neurospot

The Salience of Information: Why What Springs to Mind Matters More Than What People Know

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 22:12:24 GMT

In recent discussions about customer behaviour, a recurring theme has emerged: the belief that providing more information will lead to better decision-making (“If only they knew … then they would …”).

While this perspective isn't entirely misplaced, it overlooks a crucial nuance. It's not merely what people know that drives their behaviour, but rather what information is most salient and readily springs to mind in the moment of decision.

The Limitation of Knowledge Alone

It's easy to assume that if customers simply knew more, they would make better decisions.

For instance, knowing how to budget effectively or save money can indeed be useful. Knowing that I should save more for retirement or for investments. That I should eat less red meat for health or sustainability reasons. That I should be careful about what information I share online.

These are all real-life examples of issues I’ve worked on where educating customers (or users) might have been a solution – and where helping people ‘know’ why they should do it failed to shift the needle.

The critical factor isn't just having the information, but rather how accessible and prominent that information is when it’s needed. The question then is not do I know something, but rather does it spring to mind when it can actually shape my decisions?

The Salience of Information in Decision-Making

Consider a scenario where a customer interacts with a product or service. The decision-making process is often instantaneous and intuitive, driven by what immediately comes to mind rather than a comprehensive evaluation of all known benefits. This means that the information most salient at the moment—whether it's the immediate cost or a specific feature—has a more significant impact than the general knowledge a customer might have.

As an example, I was involved in a project where my client was responding to new environmental regulations – and wanted to find out how to do this without upsetting their customers. The initial solution didn’t work because what was salient – and thus impacted customers responses – was the benefit to the brand not the benefit to the environment. While both benefits were ‘known’ by customers, it wasn’t till small tweaks were made to subtly emphasise and customer support for such actions, that complaints dropped off.

A Case in Point: Council Rates

Another example where this idea is relevant are the rates (tax) bills that New Zealanders receive from their local council.

While residents might be well aware of the benefits their rates support—such as parks, libraries, and community services—this knowledge doesn’t always translate into a positive reaction when the bill arrives. For many, the first thing that springs to mind is the expense, not the benefits.

In my case, receiving a $1,000 council rates bill (these are billed quarterly) was a stark reminder of this phenomenon. Despite understanding the value provided by these rates, the immediate focus was on the financial burden. If the benefits were more salient at the time of billing, the experience could be more positive.

For instance, if the rates bill included a summary of the value received from various services—like a breakdown showing the value I obtain from the library based on the number of books borrowed—this could shift the focus from the cost to the benefits. In my case, borrowing 35 books over three months at an estimated value of $30 each amount to $1,050 worth of benefits, which highlights the value received far beyond the cost.

And of course there are other services that I use as well – my local park that I go running in, the playgrounds that I take my kids to, the roads I drive along or the public transport that is subsidised. I ‘know’ these things, but do they immediately spring to mind when I see my rates bill?

Seizing the Opportunity

This concept of salience extends beyond council rates. In various customer interactions—such as bills, invoices, loyalty schemes, and product renewals—the opportunity lies in enhancing the salience of positive attributes at the critical moment of engagement.

To effectively leverage this understanding, organisations should focus on making the benefits of their products or services more prominent when customers are most engaged and in a way that is relevant to the context. This means designing communications and touchpoints that highlight the value received, not just the cost or features.

While knowledge is important, it's the salience of that knowledge at the moment of decision that truly influences behaviour. By ensuring that the most relevant and positive information is top-of-mind, organisations can improve customer satisfaction and decision-making outcomes.

Remember, there are no bad ideas - just unproven ones.

How we can lift the influence of designers – and the potential for good design – within NZs organisations

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 03:17:12 GMT

Navigating the Shifting Landscape of Design

I’m fortunate to have worked with some incredibly talented and creative individuals and teams, designing fantastic experiences, products and services across a range of different sectors. Whatever job title they’re carrying (here on in I’ll use the term ‘designers’), they’re crafting much needed solutions to a range of important problems.

However designers have been doing it tough recently. Once upon a time, organizations invested heavily in design teams, providing them with the space and resources to deliver innovative solutions to critical challenges. Today, many of those same teams have experienced cutbacks and restructuring as organizations seek cost savings.

While design isn’t the only function or sector experiencing this challenge, we should be concerned as designers are often well placed to help organisations respond to the current economic and social climate, by developing desperately needed solutions. Why has this happened, and could there be a lesson to learn?

Embracing the spirit of countering pessimism with long-term optimism, I propose a thesis: when times were good, our industry did not adequately prepare itself for inevitable challenges. Through anonymous insights from various experts, I hope to highlight the lessons learned and support the ongoing hard work in our field.

The Twin Bedfellows: Innovation and Risk

Let’s start with a personal experience. I once worked on a project where there was a clear customer need and a space ripe for a new service that would benefit both users and my client. We went through the discovery process, envisioned a solution, and identified the need for further testing. A few weeks later, we had a playback session with senior sponsors, and everyone walked away excited. It seemed promising.

However, 18 months later, the project never saw the light of day. Despite the initial enthusiasm, it languished in the backlog, never receiving the necessary resources for implementation.

My suspicion is that the senior sponsors, despite their excitement and support at the time, have been inundated with new ideas in their career, some of which promised much but delivered little. When it came time to allocate scarce resources, less risky initiatives were likely prioritized (“ no one’s been fired for buying IBM ”).

Talking to a range of senior design leaders over the past 12 months, it seems clear that this experience isn’t unique.

I suspect the challenge that is being faced – a common challenge – is that the narrative we use to influence senior stakeholders has to change as we move along the process. While a more ‘value creation’ and risk-accepting mindset may work at the beginning of a project, as we move through the project cycle and start asking for greater resource, we’re likely to face more of a risk avoidance mindset.

What Does This Mean?

Many design teams are facing significant challenges, particularly in times of restructuring and budget cuts. Team leaders often ask how to maintain or build their authority within their organizations under such conditions. The key question is: what value do we deliver that the organization couldn't achieve without us?

A McKinsey study found that design-led organizations outperform their less design-focused counterparts, with profits approximately doubling. However, only a third of senior executives felt confident about how design contributes to business metrics. This gap in understanding underscores the need for design teams to better measure and communicate their impact on business performance.

It's been clear in speaking with some designers that there is a level of discomfort in this perspective – for some it infers a customer/user vs organisation mindset. This isn’t the case. We can deliver business value (however defined) and customer value at the same time. The question is, if we don’t measure it, how do we know whether we’re on the right path, and where we’ve actually delivered value?

Designers are inherently creative, empathetic, and adept at navigating complexity. However, demonstrating value requires a different skill set: the ability to measure impact and link it to business performance.

The Counterfactual: The (Design) World as It Could Be

We have a significant opportunity to more diligently measure and assess the impact of our work. One way we can do so is to take a more scientific mindset to business and design decisions, or as Richard Chataway calls it, pursuing " test tube behaviours ". Basically, an idea remains just an idea until it is proven, much like a scientific theory without evidence.

In my training as a research psychologist, and later in evaluating social policy initiatives, I learned to compare our interventions (the counterfactual) to the status quo (the factual). Demonstrating positive improvements justified continuing initiatives; otherwise, they were quickly shut down.

More recently, in a lot of the commercial and not-for-profit work that I’ve conducted, demonstrating how our intervention compares to the status quo has been no less important. However, given the need to deliver projects at pace, to keep a fast cadence of progress in an often-short window of opportunity, we’ve needed to do so in slightly different ways. In these situations, the mindset of thinking through how we can demonstrate the improvement that would occur from what we’ve created is still important.

And demonstrating our impact is important. For example, a recent report from Optimizely found that only 18% of tested ideas had a positive impact, meaning 82% had no impact or a negative impact. While you might argue that your ideas are too complex or difficult to test, my experience suggests that with thoughtful discussion and planning, many projects can demonstrate impact while reducing risk.

Irrespective of your situation, the thinking remains the same – is the world that we are designing a significant enough improvement from the world as it is today to warrant the resources needed to deliver it? Also, as there’s no guarantee that our initiative will actually make a difference, can we minimise our level of risk?

As we try to convince senior stakeholders to put their reputation and the organisation’s resources towards our ideas, this demonstration of impact and reduction in risk might be just what they need. There are always competing initiatives that these stakeholders will be weighing up!

Building a Business Case that Demonstrates Value and Impact

We work in an area where stakeholders must put their resources and reputations on the line to pursue innovative solutions. While risk is inherent to progress, humans have a natural tendency towards risk aversion, both in business and personal lives.

Here are some strategies for presenting a compelling argument for pursuing risky ventures, even in a challenging market:

Align Design Challenges with Business Metrics: Clearly define and align design challenges with metrics that matter to the business. Understand what drives the organization's concerns, whether it's customer satisfaction, employee turnover, or sales figures. By aligning your design initiatives with these metrics, you demonstrate the direct value of your work.
Demonstrate the World as Is vs. the World as It Could Be: Illustrate the current state (factual) and compare it to the potential future state (counterfactual) if your design solution is implemented. This comparison helps stakeholders visualize the tangible benefits of your proposal and understand the value of investing in your ideas.
Identify and Challenge Assumptions: Clearly outline the biggest assumptions in your business case. By identifying these assumptions, you can test and validate them, reducing uncertainties (i.e. risks) and strengthening your proposal's credibility.
Communicate Impact Widely: Ensure that the business impact of your design solutions is communicated far and wide within the organization. Use various channels to share your success stories, metrics, and case studies, ensuring that your work is recognized and valued across all levels of the organization.

The design community has the potential to drive significant value within organizations, even in challenging times. By aligning our work with business metrics, measuring and communicating impact, and strategically mitigating risks, we can build a compelling case for the importance of design. Let's embrace the spirit of long-term optimism and continue to advocate for the transformative power of design in shaping a better future.

Remember, there are no bad ideas - just unproven ones.

Developing persuasive touchpoints

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 00:43:18 GMT

Or why we need to shift our focus from what we want to say, to how our message motivates users to act

Background

In today's competitive environment, understanding the significance of customer touchpoints – and how to make them more impactful - is crucial for organizations aiming to succeed across whatever industry you are operating in. Whether we are referencing person-to-person interactions, advertising, digital touchpoints or any other type, the effectiveness of these touchpoints is contingent upon their ability to shape customer behaviour and perceptions.

Encouraging people to donate blood to the NHS

An excellent example of thinking creatively about your touchpoints, in terms of how they actually motivate people to behave differently comes from Richard Shotton, in his book ‘ The Choice Factory ’.

We all hope we’ll never be in a situation where we need to use donated blood – that we’ll remain healthy and out of hospital. But many people are put in a situation where they are reliant on the generous donations of others. That is why many countries have invested in nationwide services to encourage and support those of us who are healthy to donate blood.

Getting people to choose the right Kiwisaver plan – not the default Kiwisaver plan

This same insight seems to have been picked up by AMP a number of years ago, in trying to encourage NZ Kiwisaver members to look into whether they are on the appropriate Kiwisaver scheme. The problem being addressed is that in NZ people first entering the workforce are opted into Kiwisaver, unless they specifically opt-out.

That’s a great concept to get people into saving for retirement, but there is a second relevant part to this system: people who default into Kiwisaver were given the chance to choose a provider and scheme, and if they didn’t were allocated to one of a pre-approved group of default Kiwisaver programmes, which follow a ‘balanced’ rather than a more ‘aggressive’ investment scheme. While these schemes might be appropriate for those getting to the end of their working life, this could be the wrong approach for those at the beginning of their working life.

In other words, being defaulted into a more conservative Kiwisaver scheme at the beginning of their working life, was costing young NZ workers a more secure retirement at the end of their working life. So how do you encourage New Zealanders to take action?

Bringing this together: Creating touchpoints that make a difference

What this paper is trying to highlight is that we have options in how we frame touchpoints, whether that be the phrasing of calls to action, the images we use, or the proof points we reference. And some of our choices will be more effective than others at encouraging action, even if the intent behind these options is essentially the same.

Whether we are looking at how touchpoints are presented instore, how a website is designed, how an email is crafted or any other type of touchpoint, it is designed to have an impact. But that impact is mediated by how it is received by your customer – something that is viewed but doesn’t instigate any response (now or in the future) is not impact.

Fortunately the world of psychology (and behavioural science more generally) has much to say about how to support and motivate people to follow through on an intended action. So when designing a touchpoint it’s important that we think not just about what message we want to convey, but also how the message will motivate the viewer.

And that can help us to deliver more effective programmes of work, for both our users and the organisation.

Key take home points

It’s not just about putting a message in front of a customer, nor educating them about a course of action. What we should be judging our effectiveness upon, is how we support and motivate our users to respond and take action.
Similarly, while our messaging should support and encourage an intention amongst our users to act (whether that be in terms of products to buy, our choices to act sustainably, etc.), intent to act is not enough. There is a well-known phenomenon called the intention-action gap, highlighting how what people want to do and what they actually do differ.
Instead there are a range of strategies that we can employ to encourage a greater likelihood of our users responding differently. We can bake in more motivation, into our messaging. To do this, we need to think through how the reader is likely to engage with your touchpoint, and then how they will come to process the message in front of them.
This type of thinking can be applied to a range of channels and industries. For recent case studies of this thinking being applied in the not-for-profit , e-commerce , insurance or utility sectors, click on the links or visit www.neurospot.co.nz/case-studies .

The fallibility of memory

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 08:58:36 GMT

If I asked you to think back about an event, maybe a holiday or your last plane trip, your last dinner out, or a shopping experience, what would you remember? If I asked you to describe the experience, chances are you’d feel pretty confident about your memory, or at least some of the key elements. It turns out though, that confidence you’re feeling - it doesn’t relate to the accuracy of your memory.

Faulty memories

You’re not losing your mind, it’s just that your mind is playing tricks... sort of.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time using eye tracking technology through our client projects. It enables us to see a participant’s behaviour – what they actually see and engage with - and the journeys people take through a physical environment, like a mall or retail setting.

One project saw participants navigating a store with eye tracking glasses, getting items off a shopping list. As soon as they’d completed their journey, we asked which way they’d walked. Participants confidently recounted their route, and yet despite having literally just finished their journey, consistently missed out details.

In another project we asked focus group participants about an image we’d shown them 20 minutes earlier. This elicited quite a spirited conversation about skin colour and how the illustrator’s choice of using a dark skin colour for all of the characters pointed to the racism of the illustrator and client. The thing was though, the characters weren’t dark skinned. Not one of them. And yet all of the participants convinced themselves this was the case.

We’re certainly not the first to have encountered this phenomenon. There’s quite an active scene looking into issues with eyewitness testimony, and under which conditions our memory maybe unduly swayed or prone to errors. As you can imagine, the consequences of this could be huge.

How can we stop getting it wrong?

We’re not saying that our memories are always wrong – clearly that’s not the case! But there’s a rhyme and reason behind how our memory operates – both for good and bad.

Our brains are BUSY. It’s like a hamster wheel going full on 24/7. Even when sleeping our brain is taking stock of the day, filing away moments into short and long-term memory. In order to look after us, our brains have to prioritise its resources, and it essentially takes shortcuts wherever possible, driving the same way to work each day, ordering the same coffee and so on. Imagine the fatigue we would face if we had to make every decision and action consciously, rather than letting our brains run the show.

Which moments matter?

So when our brain – a lazy but efficient workaholic – is sorting through events and the happenings of our day, it throws out the mundane, peripheral information it deems unimportant. It instead focuses on creating a highlight reel, and takes the moment of the events and experiences that were the most emotionally intensive, and the final moment.

The concept is known as The Peak-End rule, and comes from Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Donald Redelmeier. Their 1996 study, which I am very pleased to not have been a participant in, involved 154 colonoscopy patients rating their level of discomfort at 60-second intervals throughout the procedure, as well as being asked to retrospectively describe how uncomfortable the procedure was. The level of discomfort during the procedure had no correlation to the discomfort they reported retrospectively.

As an aside, they followed-up this study with yet more colonoscopy patients, who were split into two groups. One group had the standard procedure and experience of the camera being somewhat painfully removed, and the other had an amended experience that lasted three minutes longer, but which the camera removal was more uncomfortable than painful. The second group – with a longer procedure but less discomfort in the final moments – rated the procedure as less painful than the first group and were more likely to return for subsequent procedures.

What was relevant was the peak level of discomfort experienced, as well as the level of discomfort in the final, end moments of the procedure.

So what does this tell us?

Firstly, that our memory is more fallible than we’d like to realise, more often made up of a series of stitched together moments and thoughts that can be revised and reinterpreted after the fact.

Here’s an example - one of the best flights I’ve had was on Air New Zealand to Sydney – the first time we’d flown with my then-infant daughter (you can imagine our nerves!). At the end of the flight we apologised to the man next to us who’d (somehow) been working the whole 3.5 hours. We were suitably self-conscious at the amount of screaming he’d been subjected to but were greatly surprised at how nice he was – telling us that she’d been great, and how his (now teenage) children had subjected him through worse. Then some of the other passengers near us congratulated us on surviving a flight with an infant and how good a flyer she’d been – alongside the cabin staff who were making faces at our daughter to get her to laugh.

