found that you can 7x your sales revenue and profitability when you infuse some emotion into your marketing messages. And this is again, the B2B Institute.

Bennie

Right, so true. So tell me a bit about how you got really involved in teasing out behavioral science and marketing. It’s really kind of a hallmark of your work. So talk a bit more about behavioral science and marketing.

Nancy 

Yes. So, when we talk about behavioral science, some people are like, in the world is that? very simply, it’s the study of how people behave. But more specifically, it’s the study of why people do what they do and, from a marketing perspective, how we can get them to do more of what we want them to do. And years ago, a mentor of mine recommended a book by Dr. Robert Cialdini called Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion. And as I read the book, I was just…

Taken by the information I was finding about behavioral science. And I was underlying and writing margin notes and highlighting. And I was thinking about the different marketing challenges that I was currently working on for my clients was doing some work with, I think, the Boston Globe, and they were trying to increase subscriptions. And I was doing work with a life insurance company, and they were trying to get people to buy life insurance. And I’m reading Chaldini’s book, and I’m like, that’s interesting. I can try that. I can try that. So then I start to quietly, you know,

Bennie, I  just introduced some of these principles into the work that I’m doing and I start to see the results. Then it was like the point of no return. like, this stuff really works.

Bennie 

Right.

Nancy

The application for marketing is so strong because at the end of the day, we’re trying to influence behavior, right? And his book is about how to influence it. So I went down the rabbit hole and I just started to read whatever I could get my hands on. I had the opportunity to work with a cognitive scientist. I had the opportunity to do a little work with a behavioral economist and really just started to, know, the more I learned, the more I put the learnings into practice, the more convinced I became that this is an important tool for marketers. So that’s how it started. That’s how it continues. I’ve just never looked back.

Bennie

Right? Right. I mean, it’s winning the Len Berry Award. I mean, that’s our highest distinction of a marketing book of the year. And it was this using behavioral science and marketing that really broke through and resonated with the judges and resonated with the audience. And to talk about the power that we have there. When you look at the behavioral principles, are there times that you just look in the marketplace and wish people did something different?

Have you ever, are you guilty of that my friend, of looking around and you’re like, I know better, I wish they did better.

Nancy

Or all the time. I mean, both things happen. I’ll be out in the world and I’ll see something and I’ll go, that is such a smart application. I’m running through the airport and I’m stopping to take a picture of something. So I’m like, that’s a great example of the rhyme is reason bias. Or that’s a great example of price anchoring or something. But also, as a consumer, you’re out there and you’re like, that’s such a miss. Why did they say this? no, this could have been so much better.

Bennie 

Great. Right.

Nancy 

There have been times, Bennie, when I’ve been in between jobs, right? And I would see something, you know, something, some ad, you know, popped up on my computer or maybe a piece of mail I received. I would rewrite things, okay? These are not my clients. I had no hope of becoming employed by them, but it, you know, it was just, it was driving me crazy. I’m like, no, no, no, it should have been like this if they’d only said this, you know? So yeah, you know, you see things and you’re like, with a slight change, a different word, a different phrase, a different lead in, a different approach. Or perspective, this could be so much more effective. And the more you know about behavioral science, the more these things jump out at you.

Bennie

We both smile so broadly because what you just described, I’m sure every person listening today is guilty of that same thing. We market regardless. If we have a client, if we’re getting paid for it, if we’re thinking about it, if it’s our product, your brain starts to problem solve and think of that. That’s a great example that you jumped into that. Well, know, one of the things we talk about some of those

Nancy 

Yeah, it’s like an occupational hazard. You can’t shut it off.

Bennie 

those powers that we have or that we see in marketing. There’s a lot of conversation in today’s world about the power of storytelling. And I’d love to kind of dig into that a bit because we as humans, we make meaning. We are creatures of our own habit. And we rely on our instincts to make decisions in time. What can we do as marketers to understand this better and to build this into helping to make better campaigns and better work.

Nancy 

That’s a great point and a great question because storytelling can be so effective for marketers. When you think about it, stories were how information was handed down from generation to generation before the written word. We all learned from stories. Now all these generations and generations later, we still make sense of the world with stories. And if we’re absent a story, we create our own. We create a story.

Bennie 

Right.

