Speaker 1if you go to a new city and you want to go out and get some dinner and there's a restaurant with a bunch of people lined up out the front and there's an empty restaurant or there's a restaurant with 4,000 4.8 star reviews and a restaurant with none you're going to go with the crowd that's just how we're wired you're not going to do the objective rational let me evaluate everything on this menu and the price and the ingredients and work out what's the best option you're going to go with the crowd so the caveat is there's no bias that works on everybody in every context all the time however there are definitely biases that lend themselves more to solving different sorts of problems so if the problem is an awareness problem there's going to be a different set of biases we're going to look at than if it's a value perception problem or a pricing problem or a conversion problem because there are yeah triggers that more closely match those those sorts of challenges
Speaker 2you , welcome back to the smarter marketer podcast i'm here today with dan monheit dan welcome back to the pod hey great to be back in the fleet and so dan is one of the australia's leading voices in behavioral science and cx in marketing you co-founded hardhat back in 2005 you built it into basically the most respected cx agency in the country behavioral science you're acquired by thinker bell in 2024 and that was roughly around the time that we last spoke today i love your job title chief cx thinker at thinker bell and i was kind of looking at the website and it's kind of it's a who's who of the biggest brands in the country doing some of the best work in the country dan i thought it'd be awesome to have a chat around your history and backstory in the australian marketing industry how you got into it i guess that journey from hardhat into thinker bell and then i just wanted to essentially have a chat around all things behavioral science customer experience and i think it's a really good idea to have a chat with you because i think it's a really good idea to have a chat with you because i think it's a really good idea to have a chat with you and trying to i think put ourselves into the shoes of in-house marketers right because i think this is a space that is of interest to heaps of marketers but i'm going to ask that lame question of how did it all begin but i think your backstory does inform your perspective now so i think it'd be awesome just how you got into the industry and um and kind of where you've
Speaker 1gone for sure all right i'll try and give you the uh snappiest version of the last 20 years that i can and we can dig in
Speaker 2this could be a three-day podcast
Speaker 1all right at double speed it's only a day and a half guy very good value all right so um started hardhat with a childhood friend all the way back in 2005 so we're both basically straight out of uni uh we had these ambitions to be a great creative agency not that we really knew what a creative agency was but it seemed like that would be a fun thing to do and we found out very quickly that nobody wanted to get back into the industry and we found out very quickly that nobody wanted to get back into the industry and we found out very quickly that nobody wanted to get back into the industry branding advice or creative advice from two 24 year olds with no experience however people were quite happy to give us little bits of money to try and do things with this new thing called the internet um and so for i imagine most of your listeners uh weren't around or working back then but i mean this is a time before mobile before social before youtube google was one of five different search engines you might have tried to use on any given day to find your way around the internet and so i think it's a great way to get back into the industry and i think it's a great this was new wild uncharted times which we almost haven't had anything like except for this moment now so people were happy to give us money to do little things for them we started experimenting in that space and the long story short is we realized if we were going to learn like we didn't know anything at the time and we thought if we're going to learn to do something we might as well learn something new not something old where there's not already a thousand people in our suburb that know how to do this so we started building little websites and then spent call it 15 years and we started building little websites and then spent call it 15 years and we started as a digital agency in air quotes and all of the things that that meant over the years and so that meant early on knowing how to do websites and email marketing and then it meant knowing how to do flash games and then it meant knowing how to do mobile apps and social apps and then big websites and then content and you know web apps and the business really changed was fundamentally every two or three years which is fun and exciting but also a tricky way to make money because as soon as you get to the point where you're like oh i'm going to do this i'm going to do this i'm going to do this i'm going to do this i'm going to do this i'm going to do this i'm going to do this you get good at doing something like we are so good at doing flash games now and guess what nobody wants a flash game because i don't work on iphones so it was a fun exciting time we learned a lot um and a funny thing happened really when when social became mainstream and a thing that brands started to invest in we saw that as our opportunity to get back into the creative space so we were already doing websites and digital experiences for big brands but social