It's honestly one of the best flights I remember – but clearly it wasn’t that pleasant at the time! The Peak-End rule in action – our actual and remembered experiences diverting wildly.

How to apply these learnings to your work

Don’t rely on people providing an accurate testimony of their experience. It’s more important to look at what a customer does vs what they say they do.
When reviewing a process, journey or customer experience, focus on the moments that matter – the peak emotional moment and the final moment. This provides direction, stopping you from spreading your resources too thin and helping concentrate efforts on the moments most likely to have an impact.
Be creative when designing experiences. Because our remembered experience is more important than our actual experience, you have a unique opportunity where you can creatively leave customers with an experience perhaps better than what they had… If you know there’s a frustration or issue during a process, while working on a fix for that, make sure your final moment knocks their socks off.

What JCDecaux can do for your brand in 2 seconds

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 07:40:07 GMT

JCDecaux is one of the largest Out-of-Home businesses worldwide; in New Zealand it specialises in high quality Large Format and Airport touchpoints. JCDecaux is committed to delivering research-led validation to its partners regarding Out-of-Home effectiveness and looks for partners who can deliver neuro or behavioural methodologies that can deliver on this objective.

The Challenge

A strong believer in the use of distinctive brand codes for memorability, the New Zealand team wanted to demonstrate to partners that the use of strong branding in the out-of-home medium can increase the likelihood that their brand will spring to mind in a purchase situation. This concept, known as mental availability and infamously popularised in Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow , has been well proven to be the cornerstone of effective marketing.

Our key objective working with JCDecaux was to prove that Out-of-Home creative with strong brand codes could maintain or grow mental availability for brands, compared to advertising with weaker brand cues.

The Solution

We surveyed over 1,600 New Zealanders, showing people a range of Large Format ads for just two seconds each – about the length of time people typically view Out-of-Home advertising. Of the adverts shown, we were particularly interested in five brands or categories: Automotive, Banking, Beer, Energy and Bread. These were chosen to represent a range of sectors, covering faster and slower consideration categories, and less/more well-known brands.

For each of the five categories, people were randomly allocated to one of three conditions, where they saw either no advert for the brand (our baseline/control), a week brand coded advert for the brand or a strong brand coded advert.

The categories chosen were cluttered categories and the brands were not clear leaders, so the intention was to see whether we could increase mental availability for brands (vs a control group) as a result of seeing creative that used strong brand codes (and was thus memorable).

The Results

The most exciting finding is that this research reiterates that Large Format Out-of-Home advertising is effective; it increases the likelihood that your brand springs to mind in a buying situation, and that strongly branded advertising outperforms weaker branded advertising. This is regardless of whether someone recalled the advert .

The results we saw were particularly impressive when you consider that our participants saw each Large Format piece of creative just once for two seconds each, and that along with the five test brands, we included a further nine distractor adverts.

Being seen in any capacity on Large Format, just once: 23% uplift in category mental availability compared with control group.
Strong brand coded creative averaged 13% uplift in category mental availability compared with weakly coded creative.
Strong brand coded creative was 31% more liked compared with weakly coded creative.
Liked ads saw 18% uplift in category mental availability compared with disliked ads.

Here's what JCDecaux New Zealand Senior Insights and Strategy Specialist Victoria Parsons had to say about working with us:

“At JCDecaux, we believe advertising ‘works’ through building memory structures that consumers call on in a buying situation. Large Format, as a commanding, visual channel, is an ideal media to deliver simple, emotive and memorable campaigns – however, unless these campaigns are correctly linked to the brand in question, they do not deliver commercial outcomes. The use of distinctive brand codes, that consumers instinctively recognise, helps in this challenge. We know brand codes deliver effective outcomes for brands however being able to put specific numbers on the impact strongly coded Out-of-Home creative has on mental availability – when shown just one ad for two seconds – is extremely useful. NeuroSpot was a pleasure to work with on this project – their methodology was clever and enabled us to have results that were easy to communicate to our partners - their insight and judgement have been instrumental in this project being noted by the marketing industry in NZ and abroad. We are scoping our next project together to continue our research in this theme".

Disrupting London commuter journeys

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 22:38:32 GMT

In 2014, staff working on London’s underground network went on strike causing massive disruption to millions of commuter trips. For a city so heavily reliant on the tube network this was a disaster that interfered with the habitual travel routines that the city used to get to work and play.

While all commuters would’ve been aware of the disruption, and to some degree would have felt it’s effects, some were more affected then others. Strikes resulted in some, but not all, of the networks underground stations to be closed, meaning some commuters were forced to look for new routes while others were able to continue with existing routes. After strikes finished, 5% of disrupted commuters continued with their new routines – suggesting that they’d optimised and improved their travel to work.

Sources:

Photo by Tomas Anton Escobar on Unsplash

https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp455.pdf

The role of bias in hiring practices

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 22:31:19 GMT

A major social and commercial policy issue in recent decades is how to reduce discrimination in workplace hiring situations, even if such discrimination is unintentional (i.e. subconscious bias). This is to reduce disparities in the economic opportunities between different genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, socio-economic backgrounds, and so on.

This largely comes about due to snap judgements, where certain people are assumed to already hold desirable traits and interviewers look to confirm these views (i.e. confirmation bias). Steps to overcome this include anonymised review of applications and standardised scoring along key traits, all designed to reduce the chance that interviewers will be looking to confirm pre-existing judgements.

To illustrate the power of confirmation bias, one study compared the likelihood that female musicians would be offered a role in an orchestra when identities (and gender) were masked vs open auditions. The likelihood that a female applicant would move to subsequent rounds of auditions increased by 11 percentage points and the likelihood that they would be selected for the spot increased by 30% when “blind” auditions were used.

Sources:

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact-%E2%80%9Cblind%E2%80%9D-auditions-female-musicians

Kaipātiki Project: Growing volunteer numbers

Thu, 07 Jul 2022 22:12:46 GMT

Kaipātiki Project is based on Auckland's North Shore, and are a charitable eco-hub aiming to grow a sustainable future for people and nature. They run a native plant nursery, facilitate green space regeneration, promote zero waste and teach locals on sustainable living, gardening and composting. Kaipātiki Project couldn't operate and make the difference they do without donations and the hundreds of volunteers who help each year with the nursery and teaching garden, restoration working bees, the zero waste hub and community restoration days.

The Challenge

Kaipātiki Project run regular volunteering days across their green space restoration projects. Althought they have some dedicated volunteers, the Kaipātiki Project team want to encourage and support more local residents to regularly volunteer their time with them.

The Solution

NeuroSpot took Kaipātiki Project through the behavioural design process, aiming to identify the different psychological levers that needed tweaking - what elements of the experience were acting as promoters, or needed further boosting, and what was inhibiting repeat volunteers, was there friction or a barrier that needed removing?

The Results

There are many factors that influence whether someone has the time or inclination to volunteer, and again whether they volunteer once a year, or once a fortnight.

To help uncover the influences at play, we used our behavioural design toolkit. 70 rapidly developed ideas were created using behavioural driver prompts from the toolkit. These ideas were then scored and whittled down to a handful worth pursuing - and a longlist to investigate over time, as resource allows.

Ideas included some simple wording tweaks in their marketing and communications, changing the registration process to make signing up to the next - or regular - events more straightforward, and signing people up at the end of the event for the next, while they're still in the mindset and on the feel good high. These, and many more ideas are in the works to boost repeat volunteer numbers.

Here's what Kaipātiki Project Marketing Strategist Blanka Ros had to say about working with us:

"We're a small but passionate team at Kaipātiki Project, and while we have many ideas on how to improve various aspects of our organisation and the value we bring to the community, it can be hard to know where to focus our energy. Working with NeuroSpot on a specific challenge enabled us to understand what can drive or inhibit the behaviours we are seeking, ideate and prioritise solutions based on what is more likely to work. It means our time is spent more efficiently, and we see results sooner. The NeuroSpot approach was practical and actionable, backed up by research but personalised for our requirements."

Is your customer experience actually built for your customer?

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 23:05:41 GMT

Back in May we took the virtual stage alongside our friends at eCommerce agency 10XL and testing platform VWO to talk about designing for the online customer experience. There are some great learnings in the webinar, and we've broken it down into three short videos. If you'd like to watch the full version, you can find it on vwo.com .

Watch the summary videos

Watch the full webinar

Some of the key insights

Good businesses are good human businesses - they have a strong alignment with the psychology of people and how they make decisions.
People are making thousands of decisions each day, so our brains have evolved and creates shortcuts, so most decisions happen subconsciously - understanding the psychology of how we make decisions means you can make changes to your experience to help influence this.
Throughout your experience, consider how to maintain your consumer's motivation, and how to reduce any barriers that are stopping them from converting. If it's too hard, even the most motivated customer may struggle.
Do as much of the thinking for your customer as possible - present good default options, popular categories, and consider what to present if a customer has previously purchased.
Friction can be good - for example SkyScanner purposely slow down the experience to demonstrate the value they provide.
People make decisions in a relative sense. Consider what category you're in, and what is in the comparison group. Can you change this?
Test your assumptions. Drill into your analytics to learn more. Test things, then test different things.
Customer preferences change, and your experience should too.
No matter how well established your brand is, always continue testing.

The subtle impact of other people's behaviour

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 22:09:43 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I went with my family to a local produce market (Avondale Market). While there I went up to one of the stands to pick out some beans – there was a whole bin of them, and they looked great! How would I normally approach this? Like most other people (I stopped later to watch what others did), I would normally grab a handful and put them in the bag. It’s beans!

But on this visit, I didn’t do this – and it came down to what the person next to me was doing.

When I arrived at the stand there was another person next to me. They were searching through the beans and specifically choosing which beans made the grade – if they were too short, thin, or damaged they were discarded – if they were unblemished, sufficiently sized etc. they went in his bag.

Without even thinking, I started mimicking the behaviour, picking beans one by one instead of by the handful. I didn’t stop and think about what this person was doing, nor did I make a conscious decision to follow him - I just started doing it! Eventually I realised what I was doing, and what the other person was doing – and went back to grabbing a handful of beans and got on with my day.

What does this tell us?

We are inherently impressionable.

In many situations, when we are in a new context, our behaviour can be quite malleable. Start a new job, enter a new social situation, or even if it’s a regular task like visiting a market, we may subconsciously look to how others behave, following the norms of what others ‘typically’ do. It’s quite a bizarre feeling, even as a professional in this space, to become aware of your behaviour having changed without your knowledge.

Have you ever thought about how easily and quickly your behaviour changes as you move between the workplace, visiting friends, spending time with your partner or engaging with your kids? Probably not – you just change your behaviour depending upon who’s around you and what’s seen to be appropriate in that case.

How do we account for this?

When we’re trying to achieve some form of behaviour change, we make sure not to overlook the influence of other’s behaviour on setting some form of norm or exerting a subtle impact. We ask ourselves:

Who else is nearby that people might take their cues from in terms of what is appropriate?
Who else might people be referencing – even if they’re not physically at the location where the behaviour is being shown – that might exert an impact?

In some ways, seeing the way I changed how I picked beans at the market was (very unscientific) proof that it is possible to change people’s behaviour, and that our subconscious has a huge role to play in doing so.

Photo by Emma Shappley on Unsplash

Download our Service Experience Guide

Wed, 25 May 2022 22:48:20 GMT

Case studies from around the world using behavioural science to drive customer satisfaction and business results.

Every time you have a service interaction with a company, you're left with a impression of that company. The time it takes to answer your call, how much of it you spend on hold, the wait as they type their next response in a chat - it all has an impact. Whether it's a purposely designed experience, or the default, it's an opportunity to have a customer feel positive about your brand.

As behavioural science practitioners, we're focused on helping organisations to deliver these experiences, leaving customers happy and business scorecards green.

We've put together our Service Experience Guide to help those managing service interactions see how behavioural science works, and how having that additional understanding of what makes people tick can help in your service design.

Download it today and get in touch to see if we can help you.

IF YOU WORK ON CHALLENGES LIKE THESE...

...THEN THIS GUIDE IS FOR YOU.

There's a fraction too much friction

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Wed, 11 May 2022 04:29:47 GMT

My family has health insurance. We spend quite a bit on it too, it’s one of those things that just doesn’t get cheaper. And if you have health insurance that covers GP visits, dentists visits and the like – you want to make sure you use it. So why then, despite spending this money for a service I intend to use, do I not claim?

I don’t consider myself a particularly lazy person, or a procrastinator, but there is no denying that the small amount of effort I need to exert when making the claim – having my claim details handy, my insurance details handy, my log in and password – puts me off from doing it.

It's friction.

In the world of psychology, friction is essentially something that slows you down, or acts as an obstacle to performing an intended behaviour. It can be used as a positive (more on that another day) but in many cases it’s negative. And when an organisation is looking to change the behaviour of a consumer or increase the chances of a consumer taking the action they want, one thing we look at is where there is friction in the journey.

Here are some real-world examples of friction exerting an impact.

And it can be surprising just how little friction can make a difference

Take Google, well known for providing endless snacks for their employees. However, when employees started complaining about gaining weight, Google wanted to help (after all, healthy employees make happy employees).

After studying the behaviour of employees in the kitchens, Google didn’t change what was on offer, but made subtle changes to how it was arranged . The first thing you see upon entering a Google kitchen is now fresh fruit and vegetables. The M&Ms that people couldn’t resist grabbing a handful of when making their coffee were moved further away (now just over 5 metres instead of the 2-metre distance they were) and put into opaque containers.

Personal autonomy remained, but better choices were made.

A previous workplace took advantage of this concept when trying to encourage greater recycling and lower waste going to landfills. They simply picked up everyone’s bins and moved them a few metres past the recycling bins. A small amount of additional effort (friction) that lead to positive outcomes.

It's not all bad: The positive impact of friction

Friction can, on occasion, have unintended positive consequences for consumers, particularly where this disrupts habitual behaviours.

In 2014, staff working on London’s underground network went on strike causing massive disruption to millions of commuter trips. Strikes resulted in some, but not all, of the networks underground stations to be closed, meaning some commuters were forced to look for new routes while others were able to continue with existing routes. After strikes finished, 5% of disrupted commuters continued with their new routines – suggesting that they’d optimised and improved their travel to work.

Friction in the world around us

Going back to the example of my health insurance. There are a couple of ways you could look at this:

Is the friction created on purpose, to discourage me from making a claim (and thus lining their pockets?) or
Have they removed a lot of friction in the process by enabling me to claim online or in an app, but some friction remains, which may well be on an agile backlog to address in the future?

My rose-tinted glasses may be on here, but I believe organisations rarely create friction points today with the intention of a negative result for the customer – the organisations I have worked with seem to have an honest desire to remove the effort from their customer experience. My belief is these come about unintentionally – from a lack of awareness that it’s occurring in the first place or uncertainty about how to resolve a known issue.

But it’s in our benefit as organisations to create experiences that support a customer’s best interest and deliver the outcomes we desire – they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

We’d love to hear your examples of friction you’ve experienced as a customer. Email us at hello@neurospot.co.nz !

Main photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

Breaking (or creating) the cycle: The challenge of habits in behaviour change

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 03:52:01 GMT

Is there anything in your life that you do repeatedly, whether that's monthly, weekly or several times a day, that you do a certain way? Something you do on autopilot, without a lot of thought?

Of course there is.

Have a think about these tasks - do you follow the same routine every time?

Doing a weekly supermarket shop in store - do you tend to buy the same brands of food, shampoo etc. each time? Explore the store in the same way?
Which stores do you visit – is it the same supermarket? Petrol station? Café on the way to work?
Putting your shoes and socks on - are you a sock/sock/shoe/shoe person or a sock/shoe/sock/shoe? Do you always start with the same foot?
Doing the dishes - do they pile up on the bench, or in the sink? Do you rinse before putting them in the dishwasher? Does the dishwasher go on at the same time each day? Do you empty it straight away or when you're next getting a meal prepared?

For the tasks we've mentioned above, there is no right or wrong way to do them. If your pantry’s stocked, your car is topped up with petrol (unless you’ve taken the socially minded EV route), you've got your shoes and socks on and a kitchen of clean dishes* - you've succeeded. But the way we each go about doing these tasks is generally so engrained in us, that we do them without thinking.

*We do acknowledge the many domestic arguments that can come from different household members having a different routine for these tasks. If you're a 'dishes do NOT go in the sink' person living with a 'dishes go in the sink until I'm ready to deal with them' person, I feel you. ^SG

And that’s great. By performing these tasks on autopilot we’re able to direct our attention – and our limited headspace – to more important topics.

Imagine now you're a retail store, trying to change the way people walk around your shop, a contact centre manager, trying to get your team to reduce call handling times by a few seconds, or an FMCG brand trying to increase purchase of your products. Or maybe you work hard all day, you're tired and you just don't want to see a sink full of dirty dishes when there is an empty dishwasher waiting nearby.

In each of these situations, you're trying to change someone's behaviour, and likely to come up against someone’s existing habits.

So what is a habit?