Nancy

If we’re not provided one. So marketers have a big opportunity here to get out ahead and to plant their story in people’s minds. And that’s another interesting thing about stories. Stories are perhaps the one vehicle we have that allow us to take what’s in our heads as marketers and literally put those seeds into our audience’s head and make the audience think of it as their own, right? Because that’s what stories do. We get kind of transported along.

When we’re reading a story or listening to a story and we start to feel what the main character feels and we start to experience that. So if you want people to know how wonderful it feels to use your product or service, you tell the right story and they start to feel it. And then from a behavioral science perspective, stories impact the brain differently. So if we’re only dealing with facts and figures, that impacts

Bennie

Right.

Nancy 

Or activates, I should say, two areas of the brain, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Those are the two areas that are responsible for processing language. But when you tell a story, it activates the other parts of your brain. If I was telling you that I woke up this morning to the smell of hazelnut coffee wafting under my door jam, and then I went out for a run, but I tripped over a… A tree branch and face planted head first into the concrete and smashed my nose. Now I’m telling you a story and I’ve involved your olfactory senses because I talked about the smell of hazelnut coffee and I’ve talked about going for a run and face planting and that’s your motor cortex. These various parts of the brain that we start to involve, the more of them that we involve, the better we understand the information and the longer we remember.

And what do marketers want? We want people to understand our main message and we want them to recall it when the time is right. So stories are so valuable in that respect.

Bennie 

Right. Right. So talk a bit about our contemporary space. We have the ability not only to tell stories, but in effect, deputize our customers to sometimes tell even better stories about the brand than we can.

Nancy 

Absolutely. People will take what a marketer says with a grain of salt. We can tell them our story and for all the reasons we just discussed it, it will be effective. But there’s always just a little bit of skepticism because it’s the marketer who’s saying it. Of course you think your product is wonderful. Of course you think your service is fantastic. What else would you say? But when somebody like me, another customer, has something wonderful to say, that’s when things get really believable.

Customer has no particular reason to be telling the story other than they had a favorable experience and they want to share it. I went on a boat cruise once. Bennie, I was jonesing, jonesing, jonesing, jonesing to do this Caribbean yacht tour where you rent a boat with a captain and a cook and a crew and they just take you from island to island. And I worked on this group of friends for easily three years.

We have to go, have to. Finally, they agree. We’re all set, right? Now I know that I’m prone to motion sickness, but I’m like, that’s okay. I’m gonna get some Dramamine and I’m gonna get one of those scope patches. And then I read about this thing called a relief band that you kind of put on your wrist like a watch, but it also is supposed to control motion sickness. So I come armed with everything. We get on the boat, Benny, we’re not on the boat 10 minutes and I am green. I’m thinking, like my friends are going to kill me because now we’re out here for this whole week and I am absolutely green. Anyway, long story short, I grabbed this relief band, I put it on, a minute later I am fine. The thing never left my wrist for the entire week of the cruise. I felt fine. I will tell, and this is a perfect example, I will tell anybody that story, anyone that I see looking a little

Bennie

Wow.

Nancy

Now, green on an airplane, anyone who happens to mention, oh, motion sick, anyone who happens to say, oh, I’m going to be going on a cruise. I, you know, I am such a proponent because it worked for me. And those are the stories, as you’re saying, that can be so meaningful and so helpful to us as marketers and as brands, because it’s our constituents, it’s our audience that are telling them and they’re believable and they’re credible and they have the proof points and the details and the passion behind them.

Bennie

So as creatures of habit, what advice do you have for integrating these revised or newer approaches into the marketing that we do? I think of that department that’s been successful for some time, but has an opportunity to do better.

Nancy 

So the opportunity to maybe add some behavioral science into the marketing best practices. Yeah, I say what you should do is you should start to test it. Because some people are like, well, I don’t know. I don’t know if this is going to work. I’m skeptical. Other people are like, I’m sure it’s not going to work. That’s OK. Start by just testing and see the results. And the more you test, I believe, based on all the work I’ve done with many, many clients across so many different verticals. The more you test, the more you’re going to see positive results. The truth is, people do have these hardwired automatic responses. And as marketers, when we learn how to prompt or trigger them, when we can tap into them, it increases the likelihood we get the response that we want. There’s no magic wand. I’m not talking about smoke and mirrors here. There’s no way we can get 100 % of the people to do 100 % of what we want 100 % of the time. It’s never going to happen greatly increase the likelihood that people will pay attention to your message, that they’ll understand it, that they’ll remember it, that they’ll act on it when you add some behavioral science into your best practices. So you certainly want to have the best practices for the particular channel that you’re advertising in, and you want to overlay that with behavioral science. And that one-two punch is what really increases your likelihood of success.

