I’ve just had a rare moment of clarity.

A few posts back, I wrote about fundamentally redesigning the online banking interface to look like a collage of real-life ‘reasons to spend’ (loved one’s education, car stereo, rent etc.) to help people to manage their money better. The post was inspired by some research conducted by a Professor of Marketing in Canada called Dilip Soman.

Well, Rory talks here about the importance of behavioural economics to the future architecture of the communications industry. In the video, he mentions a Dr. BJ Fogg, a Professor (yes, another one!) at Stanford.

It turns out that captology, Dr. Fogg’s pet subject, is what I was skirting around with my blog post but couldn’t quite put into context in the grander scheme of things:

Captology is the study of computers as persuasive technologies. This includes the design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors.

First off, ‘persuasive technologies’ is a fantastic little phrase bursting with meaning. I hope not to wear it out over the next few weeks.

Secondly, this meeting of technology and behavioural science gets me very excited. Obviously there are elements of both of these things in some of the work that the comms industry already produces (most recently, Fiat eco:Drive). What excites me though is the implicit motivation behind Dr. Fogg’s work to make the world a better place. Peace Innovation? I’m in!

Check out captology papers and case studies here.

It appears that I have a famous namesake in the world of marketing.

He’s currently the Group marketing director of SABMiller.

Whilst Marketing is determined to turn this into a Google-ranking battle, I have another suggestion for him: to create a marketing powerhouse together, staffed exclusively by people called Nick or Nicola Fell…

We could call it ‘Steve’ for irony’s sake…

I hope he gets in touch.

Yesterday, I heard about a really interesting strain of social/behavioural research.

Some of the thinking is being led by a guy called Dilip Soman who is a Professor of Marketing at Rotman School, University of Toronto (you can hear more from him on Dan Ariely’s podcast, Arming The Donkeys).

It goes something like this:

When people buy a bucket of popcorn at the cinema, they tend to eat the lot – no matter how big the bucket is. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/serendipitys/2827385395/

Soman and his colleagues wanted to see if they could curb the amount of popcorn that people ate.

So they asked some cinema concession stands to replace the single bucket of popcorn with four separate bags, whilst keeping the total volume of popcorn the same.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people ate less popcorn. When asked why, the participants said that it was because they had to think for a moment before opening the next bag.

With the bucket, they just ‘went with the flow’, as it were. With the four individually-wrapped portions, they had to stop and decide whether or not they wanted to carry on.

Then Soman and his colleagues decided to perform the same experiment with cash and envelopes.

They worked with a not-for-profit organisation to distribute pay to construction labourers in India.

Some labourers received their cash in one envelope. Others received it in a number of envelopes. As with the bags of popcorn, the envelopes acted as a psychological barrier to go on spending. Those who received their salary in the most envelopes spent the least amount of money over the same period of time.

In other words, money in many envelopes is ’stickier’ than money in one envelope.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/socialbreakfast/216995061/

Next Soman and his team sought to strengthen the barrier even further by earmarking a portion of a few of the workers’ salaries for their childrens’ education expenses and,  most importantly,  placing pictures of their children on the envelopes in which this portion of the money was kept.

Guess what? Noone opened those envelopes.

So once you label money with its use, it becomes more sticky for that particular use. Adding pictures to represent the money’s use makes it even stickier. I guess because pictures are quicker than words in evoking emotions, like guilt?



So having listened to this podcast, I asked myself: what if you took this understanding and applied it to online banking, with the aim of helping people to save and spend more wisely?

You might replace a single, separate savings ‘pot’ on your online banking interface with a number of virtual envelopes which each represent a different expenditure (the electricity bill, the friend’s birthday present you’re saving up for, the holiday to the south of France etc.)

You might then build in some element of opt-in virtual ‘friction’ so that people are dissuaded from opening their envelopes unless absolutely necessary, just as they were in the real-life experiment, e.g. in order to release the funds, you have to use your mouse to literally tear the envelope open on screen (or something!).