Essentially, a habit is a behaviour that you perform in the same way, in response to specific situations every time. It’s an automatic and inflexible response, and although it may have started out as a choice, it’s become an engrained habit through repetition.

When you first performed the behaviour, it would have taken more brain power and thought, but through the repetition, over time, the behaviour is now performed with little conscious thought.

How do habits get formed?

Charles Duhigg , an American writer, coined 'the habit loop' in his 2014 book 'The power of habit', from a simple neurological loop discovered by MIT researchers. The idea is that there are three key stages involved in forming every habit, and once you've identified each component, you can then start to work on changing the habit.

What are the challenges of habits?

The key challenge of habits - for anyone wanting to change one - is that they occur subconsciously, and they can occur long after their utility has waned. As an example, I once did a lot of training to complete the NZ Ironman (2015 … it was before kids), which required a lot of food intake. Unfortunately, after Ironman – when I stopped training – the food habit continued and my weight ballooned.

The habit continued long after the requirement for all those extra calories had disappeared.

From a different perspective, I recently moved house and now have a 10min walk to a ferry terminal. This ferry could take me across the water to Hobsonville Point, a new suburb in which several members of my family live. While I knew the ferry was there, by habit, I consistently put my kids in the car and took a much longer commute to visit family. It wasn’t an issue of awareness, it was a habit that had outlived it’s usefulness.

How do you create a new habit?

The idea behind the habit loop is that once you have identified what triggers the behaviour, the reward it provides, and the behaviour itself, you can begin to adapt it. Through experimentation you can find a behaviour that triggers the same emotional response (reward) as the original.

If there is a new habit you want to create - e.g. bringing your lunch to work instead of buying it, or going to the gym every day - you need to create the cue and reward that will set you up for success.

For example, to build an exercise habit could you leave your shoes by the bed (the cue) to trigger a run in the morning (the routine), which finishes at your local café for a coffee (the reward)?

What about breaking a habit?

The approach we've outlined above relies on new habit formation - what if you would instead like to simply break a habit? Perhaps stop customers from leaving clothes on the changing room floor, or stop employees from talking over others and interrupting in meetings.

In this instance, the science of habits would tell us that we should remove the cue that causes our customers or employees to perform the related behaviour, or replace it with a competing cue. Do customers leave clothes on the floor because there aren't enough hooks? Try a clothing bin just outside the doorway. Are employees interrupting because they don't feel they usually get enough time to share their ideas? Try changing the meeting format!

But one of the biggest opportunities is some disruption to our existing routines. Moving house, changing jobs, getting married or having a child, as examples, are all changes that might allow us to create new, or replace old, routines.

A good example comes from the UK … during the 2014 London underground strike some, but not all, of the networks underground stations were forced to close. This meant some commuters were forced to look for new routes while others were able to continue as normal. After strikes finished, 5% of disrupted commuters continued with their new routines – the new habit had stuck.

Perhaps that’s why we’re seeing some organisations coming through the past two-years of COVID disruptions (e.g., lockdowns, working from home) stronger. Through intent or luck, they’ve been able to align themselves with the new habits of their users.

Want to know more?

If you're interested in learning more about habits, get in touch or follow us on LinkedIn .

Main Photo by Social Mode on Unsplash

How do high functioning agile squads achieve progress? By thinking like a scientist.

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:55:59 GMT

Hands up if you work for a large corporate that hasn't shifted at least some of its resource to agile methodology? There's not many - over the last decade there has been a widespread shift across New Zealand organisations to agile. And it makes sense - break work into smaller chunks, deliver more frequently, pivot faster and realise business results sooner.

We've worked in, with and near some of these companies, and have witnessed a variety of results, all coming down to the way squads approached their challenges. After all, agile is just a structure, so what separates high and low functioning teams? One feature we witnessed of the high functioning teams is a curiosity informed by evidence: a scientific mindset.

A focus on the problem, not the solution

In many organisations, agile and non-agile alike, we see people seeking to provide solutions, at the expense of more careful consideration of problem definition or discovery, and with little investment in evaluating the impact of their ideas.

This often ends up in a 'survival of the fittest' - or at times, survival of the loudest voice in the room.

Agile done well helps teams focus on resolving a problem, rather than providing a solution. It's a subtle reframe, but an important one. It means working forward: agreeing on what the challenge is that our squad is being formed around; what metrics show us that the problem is there (and that we are potentially impacting it); and being clear about what our assumptions are.

Squads engaged in this way are focused on learning and understanding what is really driving the challenges they are there to resolve. And it fits really nicely with the scientific approach.

Getting into the right mindset

A scientific mindset doesn't mean getting out lab coats and chemistry sets. It's about taking the scientific learning process and applying it to your business challenges.

In Richard Chataway’s book The Behaviour Business: How to apply behavioural science for business success , he points to the role of science in solving mankind’s problems, and how a scientific mindset is underpinning the success of some of the world’s most successful businesses.

“The houses we live in, the food we eat, the transport we use: all of these contain innovations that were developed by scientists using the scientific method. A hypothesis based on scientific evidence, followed by a deduction, and tested through observation. Then repeat. And yet, in business, little work is scientifically based. In fact, most of it involves no experimentation, and an awful lot is based on outdated assumptions. Isn’t it time we remove the guesswork?”

Consider the typical stages of a scientific process:

Define a question to investigate
Create hypothesis
Test with an experiment
Analyse data
Report conclusions

You can see how easily these transfer to a business challenge/project situation:

Turn your challenge into a question to investigate, e.g. "How might we increase the number of customers self-serving online?"
Make observations, collect data, research - talk to actual customers, and don’t forget to review any research (including that conducted outside your organisation) you already have access to.
Create your hypothesis. Remember, this is essentially your educated guess on how to answer your question in step 1. For instance, "Redesigning the self-service menu to highlight the three most common tasks will encourage more customers to trial an online service offering, before resorting to phone"
Put the hypothesis out to experiment. In this scenario, an A|B test could work well, in which half of customers see the existing webpage and half see an updated webpage.
Analyse the results. Did it work? Or did it simply sound like a good idea, that failed to have an impact in the real world?
Review and implement, adapt and re-test, or workshop through the next challenge. E.g. what did we learn? Should we scale up and turn into a BAU proposition? Are there some customer segments that this didn’t work for, and need a different solution?

Delight in being wrong

Of course, testing our concepts can mean we discover they don't work.

There’s a scientific principle that our theories are never proven to be true, only proven to be wrong. This means it only takes one result to disprove an idea, and that all others are just in a permanent twilight zone waiting to be shown that they are wrong. From a business or design perspective, that probably feels unsatisfactory (or unmotivating and generally depressing!). But from a learning perspective - and when viewing it from a long-term impact perspective - it's actually ideal.

We want to find out that we're wrong, so that we can more quickly, effectively and cheaply, move onto more effective ideas. It's the ultimate ‘test and learn’.

There's a certain humility in being guided by the evidence, allowing yourself and your squad to put aside your own ideas and expectations, and accept what emerges from the discovery and testing process. The evidence can come from a range of sources, and some are more rigorous than others. But the key is to rely on the evidence at hand - even when it goes against our pet theories or ideas.

Try reframing being wrong from a failure (which it's not), to a cause for celebration - the test was successful! And then you can do what all good scientists do: find another question to investigate.

Moving faster … with more curiosity

Taking on this approach in your squad shouldn't mean you take the fun out of ideation and delivery, it's just about helping you streamline your processes to deliver the right solution, for the right problem. It's up to your squad's experience and judgement to decide where to focus attention and how to apply the findings.

The other benefit is that this process should help your squad move faster, from problem statement, to solution possibilities, to scalable strategies. For teams struggling to get traction it’s a great way to see – and demonstrate – progress, and move past having the same ‘what if’ conversations over and over again.

If you need some help or ideas on applying a scientific mindset to your project or challenge, get in touch .

Quantifying impact: The art & science of measuring the value of design

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 22:39:43 GMT

This article is based on a recent presentation that Cole Armstrong and Suzi Goodwin from NeuroSpot gave to the CX Collective , a global community of customer advocates run out of Aotearoa New Zealand. We greatly appreciate the input from Sarah Clearwater and Baruk Jacob from the CX Collective, and from the participants on the day.

A key reason for tackling this topic was because we know the work that goes on in organisations across the country, work delivered by people passionate about the customer experience, work that provides real value to organisations. But work which is at times hard to justify, seemingly impossible to quantify and difficult to see the tangible evidence of positive shifts in behaviour. Work that at times can be viewed as a cost centre rather than a value driver.

CX as a function is not always well understood at all levels of a company – McKinsey reports show that companies with an embedded design practice are growing at nearly twice the rate of their peers, yet only a third of CEO's and their direct reports could state confidently how design delivers on business metrics . We wanted to share ways that you could actively measure not only the impact you have delivered, but the potential of testing different assumptions and interventions from the beginning of a project, giving you opportunities to set every project up for success, and highlighting the value you provide.

You need to quantify your impact

In the fast-paced world where organisations are constantly moving onto the next thing, we rarely get a chance to look back and see how what we delivered made a difference. Retrospectives are great, but not always well timed or they can be rushed as a box ticking exercise as we all try to focus on our current challenge. If quantifying your impact takes extra effort, why bother?

We want to make a positive difference. If we don't measure our intervention, we can't say for sure that it worked. Maybe all that resource resulted in no change, or potentially, having made things worse?

Quantifying impact helps mitigate risk. Every new innovation or experience brings a measure of risk, and it takes up a lot of stakeholder headspace. How can you alleviate this?

Look at the cost/benefit. Experimentation helps you see if the expected gain justifies the resources required.

Build your professional standing. Building trust with your stakeholders, showing that you deliver well executed interventions with measurable outcomes can help with internal support for your next challenge.

Use experimentation to articulate value

Users: you need a group of people to test on. How many depends on a number of factors but for some projects 100-200 per group could be enough.

Intervention: this is the thing you actually want to test, the change you are wanting to make to a process, product or experience.

Randomisation: your users need to be randomly assigned to your control and treatment groups. Randomisation means you can be confident you're not inadvertently introducing bias (e.g. males vs females). While straightforward in the digital space, in other settings this could involve splitting a call centre in two, sending two different letters or changing instore displays from one hour or day to the next.

What will the decision drive?: consider all the potential outcomes of the experiment. What decisions would it drive if your outcome metric shot up, or down - or stayed the same?

Having these clear in your head will help you both articulate the experiment and its intent to stakeholders, as well as provide an instruction manual of sorts to the team implementing it.

Experimentation adds value earlier in the design process

One of the key takeout’s from our presentation is this: don't wait till you're delivering the work to experiment . There is often far greater value in incorporating experimentation towards the start of the design process. Why not test:

Stakeholder assumptions . Experimentation at this stage helps ensure you focus on the issues that matter, and allows you to engage stakeholders into the process, getting buy in for down the track.

Alternative concepts . How do you objectively know the intervention your team is looking at is better than the one tossed aside? Or, how can you test your intervention at a small scale, to estimate the impact it could have when rolled out? Experimenting at this stage gives you the opportunity to test some of the crazier, counter-intuitive ideas that could be a huge competitive advantage for your organisation.

This is no t to say there is no merit in experimentation at the end of a project - it can help ensure you've delivered a project of value and should absolutely be used. You'll want to be able to share those results with stakeholders, and add them to your CV...

Finally, your experiments need to be ethical

Ensuring you have some ethical boundaries in your experiments means you're avoiding brand damage and a loss of trust to your organisation, and hopefully not keeping yourself awake at night with a moral dilemma. Some questions to keep in mind:

Is the objective ethical? This should be universal to all projects.

Does it infringe on your user's welfare? The objective might be worthwhile, but it shouldn't leave people worse off.

Is there anything more than minimal risk? Holding a conversation for example, carries a risk - what's the risk from your experiment?

And at the end of the day, is it ethical to offer a new product or service that makes people worse off?

This is just a summary of what we covered, the video of our presentation and the resources discussed in the session are all available from the CX Collective Learning Library . But we're here to help too, so if you have any questions about what we've discussed or have a challenge you need a sounding board on - get in touch . You can also check out some of our other work here .

Remember, there are no bad ideas - just unproven ones.

Dose & Co: Supplementing success

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 01:29:46 GMT

Dose & Co is a collagen supplement brand from the disruptive Zuru Edge stable. Launched in New Zealand in 2019, early success led them to expand globally in 2020, with products in stores across Australia, the USA and UK. With Khloe Kardashian coming on board as a brand ambassador driving considerable traffic to their website, Dose & Co wanted to ensure they maximised the opportunity ahead of them, utilising ecommerce agency 10XL and behavioural insights agency NeuroSpot to unpack Dose & Co customer behaviour. This ensured that the latest thinking in behavioural economics could be applied successfully in a digital environment to drive long-term brand growth.

The Challenge

Dose & Co run a successful ecommerce site in several key markets around the world, achieving well above average conversion rates. They wanted to further improve on their success, to ensure they were taking advantage of the opportunity in front of them. They knew that an understanding of customer behaviour was crucial - but what did they need to do next?

Working alongside 10XL, Dose & Co's ecommerce agency, NeuroSpot provided insights into consumer psychology and behavioural economics to help enhance their online store to support consumers to make a purchase decision in the moment.

The Solution

We needed to find the right problem to solve. The team began with a UX/Behavioural audit to generate a range of solutions that could be tested and implemented. This included:

page by page review of the customer's journey through the site.
review of major past changes and the corresponding impact on results.
audit of elements within the site design that could influence conversion/sales, and what could be added into the design.
reviewing existing customer journeys via Hotjar and Google Analytics to see what customers were actually doing on the site and where the greatest opportunity was for the brand.

After looking at which parts of the site were underperforming, we used some existing decision-making frameworks from the world of behavioural economics to pinpoint what was driving these outcomes. Did people have the ability to respond the way they wanted to? Were they motivated to act? Were we presenting consumers with the right triggers? The team came up with a hypothesis and used site data to rule out any confirmation bias.

This led us to three main hypotheses about what was holding customers back from following through and purchasing the product. As a result, we were able to make simple changes to the site content and user journey, that reduced some of the barriers to purchase, affirmed a customer's interest to purchase - and increased their motivation to take action.

The Results

The solutions were A|B tested in a live site environment to determine whether they influenced customer behaviour.

The result? A 35% improvement in conversion rate.

NeuroSpot worked with 10XL on this project. On working with a behavioural insights agency, Founding Partner Christopher Andrew had this to say:

"As far as optimising customer touchpoints go, we're pros at helping brands test and learn from their ecommerce experiences. Good design is more than just painting pixels - optimisation takes a team effort. Typical CRO programmes get 30% uplifts after a years worth of experimentation - but not every client we find has the time to wait to get lucky with their experiment design. Working with NeuroSpot meant that we can design smarter tests that work with how our customers make decisions in their shopping experience, deliver the most effective changes for Dose & Co, and improve success rates beyond what A|B testing best practice would usually obtain. At its heart, good marketing is about understanding what is going on in our customers' heads."

And we'll leave the final word to the client, Marc Day, Lead Print & Digital Creative from Zuru Edge:

"The online retail environment is constantly changing, ruthlessly competitive and rewards innovative thinking. Our partnership with NeuroSpot led to a new approach to understanding why our customers choose to do what they do and provided a different lens to our evolving online offering. The key thing that made the difference to use, was their constant push on 'what do we do next' and their partnership with 10XL meant we could keep pushing forward."

What have we learnt from The 2020 Vision Project? NZ's experience of Covid-19

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 00:57:30 GMT

As The 2020 Vision Project comes to an end - even if NZ's experience with Covid-19 continues - what have we learnt?

Covid-19, lockdown, MIQ ... the list goes on of terms which will be seared into our collective memory, terms which a few years ago would have been meaningless. As NZ went through this ordeal, The 2020 Vision Project was setup to help us understand how people were experiencing this unexpected change in circumstances and to learn how this has shaped us.

Browse through the reports to see what we have learnt:

A vaccinated workforce - motivating staff to get the jab

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 23:45:31 GMT

Yes, we're going there: the COVID-19 vaccine. But we're not here to debate the science, rather a problem facing some organisations: low vaccination rates.

New Zealand is a country built on production. Between our primary, manufacturing, transport, logistics and retail trade industries alone, it’s a $65 billion contribution to our GDP . That’s a lot of workplaces built on large team environments, people movement and the flow of goods. So it stands to reason that an employer would want that workforce to be vaccinated, at the very least for their employee’s own health and that of their community.

Added to that, many of our essential businesses (such as retail, supermarket or transport) are reliant on one or a few distribution centres. The risk associated with COVID-19 affecting workforces in these sites, whether from a moral or operations standpoint, has been highlighted with recent cases at NZ Post’s distribution centre .

Despite living in a developed world largely free of infectious diseases - thanks to modern vaccinations - more individuals than ever are feeling hesitancy around whether to get the COVID-19 vaccine themselves. Evidence suggests that few of these people are outright ‘anti-vaxxers’; most support the concept of being vaccinated. But as we look forward to an economy that is more resilient to COVID-19 in whatever shape or form that may be, many will be looking at our (unvaccinated) workforce as a potential weak spot – whether from the risk of shutting down sites, the potential it can have on the wider economy and needs for regional lockdowns, or from a health and safety perspective.