Bennie 

Now, I am definitely a believer in the methods and approach we’re talking about. But I want to ask a probing question, a challenging question. And it’s around evolution. So if our products evolve and our customers are evolving, how does our use of behavioral science evolve? I’m thinking of the way we engage with that customer of email 20 years ago. It’s very different now after they’ve had 20 years of email. Or they’re like my kids who weren’t around 20 years ago, right?

Nancy 

Sure, sure. I think what we need to do is we need to A, make sure that we don’t overuse anything. Even more importantly is B, we need to use these tactics ethically, responsibly, honestly. So one of the quickest ways to get people to tune out is to misrepresent what our marketing message is. For example, we talk about scarcity. People are more likely to act if there’s a limited quantity, right? And so if we say there’s a limited quantity, people act and then they find out that there’s an unlimited quantity that we actually misled them. They’re not going to believe us that erodes brand trust and it’s virtually impossible to get back, right? Certainly very, very, very hard. So what we need to do is we need to think about who our audience is, what their mindset is, what the potential buying barriers might be. Then we look to behavioral science and in my book, I talk about, I think, 25 different go-to principles that have really worked well for my clients. We look at what behavioral science has to say, and we continue to look at the new studies that come out. I just posted something today. It was a study that came out of, I think, Columbia and UCLA that was done like a year or so ago. There’s continually new behavioral science findings coming out. But what we want to do is we want to tap into what’s out there, what’s continuing to come out. We want to find the right behavioral science tactic to address the particular challenge in front of us, the buying barrier in front of us. And then we want to use it honestly, ethically. We want to keep things fresh. We don’t want to overuse anything. But used properly, it’s almost like they slide in under the radar and they work. But when you start to misuse them, people pay attention. And that’s when they get resistant.

Bennie 

That makes a lot of sense and I think that’s great advice. One of the things, commentary that was offered in the book was that you’re providing lessons that aren’t just about starting your career, but they can be applied at every step of your career as a marketer. What were you thinking about as you were kind of building this book and this body of knowledge? Were you actively thinking about, how is the entry marketing manager going to take this versus the director versus the CMO?

Nancy 

So it’s interesting. I never expected to write a book, first of all. So we’ll step back and say that. And then when I had the opportunity, Kogan Page reached out to me and said, would you be interested in submitting a proposal? And I was like, yes, I would. So anyway, the proposal gets accepted. So now I’m thinking, all right, I never really considered writing a book. Now I’ve got this opportunity. And honestly, Benny, what I did is I tried to take all of my years of experience and distill them into this book. Because I thought,

Bennie 

Okay. Yeah, right

Nancy 

I’ve learned so much over the years through research, through trial and error, through testing. And I’m at the point now where I know quite a lot. And I’m happy to share that with people when I speak, because I do a fair amount of speaking out in the industry, just like you do. And I’m happy to obviously work with clients. But realistically, there are only so many clients an agency can work with. But if I have this chance to write a book, I can put so much into it so that everybody can use it.

An entrepreneur, a person who’s just starting out, somebody who’s at the middle of their career, somebody who’s more advanced but considers themselves a constant student. And really, we should all be thinking of ourselves as people who are students of the craft. But I tried to think about what are the marketing challenges that are out there and how might these behavioral science principles work to solve them. So each chapter talks about a particular

Bennie

Right.

Nancy

Principle, it explains how to use it, and then it has a mini case study. I don’t go deep into the science, I don’t go deep into the case studies. There’s just enough so that you’re like, that’s how another company used it. Here are some key takeaways. This is how I might be able to apply it. And as it turns out, depending on where you are in your career, you’re going to take different things from it. If you’re just starting out, you’re going to get some of the foundational information that’s going to help you grow. If you’re more seasoned, you’re going to pick up some of the nuances that will allow you to refine and increase the success of your efforts. So there’s a lot in there, but I really just try to distill everything that I’ve learned into this single book so that it’s like, know, when I’m gone, the book is still there.