really opened the door to doing stuff that was more fun creative work and we were able to do a lot of and we sort of pivoted the business to really the last three or four years as hardhat we were half digital experience customer experience and half creative and brand and the way we would talk about that was that we fundamentally saw every brief as a behavior change brief and all behavior change essentially comes down to desirability or motivation and ease so if i want you to do something that you're not currently doing my options are you know i'm going to do something that you're not currently doing and i'm going to do something make you feel better about doing it or make it easier for you to do and the advertising creative side is mainly about the desirability or the motivation and the digital experience side is mainly about the ease so that's how those two things live together
Speaker 2and you have built up this reputation as being if not one of the leading minds in behavioral science in the country right when like was that happening back in 2008 when facebook were taking off was that happening when you're building websites and you were kind of talking about cro and cx or like was it more towards the back end before the
Speaker 1acquisition uh so a lot of people today will go and study behavioral science and then go and apply that to a field like advertising when i was doing it it was the other way around so i found myself in this world of advertising and marketing and one of the things that i noticed was that you know as we started working with bigger and bigger clients and then those clients would bring in their other bigger and bigger agencies who were doing the you know ad campaigns and we're doing a little facebook campaign that goes with it i noticed that there was lots of energy spent on trying to understand how different things worked and how attribution models worked and how long-term brand building worked and how all of these things work and surprisingly little on how people work and why people do the things that they do and i found it odd that we have so much data good data bad data about the different platforms and whatever else but but not much research and data really on people and and it seemed crazy like isn't our job basically to get people to do something that they weren't doing so surely it's odd that this industry doesn't really focus on that and then what i sort of stumbled across was if i shifted my gaze 15 degrees to the left out of the marketing and advertising world and looked at this at the time very nerdy world of behavioral science or behavioral economics i realized there's a whole there's a whole world of people literally just trying to understand why people do the weird and wonderful things that they do why is nobody doing anything with this it seems crazy and so i just plowed myself into that and you know in terms of how i became a big name in small rooms let's get on it i just followed my curiosity and i was lucky i was early enough in the world of behavioral science it'd be hard to do now because there's a lot of people doing it i was really early on podcasting and i partnered up with a friend who was a i knew dr melissa weinberg who was a performance psychologist and we built this format for this show called bad decisions where every episode we'd explore a bias she would talk about the brain science and the research i would talk about the cool but how do we use that to sell more stuff and we were just so early in this space that before we knew it there were people from 100 countries downloading episodes there were hundreds of thousands of listeners and you know we were in like a tiny little it wasn't even a studio like we used to have a couch that our producer friend would like put blankets and towels over the top to record us and that was one of the most um personally beneficial periods of my career because i just forced myself to learn i had to i had to learn every every episode i had to learn a new thing and think of examples for it and we just built built the momentum from there and it just got to a point where when google decided they wanted to do a content series on behavioral science i was the guy that they called and then when meta and facebook wanted to do a piece a couple of years later on the history of advertising and the internet and behavioral science i got to be the guy they called and then i ended up on stages locally and then stages overseas and i just i was very lucky to get curious about the right thing at the right time and just yeah follow my nose so cool
Speaker 2it's just such a story isn't it of i think of just in my own personal life the content now and it's kind of just that that creator economy right where you could just put out good content didn't matter if you're doing it in your bedroom and as long as the content's good you will find your audience whether that's 100 people a thousand people a million people that's um yeah yeah it's i mean things haven't changed too much we were laughing before recording just around the uh your backdrop and my backdrop it's not too different from the sheets behind the lounge
Speaker 1well that's true um i know it also it sounds kind of cliche now to say um but when we were making the I didn't care if nobody wanted me to do it. listened to it. And it was really nice to go and see people listening to it. But I didn't care because I was having so much fun learning about this topic and forcing myself to learn about this topic that I got huge benefit from it, regardless of whoever heard it and then ended up calling me about it. And we ended up doing work for them as an agency.