So what can employers do to increase the likelihood that their staff will get vaccinated, and reduce the risks inherent from this virus?

The most straightforward approach would be to mandate it. But regardless of whether that’s even legal, there’s a risk of backlash amongst your workforce and the wider community.

Another common approach is education and awareness programmes. As a behaviour change solution, such programmes are often not a solution by themselves, but require additional supporting strategies to address the impediments to seeing the desired change. So, it could be a good idea to make people aware of the need to get vaccinated, but don’t assume more education and information will be the solution.

What other options are there?

Thankfully, behavioural scientists around the world have looked at this issue, and similar issues for a number of years. There are a few options that can work:

A trusted messenger

Who is telling people to get vaccinated? If it’s you the employer, then you might not be someone whose opinion is respected in the context of vaccinations. Trusted internal – or external – messengers with a respected opinion could help.

Make vaccination the social norm

People inherently want to belong, so encourage everyone in the workforce who is vaccinated to wear some form of pin, or something that might indicate their support. Then, you’ll increase the social proof that vaccination is something worth doing.

Play to a different identity

People have multiple self-identities, so while one identity might be the barrier to vaccination (e.g. from a religious or peer-group standpoint) another could be the key motivator (e.g. encouraging multiple generations to get vaccinated together, or “doing it for your family” could activate a parents role to protect their loved ones).

Let people play hooky

If you’re able to offer vaccinations at your workplace, can you time it for when people are most receptive to the message? Timing matters, so potentially asking people towards the end of their shift, for example, might lead to greater uptake as people try to avoid work!

Procrastinate today, but commit to tomorrow

Can you get people to commit to getting a vaccine ahead of time? It’s been shown that people might agree to do tomorrow what they don’t want to do today, and being reminded of this commitment has a strong impact.

Cole, your Pfizer vaccine dose is ready and waiting

Can you send targeted text messages to your workforce that let them know their dose is waiting for them? Research from the USA has shown a personalised approach has a strong impact on vaccine uptake.

No barrier is too small: remove obstacles

Finally, what are the small points of friction, the small additional points of effort that people might need to go through? Offering vaccinations offsite? Bring it onsite. People need to book a vaccination slot into their shift? Do it for them, with the option to reschedule.

What we’re trying to do is use multiple psychological cues to increase people’s motivation and ability to get vaccinated. The more approaches used, the better the chances for success.

Ultimately, people’s reasons for not getting vaccinated can stem from a range of sources. And without being moralistic about the issue, they will be making the best decisions based upon their experiences, their access and the motivations that are put in front of them.

Our goal is to support a choice towards getting vaccinated. Good luck!

What have we learnt from COVID-19? And what does this mean for brands?

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 21:32:29 GMT

We’re over 18 months on from the first hints of COVID-19 in New Zealand, and we know things have changed - but which things? And by how much? What will the experience of living through COVID-19 mean for the attitudes and behaviours of everyday New Zealanders? Which habits have been disrupted; which have been created? Has the way we think and act changed forever?

Photo of Auckland motorway by Patrick Pellegrini on Unsplash

The 2020 Vision Project sought to answer these questions. Created by Cole Armstrong from behavioural insights agency NeuroSpot , and Mark Finnegan from Clarity Insight , they recently presented the research project as part of the Research Association of New Zealand (RANZ) speaker series (ironically, during the latest level four lockdown).

Kicking off in what was to become our first of many lockdowns, The 2020 Vision Project recruited 30 people from around New Zealand and followed them throughout 2020. In a series of interviews, the participants spoke about bracing themselves for the impact from COVID-19 and lockdowns, the subsequent reintroduction to wider society, and the shock of the second wave in August 2020.

Why does a study of this kind matter?

At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone – individuals, brands, governments – were largely responding on educated guesses, as there was little objective information to rely on. The long-term strategies many brands were building, or delivering on, were built on assumptions that could have changed significantly. But with COVID-19 introducing a raft of changes to the context in which our society operated, were these assumptions – and the strategies resting upon them – still sound?

It seems likely that it’s not the person that has changed – needs will be the same – but the context is which people make decisions that has changed .

Equally we know that after many world-defining events (e.g. World War 1 and 2), it’s been the second order effects that were unleashed from the original social changes (e.g. woman’s involvement in the workforce) that have had lasting impact.

Likewise, COVID-19 introduced a new level of strain to society. This stress can bring into greater clarity elements of good practice. Suddenly we could see the full spectrum of how brands were responding to the crisis, and it became clear that some were doing a better job than others.

Our RANZ presentation covered three key learnings for brands:

Key Lesson #1: How we respond to stress

It could go without saying that any research into COVID-19 would tell us people were stressed. But the key insights here were the elements of effective messaging that helped lessen that stress and uncertainty people were feeling:

Clear and concise messaging – get to your point, quickly.
Directive messaging – talk about what people should be doing, not what they shouldn’t. We saw this change come through from a lot of essential brands in the first lockdown, who reframed their messaging for greater impact as time passed
Trusted messenger – New Zealanders weren’t going to stay home on the advice of anyone, and not everyone was up to the task. Who knew at the time that the unassuming Dr Ashley Bloomfield would become such a household name within weeks?

Key Lesson #2: The role of psychology for understanding people’s behaviour

In some ways a pandemic is in part a giant (unwelcome) psychological experiment, highlighting many examples of behavioural drivers impacting society. Two came up time and again: mental availability and social norming.

Mental availability (or salience or the availability heuristic ) is where we place greater weight and importance to concepts that spring to mind faster. For example, when choosing a new insurance company or bank you’ll be biased towards which ever brand springs to mind fastest. None of us are immune to this.

Take the Trans-Tasman bubble. If you read the newspapers at the time, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everyone was clamouring to go on a Gold Coast holiday. But our study was telling us different; in June 2020, Dynata survey data suggested only 22% of people were supportive of a bubble, and at the same time our participants were talking of the risk of opening up to other countries – while they were clearly aware of the economic issues, there was hesitancy about opening up too early.

The lesson? Beware the noisy minority . Brands need to ensure that what we’re hearing on social media, reading in the news, and discussing amongst our colleagues in the boardroom are reflective of where our customers are actually at.

Social norming comes down to wanting to belong, and that means living by some arbitrary set of standards that we all largely and implicitly understand. In 2020 we saw this play out with masks. Wearing a mask every day, on the bus or to the shops, was not ‘normal’ behaviour . People generally understood the benefits of them, and were supportive of making them mandatory, but a lot of the time they’d be firmly in our pockets when heading out, not wanting to be the only chump wearing one.

A new socially accepted behaviour was coming up against an existing social norm around not wearing masks.

What changed between now and then to make mask wearing (relatively) more acceptable behaviour? A few things, but one of the biggest was the modelling of appropriate behaviour – we saw politicians wearing them on TV, staff in stores, signs encouraging us to, and suddenly wearing masks was considered more acceptable. You can’t help but see alignment here to why so many workplace culture programmes fail when the people up top aren’t modelling the behaviours they want to see below!

Key Learning #3: Best practice works in good times and bad

Essentially, we found that best practice is always best practice . When times are good, it’s easier to hide the impacts from poor decision-making. But when the country is under stress, less is forgiven, and brands could find themselves lost. And that’s where those everyday elements of best practice come into play, including:

Adapt and deliver – customers still want to see the value that your organisation is offering them, so find new ways to get your product out there (coffee delivered socially distanced through a train set, anyone?). Importantly, people were comfortable with ‘appropriate experimentation’; test and learn solutions didn’t need to be perfect, but clearly intended to deliver customer value
What you say, might not be what is heard – much like the effective messaging we saw earlier, its crucial brands are clear and transparent with what they say. Equally as organisations we can’t assume that the message we try to convey is the message that customers will receive – and a crisis isn’t a time you want to be misinterpreted.
Your brand is who you are AND who you are not – a reminder to always be true to your brand. The key example from COVID-19 was that if you didn’t used to provide public health advice, don’t start now! Too many brands took the lockdowns as an opportunity to get in touch with customers from years’ past, telling them they’re closed in level four – no kidding.

After a year following 30 people through what is likely to be the biggest period of upheaval in their lives, it’s hard to summarise all our learnings into one article – which is why we haven’t. You can read about the many other learnings uncovered, or get in touch.

If you want to find out what else is likely to change or how to deal with these impacts, please get in touch with Cole Armstrong at NeuroSpot ( cole@neurospot.co.nz ) or Mark Finnegan at Clarity Insight (mark@clarityinsight.co.nz).

Attention, Attention! You need to be seen to have an impact.

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 21:43:03 GMT

We have a pretty big challenge these days. In a world inundated with marketing messages, products clamouring for us to buy them, and social media popping up on phones that we never leave behind, it’s getting harder to cut through the clutter. And if your message isn’t being seen (or heard), it’s not going to influence anyone.

And to be clear, this problem isn’t confined to advertising. Whether you’re talking about websites and ecommerce, product and packaging, or any other aspect of the consumer attention, it’s an attention economy, and knowing how to get noticed puts you ahead of the game.

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention"

Herbert A Simon

Nobel Prize Winner

What’s the scale of the problem?

There are a number of studies that have highlighted the challenge being posed to brands. One UK study from Lumen Research looked at how many “viewable” digital adverts were seen – finding 82% of adverts weren’t seen at all. In TV, it’s been estimated that 60% of an advert may be missed as people get distracted by other tasks. And according to Harvard Business School’s Thales S. Teixeira, this is an increasing trend brought about by greater attentional for consumer eye balls (or ears).

Closer to home, recent research conducted by NeuroSpot has found that even in distraction free lab settings, for some adverts only 10% of NZ viewers were paying attention to end-frame branding (although the average was 64% showing the differences in performance). That’s 90% missing the branding in a controlled environment, without the kids arguing, a phone in their hand, or the dog chewing on your shoe – in reality we can expect this number to be lower. Another interesting point – on average viewers were looking at end frame advertising for just over 0.6 sec.

90% of viewers on some NZ adverts missing end frame branding
0.6 sec – the average length of time NZ consumers looked at end frame branding across adverts tested

And the results get worse when we start talking about attention to products instore, where you’re expecting your packaging to stick out on a crowded shelf. Early results from a NeuroSpot pilot study suggest that that the majority of craft beer brands, for example, are being missed on shelf. According to British consumer research firm Walnut Unlimited:

“ The average large supermarket has 40,000 product lines. You buy on average 40 products per trip in a shop that lasts 30 minutes. This means you need to reject 20 products per second ”

Consumer Neuroscientist Andy Myers , from Walnut Unlimited

While not wanting to state the obvious, it’s getting harder. More adverts, more channels, more brands – it’s a competitive environment, but there’s a finite limit to how much attention a single consumer can give to the tumult of messages.

What’s the payoff if we get it right?

Being seen matters. If people don’t look at your finely crafted message, creative advert, or carefully considered proposition it’s all for nought.

And this comes through strongly in a number of ways. For example, research has shown that products on eye level shelves can have 23% additional sales pointing to the need to be in the optimal location for where your customers are looking. But equally, there is a definite impact of choosing an optimal package design – as Tropicana famously found when revising their juice carton a few years ago.

But equally there is some great media research pointing to similar relationships. Lumen Research have shown that being viewed online (as opposed to being viewable) is correlated with greater recall, click throughs and incremental sales – which makes sense. If you’re not seen, how can you be brought.

So now what?

Well now you need to be seen. Your product needs to be seen on the shelf. Your adverts need to be heard on radio or seen online or on TV. But do you know who’s paying attention to your message?

My fear is that there are some great products, great adverts, great messages that don’t hit the mark and are classed as failures, simply because we’re not thinking about what it takes to be seen via a channel. For example, are you placing your product on the right shelf, or is it distinctive enough against your competitors? Are your digital adverts being placed on the right websites in sufficient quantity to have an impact? For online video, are you getting your branding in early enough and bold enough before you lose someone’s attention? And on TV, while you’ve got a great story, are people still paying attention by the end of the advert when your branding becomes prominent?

So is your brand being seen – because I know that some are not.

The 2020 Vision Project

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 20:49:04 GMT

2020 was one for the history books - we started the year living a relatively normal life, only to be thrown a few months later into the first of many lockdowns, where terms like 'social distancing' and 'essential services' that we had previously never heard of, became common language. Everywhere you looked, people were talking about how unprecedented the events of the year were.

The Challenge

Would the year 2020 change us? And how? Would new habits formed in lockdown become a part of normal life? Were previous non-negotiables relegated to 'pre-Covid' life? While it was a scary time and no one knew what the world would look like next week, next month or next year, researchers and behavioural scientists were giddy. The changes to peoples live were so unexpected, drastic and widespread, the opportunity to gain insights into how people were feeling and behaving was huge.

It felt like an issue too important to our wellbeing and economy to ignore, and one which NeuroSpot founder Cole Armstrong and fellow researcher (and Director of Clarity Insight ) Mark Finnegan took on amid Level-4 lockdown, creating The 2020 Vision Project . The project is supported by Trustpower , Dynata and Hunch .

The 2020 Vision Project aimed to find out how the events of 2020 would change consumers behaviour and attitudes, to help brands understand what has changed and where opportunities may lie.

The Solution

A longitudinal study was set up, with 30 New Zealanders recruited and interviewed over the course of 2020.

The participants were interviewed via Zoom three times - midway through the first Level 4 lockdown, once the restrictions eased, and then a few months later, shortly after community transmission returned and Auckland was sent into Level 3 lockdown once more. Toward the end of 2020 a survey was sent to the participants to unearth some concluding insights.

Of the benefits of the longitudinal study, Cole Armstrong says:

"By interviewing the same group multiple times, we were able to gather insight to work out which changes people made over the year were fleeting (such as daily walks with our bubble and baking bread) and which might stick around longer (like working from home and a greater preference for online shopping). We were able to really build a bond with the participants over the course of the study, and so some of the more typical walls that a consumer may put up during qualitative studies disappeared, so we really got to know and understand the person, which added a lot of value to the findings of the study".

The Results

The result is a wealth of information that depicts the mood of New Zealanders throughout 2020. Key outtakes for organisations are:

Consumers now have a greater sensitivity to fairness
A need to truly grasp how terms are being understood by consumers – ‘buy local’ for example had a range of different understandings. Something so simple is actually quite complicated.
The need for brands to be clear about their brand identity. Be loud on issues relevant to your brand, but be brave enough to stay silent when you’re not relevant – don’t piggy back on a cause as a marketing opportunity.
Always focus on customer relevancy and adding value. Customers were prepared for MVP solutions, as long as they could see the value in their own life. Equally customers were scathing where they felt that their interests weren’t the focus.

While the world still grapples with Covid-19 and the vaccine rollout continues internationally, the country's borders remain largely closed: life is still not the same as it was pre-Covid, and many of the insights found are still relevant today. The experience has highlighted the importance of having a strong and effective brand. Where previously companies might have been able to mask some of the less effective features, Covid-19 really brought to life the small mistakes that brands were getting away with.

Visit www.the2020vision.co.nz for full insights from each wave of the study and associated articles. If you're interested in the project, or have questions around how the insights could help your organisation, get in touch .

Inattentional blindness: Why a gorilla on a basketball court explains why no one saw your brand

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 07:56:13 GMT

Earlier this week I was talking to an old colleague about the latest advertising campaign they worked on. Media spend was relatively high but the latest tracker results had come in – and attribution was disappointing. I tried to reassure him that other brands had similar issues – I’m not certain it was that reassuring!

Why?

The challenge is that in our busy lives there’s so much info streaming past our eyes that never gets picked up – in fact much more than we realise. We’re focused on other tasks; we have other goals we’re trying to achieve. In short, there’s a lot going on. And of course, we’re not aware of what we’re missing. (As an example, one study found that only 18% of ‘viewable’ online adverts were actually seen by people).

The busyness of our lives can lead to something called inattentional blindness – one of the most entertaining ideas presented to first year psych students. What is it?

Watch the video below for an explanation.

WARNING: DON’T READ ON WITHOUT WATCHING THE VIDEO BELOW

The disappearing gorilla – that never disappears

Our mind’s a powerful thing – it pulls together a lot of different information to help us understand an amazingly complicated world. And sometimes it’s ability to focus attention on a task can make it blind to some pretty important bits of information – such as a gorilla walking across a stage and beating its chest.

The psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris demonstrated inattentional blindness in this now infamous experiment . By getting people to selectively attend to the people passing the basketball, they were able to blind people to something that in hindsight was obvious. Similar studies have shown this can also occur for auditory info .

Why? There are limits to our attentional capabilities – and when it’s overloaded or focused on something, it has to restrict the attention it gives to other information. Even if it’s a gorilla walking through the centre of your screen.

Commenting on the finding, Simons says:

"Although people do still try to rationalize why they missed the gorilla, it's hard to explain such a failure of awareness without confronting the possibility that we are aware of far less of our world than we think”

As an aside, Simons and Chabris did a follow-up video with similar results.