Bennie 

So I’ll ask that question as I know you’re always learning. If you were to have a next chapter, what do think you would add? Since you published the book a couple of years ago, what in your travels and engagements have you thought of and learned?

Nancy 

You know, it’s funny. Kogan Page keeps saying, you’re ready to do another book. And I’m like, I’m too busy talking about this one. And of course, running the agency, HPT Marketing, and speaking at the conferences. But I do continue to learn. I’ve been thinking lately about a couple of different things. There are certain counterintuitive tactics that we should tap into so that marketers, we rely on best practices. And that’s great.

But then there are some things that actually aren’t best practices, but that work based on behavioral science. And I think there’s something in that, this idea that there are things that you wouldn’t think work, but actually they’ve been proven in the market to do. And here’s the behavioral science explanation as to why. I think there’s that. Another area that fascinates me is the idea that people don’t always know why we do what we do. And as a result, when marketers do research, we get lied to. And I use that term,I know, tongue in cheek.

Bennie 

Right. Well, we don’t understand why we actually do what we’ve done. And so we post-rationalize to your point. We make up a reason that we did it. But it’s not, things can be true, but not the truth.

Nancy 

That’s exactly right. That is so perfect. I’ve got to steal that if I ever do another book. I’ll give you credit. Absolutely, they can be true but it might not be the truth. If I ask you why you did something, you’re to tell me what you honestly believe is the answer but you might not even know why. I think there’s something really interesting there particularly with, I think there are, I don’t know, 6, 8, 10 common things that we often hear from our customers and prospects and they’re not necessarily take it to the bank true. And I think there’s something interesting in that. There’s a lot out there as we continue to delve into behavioral science.

Bennie

So I want to focus on one topic area that I know is really important to us as marketers and business leaders, and that’s this question of loyalty. We know the premise that it’s cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one. So at the heart of whatever business we are, B2B, B2C, nonprofit, that kind of continuous virtual loop between someone who has already been in your process and going forward is really important. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on how does the best of behavioral science principles play into us prompting deeper loyalty.

Nancy 

Yeah, that’s a good question and you’re absolutely right, of course, which is, you know, we often spend more time focused on acquisition than on retention, but if we focus a little bit more on retention, the payoff is so much better. So I think one of the things that we need to keep top of mind is there’s a behavioral science principle called commitment and consistency. And that is if you get somebody to say yes to you once, they’re much more likely to say yes a second time, a third time, a fourth time. And this is particularly true if your first request is relatively small.

A lot of times, we kind of come in guns blazing, we want to make the big sale and we just go for it. And, you know, sure, some people are going to buy, but a lot of other people are going to be like, whoa, you know, that’s a little too much. But if we back up a little bit and we start to think about using commitment and consistency, we can pull more people into the fold and we’re more likely to keep them because we ask for a little something and they say yes. And the next time we ask for something, they start to get onto autopilot. Right. It’s like, oh, yeah, I don’t have to vet.

Bennie

Right.

Nancy

You know, Nancy’s agency, I’ve used them before, they’re good. You know, it’s just an automatic yes. So once you can get that commitment and consistency going for you, that can be very helpful in terms of retention. The other thing is, you know, surprise. You know, if people start to just get used to what it’s like to buy your product to, you know, subscribe to your service, you know, it gets old after a while, but if you…

Bennie 

Right.

Nancy 

Periodically surprise people, you surprise and delight them. When you surprise people, their emotions are intensified by like 400 % according to some research that came out of University of some place in Scotland. Well, at any rate, out of a Scottish University. So if we keep, you know, surprising people, it keeps them coming back, you know, and that’s even better than even better than a predictable incentive program because if it’s predictable people know what they’re going to get.

If you spontaneously surprise someone or reward them, then what happens is it’s like, you know, there’s something behavioral scientists call the unpredictable rewards, right? This idea that unpredictable rewards are more motivating because we want to find, it’s called motivating behavior with unpredictable rewards, because we want to find out what is the reward am I, and am I going to get it? Right. So if we, you know, if we’re, if we occasionally surprise our customers, that helps keep them in the fold because they never know when they’re going to get that, that wonderful reward that, you know, that nice treatment.