Speaker 2Yeah. You probably would have heard it. I mean, there's a guy called Blair Enns in Canada and he does a lot of kind of thought leadership consulting work for agencies. And I was talking to him once and he just talked and he was talking about writing a book or just writing in general. And I think it applies to preparing for podcasts and, you know, doing video pieces or whatever, but nothing consolidates your own thinking and learning, like actually having to put content out on a particular topic. So I find that myself, like I even preparing for this, right? Like I'm reading up on behavioral science and behavioral economics. I'm kind of, you know what I mean? It's like, it's, it's, um, it's happens in life so
Speaker 1much. Yeah. I'm a huge Blair Enns fan and there's actually, um, a little bit off topic, but something that he says about writing, which I think about quite often, that we have two reasons why we write. So I feel like I work in a really similar way to him. Like for me, writing is really important because it does sharpen the thinking, but he says we write for two reasons. One is to communicate and one is to think. And so we think about how we use AI, which is this constant temptation to don't actually think it through. Just ask me and I'll give you something that sounds kind of right. AI is a tool for communicating. Like if I, I want to write you an email saying, Hey, I actually can't make this time for our podcast interview. And I'm going to sweat for half an hour about how to write this in the right way. So you're not going to be too angry with me and you're still going to want me back on the show. Like so GPT or Gemini, whatever, he's going to do a much better job of that than I will. Great use of it. When I'm actually trying to synthesize my thoughts and think about like, what is the future of CX and what does this mass LLM adoption actually mean for brands and for consumers in the world? I can't. If I cheat, it's cheating and I don't really do the work, you know, the work is in the work. Um, and so, yeah, there's nothing quite like producing your own content to, to make sure you really know something and you've sweated all the angles. It's so true.
Speaker 2And it's like, we, I was literally having this very thought driving the kids to school this morning and just around, um, cause yeah, I actually was, I had to do an internal email today around a topic and actually did just hand wrote the whole thing. Cause it's, it's something I actually don't feel I have solidified in my own mind. It wasn't like just the direction, how we need to do these three things. I was actually trying to wrap my head around the whole bunch of parts of the business and whatever else. And I was thinking like, oh, these kids, like when they grow up, he like, is, is writing going to be the same as a calculator these days where it's just, we don't have a right ever again. And it's such a, this is not an AI skepticism, love AI for a whole bunch of different reasons and use it in the agency for a million different things. But it is, it's that tension, isn't it of, of, um, went to and went not to.
Speaker 1Uh, yeah, I think for, for a long time, um, you know, I think it's, I think for a long time, a lot of things, the work is in the work, like the work is not in the output. So I feel it's the same when I'm working on strategy work for clients that AI can give me something that sounds right, but there's so much value in all the things that I see and think that I don't include in the ultimate recommendation for the client that, you know, I feel like so much of what we get from AI is paper mache. Like it looks real, but as soon as you try and interrogate it, it falls in a heap. And if we're getting paid to do thinking for clients, like we need to sweat the thinking and, and I haven't yet found a way to shortcut that in a way that's satisfactory for my own standards or my client's standards.
Speaker 2Yeah, a hundred percent. In terms of the work you're doing now, the audience for the pod are in-house marketers, right? From small businesses to big businesses, small budgets, big budgets. How should they be thinking around these themes and these topics in their own marketing setups?
Speaker 1All right. So if we just cover a little bit of context here, um, so part of the reason why the deal with Thinkadel made so much sense was because they are also an agency built on behavioral science, marketing science. So I, and a little line comes up cause I'm in the office now. And every time I hear you say, you know, one of Australia's leading voices on behavioral science, I'm like, where's Adam Ferrier? Cause if he's in the building, you know, credit where it's due. You know, a lot of what I did in my early career was I looked at Adam and I said, I just need to do what that guy's doing. You don't tell him that, do you? Sorry, no. You don't tell him that. Of course not. And I don't know if I've listened to the podcast, but yeah, I'll tell you what, I, um, yeah, I, I shamelessly just took a lot of what he did and said, I got to find my version of doing that cause it's working and he's a smart guy. So part of what made it such an appealing deal, you know, there were a few things that really made a lot of sense. You know, one was they were independent. We were independent or didn't want to go to be part of the big global, you know, number two, we'd already had a bunch of clients and staff move backwards and forwards between us. So I imagine if there was like a big Amazon store. agencies the people who like this agency also like this agency like we would have we would have paired up a lot the founders are brilliant and smart but also this foundational idea of behavioral science as an important driver in what we do so at hardhat we used to talk about brands built on behavior think about the core premise is measured magic and measured magic is the coming together of marketing science and hardcore creativity so it was already a language in this agency and to be to give credit where credit's due think about did a much better job of scaling behavioral science thinking inside the agency than i did like when we joined there were already 140 150 people here and the way that this agency keeps people educated and informed and you know up to date with with what is happening in this space is amazing and far better than what i could have done by myself yeah it's