Inattentional blindness and advertising

A 2012 Colgate from Y&R Brazil takes advantage of people’s inattentional blindness in these dental floss adverts.

Did you notice anything unusual about these images? How about the fact that in the first image, the woman has too many fingers on her left hand? Or the phantom arm on the man’s shoulder in the second image? Or the missing ear on the man in the second image?

This campaign (tag line: “'Not even that [insert anatomical oddity] gets more attention than a mouth without care”) demonstrates that when people’s attention is focused on something, it can miss a whole lot else.

A more concerning insight comes from several bits of research I’ve been involved with over the past 18 months. Using eye tracking to find out what elements of NZ TV adverts viewers actually see, it’s become clear how few people notice key branding elements because attention is being focused on other story elements or bits of info (e.g. websites, products). Essentially the advert is competing with itself for viewer attention, and branding loses out.

What does this mean for advertisers?

Beware of the limits of your customer’s attention – and if you want them to remember who you are, try not to overload them with other tasks and story telling elements. Otherwise, your brand will be the gorilla on the court.

This article was first published by Cole Armstrong on LinkedIn in May 2019.

Vodafone Warriors: Measuring the home-team sponsorship advantage

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 20:37:26 GMT

Brand sponsorships can be risky business. You're taking a gamble on what is essentially an intangible relationship - will there be a return on your investment, and how do you even begin to measure it?

The Challenge

How do you show value in sponsorships for brands?

This was the question the Vodafone Warriors posed of NeuroSpot in mid-2019. In particular, they wanted to understand what it was like to be a game-day supporter at the home ground - Mt Smart Stadium, and what impact a home game could have for their sponsors.

The Vodafone Warriors are one of New Zealand's most exciting professional sporting teams and are backed by a loyal fan base that spans the country. They've also attracted an extensive list of long-term sponsorship deals with well-known brands such as Vodafone, Canterbury of New Zealand, Mazda, and Asahi Beverages (Woodstock). These organisations understand the game, the team and the history, they want to be part of the trials and tribulations; they're not fair-weather sponsors, having stuck by the team throughout many a challenging season. What benefit do these brands get from their association with the team, and how can the Vodafone Warriors give these brands a home team advantage?

The team partnered with NeuroSpot to bring a scientific lens to the field, using the 2019 Round 24 match against the South Sydney Rabbitohs to understand how fan emotion translated to brand value.

The Solution

A scientific research approach to emotion

When undertaking consumer research, one of the benefits of talking direct to customers is that you get their verbatim thoughts - they tell you what’s consciously entered their minds. The downside is that they tell you exactly what they think they feel, as so much of our mental processing is subconscious. As humans, we are remarkably poor at being able to accurately describe what is going on inside our own heads.

A scientific approach, like the one taken by NeuroSpot, measures the body's physiological response, instead of relying on consumers identification and recall of emotion. To answer this question for the Vodafone Warriors, NeuroSpot used biometric technology that measured changes in galvanic skin response - essentially, sweat - throughout the game. When your body encounters an emotional response (for instance, the elation of a try, anger of a ref's wrong call, or the disappointment of the other team scoring), your skin responds with subtle changes - so small you might not even notice them yourself.

Kicking off the study

20 fans were recruited and set up with two small sensors on their fingers and watched the game from a media box. The sensors were set up pre-game to enable baseline measures to be recorded, and then throughout the game NeuroSpot monitored and measured second-by-second fluctuations in fan emotion - and identified what caused it.

The Results

If you know a Vodafone Warriors fan, you'll know they're a passionate bunch - and watching their team live at the home stadium only heightens the excitement. This came through in the study, with an overall uplift of 38% in heightened emotion vs the baseline.

Vodafone Warriors player Ken Maumalo scored the second try for the team in this game, in what was the most exciting moment of the match - we observed a 44% uplift in heightened emotion when this occurred in the 37th minute. Only two minutes earlier the first try was scored by Adam Pompey, observing a 20% uplift. Onya, Ken.

The other team scoring? That's exciting.

You'd be hard pressed to find a true Vodafone Warriors fan who would tell you the other team scoring is exciting. But that's just what our study showed; with a 25% jump off the back of a breakaway try to Dane Gagai. Just goes to show, the excitement of a live sporting event doesn't just come from your team scoring - people respond to the excitement of both teams competing and the atmosphere at the event.

But do fans really care about the sponsors?

Let's get back to the crux of the question from our client. Are our fans taking the excitement and emotion of a live sporting match, and transferring that into positive brand associations for the sponsors?

As part of the study, fans were shown a series of sponsor adverts before the game started, and during the half-time break. Would the excitement of the game cause them to respond differently to the adverts?

In short: Yes. Our key finding was that emotional responses to the same adverts increased by 21% at half-time vs before the game. That means, watching the same advert during half-time stimulated a bigger emotional response from the fan.

While this study only looked at specific sponsor adverts before and half-way through the game, the uplift in emotion measured clearly demonstrates that a sponsorship can provide value to a brand, particularly when associated with a live sporting event. This is good news for the Vodafone Warriors and their sponsors, with more opportunity for positive associations by increasing sponsor logo placement both in stadium and on player uniforms.

NeuroSpot worked with Aaron Lawton, GM Marketing, Communications and Projects at NZ Warriors. He had this to say about working with us:

“We often hear that following the Vodafone Warriors is like riding the world’s longest rollercoaster ride. Sure, there’s sometimes disappointments, but there’s always plenty of excitement too when it comes to watching our games. That said, we wanted to know whether we could back up something so subjective with some more objective insight. Innovation and doing things differently is a key value here at the club so when the opportunity arose to do something like this, we absolutely jumped at the chance”

A final note - in the particular game studied, the final result was Warriors 10, South Sydney Rabbitohs 31, which goes to show that no matter how your team play, it's still possible for your brand to reap the benefits from a sponsorship.

How do we unpack the levers for behaviour change? A simple framework

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 07:36:44 GMT

How do we inject some more science into our design process, to develop solutions that best fit with how people actually make decisions?

Over the past few years I’ve worked with a range of teams and companies operating in different sectors to better understand why their customers do what they do, and how we can engineer better experiences – for the user and organisation. And I’ve noticed that the growth in interest in behavioural science as a core part of a designer’s toolkit has been phenomenal.

Concepts such as ‘people don’t do what they say’ or that our behaviour can be influenced by factors outside of our conscious awareness seem to be well accepted. In fact, more and more I’m finding that people are aware of researchers such as Daniel Kahneman or Dan Ariely , or can use terms such as ‘ System 1/ System 2 ’ and ‘ heuristics ’.

The interest is there. The willingness to probe into the psychological levers of behaviour is there. Is something missing?

From my experience, the challenge is in application – taking well-proven concepts and applying them in a systematic way as part of the design process. Done well, behavioural science can support a designer’s understanding of their user and lead to better, and even counter-intuitive, design solutions.

But to take advantage of scientific fields such as psychology and behaviour economics (yielding 4 million+ and 3.3 million+ references, respectively, on Google Scholar), there need to be some guidelines. Guidelines that help guide your path without spoiling the creativity of designing for people.

For a view on why designers should be interested in bringing more behavioural science into their repertoire, see a previous article How can behavioural science contribute to better design decisions?

A simple framework for understanding behaviour change

When trying to understand why people do what they do, and how to design for behaviour change, there are a number of frameworks that can be utilised. One that I’ve found useful in a range of situations is the B=MAT (or B=MAP ) model developed by the behavioural scientist BJ Fogg from Stanford University.

Figure 1: The B=MAT model for understanding behaviour change.

It explains “that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behaviour to occur: Motivation, Ability and a Prompt”. When someone is motivated (M) to behave in a certain way, has the ability (A) to behave in a certain way, and the right trigger (T) converges then a behaviour (B) can occur. It’s proven useful for understanding for what and why people are currently behaving in a given way, and what might be changed in the future.

The key benefit I find with this model is it stretches people’s thinking beyond what is immediately in front of them (e.g. what users claim to be important in interviews). As an example, in a recent project I used this model to help reframe the problem from one of awareness of the proposition’s benefits, to one in which the key trigger to make use of the proposition wasn’t cutting through into people’s awareness. Making the trigger more salient and obvious was a simple solution – and one which didn’t immediately surface in the team’s thinking.

An example: Understanding reluctance to wear masks in public

To illustrate how this approach can be applied, let’s take the issue of mask wearing in public spaces such as supermarkets and buses. In a recent project I’ve been involved with ( The 2020 Vision Project ) looking at how New Zealanders have responded to COVID-19 and the several waves of lockdown, people’s reluctance to wear masks in public settings proved to be an interesting challenge.

Why? Because most people accepted that it was a necessary behaviour, to help the ‘Team of 5 million’ combat COVID-19 – supported by frequent exhortations from people such as Jacinda Arden to “make it [wearing masks] a part of normal life”. But there were also plenty of people who were reluctant to wear them in public at first due to concerns about what others might think: “My theory is that the minute I want to shop … the mask should go on … but I look around at what others are doing”

This led to two challenges:

We found broad support with the idea of wearing masks in public, but reluctance to wear them as it was a new and weak social norm coming up against a strong existing social norm. For example, data from survey research firm Dynata found that only 45% of Aucklanders during Level 3 in August 2020 reported always wearing a face mask in public locations
There was a belief that retailers and supermarkets needed to control the safety of the store environment, including controlling the behaviours of other customers. Another survey conducted by Dynata found that 63% of people supported mandatory mask wearing in supermarkets and 64% at malls

So if you were a retailer caught in the middle, how might you address this issue, where people knew what they should be doing, but weren’t, and expected you the retailer to keep control of the store environment?

Here’s how you could unpack this using the B=MAT model, and come up with a range of different solutions:

M otivation: What are people motivated to do (or not do)?

Social pressure can exert a strong promoting and inhibiting pressure on how we behave
In this situation, could we highlight the desired behaviour, or make it the default behaviour to normalise it? For example, signs saying “Thanks everyone for wearing their mask”

A bility: What are people able to do (or not able to do)?

Ability is more than just the skills and knowledge to undertake a behaviour, but also the capacity to perform the behaviour at that point in time. In this case, do people have a mask to wear at the point they enter the store?
Could we hand out masks to people on the way into a store, or have them on offer next to the entrance? This reduces expectations and effort on behalf of customers

T riggers: What triggers do people see (or not see)?

A trigger can exist to increase people’s motivation, raise someone’s ability or to remind people in the moment to change their behaviour
Could we use visual triggers (e.g. shop displays and images with people wearing masks) to reinforce a new social norm? Or even a simple command as someone walks into the store (“Now’s the time to put your mask on”)?

Are these three factors aligning at the right time?

Quite simply, are the right messages and prompts occurring at the time necessary to impact behaviour
For example, signs saying to “remember your mask” might be too late outside the store, but might be a good reminder as people leave their car, assuming there is a mask in the glove box

This is quite a simplified example but is a nice way of demonstrating how taking a different lens on what people are doing and why that might be the case can yield different results. In practice, this approach tends to stretch team’s thinking when conducting user research and encourage them to come up with different types of solutions.

Is this the one user behaviour model to rule them all?
Unfortunately, not even close. There’s a range of models that are worth pulling out in different situations, that can yield different solutions and ways of thinking. But like my Master’s supervisor said: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.

For me, this model continues to be a simple and useful lens on people’s behaviour in a range of situations.

Note: For anyone who wants to go deeper into this topic, I’d highly recommend visiting BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model site

Trustpower: Understanding advertising effectiveness

justin@marsbound.co (J B LIGHT C YANG) — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 23:16:31 GMT

Trustpower is one of New Zealand’s most successful home service providers. The company’s strategic choice to extend beyond it’s origins as an electricity retailer, to provide bundles of energy and telco services has led to significant growth. The energy and telco sectors have however heated up in the past few years, with new retailers entering the market, aggressive competition between established players and changing consumer behaviour. Levels of switching have increased, and many consumers are reviewing their options on a regular basis.

In this environment, commercial advantage can be gained from finding new and innovative solutions. So, with a new brand advertising campaign in market ("We’ve Got the Time"), Trustpower decided to double-down on their investment, and use the latest research methods from NeuroSpot to ensure their campaign hit the mark.

The Challenge

In recent years several research studies have pointed to the importance of brands making an emotional connection with consumers in their advertising. Work carried out over the last decade by advertising effectiveness gurus Les Binet & Peter Field, who recently visited New Zealand, has highlighted the need for brands to invest in emotionally-driven, creative brand campaigns to produce long term growth. The challenge is that emotion is a very difficult concept to define, although seemingly easy to recognise.

So, how do you know when you’ve hit the mark?

The Solution

Trustpower turned to NeuroSpot to use its scientific approach to understanding consumer behaviour, and gain insight into how viewers actually respond to advertising. By using a combination of eye tracking and EEG (a tool to measure brain responses), NeuroSpot was able to pinpoint moment by moment how engaged and emotionally motivated viewers were when viewing Trustpower and their competitor’s adverts.

This provided Trustpower and its creative partners with the insights to go back and re-edit their advert. By carefully looking at what shot selections created the greatest emotional impact, they were able to optimise the advert while remaining true to the original creative concept.

The Results

After re-editing, key metrics for the advert improved substantially compared to the already successful original cut:

+14% prompted awareness for the advert
+77% brand recognition for the advert
+20% brand consideration for those exposed to the advert.

According to Carolyn Schofield, Marketing Communications Manager at Trustpower:

"This project just clicked with us. The findings helped explain some of the unexpected results we’d seen in our more conventional advertising effectiveness research. But more importantly it gave us concrete data that we could work with to make further improvements. As a result we went back and re-edited and retested the 90s TVC. The results are amazing – we’ve increased the emotional connection people make significantly, so that each second of the TVC works harder, without compromising the creative product. We’ve also been able to increase the impact of the branding, something all advertisers want to achieve, and have learnt some valuable lessons that we can apply going forward"

How can behavioural science contribute to better design decisions?

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 22:53:51 GMT

What the world needs isn’t new ideas; it’s new ideas that work. Our challenge is often to get to those ideas that work quickly, with an efficient use of time and money, and to demonstrate that these ideas have made an impact (i.e. separating the ideas that work, from the ideas that sounded promising).

We also need to be aware that when we are designing for behaviour change, we are designing not for how people experience the world, but how people perceive their experience of the world. Perception trumps reality[1].

This is where there is an opportunity for designers to bring a different lens and set of tools into their design tool chest, calling upon the fields of psychology, cognitive science and behavioural economics to inform all stages of their design process. This idea isn’t new, with behavioural design increasingly used in government (for example the infamous Behavioural Insights Team which operates around the world including NZ ), and in corporate settings (e.g. Walmart , Google, The Commonwealth Bank of Australia , Spotify).

However, the challenge I see isn’t people’s willingness to utilise behavioural science (there’s widespread interest in the field of behavioural economics, for example[2]). The challenge and opportunity is to see how behavioural science can be more rigorously used throughout the design process, in the process, de-risking key design decisions.

Over the next 12 months as part of the CX Collective Associates programme, I’ll be exploring how we can better integrate behavioural science into the design conversation.

Behavioural science: A different lens to the same problem

So why behavioural science? My view is that a behavioural lens holds value at all stages of a design conversation, from problem definition to validation of ideas.

The benefits can be seen in a well-known case study, of an airport in Houston that looked at how they could decrease customer complaints, caused by the wait times at the luggage carousel. While a rational response would be to look at shortening how long it takes to get the luggage off the plane, you could imagine this would also prove costly.

Their approach was to do something quite different – to make people walk further from their plane to the luggage carousel, so their bags were waiting for them when they arrived. Why? The designers understood how human perception of time plays into an experience, and how this could be influenced by changing the environment. I’ve found similar insights – leading to a different set of solutions – in online and physical environments.

This example, illustrates several benefits of taking a behavioural science lens to developing new solutions, not least finding a relatively cheap and non-obvious solution that benefits the organisation and its users.

Moving beyond the academic to the practical

Behavioural science, or Behavioural Economics, has been having a large impact on the thinking of a number of customer/ user facing strategies. For example, it’s recently been discussed in terms of how to increase uptake of a COVID-19 vaccine , Heineken’s campaign to reduce drink driving , and how to increase Kiwisaver savings rates . Behind the scenes, it’s also informed the strategies of many NZ commercial organisations – hidden away behind the guise of competitive advantage.

But here’s the opportunity. I see plenty of design solutions that could have been improved by a basic understanding of psychology; projects that are unduly influenced by what a customer says; solutions that are signed and delivered without an understanding of the actual impact on the user. And because they’re overlooked, they’re often easy pickings – ways to differentiate from your competitor, or from previous solutions proposed.

But should it be hidden away like this? Shouldn’t something as important as the study of human behaviour (i.e. psychology) and decision-making (i.e. behavioural economics) be made accessible to a wider audience? This is a big opportunity, to make the study of human decision making accessible and part of the daily conversation for NZ designers.

Over the coming 12 months, Cole Armstrong from behavioural insights agency NeuroSpot will be taking part in the CX Collective’s Associate’s programme. During this period, he will be looking at how some of the key frameworks from the world of behavioural science can be made accessible to designers – adding value to their existing approaches.