Bennie 

Right. Is this the gold star or extra piece of candy in kindergarten? In the kindergarten classroom? Is it that moment? Yeah.

Nancy

Well, some respects, right? Yeah, you know? But it’s not, you know, if you get 100 on your paper, you’re going to get the gold star and the piece of candy. It’s just upon occasion, hey, Benny, you’ve been a good guy. Have a piece of candy, you know, just kind of out of the blue. It’s that like, ooh, and you just so you’re going to stick around to see when the next time you get surprised is, right?

Bennie 

Right. This is really, powerful. So we talked a bit about connecting this to retention, but I’d love to connect this to our position as leaders as we start to instill a sense of purpose and mission into our work. How do we use these tactics both internally with our teams and with our product and business connections with mission and meaning?

Nancy 

That’s a very good question. I think what it comes down to is, at the end of the day, we’re people. We’re all people. Whether we’re talking to our colleagues or our clients or our customers, there are certain ways that we should behave because that’s going to motivate behavior. So making sure that when we’re communicating, we’re embracing what behavioral scientists call cognitive fluency. We’re making sure that we’re saying things in a way that people understand.

That’s so important. It’s important for our customers because if they don’t understand our benefits or our value proposition, they’re going to go elsewhere. But it’s important for our colleagues, our team members, because they need to understand what it is we’re saying so that they can get on board with it. So that’s important. There’s the idea of reciprocity. When you do something for someone, they feel like they would like to then do something for you. And that works when we give a free sample to our clients, but it also works when we go out of our way to help a colleague or a client, right, or a contact. We do something for them, they kind of want to return and do something for us. Just understanding how the human brain is hardwired and how people behave really helps us not just in marketing, but in growing our teams, motivating our team, and also just our communities at large.

Bennie

Right. So we’re in a space, and we talk about this often, where we have five generations in the workforce at one time. What nuances have you seen in your approach to behaviors against and throughout these generations?

Nancy 

That’s interesting. At their core, these behavioral science principles are fairly applicable across age, across gender, across culture at their core. That said, there absolutely are differences in terms of gender, terms of age, and in terms of the country you grew up in, your culture. Older people are a little less motivated by loss aversion.

Based on behavioral science research, right? Like where the idea of loss aversion is we’re twice as motivated to avoid the pain of loss as we are to achieve the pleasure of gain, right? So if I say to you, you’re coming to Boston, do you want to know the best restaurant to go to, or do you want to know the one you absolutely should not go to? Or you’d be like, tell me the one I should not step foot in, know, step foot in, right? Like we’re more motivated to avoid pain. And that is true. And it also works with, you know, the senior set, but it doesn’t work quite as well. Behavioral scientists have found that the older we get. We just focus a little bit more on the positive. We just don’t have time for the negative. So we’re just not as, you know, attuned to it. Younger people are coming in way more skeptical, right? They’re just questioning everything. So we have to be deliberate in how we use behavioral science. And we have to think about, all right, what’s going to play well and what might raise that skepticism meter. For example, with testimonials. A lot of times we want that glowing perfect testimonial. HPT marketing is the best thing since sliced bread. like, my god, someone legitimately said that. I’m going to put that all over the place. But we’re better off, honestly, saying, you know, I thought for the most part all agencies were the same and how could this one be substantially different than any of the others. But you know what? They were around. I decided to give them a try. My gosh, they’re the best thing since sliced bread. know, if you can start where the audience is, which is that point of skepticism. And again, we’re seeing it even more with the younger generations, kind of acknowledging what they’re thinking and then explaining why it’s not really so. That’s a much more considered and much more effective approach, particularly for that generation.

Bennie

It’s interesting because we’re talking about generations that have grown up with more user-genetic review and content at their disposal.

Nancy 

Absolutely, absolutely. one could argue there was a in it and the other could argue that that’s what the expectation is. And so if it’s going to be user generated, we as marketers need to make sure that we’ve got that user generated content that’s out there reflecting well on our brand. And we can’t just depend on the corporate generated content.