But you might go even further and use personal images to represent each of your ‘envelopes’ (as Soman did to great effect in his experiment) so that your online banking interface looks more like a collage than a bank balance, where each image is attributed an appropriate financial value (which, at the very least, would make the online banking experience a little less dry).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zachflanders/109721463/

You could then make the ‘friction’ aspect really dramatic – like your holiday photo literally going up in flames on screen if you were to ever release the allocated funds before the end date you’d set yourself!

Who thinks I’m on to something? Who thinks I’ve gone mad?

91 days.

That’s how long it’s been since I last wrote a post here on the blog.

Despite the delay, there was never any doubt in my mind that I’d be back writing again.

Why was I so sure?

Because I would have felt very awkward and uncomfortable otherwise.

Awkward and uncomfortable in the knowledge that anyone stumbling across this place in future would see that the last post was written in April 2009. A house in utter disrepair.

Now, I realise that this already sounds like an extremely superficial reason to be writing again.

But the shame of neglecting my blog got me thinking about the concept of “closure”, the popular psychology term which generally refers to a feeling of conclusion to a traumatic event.

In my thinking, I took liberties with the concept and stretched it slightly to mean the feeling of completing anything, traumatic or otherwise.

For example, the air-punchingly joyful sensation of having crossed everything off your to-do list at the end of the day.

What I concluded was that, because of its very nature, the digital to-do list is never ending and so impossible to complete. In saying ‘its very nature’, I’m referring to the instantaneous feedback loop of communication that the internet provides ad infinitum.

Everything is always in beta; including your blog, your email back-and-forths with friends, your IM conversations, your twitter feed, your facebook profile etc. Nothing on the internet is ever finished.

The author of a book can complete her works and have them bound. Even if just for a fleeting moment, she can bathe in closure.

The author of a blog, on the other hand, must be happy with the idea of never ever finishing it.

Once you pop, you can’t stop.

French was my favourite subject at school, but even after 12 years of lessons, I was far from being fluent.

So, once school was over, I decided to go to Paris for six months with the aim of returning with a perfect command of the Romantic language.

Working in the customer relations department of a theme park, which didn’t quite meet every visitor’s expectations, meant that I spent most of those six months being shouted at in a very different style of French to the one that I’d become accustomed to in the friendly surroundings of a classroom. It turned out that ‘zut alors’ was not the most satisfying phrase available for venting your frustration; there are, it turned out, many alternatives. And the fact that I wasn’t adept enough with the language to be diplomatic in the early heated encounters meant that I’d often inadvertently make the situation much worse than it already was.

The stresses, strains and the sense that I was way out of my depth led me to want to throw in the gauntlet after just a few weeks, to go to work in ticketing or at a fast food outlet, where good spoken French wasn’t necessary. It would have been a comfortable existence.

But a timely intervention by a colleague encouraged me to stick it out in ‘Acceuil’ despite how awkward and vulnerable I felt. And naturally, over time, my French improved and my confidence increased; a virtuous circle ensued.

It’s a rather long story to get to the very basic point that I wanted to make, which is this:

the fastest way to learn anything is by making yourself uncomfortable

For this reason, I also reckon that the more you put yourself in uncomfortable situations, the more things you’ll learn and eventually master.

You might not always have a particular lesson in mind. In other words, it’s worth putting yourself in an uncomfortable situation even if you have no clear and/or specific idea of what you might learn from it; I believe that if you’re observant enough, you’ll learn something.

I also think that it’s good to make other people feel uncomfortable. Not in a weird way, mind. But with the intention of helping them out with their problems/careers/lives.

For example, asking them awkward questions, saying something deliberately controversial or giving them a task that they’re likely to find difficult to complete because of an initial lack of know-how.

We should be comfortable with the idea of feeling uncomfortable.

Do you agree with me? If so, let me know your own tales. If not, why not?