Notes:

[1] Ironically, the best example of perception trumping reality, comes from the current US President.

[2] One of the challenges that behavioural economics has as an applied field, is a perception that it can be used as a series of one-off tactical approaches or gimmicks.

The mental toll from 2020 – and what this means for 2021

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 06:56:52 GMT

The physical ravages and unfortunate deaths caused by COVID-19 are well documented, but this pandemic has also taken a toll in many other ways.

There are the obvious financial impacts – from business closures; inevitable redundancies; through to billions of dollars of government funded wage subsidies – as we all try to navigate our way through some serious economic turbulence. Then there’s the ongoing uncertainty of living in the shadow of COVID-19… Should we book that event? Should we plan a holiday? When will we see loved ones overseas again? And with Auckland bouncing in and out of lockdown (and back in again) just recently, uncertainty has ratcheted up another notch.

One of the lingering impacts from 2020 therefore, has been on the mental health of New Zealanders.

It was a tough year for many of us

The Ministry Health estimates that 660,000 New Zealanders suffer some form of depression – up 32% compared with 2012 . With the stigma around mental health slowly receding and more focus on the subject, we need to understand the wider mental health context resulting from COVID-19, even where the physical (i.e. health) impact may have been limited. And it could be argued that the long-term impact to our minds is arguably an even bigger public health challenge.

As an indicator, a Dynata survey taken at the end of 2020 certainly alludes to a mental health impact, with four in ten (43%) saying they were more stressed than the previous year. An identical number (43%) also said they were more anxious than in 2019 before COVID-19 appeared. In amongst the plethora of negative news related to health and the economy – from NZ and overseas – this certainly doesn’t seem surprising. But when does temporary mental state become an ingrained trait for those who have suffered the worst effects from COVID-19?

One of our 2020 Vision participants noted “ I don’t watch the news anymore – its so depressing. All you hear about is how many people are dying of this virus. You wonder when it will all end ”.

The unique experience of lockdowns and the various travel restrictions were certainly felt, adding to our mental health load. The Dynata survey highlighted that three in ten (29%) were more lonely in 2020 compared to the previous year, while four in ten (40%) considered their personal relationships stronger than the year prior. So, while our household bubbles helped bond many spouses and families over board games and long walks, others were disconnected from their loved ones – particularly the elderly.

With a vaccine having now arrived in New Zealand, hope is certainly on the horizon, but we still have a long way to go before COVID-19 is fully under control. Large-scale vaccination of the general population is unlikely to be completed before the end of this year, nor is our international border expected to be freely open before 2022. What if this ‘COVID-19 environment’ lingers for longer, or the economic recovery (especially in the hardest hit sectors) isn’t as quick as desired? The Christchurch earthquake experience has shown that the effects of psychological distress often don’t manifest until much later after the actual event . The mental scars of COVID-19 may well endure for some time.

Of course, not all people’s mental health has been adversely affected to the same degree, but all of us will be feeling the effects in some way.

How do brands need to respond in 2021?

That’s a big question off the back of a year in which many organisations were called out for how they responded – or didn’t respond – to support the ‘team of 5 million’. But the Dynata survey provides some clues on what these organisations need to be thinking of in 2021.

For starters, those expressing greater levels of stress or anxiety in 2020 indicated they were looking for brands that demonstrate they care and who are transparent – essentially showing a sense of fairness in how they interact with their customers. It seems like customer experience design teams have the perfect opportunity to make a case to really enhance the customer journey – eliminating any pain-points that just add to stress levels, while showing a humane side even if delivered via channels that aren’t classically ‘human’.

At a time when communications budgets are coming under increasing scrutiny, it also feels the right time to invest wisely in building even deeper emotive connections with consumers. Stories of human bonding and relationships have always been rich emotional material, but this has been heightened through this pandemic as our household bubbles have brought us closer together in many cases.

Trustpower has managed to tap into this with their most recent campaign 'Lost & Found' , in which two people re-connect later in life. This story of human connection has performed well above industry norms in a number of advertising diagnostics, and achieved the highest recall of any Trustpower campaign over the past seven years. By reflecting what’s important to us as a society at the moment, Trustpower have succeeded in creating an emotional connection with their audience.

*Survey data was collected by Dynata in December 2020 and interviewed a nationally representative sample of 1000 New Zealanders.

Note, this article was first published as part of the 2020 Vision Project - a research project conducted by Cole Armstrong at NeuroSpot ( cole@neurospot.co.nz ) and Mark Finnegan at Clarity Insight ( mark@clarityinsight.co.nz ), looking into the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic was having on our community.

Why we’re not scanning in with the COVID tracker app (or why we don’t do what we intend to)

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 06:15:33 GMT

An ongoing challenge in New Zealand’s battle with COVID-19 has been people’s compliance with seemingly simple behaviours such as mask wearing in public spaces during lockdown, and use of the COVID tracer app. While these simple behaviours can reduce the spread of future outbreaks, and the likelihood of future lockdowns, clearly there is a barrier stopping people.

Ultimately these barriers are psychological in nature, reflecting well-documented decision-making biases. And this means we need to look to understand the drivers of these behaviours, to develop effective solutions.

It’s not a challenge of intention … it’s a challenge of behaviour

Research from The 2020 Vision Project has pointed to people’s willingness to do ‘the right thing’. When talking to some of our participants we found people were generally supportive of steps such as wearing masks in public spaces such as public transport and supermarkets, and scanning in with the COIVD tracer app. One person said: “ I really don’t mind wearing them … it’s not that hard to wear a mask for 20 minutes while you run into the supermarket ”.

This matches recent survey results from Dynata (collected December 2020), showing that people understood the gravity of the situation, finding that 79% believed that NZ needed to avoid taking unnecessary risks in relation to COVID-19. Data collected by Dynata in August 2020, shows a similar story, with more than 60% supporting the idea of wearing masks in public spaces such as supermarkets during Level 2.

But clearly that’s not the full story. After each community outbreak, we see spikes in COVID app usage – which drops again soon after. This is despite frequent requests from the likes of Ashley Bloomfield to continue using the app when out in public to control future outbreaks: " We all have a responsibility to support contact tracing by keeping a record of our movements, either with the app or by another method such as a diary ”.

Figure 1: Number of daily scans and diary entries using the NZ COVID Trace app. Source: NZ Ministry of Health

Is it that people can’t be bothered? Or is there something more?

In our conversations with people, it became clear that the intention was there – people knew how they should behave and wanted to do it. But as time wears on, day-to-day issues become more urgent and salient in people’s minds. This results in decreased motivation to follow through with the behaviour, at the time the behaviour needs to be enacted.

As one person said: “ I feel bad about [not scanning in] and I should do it … the other day I was looking at something on my phone and I walked straight past [the QR code] ”

Why does this happen?

This challenge – getting people to follow through with how they know they should behave – is something very common. This affects everything from our attitudes towards sustainability (do we use the single-use plastic bag in the produce department even though we know it carries a long-term cost?), and our willingness to save for retirement , amongst other things.

It can come down to several reasons – and all might be acting to influence people’s behaviour. An effective behaviour change strategy requires robust insights into what these reasons might be.

For example, in the case of using the COVID tracer app, we know that small inconveniences (or friction) can have a large impact on what people do. This is why Amazon’s one-click ordering has proven so successful – they’ve taken away one point of friction to people doing what they wanted to do.

Another factor could be the reduced risk saliency in people’s minds – over time, information is downgraded in people’s minds until a new incident increases its space in our consciousness. As an example, whenever a well-documented plane crash occurs , anxiety about flying increases – despite the car ride to the airport being more dangerous.

Finally, we could also be seeing something called temporal discounting, in which costs incurred today, even trivial costs such as opening an app, are seen to outweigh the benefits incurred in the future. In one famous case study, Bank of America was able to reverse this impact , by allowing retirement fund customers to upload a picture of themselves and see how they would look in the future – making our future self (and the benefits it will experience) more readily apparent to our current self).

What do we do now?

Many of the challenge’s organisations are facing, whether from COVID-19 or more everyday customer challenges, are psychological in nature. Understanding what is impacting your customer’s decision – even when it doesn’t make sense at first glance – is the first step to developing an effective strategy.

If you’d like to find out more about how to understand the psychological drivers impacting your organisation’s users, feel free to get in touch with Cole Armstrong at NeuroSpot ( cole@neurospot.co.nz ) or Mark Finnegan at Clarity Insight ( mark@clarityinsight.co.nz ).

AA Insurance: Improving the online experience

justin@marsbound.co (J B LIGHT C YANG) — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 12:57:31 GMT

AA Insurance is New Zealand’s leading personal insurance provider, offering house, contents and motor insurance amongst others, direct to consumers for almost 25 years. A key focus has been to constantly improve and optimise their online sales funnel, making the process easier and less taxing for potential customers. This is no easy task, with customers needing to be asked for a number of pieces of information to adequately assess risk and pricing.

So how do you find those small opportunities that can have an outsize effect on consumer?

The Challenge

The online sales process involves a number of questions being asked of customers, and different brands present this to their potential customers in different ways. So how do you know what layout and approach works best, or what aspects of your current experience could be improved?

AA Insurance knew that some of the most important opportunities for improvement wouldn’t be consciously recalled by customers, as 95% of human decision-making happens subconsciously. They were looking for a more objective, scientifically-based solution, that would identify how a consumer felt throughout the experience, and what elements were being missed due to the page layout.

The Solution

AA Insurance turned to NeuroSpot, and its scientific approach to measure how people actually engage with the online experience. Combining the best approaches from consumer neuroscience, NeuroSpot turned to eye tracking to find out what customers looked at, or what they missed, and a device called GSR which measures changes in people’s emotional state.

Combining these tools allowed AA Insurance to pinpoint what moments during the experience resulted in greater frustration to their customers and benchmarked against the industry. This objectivity leads not only to recommendations and improvements, but the ability to prioritise those changes that will lead to the greatest impact.

The Results

AA Insurance was able to further validate the issues its customers were experiencing in the online sales process. This combined with new insights into previously unknown customer pain points has meant AA Insurance has been able to prioritise and focus on changes that best support their customers, supporting improvements to online conversion and helping to drive strong business results.

According to John Lewis, Digital Platform and Performance Manager at AA Insurance:

"Working with NeuroSpot gave us great insight into what our customers feel and experience when using our website. That we could measure this and see how key pain points affected people has enabled us to focus our effects on the areas that make the biggest difference to our customers. Using NeuroSpot’s scientific approach has created huge value and opened up opportunities that wouldn’t have been found otherwise. We look forward to continuing our work with NeuroSpot"

Why Santa needs some Choice Architecture

justin@marsbound.co (J B LIGHT C YANG) — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 02:39:10 GMT

Over the weekend I went to the local shopping centre with my wife and 10-month old child for our first family photo with Santa. We were lucky – our daughter had slept well, and is pretty good with new people, so there were no tears (maybe next year?).

But one thing became obvious – that no one had given serious thought to how a consumer would choose from the myriad of photo packages. The way the photo packages were presented to us caused so many issues: a poor customer experience, longer queue times as every family in front of us struggled to decide on which option to pay for, and likely lead to lower revenue for Santa and his helpers. And this could be an easy fix. So, what could they do to fix this? The answer is Choice Architecture.

Choice Architecture: Controlling the context to influence decision-making

Choice Architecture came out of Thaler and Sunstein’s infamous book “Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness”. It refers to the practice of organising the context in a way that influences how people make decisions. This is a reflection that the decisions people make are heavily influenced by the context in which we make those decisions e.g. eating healthier food is influenced by where in a café the healthy food is located; our willingness to accept financial risk is influenced by the way the risk is framed.

By understanding that context influences decisions, and how context influences decisions, “choice architects” can make deliberate choices about the context that influence real world behaviours. In practice, choice architecture happens all around us. By placing fruit and veg at the front of a supermarket and chocolate bars on the way out, someone has made a deliberate decision to influence what I buy. By placing bus stations at certain intervals, increasing the frequency of buses in my area, and developing an app to track where my bus is, someone is deliberately trying to influence my decision to catch a bus.

What makes Choice Architecture particularly powerful, is when “choice architects” utilise the latest findings from behavioural science – in a deliberate, rigorous way – to influence behaviour. Research has shown that people’s behaviour is more predictable than we many people realise; and that the influences on our behaviour can’t always be detected by asking people what affects their decisions, but by observing what people actually do and how they respond.

Salience: Making the desired option the most visually obvious

One of the simplest solutions is to make the most desirable choice stick out on the page. This can be done through use of imagery, borders, font size and colour, amongst other options. This stems from the fact that the brain is inherently lazy – with a preference for the option. Making the option more salient doesn’t just increase attention, it makes the option easier to process..

For example, Vodafone guides people towards a preferred mobile option, Unlimited , by changing the outline colour to make it more salient. NB: this also works because they’ve focused on one option, instead of highlighting multiple competing options..

S ocial proof

When making decisions, we are heavily influenced by the decisions of those around us. By utilising social proof we can indicate what a typical decision is and increase the likelihood that a customer will make a similar decision.

For example, in this situation Santa’s photographer could have indicated which option is their most popular option (assuming that’s the option they want to promote), or which is their most popular option amongst a certain type of customer. We were a family of three – what option would most families our size have chosen? We’ve got three sets of grandparents and a range of uncles and aunties we might want photos for – what do people in a similar family dynamic choose?

Decoy product

Another option that may have worked is through the use of decoy products – the inclusion of a similarly priced but inferior choice that makes you away from choosing a lower value option and makes the higher priced option seem like a better deal. This works because value is a subjective experience and is based in the context in which a decision is made. Change the context, and you can change someone’s perception of value.

Perhaps one of the 43 photo packages could have acted as a decoy product to a more expensive product offer?

A nchoring

How do we know something is good value? Obvious really – we evaluate what we get for what we pay against some other value that springs to mind. Anchoring works by deliberately being that anchor value that springs to mind – for example a $5 coffee sounds great given that I’m anchored to pay $5 for coffee in most cafes. A $7 coffee sounds like more dubious value – unless I’m sitting in an airport or at a café overseas where the coffee around me costs an average $7.

This effect has been famously documented by behavioural economist Dan Ariely, using the example of The Economist subscription. In this example, the inclusion of an inferior subscription offer – an offer that few people chose – would have resulted in an increase in revenue of 43%. The inferior subscription offer wasn’t intended to be chosen, but merely makes a more expensive subscription offer appear to be better value and hence more desirable.

In this case, they might’ve anchored me by pointing to the cost of a typical family photo sitting (say $200).

Summary

Some of these examples are more plausible than others. What would make the difference is taking control of the Choice Architecture – being very deliberate about what is presented and presenting in a way that works with how our minds actually make decisions. If employed correctly this can be a win for customers who get a better experience and feel better about their choices, and a win for the organisation who is bringing in greater revenue for existing resources.

Don’t think COVID-19 impacted everyone equally: The K-shaped recovery

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 18:57:03 GMT

While the narrative about NZ’s post-COVID recovery has been largely positive, there are still significant numbers of the population who continue to struggle. What does this mean for your organisation, and what strategies need to be developed to respond both compassionately and pragmatically for long-term value?

Amongst my circle of friends and work colleagues, there has been almost a sense of buoyancy about how well NZ has rebounded from the impact of COVID-19. The economy is doing well , unemployment figures aren’t as bad as we once thought they were going to be, and the housing market is increasing at astronomical rates. After a fantastic Kiwi summer, where we’ve congregated with friends and families at the beach, it’s hard not to feel good about things. This shows as well in consumer confidence (up +2 points according to ANZ Consumer Confidence Survey ) and retail spending data (+3.5% according to recent electronic transaction figures released by Stats NZ ).

But not everyone has come through 2020 and COVID-19 equally, and recent research from The 2020 Vision Project has highlighted the scale of the issue.

Winners and losers from COVID-19

At the end of 2020, The 2020 Vision Project wanted to get a sense of scale of the lasting impact that COVID-19 left on NZ. Interviews throughout the year had captured the general sense of recovery as we moved from first shock as COVID-19 and lockdown first entered our consciousness, and later recovery as we adapted to the new landscape. In partnership with survey firm Dynata , we conducted a survey with 1000 New Zealanders in December 2020, to see how people felt they’d personally been impacted.

The responses were divided.

First of all, the majority of New Zealanders felt their life hadn’t changed much relative to other NZers. 50% said their life hadn’t changed, 51% said they were still earning the same income.

There was a second group, whose life had gotten better – 28% of people in fact, who believed their situation had improved relative to the rest of New Zealand. Only 16% said they were earning more, and our figures support some of the recent commentary around increased house prices – you don’t need to earn more income, if your house is earning it for you.

But there was also a sizeable minority who felt their situation had gotten worse – 22% of people in fact. Similar numbers said they were earning less than the same time in 2019 (29%), or weren’t feeling secure about their employment (21%). These might be the hospitality or tourism workers who lost income, the solo parents who struggled through lockdown without an income, or even the pilots who are grounded and working in other industries.