Bennie

So if we follow this premise that trust is a behavior and reinforced by behaviors, what behaviors would you recommend for marketers today?

Nancy 

Okay, so trust is interesting. We touched on it just a little bit when I was talking about acknowledging doubt or skepticism because you’re more likely to be believed, right? So that’s part of it. There’s a of a corresponding study. came out of Northwestern University that found that five stars.

Bennie

Right.

Nancy 

Are suspicious. We’re all chasing after five stars. You like my product, give me a five-star review. Enjoyed our service, give me a five-star review. There’s nothing wrong with five-star reviews, but Northwestern University found that the optimum number of stars is actually somewhere between 4.2 and 4.5. Because if you have nothing but five-star reviews, if you look too perfect, people get suspicious. They wonder, are you paying for your reviews? Are you pulling down the negative ones?

4.2 to 4.5, that’s good. Then behavioral scientists talk about something called the Pratt-Fall effect. And this is really interesting. What they found is if you admit a small flaw or blemish or imperfection, people can actually prefer you more. So there was a researcher named Elliot Aronson out of Harvard and he ran the study. He sent this guy in to audition for a quiz show. But unbeknownst to everybody, he gave the guy all the answers ahead of time.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Nancy 

So the guy goes in and he auditions and he’s like firing on all cylinders, getting all the questions, you know, properly answered. And then he finishes his audition, he stands up and he spills a cup of coffee down his soup. Aaronson has all of this on tape, right? So he plays the tape one of two ways. Some people hear the tape of the guy answering the questions all correctly and then the tape stops. Other people hear all the questions being answered correctly.

But also on the tape they hear the guy stand up and go, my gosh, I just spilled coffee all down my suit. Aronson asked people, what do you think of this guy? Do you think he’s smart? And both groups were like, he is absolutely smart. You can’t argue with it, absolutely smart. And they said, do you like him? The people who heard the longer tape where the guy was spilling coffee down his suit liked him better. He just seemed more relatable, more human, more.

Bennie 

Right.

Nancy 

Like me. I can’t answer all of those questions, but I could certainly spill coffee down my suit. So the idea of admitting a small blemish, not one that would have a material impact on the performance of your product, but if you think about like Heinz ketchup, great ketchup, number one selling brand, but it comes out of the bottle slowly. So Heinz leaned into it. At one point, they were running a campaign where they put their labels on the bottle so that the label only read upright.

Bennie 

Right.

Nancy 

When the bottle was angled at the ideal degree to make ketchup come out. Sometimes they run commercials and they have anticipation, the song anticipation in the background. If you think about Oatly Milk, for example, number one in the Alt Milk category, they not that long ago ran an ad that said, our customers think our milk tastes like, and then it was an expletive deleted. And you think, my gosh, why would you say that? And they said, hey listen, we’re not for everybody. If you don’t like the taste of oat, you’re not going to like our milk. But if you do, you’re going to love it. There’s this authenticity and sometimes I guess that word is overused, but there’s this authenticity that comes across when you embrace something like the Platt fall effect. When you say, hey listen, we’re not 100 % perfect. There are things about us that not everybody loves. But if you love us, you’re really going to love us.

Bennie 

Right? Right.

Nancy

When we’re thinking about how to come across and we’re thinking about building loyalty and we’re thinking about connecting with today’s consumers, the prep fall effect is absolutely something to keep in mind.

Bennie

I think that’s a powerful suggestion to our group. Like, how do we build in that authentic space? How do we take our perfected brands that have no stains and then say, well, yeah, we’re kind of slow. We taste weird. We are special. And you’re special too. And this is a part of that kind of connection that I think is powerful.

Nancy 

And like you say, in your specialty, it helps build that community. We’re not for everybody, but we’re for this group.

Bennie

Right which allows you to kind of lean into that space. Now, when we think about the future and the work that you’re looking at, what do you get most excited about? Seeing the way that marketing is responding.

Nancy

We are right now in a period of such incredible change and disequilibrium with AI, with the advances that that is bringing so rapidly. And the idea of where that’s taking the business is both exciting and frightening. It scares me a little. Sometimes it bums me out. Other times it totally excites me.