I’m very much in the camp of getting your ideas out there even if they’re not “perfect”. The fact of the matter is that nothing is ever perfect. And keeping everything to yourself might make you addicted to Brain Crack:

Thankfully, there’s a new outlet for all of the ideas floating around in your head that so far haven’t gone anywhere. It’s called killedideas, and if you feel like sharing your genius with the world then you’ve got until the 7th of April to submit them.

Stay in School.

Sorry, but there isn’t one.

Just like there isn’t a RIGHT way to use any tool. RIGHT suggests that the only other alternative is WRONG. Life’s not that neat.

For me, Twitter’s beauty lies in its deceptive simplicity. Simple because it’s just 140 characters of text; deceptive because such an elegant format creates the potential for great complexity.

There are an infinite number of ways to use Twitter. The only instance in which some of these might be WRONG is when one assumes that everyone is trying to achieve exactly the same thing. Again, life’s not that neat.

People and organisations are already using Twitter in different ways: the ones that makes the most sense for them. This might mean talking to directly to your consumers (actual and potential), e.g. Zappos, bringing a fictional character to life, e.g. Aleks the Meerkat, assembling geographically dispersed family members, e.g. Tim’s Whirledgeclan, or even rigging your house up to the service, e.g. Andy Stanford-Clark.

We need to resist our natural urge to anchor the new and unfamiliar in a bed of rapidly fossilising structures, terms and understanding.

Instead we might be better off treating Twitter like a prop in “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”: a fantastic opportunity to improvise.

This post was inspired by a conversation that was instigated over at the We Are Social blog.

Of late, many great people have written many great things about the great amount of respect that professional marketers need to have for the world around them. The message is clear: create things and relationships that are useful, well-liked and aim to make life better. A sloppy approach is inexcusable.

But, equally, there’s been much talk about how the marketing function is losing power. Thanks in large part to technology, “the people” are taking back any control that organisations and their marketing departments might have had over their reputations, and even the DNA of their products/services. It’s now more clear than ever that “having exclusive ownership over your brand” is a contradiction in terms – people will think, say and do what they like.

And it’s this last point that has led me to the following conclusion:

We have more power to enact positive change as consumers who happen to be professional marketers than we do as professional marketers who happen to be consumers.

As professional marketers, we have specific tasks to perform, people to answer to and objectives to meet. These are somewhat limited by the remit, scale and scope of our roles in the organisations that we work for.

However, as consumers, we have interactions with a large and varied array of organisations. Further, these are not organisations to whom we are in any way answerable. On the contrary, they are answerable to us.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this is an “either/or”. Of course we should continue to strive for a better marketing in our professional lives.

What I am suggesting though is that, as consumers, we should seek out more opportunities to proactively make things better, i.e. by becoming ‘constructive consumers’.

Constructive consumers don’t moan and shout FAIL when things go wrong. Constructive consumers take the opportunity to suggest improvements to the organisations who’ve let them down and lead by example based on a general philosophy of making things better.

We know what good marketing looks like. Let’s make sure we’re actively promoting it in our personal lives where, arguably, we have greater influence over the outcome.

Thought starter: What if, as well as your achievements as a professional marketer, your CV also featured ideas that you’d had as a consumer and convinced an organisation to make happen?

The internet guarantees that I’ll see at least one thing a day that’ll blow my mind.

After recovering from the joy of being shown something new and exciting (normally via the peeps on Twitter), I’ll often feel a little frustration. Frustration born out of a feeling of inadequacy: “I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t know where to start”.

But I had a realisation today: that at some time or other, the creators of great things wouldn’t have known where to start either.

“No sh*t, Sherlock” you might say, and I wouldn’t blame you…

For me though, it’s a moment of clarity; instead of worrying about knowing where to start, I’m now going to start where I know.

Practically-speaking, it means pursuing opportunities that are within my grasp but are also ambitious enough so that I learn.

Thanks for listening to my ramble. Hat tip to Andy for the mind-blowing vid.

Most of the images I like end up here.

But I think that these words are too good not to share with you here.

By David Horvitz. Found with FFFFOUND!