Throughout 2020, we heard the tales of some of these people, how they viewed the behaviours of other NZers, and how they responded to some of the actions of well-known NZ businesses. This provided the human voice to what many economic commentators have described as our K-shaped recovery : some are seeing life getting better at the same time as others see it getting worse.

“ We've been quite fortunate to keep our jobs and we have a house ... so we were lucky I think … some of our friends did lose jobs or had financial struggles. ”

Why does this matter?

In short, this matters because of how humans are hardwired to respond to fairness . We’re willing to accept much worse outcomes, as long as we can explain it as being fair relative to others, and importantly, are willing to give up much better outcomes if it seems out of whack with what others are getting.

So, we know that right now there could be 22% of the population who see their place in the world getting worse, as others are getting better.

This matters. From a moral perspective and from a consumer confidence perspective, with research showing that those who are perceived to have been dealt with unfairly, disposed towards a negativity bias of the world around them. This showed up in our research: those who felt they were doing worse relative to 2019 held more pessimistic views on how their fellow citizens treat each other and whether the economy will bounce back in 2021.

Could this impact the social bonds that hold our society together? Could this add another level of fragility to our economic recovery? These are important questions with both societal and commercial implications.

Unequally impacted: “It’s just not fair”

The impact that this can have shows up in terms of public sentiment, and how people responded to several brands seen to take advantage of the situation during 2020. Those who felt most aggrieved with how their life had changed, were also those that held the most negative sentiments towards key brands who were seen to have taken advantage of the wage subsidy .

One of our participants captures this sentiment perfectly: “ They can’t take advantage of the situation, like try to exploit it. That would be real poor form ”. Could some of the social media furor have been exacerbated by the perceived ‘unfairness’ of the situation?

What this means

While brands and organisations are at the mercy of customer sentiment, there are opportunities to ensure that you capture the current mood of the population and take steps to ensure you don’t inadvertently upset a large minority of people.

This might include concrete steps built around a longer-term relationship with a customer (e.g. extended interest free terms, down sizing customer plans, holding back increases in insurance premiums). It’s also how we present ourselves as a brand, or how we interact with our customers – given a fifth of customers might feel life has gone backwards over the past 12 months.

NZ’s response to COVID-19 (so far) has been great but what does the future hold?

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 06:52:32 GMT

NZ’s response to COVID-19 (so far) has been great but what does the future hold?

As the turbulence of 2020 gave way to the hope that a new year brings, most Kiwis were enjoying the balmy summer weather with the misery of COVID-19 seemingly receding into history… we had beaten the great invisible enemy (at least for now). But as we pondered what 2021 (and beyond) may hold, things seemed less certain. The only thing we tended to agree on was that things weren’t going to be quite the same ever again.

Findings from a Dynata survey taken at the end of 2020 indicated that we were rather pleased with our collective effort to beat back COVID-19 with seven in ten deeming our response ‘excellent’. As a ‘team of five million’ we were particularly proud of our unity (57%), determination (55%) and resilience (49%) during 2020 – well captured by one respondent:

“The way we all pulled together was so impressive – it made you realise what we can achieve as a nation when we’re all focused on the same goal”.

Despite escaping the worst of COVID-19’s ravages, particularly when compared to many other countries, there is no doubt that such a defining moment in history has altered how we see things and live our lives in New Zealand. This isn’t uncommon – people who lived through other pivotal events in history discovered that the world they knew changed forever…. Those who lived through the Great Depression developed the frugality of a ‘waste not, want not’ culture that lasted for decades, while WWII cemented the role of women in the workforce. What sort of changes will emerge in our lives once COVID-19 is finally under control?

The Dynata survey highlighted that almost half of all Kiwis believe life will never return to how it was before the pandemic. Of course, some of these changes may not be entirely clear right now, but there are other shifts in attitudes and behaviour already visible…

Last year, the 2020 Vision Project unearthed the shift in working from home that was inspired out of the necessity of lockdown. With suitable technology platforms now readily available, employees (and organisations) have discovered the productivity gains and lifestyle benefits that working from home has enabled. With three in ten working New Zealanders feeling their work/life balance has improved since the pandemic began flexible working is likely to endure long after COVID-19 has subsided….

But what other changes will working from home inspire? Already we have seen an increase in cosmetic surgery as meeting participants want to look their best on camera. We’ve also seen a rise in orders of bookshelves (and corresponding book collections) to project the right sort of image to those Zooming into your home office.

There is likely to be significant disruption to the way corporate offices are structured, from interior layouts to commercial leasing agreements themselves. Think of the knock-on effect on corporate team culture…. Or the ability to cultivate business relationships and develop new business. Even traffic congestion is likely to feel the consequences of greater working from home…

Whatever your political persuasion, it is hard not to argue that the 2020 New Zealand General Election was a stunning result. Amid all the fear and uncertainty brought about by COVID-19, it was as much an endorsement of the mantra of kindness and compassion that underpinned our unified approach to dealing with COVID-19 as anything else. Maybe it was serendipitous, but the collision of a young, progressive Prime Minister and a global pandemic has encouraged a new era of ‘doing the right thing’. The Dynata survey shows that brand attributes around being fair, responsible, and transparent are increasingly to the fore in purchase decisions, and there is evidence that is sentiment is now permeating consumer decision-making given the social media backlash directed at many large companies who accepted the government wage subsidy and then went on to record large profits. Many of whom have now re-paid the subsidy such was the need to ‘do the right thing’.

If we think things in New Zealand will be changed because of COVID-19, then how will other countries who have been hit much harder emerge from all of this? Being in repeated lockdowns for many months will undoubtedly take its toll – physically, mentally, and financially on many individuals. As an economy, New Zealand relies on international tourists – but what does the future hold for our tourism industry?

Will our strong handling of the pandemic endear us to prospective travellers? It is likely that post-pandemic travel will become more of an experience to be immersed in rather than a fleeting ‘tick the box’ jaunt of historic landmarks and Instagram shots. As a ‘destination’ with a rich indigenous culture it would seem that New Zealand is well poised to deliver as travellers seek more ‘meaningful’ travel. At the same time, travellers are already trying to limit their carbon footprint and with many re-acquainting themselves with the ‘road trip’ off the back of closed international borders, getting them to board an ultra long-haul flight to New Zealand may not be as easy as it previously was. Especially as the focus on sustainable travel intensifies…

Flexible working, ‘doing the right thing’ and international tourism are some of the ways COVID-19 is changing our world. If you want to find out what else is likely to change or how to deal with these impacts, please get in touch.

A New Retail Experience: Assisting Customers to Feel Safe in a COVID environment

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 20:39:59 GMT

As New Zealand emerges from COVID-19 and lockdown, there is an expectation that retailers continue to off a safe and comfortable shopping environment for customers. But one challenge is the introduction of a new behaviour - wearing masks in public locations - which is pushing up against an existing social norm. How might retailers respond to this?

To find out more about the challenges and opportunities posed by this new social norm, have a read of a recent article from NeuroSpot founder, Cole Armstrong.

How we can draw customers back into stores after COVID: Rebuilding old habits

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 21:48:40 GMT

One of the challenges from COVID-19 and lockdown - undoing months of learnt behaviour

After COVID is eliminated, or even accepted, how do we encourage customers back in the numbers that they had previously—and move forward after e-commerce became the primary source of shopping for millions?

To find out how you can address people’s perception of risk, and get more people back into stores sooner, have a read of a recent article from NeuroSpot founder, Cole Armstrong.

Lockdown round 2: How has the country responded?

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 20:16:20 GMT

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Closing the gates – how New Zealanders view the border closures, and its impact on the country

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 20:41:04 GMT

As part of The 2020 Vision Project, we’ve been asking a range of New Zealanders from across the country how they feel about the world around them, and some of the key issues coming out of COVID that affect organisations and people alike. One of the most topical has been about the closure, and maintenance, of NZ’s border.

At the point at which we conducted our second wave of interviews, there had been much public discussion about whether NZ should open up our borders to a trans-Tasman or Pacific travel ‘bubble’. There had also been the much publicised issues at the border, where 1000 people had been allowed out of quarantine without being tested.

So what was the sentiment of the average New Zealander?

The border issues were disappointing, but we’re still trusting the government response

The issues identified at the border were clearly a disappointment to the people we spoke to, with many commenting on the hard yards that the country as a whole had gone through to eliminate COVID-19 in the community. In fact, there was a sense of pride in what had been achieved, the sense of “haven’t we done well?” compared to other nations – and this was all being placed at risk.

But interestingly, people still trusted the government’s response in managing the border. Comments such as “I don't think you’re ever going to eliminate it … we're always going to be cases coming in. It’s just how they're managed” suggested that people were in some way understanding of the difficulty in managing such a complex undertaking, reliant upon so many people doing the right thing consistently. While the gloss had been slightly tarnished on the government’s response, there was still widespread trust that they’d sort the issues and get it right – or else.

“I guess it's very hard to manage and they probably have to realize that there's going to be a lot of people that probably slipped through the controls that they put in place as it already happened”

We’re looking forward to a wider bubble – just not yet

There was widespread interest in the idea of opening up our borders to Australia and the Pacific – just not yet. At the time of interviews, the numbers of cases in Victoria had slowly started to increase (this was before Melbourne’s 2nd Lockdown ) and the border issues had highlighted the level of risk that were sitting in the wider world.

People were interested in opening up our borders – seeing the impact this would have on our economy, and to a lesser extent, the ability to restart something akin to normal life (e.g. the holiday to Fiji, visiting family and friends in Australia). But after 49 days of Lockdown, people expressed reluctance to risk the gains we had made, given how much it was seen to cost us.

The general sentiment was: “We want it, but not yet”.

“They haven't even got their borders open between states, let alone opening their border to us. I think they need to get themselves sorted inter state first and then look at maybe a trans Tasman bubble and the islands”

The border highlights a difference in values: health vs economy

While people were generally reluctant to open up the borders – showing a degree of consensus on this point – their reasoning tended to differ along two key lines: an emphasis on protecting the health of New Zealanders, and on protecting the economy. This suggests a difference in value judgement, which could be an interesting point of division in the upcoming election.

For those talking about health issues, it really came down to a prioritisation of people’s well-being; the idea that you can rebuild an economy, but you can’t bring back a human life. This line of thinking has come up in recent years in arguments about Pharmac and funding of cancer drugs – and whether you can place a value on the loss of a human life.

“I know how devastating a disease can be. The people who are [pushing] the decision to control rather than eliminate [COVID] are just looking at the economic impact of the disease … so if you ask a person, a family member who las lost someone to COVID-19 … I don’t think they’d support [opening the borders]”

Amongst those who were concerned about the economic impacts of opening up the border, this largely centred around not wanting to run the risk of another round of Lockdown (as Melbourne are currently experiencing), and experiencing greater economic hardships. There was a sense that we’d already been through it once, and that now was the time to ensure that we’d preserved the gains made.

“I think they've spent too much, invested in the [elimination] strategy that we’ve sort of committed to it. And I think that if we were to change our strategy now would have wasted a lot of our efforts previously”

Note, neither viewpoint was disagreeing with the other – in fact we often heard both points of view being expressed by the same participants. But what we did hear was people leaning towards the health vs economic impacts.

There was less clarity around what it would take to open up the borders

This point is interesting – alongside people’s confidence that the border shouldn’t be opened, and equally, confidence that it needs to be opened in the future, people were less specific about what it would take to make opening the border in the future agreeable. Was it no cases in countries like Australia and Singapore (NB: the Pacific is already there)? Was it a decline in community transmission, even if cases were still apparent in those countries? Was it having people tested before departing their country of origin, and demonstrating their COVID free status?

We see this as a challenge for the government and the economy going forward. While not suggesting what the correct response is, the issue with our current level of zero cases is this – perfection is a hard thing to maintain. It limits the number of acceptable responses – and could impact how New Zealanders were to respond to any future news that COVID has spread outside of our isolation facilities.

After all, there is much research that points to how humans respond much more strongly to a loss (e.g. of our COVID-free status) than to a gain (e.g. benefits to the economy) – otherwise known as loss aversion.

People are aware of the economic impacts of the border closure

The impact, both now and in the future, of COVID-19 and the NZ border closures on our economy have been well documented. Not surprisingly then, GDP decline, job losses, and the impact on key sectors of the economy were brought up during interviews.

Two concerns were brought up – the impact that the border closure was having on our tourism sector, and on overseas trade:

“I guess we have to at some point, you know, to get our economy going. I mean, tourism is a lot of jobs, and does this mean we can sell our stuff overseas? I don’t know”

Interestingly though, there was some support in loosening up some of the restrictions associated with economic migrants. Despite some of the contentious reporting around foreign Avatar and America’s Cup employees entering the company, people could appreciate the benefits – as long as there was sufficient protection in place. Whether these were workers on Kiwifruit employees, foreign students or skilled workers on high value films, there was acceptance that there were benefits to opening up the borders – to some.

What have we learnt?

What this research has shown is the difficulties with managing NZ’s border in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic – but equally the levels of trust we place in the government’s management of the process. There could be some wider support in loosening border restrictions for foreign workers (or students) who bring some economic benefit to the country; alleviating the economic costs that the country is widely accepted to be incurring. But equally, there is little support to loosening up border restrictions more generally, in the form of a multi-country bubble.

We’re largely confident in our ability to control COVID at the borders, and few seem willing to risk what we’ve gained. Not yet anyway…

We’re in this together – but we’re impacted differently

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 20:49:31 GMT

In amongst stories of panic buying, working from home, and the national fascination with making sour dough, there’s also been another story to Lockdown – inequality. While speaking to participants of The 2020 Vision Project, we heard stories of people finding Lockdown to be a quiet reprieve from normal life – and equally we heard stories of how difficult Lockdown had been.

In our project we heard about the inequality of experience – how for some it was a case of spending time with family and watching Netflix, whereas others had a different, and more stressful experience. In particular we heard of three key challenges that some in our society dealt with:

The impact on jobs and financial security
Unequal social support
Disruption of life plans

Lockdown was a needed break – for those who were still working

“I run my own business which is stressful struggling… it’s been stressful thinking about work because … the stuff that was going to be there this time last year … just won’t be there because people just don’t have the certainty”

We heard some fascinating stories of how people responded to Lockdown – enjoying the break away with their families as they stayed home from school and workplaces. People talked about baking at home with the kids, getting on top of DIY, and bingeing on Netflix.

But there was also the darker side, of people who were worried about lost jobs or lost income. This included people whose hours and/or pay were reduced, those who were prevented from doing jobs requiring them to be physically present (e.g. builders, hospitality), and those who needed carer support to look after kids while they worked. For these people, the government’s wage subsidy scheme was hugely beneficial, but there was always the “What next?”.

Unfortunately, as part of Wave 2, we heard people becoming more aware of those around them losing their jobs – suggesting these stories might become more common.

We all need some support

“I totally agreed with the Level 4 Lockdown. I thought it was the best decision. But certainly … it’s kind of stressful being home with the kids 24/7 … it’s kind of hard not being able to see a lot of my other family as well. Being on my own, I definitely need the support of my mum”

One of the most gratifying themes that came up during Lockdown, was the near unanimous appreciation of those around us. Whether it was family, friends, or work colleagues, it seemed Lockdown made us more aware of how important the people around us are in our lives. They mattered from an emotional level, but also a practical level, to support us during our daily lives.

But while many talked about this in terms of catching up on Zoom calls and Facetime with distant family, others talked about the struggle from not having the usual social support in their daily lives. For example, if you’re a couple that are both working, the lack of day-care to look after children affects your ability to do a day’s work – and this becomes doubly important if you were a solo parent.

Many of the better workplaces have implicitly recognised this point – that not everyone has the same access to social support. Whether that means providing access to childcare, flexible working, or being mindful of issues such as domestic violence and mental health, this experience has demonstrated to many the need to offer empathy.

It’s alright for you – but what’s going to happen to me?

“I’m a little worried about [the future] … am I going to struggle find work after I’ve graduated. Like next year is when I’m supposed to be getting a real adult job. I’m wondering if that option is still going to be available to me”

COVID-19 has disrupted many people’s plans – work plans, weddings, holidays amongst others. And in the scheme of what’s happened around the world, it’d be easy to downplay the impact this has had on people. But that ignores the emotion that is invested in many of these plans, for example the missed overseas wedding.

Two groups of people really stick out as being overly affected in this way – the young and the old.

For some of our younger participants, COVID-19 has impacted the stable career pathways they had in front of them – causing them to question how easy it will be to progress and gain experience in their chosen career. It’s also meant that travel plans – including the big OE – are off the cards for an unknown period of time. Will it reappear?

For some of our older participants, this has similarly impacted their travel and economic plans. The idea of the big cruise during retirement and being able to see those overseas destinations they’d always wanted to visit may be on hold. Similarly – how do they pay for retirement? Investments have taken a hit, and some have questioned what this means for the value of their house.

What does this mean going forward?

COVID-19 has caused massive disruption to everyone in NZ – and in global terms we’ve gotten off easy. But some people have done it harder than others – and will continue to do so. Whether you’re a public or private sector organisation, a bit of empathy and understanding of what different groups of people are dealing with has never been more important.