Speaker 2an awesome perspective so to
Speaker 1actually answer your question of why like why clients come to us and what do they come to us with i guess what happens is when you're an agency with a perspective you put that thinking out into the world and clients who like that thinking are attracted to it and so every brief is a behavior change brief is what we used to say at hardhat i think about the saying is every business problem is a behavior change problem so it's just crazy how aligned we were yeah interesting um clients either come to us because they know that or they come to us without realizing that and we say to them hey this thing you want to do launch this new product get people to call the police or don't call the police when something bad happens uh go on this cruise don't go on that cruise everything you could ever want to do is a behavior change problem and the way we think about behavior change is a b and c and here's how behavioral science fits into that and here's how we can then deploy that as an ad as a pr campaign as a media buying strategy as a customer experience as a digital
Speaker 2experience hey it's james here before we continue i have a sincere request if you like the podcast it'd be so appreciated if you could leave a review for us on either apple or spotify it'll mean that the pod ranks better and that more marketers listen to the content that we share thanks so much now back to the pod so you're saying putting a customer first is uh is central to marketing dan
Speaker 1well interestingly that is actually not how it goes here you're right say we need to put the customer and the brand on equal footing interesting because if all we do is put the customer first first of all you know people often don't know what they want and second of all their needs are category needs they're not brand needs and so if we just do what a customer wants in any category from yogurt to cars to being an agency um we will fulfill the category needs but there will be nothing interesting or distinctive or valuable about us so we have to solve problems in a way that is good for the customer but also in a way that is really distinctive for the customer and the brand otherwise why would they come to us when there's lots of other brands in the category
Speaker 2that's awesome i was kind of thinking of rocket how we you know how we put ourselves out into the market right i think that idea that you put i haven't thought of it in this way though right but you you put out a certain sentiment or a perspective or whatever it might be and that either attracts or repels right in terms of who comes in i mean i guess that the clients that you then speak to that you land are ones that clearly like that message right so it is almost this self-fulfilling cycle like do you get put into the market and you're like oh my god i'm going to push back on the perspective or it's just you don't you're not even speaking to marketers or business leaders that don't think the way you think in terms of put you know every brief being
Speaker 1human behavior change i mean of course we get pushback on strategic lines and on creative territories and different approaches but the idea that every brief is a behavior change brief every business problem is a behavior change problem it's so fundamental like our jobs as if they're already doing it you don't have a job like we're finished so at a foundational level that seems to be fine it's just what we do with it like once you know that that's the problem then there's a thousand different ways you can try and solve it and of course we get pushback like any agency does on some of the ways that we might approach it so
Speaker 2yeah it's interesting how do you see the best marketers bringing other people in their organization ahead on the journey to kind of start thinking this way and you know you're dealing with finance and cfos where it's like don't really give a shit it's all about the numbers and ceos who might not necessarily be thinking in this way like do you see common traits or practical devices that the best marketers you deal with manage this thinking inside their organizations
Speaker 1there's a couple of clients who come to mind who are exceptional at business casing And business casing until a few years ago, was a thing that we kind of heard about it's this thing that happens in the client world we would sort of you know politely offer our assistance if there's if there's anything we can help you do with your business case uh let us know knowing that if the client said yes we'd be frantically googling like what is this and how does it work when i've seen clients do this like a cmo go to the board of a i'm just trying to think if i can talk about this one yeah so i had a big bank that we were working with who really wanted to redo their whole website digital experience and this was hard annoying expensive seemingly unnecessary project inside the bank and the best client that they're almost like the best pitch people um that happen to be based in client roles and so what this client did was she produced a really short video screen capture of how long it took to apply for a home loan how many clicks it took to apply for a home loan on their website versus one or two other competitors and just help the business understand how big the gap was and how big the opportunity that they were missing out on one and it was you know you could have a 150 page report that followed it up that nobody needed to read you just saw the difference night and day and all of a sudden the business could not get onto this priority quick enough i i mean i'm trying to give you something more interesting than you've got to talk in the language of the cfo and the ceo but you know getting really pointy on how big is the problem we're trying to solve you know the the bigger the problem the more urgent it usually gets attention and so it's often the clients who can do a good job of identifying and articulating the problems most worth solving to get the best