It’s something I’m thinking a lot about and it is very exciting. I think that the combination of behavioral science and AI is going to be really, really strong because with artificial intelligence we can crunch data so much faster, we can target so much better. We’re going to know what we want to say to whom, where to find them, when they’re most approachable. And then the behavioral science is gonna help us frame our message or phrase our message in the most optimum way for that particular slice of our audience, for that particular segment. So I think that there are some incredible breakthroughs on the horizon in the marketing world. And it’s just gonna be amazing to have this ringside seat and to see where we are next year, five years, 10 years down the road.

Bennie 

Do think this will set the bar for us to be better storytellers?

Nancy

I think we’re going to have to be. I think we’re going to have to be because when you think about it, done right, no one else can tell your story but you. You have things that you can talk about that AI is not going to find, that your competitors can’t just outsource to Claude or to Chad or to whoever. So I think it is going to make us better storytellers. It’s not that we can’t craft a story with AI, but we’re gonna have more skin in the game, I believe, and we’re gonna have to reach a little bit deeper, and we’re gonna think about what our voice is and how we uniquely say things and the things that we can point to that no one else can point to. I was telling you the story about the relief band, right? Nobody else can tell that story. That is my story, but I told it in service of making a point, so I was able to make that point in a way that nobody else could because no one else has that story.

Bennie

And by telling a story that’s really anchored into your experience, others can see themselves in that.

Nancy 

Absolutely, absolutely. It reflects who you are. You’re like, I can see myself. I can start to feel that. I can imagine myself doing that. I can see how this would benefit me, how I should sign up for that product or that service.

Bennie 

So do you still, and you’re just among friends, do you still rewrite ad campaigns and emails and digital posts and signs that you see?

Nancy

Well, so I’m gainfully employed, right? Okay. I co-founded HPT marketing seven years ago and we have a number of clients that keep me very busy. So I do not want them to think that I am, instead of working on their assignments, off doing these, know, phantom ones out there. You know, I was in between jobs at the time, but you know,

Bennie

Hahaha. But just when you’re in the airport though, and it’s quiet, and you see an ad.

Nancy 

You can’t, you just can’t, said. It’s like an occupational hazard. If you see something that could be better before you even realize it, you’re starting to fix it in your head. You just are.

Bennie 

Right. Right. So what encouragement do you have for marketing leaders today to kind of take all these in? We’re dealing with this incredible pace of change with technology, as we said, with customer expectations, with experiences and, you know, marketers actually getting what we’ve always wanted, which is a seat at the table and driving things strategically. So now we’re driving. What what advice do you have in this moment?

Nancy 

So I think the advice I have is to just double down on humanity. Remember that at the end of the day, people are people. And we make decisions in a particular way. And it’s not the way that we as marketers have necessarily been taught to think, which is to say we’re not sitting down and putting together this list of pros and cons and thinking through and absorbing every word and really making this well-considered, well-thought-out decision.

Very often we’re operating on autopilot and there are things that people aren’t even aware of that kind of put a finger on the scale and they tilt them in one direction or another. And I think now, arguably more than ever before in our history, it’s important to embrace that and to harness that, right? To really think about that role that behavioral science is gonna play going forward because it is going to be a key differentiator.

Bennie 

Well, I can’t believe we’re at the end of our time right now. We think about just the behaviors we want to encourage, refine, develop, the behaviors that drive our customers to action, create loyalty, and create not just these story, but better stories for us all. Nancy, thank you once again for joining us. I’m going to encourage you because your previous book won the Barry Book Award, so it’s time to work on that second to follow up. But, you know, as an incredible kind of playbook to help encourage us to think better about how to use behavioral science in marketing, whether B2B, B2C, nonprofit, doesn’t matter the aim, it’s all marketing that we can help to make better.

Nancy 

Absolutely. Bennie, thank you so much. This has been the high point of my day, my week, my month. It has been a blast talking to you. It’s been an honor and a privilege talking to you and to your audience by extension. Thank you so much for having me on the show, for your kind words about using behavioral science and marketing, and for just energizing me. Thank you.

Bennie

Thank you so much and thank you all. This has been another incredible episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. We encourage you to come to AMA.org and any of our events to find out more about how to become an effective marketer. We encourage you to check out Nancy’s book, our 2023 Berry Marketing Book Award winner, Using Behavioral Science in Marketing. Thank you.