Working from home - the challenge & opportunity

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 20:53:13 GMT

One of the most obvious changes resulting from New Zealand’s Lockdown response to COVID-19, was the overnight shift for many employees to working from home. Where in the past it was seen as too hard, or there were concerns about productivity, in the face of an impending pandemic, the excuses fell away and it turned out not to be that hard to implement.

The first wave of The 2020 Vision Project showed that for those with jobs that allowed it, Kiwi’s took to working from home in a big way. Our participants set themselves up in home offices, on the dining room table – any space where there was a plug for a laptop.

But like many new trends, people’s response wasn’t all good and it wasn’t all bad. There are opportunities from increased working from home – but there are also adaptations that will need to be made for companies wishing to gain the benefits of an engaged workforce, and from employees wanting to reap the benefits.

“it's easier for some things, and harder for other things … I think, at first it seemed like a lot of stuff was much easier. Because we kind of changed to doing things … the way we had wanted to do them for quite a while, but there had always been some push back and that kind of just went out the window. So we kind of got to do some things a lot more efficiently”

The benefits – opportunities to embrace

There were a number of unique benefits that people embraced when working from home – not least the feeling of good fortune compared to others in the country who were unable to work.

Working from home was something that many had tried to push for in the past – it was something they’d wanted to do. But whether due to office culture or concerns from employers about lost productivity, had been difficult to implement

Increased productivity – without the constant interruptions and barrage of impromptu meetings found in a typical office
Providing people with extra hours in the day – time previously taken up by commuting into work, getting themselves presentable for face to face interactions, and time dictated by a 9 to 5 schedule
This provided the chance to spend more time with family or other members of our bubble in (Lockdown-based) activities, providing a better work/life balance
Finally, there were the mental health gains from staying within a comfy home environment, as opposed to fighting through traffic or past other commuters

“I don’t have 20 people barging in my office, telling me hey I need this or hey I need that … doing all my regular audits and that I can do online. Not having to sift through lots and lots of paperwork is actually refreshing. I guess that's that's part of the excitement there.”

The challenges to resolve

As previously said, it wasn’t all good – there were a number of challenges needing to be resolved. These included:

The biggest challenge was the lack of social interaction from not being around workmates. This illustrates that work is more than just a place of productivity, but a place of purpose and social relationships. As a result, many people didn’t want to do away with the office altogether – they just didn’t want to be there five days per week.
Many people’s homes weren’t set up for the rapid introduction of regularly working from home. While those who were lucky enough to have a home office were able to rapidly move into Zoom meetings and the like, many others were struggling to setup in bedrooms and living rooms
Finally, several expressed a view that there were additional costs they incurred while working from home. People were concerned about how much extra they were having to pay in power and stationery – costs that had previously been incurred by their employer, and costs they felt should continue to be incurred by their employer

“There was a time there for a while, you felt really isolated. I know I did, I’m a people person. So with just me and my partner at home, there was days where I was, wasn’t trying to be rude to him, but I’m like, you’re not enough!”

What could this mean for the office environment of the future?

Over the coming months and years, it will be interesting to see how this impacts workplaces.

Some potential implications to consider:

How much space will businesses need to maintain if more people work from home, more frequently? And what happens to those existing spaces, and the ancillary businesses (e.g. cafes) that rely upon them? We’ve seen the impact in Christchurch, where businesses moved out to the suburbs after the earthquake
What does this mean for how office space is utilised? There’s already a growing trend towards Agile workspaces – does this mean the end of specified meeting and desk spaces?
Could this pave the way for a greater role for shared office spaces and/ or smaller regional offices? This is already happening with companies such as AMP announcing the closure of inner city offices
How will we manage the potential effects of social isolation and mental well-being if we remove the frequent in-person interactions of the office space?
Does this impact how we utilize space within our homes, and how we manage home relationships during the working week? (e.g. when some household members might be working, and others aren’t during a typical working day)
Does the relationship between employer and employee change, if people begin to expect to work from home as a right, and expect reimbursement for the costs of doing so?
What does this mean for B2B interactions, which often rely upon a personal interaction, if traditional office spaces become less common?
Is there a flow on effect from less inter-city business travel (e.g. airlines, hotels, car rental companies) resulting from less business travel as we become more comfortable with remote remote working?

This is only one of the topics that were unearthed as part of The 2020 Vision Project, and we will continue to follow up on this with our participants in future waves. If you want to stay in touch with the latest findings, remember to sign up to the project newsletter, or contact Cole Armstrong at NeuroSpot and Mark Finnegan at Clarity Insight to discuss more.

Save more tomorrow

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:38:57 GMT

One of the challenges with retirement savings is that it requires a sacrifice to our living standards now for a beneficial impact on our living standards in the future. Research has shown that this causes two problems: we prefer benefits experienced now to benefits experienced in the future (which carry a level of uncertainty) and we are prone to an effect called loss aversion which illustrates that the pain of losing something is much more painful than the joy of gaining something of a similar magnitude.

One solution was developed by Nobel Prize winning economist Richard Thaler and his colleague Shlomo Bernatzi. In their scheme Save More Tomorrow, workplace savers signed up to a retirement savings plan whereby increases in saving rates were aligned with future pay increases– meaning that savers didn’t ‘see’ any drop in current living standards as take home pay never reduced. Additional savings came out of future pay rises.

This scheme resulted in double the savings rates compared to people who took part in a typical retirement savings plan that required them to decide on any future savings increases–and achieved this within four years. This scheme is being actively investigated as part of reviews on NZ’s Kiwisaver scheme.

Sources:

I Nudge You: https://inudgeyou.com/en/financial-nudge-the-classic-example-of-save-more-tomorrow/

How one retailer tested its discount strategy

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:22:44 GMT

Walk into any large retail store, and there will be some sales on large brands—discounts that are usually funded by the manufacturer. For retailers, these promotions can be a mixed bag: the lower prices may drive people in store or increase sales of that particular item, however the promotion may hurt sales of their competing own-brand products, which offer higher margins. A national retailer in the US decided to conduct experiments to determine how it could preserve their own market share when competing brands were on sale.

Six conditions were created —a control and then five experimental discount levels that ranged from zero to 35% for the own-brand items. The retailer divided its store network into six groups, and the treatments were randomly assigned to these. This meant each store had a mixture of the experimental conditions distributed across the different products in the study. For example, in Store 1 own-brand sugar was discounted 20%, and own-brand mascara was full price, whereas in Store 2 mascara was discounted, but sugar was not. This additional randomness meant the retailer was able to allow for variations in sales because the store groups were not identical.

The test revealed that matching the large brand promotions with moderate discounts on the own-brand products generated 10% more profits than not promoting the own-brand items at all. As a result, the retailer now automatically discounts their own items when a competing large brand comes on sale.

Once they established their proof of concept, the retailer further tested various types of promotions. For example, it discovered that a “Buy One, Get One for 50% Off” promotion on a large brand should be matched on the own-brand product, rather than applying a straight discount.

There are two key reasons these experiments were successful:

The interventions were easy to implement
The results were easy to measure.

The products used, stores involved and length of experiments were all limited for ease, and the methodology used for implementing the discounts followed standard operating procedure - store employees often didn't know they were even helping to implement an experiment!

This was because the retailer had previously run experiments, and found that if they changed too many things at once, the stores could not handle the implementation, causing long delays and additional cost. At times temporary staff had to be trained to go into the stores, find the products, and change the prices and shelf signage. Then, if the experiment extended beyond a week, problems arose as shelves were constantly rearranged and new signs applied. A maintenance program was required to monitor store compliance - too much work.

In some ways the retailer had experimented on experimentation itself— and learned how to design studies that it could analyze more quickly and implement more easily.

Sources:

Harvard Business Review: A Step-by-Step Guide to Smart Business Experiments

Explaining premium changes to over-50s

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:11:33 GMT

Financial services can be confusing, particularly the subtleties of insurance. For one UK insurance company with an older customer base – most were over 50, with many in their 80s - straightforward explanations were essential to help them understand why their premiums might be increasing.

Conversations were designed with this in mind, in a way that customers could feel empowered to make educated decisions. Success would be determined through customer satisfaction and retention rates, while they looked to not negatively impact the average handling times.

A friction audit identified over 25 different points that might potentially be improved upon for their older customers. This resulted in a revised conversation guide and a Playbook to be used by service agents when engaging with customers, and additional training in the use of basic behavioural science principles. This was complimented by planting content in an information source trusted by these customers, in this case an article in The Daily Telegraph that broke down three reasons why the premiums were increasing - psychology tells us that our brains process items in three much better than any other number. Agents were then able to reference back to this article, giving further credibility to the conversation.

Performance was measured on a weekly basis for a period of three months.

The core behavioural science elements considered in creating the playbook, and how they were used:

Authority Bias – we have a tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure. To combat this, the agents title was changed, as well as the intro they delivered when they first answered the call. This helped to create immediate confidence that the person they were talking to had the knowledge and skills to help them.

Ambiguity Aversion - we favour the known over the unknown, so again, simple terms were used.

Reciprocity – people respond to a positive action with another positive action, so for loyal customers, additional benefits were offered to build a mutually beneficial relationship with the customer.

Decrease in average handling times
Increased participation in loyalty scheme
ROI of £8.73:£1

Sources:

Cowry Consulting: https://www.cowryconsulting.com/case-studies/transforming-customer-experiences-saga-0

Insurance Covered Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/54l5s1lSw3UykWSTCFCa8L?si=c2WfmpAgSEG6vXTJyuEK1Q

Image: Photo by Ravi Patel on Unsplash

The Peak-End – What drives customers' memory of an experience?

cole@neurospot.co.nz (Cole Armstrong) — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 21:38:32 GMT

What moments will have the greatest impact on your customer?

I want you to remember the last time you had a great experience. Maybe it was a great meal at a restaurant, or a flight on an airline. Now think of the last time you had a bad experience – maybe it was an online order that went missing or being charged for the mini bar in your hotel that you definitely didn’t touch.

What do you remember? Whether good or bad, what springs to mind isn’t the whole experience but snippets of that experience.

Our memory of life’s events isn’t a movie reel or a complete catalogue of what we’ve been through, but rather a highlight reel of key moments. And we are hardwired to focus on key moments of an experience; we’re programmed to heavily weight the most emotionally intensive moments of an experience, and the final moments of an experience. This forms the basis of our memory of an experience, and is known as the Peak-End rule .

What’s the implication for customer experience? Well it’s not the experience itself that influences our future behaviour and likelihood to re-engage with a brand, but our memory of the experience. And by understanding which moments matter most to that memory we can make massive strides in improving our customer’s remembered experience by focusing our efforts for greater impact.

The Peak-End rule

The Peak-End rule comes from work by Daniel Kahneman , who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics , and his colleague Donald Redelmeier. In a series of very uncomfortable studies involving people putting their hands in ice buckets or studies with colonoscopy patients having cameras inserted inside their rectum, they were able to demonstrate that:

“The peak-end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e. its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.”

For example, in Kahneman & Redelmeier’s 1996 study 154 colonoscopy patients were asked to rate their levels of discomfort at 60 sec intervals throughout the procedure, and then asked to retrospectively describe how uncomfortable the procedure was after it had finished. What they found was that the average level of discomfort had no correlation with how uncomfortable they reported the procedure retrospectively. What was relevant was the level of discomfort in the final moments of the procedure, and the highest (peak) level of discomfort.

In an interesting follow-up, and one with implications for customer experience, Kahneman & Redelmeier did something unusual. They divided a group of colonoscopy patients into two different conditions: one group went through the standard procedure where the camera was immediately removed after an extremely painful procedure, but the second group had the camera remain inside them for an extra three minutes in an uncomfortable but not painful position. The second group, whose experience lasted longer in reality but had less discomfort at the end, evaluated the procedure as being less painful and were more likely to return for subsequent procedures.

What does this mean? People don’t evaluate an experience based on some average measure of satisfaction/ happiness/ discomfort. What drives their memory of an experience is the peak levels of emotional intensity (whether good or bad) and how they felt at the end of an experience. And this can be influenced by carefully engineering the experience.

Engineering great peak and end moments

Brands are in a race to build better and better experiences for customers mapping out journeys in a desire to build brand advocates and ensure they’re not pushing away potential customers. And long may it continue.

But not all moments are created equal, and some brands are more aware of this than others.

AT&T for example has identified two peak moments that they focus on when customers visit their store – the initial entry to the store, and when they are waiting to speak to someone. And if they miss these moments they know it has a dramatic impact on customer satisfaction – “not gradually but off the cliff” according to AT&T’s President of Retail Sales and Service, Paul Roth. So, their expectation is that a member of staff will greet all customers within 10 feet and 10 seconds of entering the store, and customers names are placed on a list to be served, giving reassurance that they will be seen to in a fair order.

For a local example, Air New Zealand’s coffee app in the Koru lounge is often mentioned as an example of great customer experience design. By carefully understanding the customer journey, where there was an opportunity to create an emotional high point, they’ve been able to engineer a moment that has disproportionally affected people’s perception of their journey (a flat white vs 14-hour flight to LA?). While getting everything else in the journey is undoubtably important – it’s this one simple emotional trigger that is being recalled by travelers.

You could also argue that a rock concert is a similar example of a “brand” demonstrating the Peak-End rule. Whether it’s U2, The Foo Fighters or some other big arena band, your memory typically relates to the one or two key songs (peak moments) and the mandatory encore (end moment), building an exceptional memory of getting it right.

So, what’s next? Focus your attention of what matters

There’s a clear implication from this rule. Rather than spreading your resources too thin, trying to deliver a uniformly good experience, try creating a smaller number of moments of great experience. Look for an opportunity with your brand, one thing you can engineer (preferably at the end of the experience) to create a moment of delight for a customer.

Best thing, these moments don’t always have to be expensive or resource heavy, as demonstrated by my local café and the design they left on the top of my flat white. It just takes commitment to delivering a moment of splendor at key moments in time.

This post first appeared in 2019 on the website of RX, a retail focused experience consultancy.

neurospot

The Salience of Information: Why What Springs to Mind Matters More Than What People Know

How we can lift the influence of designers – and the potential for good design – within NZs organisations

Navigating the Shifting Landscape of Design

Developing persuasive touchpoints

Or why we need to shift our focus from what we want to say, to how our message motivates users to act

Background

Encouraging people to donate blood to the NHS

Getting people to choose the right Kiwisaver plan – not the default Kiwisaver plan

Bringing this together: Creating touchpoints that make a difference

Key take home points

The fallibility of memory

Faulty memories

How can we stop getting it wrong?

Which moments matter?

So what does this tell us?

How to apply these learnings to your work

What JCDecaux can do for your brand in 2 seconds

The Challenge

The Solution

The Results

Here's what JCDecaux New Zealand Senior Insights and Strategy Specialist Victoria Parsons had to say about working with us:

Disrupting London commuter journeys

The role of bias in hiring practices

Kaipātiki Project: Growing volunteer numbers

The Challenge

The Solution

The Results

Here's what Kaipātiki Project Marketing Strategist Blanka Ros had to say about working with us:

Is your customer experience actually built for your customer?

Watch the summary videos

Watch the full webinar

Some of the key insights

The subtle impact of other people's behaviour

What does this tell us?

How do we account for this?

Download our Service Experience Guide

Case studies from around the world using behavioural science to drive customer satisfaction and business results.

There's a fraction too much friction

It's friction.

And it can be surprising just how little friction can make a difference

It's not all bad: The positive impact of friction

Friction in the world around us

Breaking (or creating) the cycle: The challenge of habits in behaviour change

Is there anything in your life that you do repeatedly, whether that's monthly, weekly or several times a day, that you do a certain way? Something you do on autopilot, without a lot of thought?

Of course there is.

So what is a habit?

How do habits get formed?

What are the challenges of habits?

How do you create a new habit?

What about breaking a habit?

Want to know more?

How do high functioning agile squads achieve progress? By thinking like a scientist.

﻿

A focus on the problem, not the solution

Getting into the right mindset

Delight in being wrong

Moving faster … with more curiosity

Quantifying impact: The art & science of measuring the value of design

You need to quantify your impact

Use experimentation to articulate value

Experimentation adds value earlier in the design process

Finally, your experiments need to be ethical

Dose & Co: Supplementing success

The Challenge

The Solution

The Results

NeuroSpot worked with 10XL on this project. On working with a behavioural insights agency, Founding Partner Christopher Andrew had this to say:

And we'll leave the final word to the client, Marc Day, Lead Print & Digital Creative from Zuru Edge:

What have we learnt from The 2020 Vision Project? NZ's experience of Covid-19

As The 2020 Vision Project comes to an end - even if NZ's experience with Covid-19 continues - what have we learnt?

A vaccinated workforce - motivating staff to get the jab

Yes, we're going there: the COVID-19 vaccine. But we're not here to debate the science, rather a problem facing some organisations: low vaccination rates.

So what can employers do to increase the likelihood that their staff will get vaccinated, and reduce the risks inherent from this virus?

What other options are there?

A trusted messenger

Make vaccination the social norm

Play to a different identity

Let people play hooky

Procrastinate today, but commit to tomorrow