Speaker 2traction yeah yeah and how do you go about determining which which heuristics or which um approaches to apply to a certain brief so yeah
Speaker 1this is a great question and the the caveat that has to go on this is there's no bias that applies to all people in all contexts and even you know for yourself as an individual there will be times where um so if we take social proof as an example the idea that we want to do what other people are doing if you go to a new city uh and you're there for a week and you're like oh i'm going to do this and i'm going for a conference and you're there by yourself it's the night before and you've checked into your hotel you want to go out and get some dinner and you go walk through the street there you don't really know what's what there's a restaurant with a bunch of people lined up out the front and there's an empty restaurant or there's a restaurant with 4,000 4.8 star reviews and a restaurant with none like you're going to go with the crowd that's just how we're wired you're not going to do the objective rational let me evaluate everything on this menu and the price and the ingredients and work out what's the best option you're going to go with the crowd the same you looking for a restaurant in your local shopping strip you know is going to be more influenced by what's familiar and what's comfortable and what you can do on autopilot so the caveat is there's no bias that works on everybody in every context all the time however there are definitely biases that lend themselves more to solving different sorts of problems so if the client problem is an awareness problem there's going to be a different set of biases we're going to look at than if it's a value perception problem or a pricing problem or a conversion problem because there are yeah triggers that more closely match those those sorts of challenges interesting
Speaker 2brand verse performance like what are the types of levers or devices you'd be looking at in that kind of brand building space versus bottom of the funnel awareness has been built ready to purchase like just because i think that is an interesting um kind of area you
Speaker 1went into there uh sure so if if it's top of funnel so this is a nice sort of you know excuse to talk about a couple of these biases so let's say if if awareness is the thing that yeah i'll give you i'll try and do one at awareness and one at value perception and you know one at conversion so in the awareness space we want people to become aware of our brand who are not and we'd like to do that for as little money as possible so one thing we can do is we can try and make it easier for people to talk to others about what we do there's a behavioral bias called the peak end rule this is the idea that we don't remember experiences based on the average of how we felt through them we remember experiences based on the peak moments so the emotional high or low points and what happens at the end so this is why a really good dessert can save an otherwise average meal why a um you know terrible flight home can kind of undo a whole good holiday um it's why bands always play their best song right at the end right because that that emotional peaks and the endings is what you remember and what you remember is so much more important than what you experience because what you remember determines how likely you are to repeat or recommend so one thing we could do is um if we are i don't know a dental clinic we want to give people a really good experience on the way out knowing that when somebody says hey how's how's your dentist you know the thing we're going to remember is yeah getting the minties and the toothbrush and the sticker that they gave my daughter or something like that and we're going to remember that and we're going to remember that on the way out and i was like that was a nice experience and i've sort of forgotten that i had actually no idea how much it was going to cost when i tapped the thing with my phone because who knows how private health insurance works and you know so i if i was trying to build awareness and i already had customers one of the things i would focus on is how do we make ourselves more memorable and the way i would do that is i would look to for ways to help clients create peak moments preferably towards the end of the experience
Speaker 2it's a fascinating device we've we've talked before i don't think we've ever talked specifically although i've never heard of it it's a good one yeah but so so interesting i think of um probably once again going off topic but i think of team members leaving rocket right it's like over the years obviously if people leave and it's the way people go out it's basically how you remember them right it's like head down until the very last minute perfect handovers give me a call if you need anything after i leave versus uh being sick for a few days and i'm going to put some leave in at the last
Speaker 1minute and hundred percent yeah i think people realize that and um i was just talking to my colleague about it and i was like yeah i'm going to put some leave in at the last minute and exactly this i don't know if people realize that this is how brains get imprinted but someone can be kind of average you know and really good in their notice period and it's going to completely change the reference you give them if they're actually pretty good and they really dog you in
Speaker 2the last two weeks so the takeaway to all listeners doesn't matter how average you are in your job just go out well and everything will be okay totally
Speaker 1just make the ending really good it's the only people are going to remember don't worry so that's something we might do on the awareness front uh if what we're saying is hey we really want people to choose us more than our competitors and we want them to value our product more we might explore something called the effort bias and this is our tendency to assume that something is worth more just because more effort has gone into making it now often this is factually incorrect like often more effort has gone into making something because the person making it kind of sucks like if i was going to make you at a table uh it would be an insane amount of effort and the output wouldn't be very good um but you know we're not here to rewire people's brains we're here to understand how they're already doing it and we're not here to rewire people's brains and use that to our advantage so often and this is a hallmark of great expensive brands is they will go to huge um lengths to surface and celebrate complexity that is happening behind the scenes if it is not visible it is not valuable if customers don't know how much work you did you know you're a real estate agent and you come to their you know you're a buyer's advocate and you come to them with three different houses that they might want to go and look at like that's nice but if you can somehow communicate to them look i've gone out i've looked at 150 different potential properties in the area i whittled that down to 47 that were in the right price range and you know had the right specs and then within those i've pulled it down to three one of them is bang on your budget one is slightly over one is slightly under let's go have a look at them all of a sudden like the feeling of what has happened here the output is the same it's actually is completely different so this is why you know expensive luggage and whiskey and wine go to great lengths to tell you how hard it was to make this is why most good restaurants have moved the kitchen from out the back to in the middle and why the best seats are around the kitchen right because we want to see the work we want to see the effort so if my challenge was trying to get consumers to add more value to what we're doing and be willing to pay more i would look for ways that we you don't expose the whole mess you don't want to drag them through the you know the laundry but find some things in our product in our providence in our people in our process that we can surface and celebrate and get the credit we deserve
Speaker 2for them so it's so cool you've um you've talked a lot around small change massive result what does it mean and what are some examples or devices that can be applied
Speaker 1yeah for sure so one of the things that i love about behavioral science and that clients love about behavioral science is you can apply them at a tiny scale or a huge scale so if you have um an idea that we're getting so we've talked about social proof what's popular gets bought and you say hey we really want to experiment with that for our new range of drink bottles you could send your next edm with by australia's most popular drink bottle you know costs you literally five cents to do that compared to what you were going to do you could build a 20 million dollar global campaign around the idea of a new range of drink bottles and you could send your next edm with by australia's most popular that this is the most popular drink bottle in the world and everybody from, you know, australia to amsterdam whatever um is using them so it's really really scalable so yes we do do a lot of work in like little ideas big impact but what's great is if you do a little idea with a big impact then you can make the little idea a big idea and build more and more around it so if i think about some of the the coolest examples of this over over my years um one was for an energy business that we worked on and what's i think what's cool about this is you know sometimes the best thing to add is actually nothing and you need to take stuff away so we work for the energy business that's now rebranded so i'm just as i go through the story i'm gonna have to work out if i can talk about it no i probably can i think it's on our old website anyway so the business was called simply energy and so they're a you know challenger brand in the retail energy market in australia and one of the things that happened maybe 10 years ago was the government decided that they wanted to be easier for people to buy energy plans in australia and so the way the government in typical style decided that they would address that is they would force every energy provider to provide every piece of information about every plan all at the same time so when you go onto the compare plans page even when you get it down to the minimal amount of content you can show based on what legal and regulatory guided us it was so insanely overwhelming and the average person has no idea what any of these things mean how many gigawatt hours you need and your price per kilo and i worked on this client for six seven which people don't know how to read my energy bill and the government if we just give everybody all the information they're going to be perfectly equipped to make the perfect decision which is obviously completely the antithesis of how humans actually work so one of the things we did with them is you know we realized this is bad for every retailer this is especially bad if your name is simply energy because the promise that you are making in your ads is that you are going to be simple and really easy to deal with and you get here and the simplest version of what we're giving you is still completely overwhelming so on their compare plans page we just dropped this little toggle at the top and the little toggle it defaulted to all the info and then you could slide it across to simple mode and simple mode basically collapsed everything and just came just gave you like the two or three key bits of information you know which is the price of the minimum contract term and any perks that you got for it when we put this thing live we've done lots of stuff through the site that have given us 10 improvements here 12 improvements there the proportion of traffic that went from compare plans to sign up increased by 70 from removing everything from the page and the coolest thing about this is we actually brought this idea to the client the client said we don't really know let's put it to user testing we put it to user testing and what did users tell us i hate it don't like it don't need it i'm not stupid i don't need simple mode and we said you know what we're just going to push it through anyway because even if nobody touches it it delivers the brand promise the brand promises we can simplify things for you and even if no one uses it even if no one likes it it's still something that we feel passionately about as a brand and the agency representing the brand so anyway we ran we ignored the user testing we rammed it through it had a huge impact and it cost almost nothing kind of interesting
Speaker 2isn't it and kind of what you touched on before we said customers don't like it and we said no we don't like it and we said no we don't like it we don't always know what they want right um you'd like to stay jobs thing with the iphone it's kind of it's a little bit counterintuitive
Speaker 1yeah i mean we don't know why we do most of the things that we do and so when we ask people to explain to us what they would or wouldn't buy or why they did or didn't buy something you know sometimes they lie on purpose because the the answer is because it was cheap or because i saw a cool guy in the gym had that and i wanted to be like the cool guy in the gym you know sometimes they lie by accident like they think they're telling you the answer but it's actually not why they're lying to you it's not why they're lying to you it's not why they're doing it but it's what they've told themselves why they're doing it yes so your research is really really tricky and especially any research uh about getting people to project what they would do in a situation uh i'm very very skeptical of it'd be
Speaker 2interesting like the market as it come into your orbit whether they're almost self-selecting kind of as we touched on before they're like they're they're attracted to your thought leadership they're attracted to the way of thinking that's been out there for so long um i don't think most of the marketers that i deal with would come in to every brief saying like overtly communicating this is you know behavioral change brief this is all about behavioral science and cx and you know i mean the brief would be we're trying to sell this widget or we're trying to increase this or whatever it might be what's your advice or thinking to marketers listening on how they can start to change their thinking how they can learn how they can start to infuse this into their own market marketing and potentially also upskilling their team right how to get their team to be kind of thinking this way
Speaker 1so i mean just to to be fair every client doesn't walk in here saying hey guys i've got a behavior change brief for you that i'd like you to solve with marketing science for me art or creativity what they do is they come to us with briefs saying oh we're launching this new product or we're you know changing this credit card for that credit card or we've got a new vehicle that's coming out and you know next next month but we're not going to be able to do that they know the way that we are going to ingest that problem and respond to that problem is in the think about way which is saying what can we do with marketing science and what can we do with hardcore creativity and there there are think about shaped ideas that come out of this place and so i guess they come in expecting that sort of outcome not necessarily coming in um adhering strictly to the to the language that we use internally
Speaker 2in the agency yeah fair um but but there's still a lot of people out there that are going to be able to do that and i think that's a big part of it and i think that's a big part of it and i think that's a big part of it and i think that's a big part of it and i think that's a big part of it and i think that's a big part of it and i think benefit though right in marketers learning like i think it is a way of thinking isn't it like in terms of they're engaging you or an ex like someone else as the expert to do the craft but i think in terms of repositioning their own thinking around how problems can be solved or what they're trying
Speaker 1to achieve yeah agree um and behavioral science is just one lens on the world there are other lenses that some are complementary some overlap a lot some are contradictory um it's like something that's getting a lot of traction at the moment i mean you know you did a show on it a few weeks ago about you know is this a current demand or a future demand type of brief and how should the response skew one way or the other you know we're going to end up with lots of crossover sort of stuff here um but i think it's good to have a lens or some lenses on the world that you can that you can try on and if you're walking down the path of one and it doesn't really feel like it's for you uh you know there's a lens that you know everything is about a connection and brand building and storytelling and there's you know other lenses that everything's about acquisition and let somebody else do the upper funnel stuff and we'll just be the most efficient people to snipe them at the bottom so there's um different perspectives people can have and i feel that if somebody is walking down a path of one and you feel like you understand it but it's not really for you like that's okay there's lots of agencies there's lots of approaches there's no one way it's a messy world that we live in um and to just be open for for different ways of thinking
Speaker 2how are you seeing ai large language models impacting the space i went to a conference a few years back and it was it was a sales and marketing conference and the sales guy got up and was talking about um outbound sales activity and he basically had a template which was using uh robert cialdini's uh weapons of influence create you know a killer like edm or out and i was like oh this is no i don't think this is you know put it into the chat i'm not sure this is what he was thinking when he put his work together and i was like oh this is a good idea i'm not sure this is better how are you feeling about ai how are you feeling around what's to the benefit and what are we what are we kind of seeing as a as potentially not working as some of the noise is suggesting it is uh do you mean from
Speaker 1a agency perspective or a end user perspective or a client perspective i think from a client perspective uh for i think as we were saying earlier um this has a lot of hallmarks or it rhymes a lot with the big uh digital transformation which i know sounds very lame and probably has all sorts of negative baggage associated with it but this digital transformation stuff that happened whatever it would have been 15 years ago yeah where there was a a short period of exuberance about how unbelievable this is and anyone can do anything and you know we're going to be able to do everything ourselves for for free basically and then hitting a pretty tough wall which is enterprise business and actually getting things from this 80 works in claude and i threw it up in you know two hours on my weekend to actually work in an enterprise size business that's running sap and has regulatory and compliance and legal and you know 36 month software cycles it's hard to do stuff at scale and there's no correct answers yet there's only trade-offs and so i actually think for a lot of agencies the the mirror image of that a lot of fear about oh my god we're we're about to be eviscerated like literally everything clients pay us for they're doing themselves on the weekend to now a very quick realization that our primary job as agencies is to help clients navigate through this complexity and the more complexity there is the more important role there is for us to help clients actually work out what signal what's noise how do we prioritize and and move forward in this new world where we don't just have you know in the agency we talk about system three now where we've had system one which is our quick reflexive decision making and system two which is our deep thoughtful decision making and these two systems as marketers we've um built offerings around system one is why brand and emotional connection is so important because sometimes we don't want people to think too deeply we just want them to see we're the one with the red lid and that's the one that i like and i trust and i know and my kids enjoy it and i'm just going to buy it and we also build content and stories about how we're sourced and the provenance and why if you actually do want to know whether this is the best home loan term deposit wristwatch we've got a story to convince your system two about it we now have system three which is effectively system two tasks done at system one speed these machines that we're attached to that can research and pass infinitely more data than we ever could and they can do it instantly and so for us as as marketers and brands we have to work out how do we keep appealing to system one and two strong brands and great stories behind them and also make sure we're turning up in the consideration set when the billions of people who go to llms every month turn up in a question that we could be relevant for
Speaker 2yeah it's fascinating isn't it and the way that we as humans interact with large language models right and they kind of turn themselves into people right it's kind of i would suggest this or i was traveling recently and was asking a comparison between two different um and it was very much i prefer then you're kind of reading over if someone talks to you in absolutes which is pick this one or this is true or i prefer it's like well this this must be true and real and you kind of have to go back and go no this is this is this is not a being
Speaker 1yeah you know what i had an experience last night i'm working on a um it's like a pitch script for a client i'm helping client uh with their narrative to take to global head office and so i've just been synthesizing um some of my thinking with one of the llms and got to a good spot with it at the end of the day yesterday and i just wrote something like okay i'm glad we got here and then it responded saying yeah you know as a fellow crafter of corporate stories i really enjoyed this process working with you on this well i was like excuse me you just overstepped like you are you are you are not that i'm impressed
Speaker 2by how kind and nice you're being towards uh towards claude or whatever platform you're using i'm glad we got here i
Speaker 1was i was raised right we've got us
Speaker 2yeah certain members of our team that are always very polite thinking that one day they're going to come for us and uh and you know
Speaker 1it's um it's an asymmetrical risk reward you know it doesn't cost you much to say thank you but if they do come for you it's uh it's going to be worth a lot i think
Speaker 2i'll probably just give them silence let's guess it could be worse than being mean you know just ignoring them when they when they give me something good danison awesome awesome having you back on the pod i always love chatting marketing with you because i think you do have um an awesome perspective and i think i always come out of our conversations or hearing you talk about marketing thinking about things differently which i think is
Speaker 1awesome awesome well i enjoyed being here and as i said to you off air i'll say to you on air i think you guys are doing such an awesome job leading from the front with all of the education and content work that you're doing and i have personally benefited immensely from it and i'm sure i'm not the only one thanks
Speaker 2man thanks for listening to the smarter marketer podcast stay up to date about new episodes on linkedin and instagram by searching for smarter marketer podcast you can purchase your own copy of smarter marketer via the amazon website and if you want a second opinion about your business's approach to digital marketing send me an email james l at rocketagency.com.au or visit the rocketagency.com.au website thanks for your time
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