A business has objectives and a strategy. It then needs plans for delivery, plus good quality tactical execution and sensible measures to monitor progress. What it doesn’t need is a strategy at every level.

It doesn’t need an SEO strategy, content strategy, engagement strategy and social strategy sitting on top of one another. It doesn’t need endless reassessments of its position and where ought to place itself.

Often strategy is seen as synonymous with seniority or high fees. Or worse, it’s an excuse for endless insight, fudging choices and avoiding actually delivering something.

Too many strategies is worse than no strategy at all.

You’re at a conference, you’ve taken on a ton of information. Your brain’s trying to make sense of it all and then, very occasionally, a speaker steps up and just totally blows your mind. That happened to me recently when I heard Roeland Dietvorst, a neuroscientist who works with marketers to improve campaign outcomes.

His talk ranged from football playing bees, to monkeys’ innate sense of fairness, and from Kahneman’s systems 1 and 2, to MRI scans that can be used to draw the images you’re picturing in your mind (yes, really). All of it was amazing and I it’s been circling round in head ever since.

In practical terms, for digital comms and marketing there were some very pertinent points. Some of them intuitively feel right, but it’s worth formalising them.

Keeping people in flow

The immediate priority for me to is to refocus on flow. People are busy living their lives and do many everyday things with little thought or effort; they’re using Kahneman’s System 1, the automatic, easy, low power mode. When they’re scrolling through Facebook, they’re definitely in System 1.

Traditionally, marketers interrupt people with messages. We’re trying to create some space in their minds for our brand or product or service while they’re busy doing other things. For example, we drop TV ads or billboards into their day. Online, we break into their feeds with ads. Typically, we finish our messages with a call to action – we want them to do something (usually buy from us).

The immediate lesson isn’t to not interrupt people, it’s to not interrupt them in a way that makes them think. If they’re using System 1, don’t switch them to the harder work of System 2 (the slow, deep thinking process) because it means they’re concentrating harder, are more critical and less likely to buy.

For instance, if you’re selling winter tyres, don’t evoke images of the tyres saving people from accidents because you’re making people think of accidents. Better to go with lighter messages that don’t make people think critically, that don’t raise fears.

You’ll be thinking this is obvious, but in an age where marketers increasingly seek to shock people to get attention, it’s a timely lesson to learn.

Don’t overthink it

Our brains make choices faster than we realise. They make instant judgments. When asked to explain our choices, we post-rationalise them.

A good example of this is the performance improvement made by booking.com from a small, subtle change to its website. They switched black bullet points to green ticks. It led a significant uplift in conversion.

If you asked a typical customer, what made you go ahead and make your recent purchase, no one would say, “the green ticks really swayed me.” But they made an observable impact. Those ticks changed the choices people made.

The lesson here is not to over rationalise people’s choices. It is better to observe and optimise.

Test, test, test

Everyone doing anything digital will be testing and learning constantly. Dietvorst cannot endorse this enough. Don’t overthink through which pricing option or call to action will work best, run tests and see which does. Constantly improve performance through repeat and ongoing testing. And it doesn’t have to be the big things. The composition of an image, or the type of bullet point you use can lead to statistically significant uplifts in performance.

The trap many people fall into when they learn about things like heuristics and automatic preferences, is that they take this understanding of how our brains use shortcuts and then try to apply them as a general theory. Beyond understanding that our brains automatically make choices quickly and not rationally, nothing else should be taken for granted. Don’t a single observation and apply it generally out of context. Instead, test, test, test.

A note on ethics

Keeping people in flow, optimising to increase sales, testing and learning. None of that is controversial, but it does raise ethical questions. We know people don’t always make the best choices. If you’re in the business of selling something, even something relatively benign, I think we all have a responsibility to think about customer outcomes, not just selling more. So while optimising is important, there should be a parallel stream of work to protect and properly serve more vulnerable customers.

So, you’ve been asked to present to the bigwigs at the top of the firm. You’ve got some data, you’ve got an ask, you need to impress. Here are some hints to help you hit the mark.

1. How does it relate to what you’re trying to do?

This is the first and most important question you need to answer. It goes without saying that you can only answer it effectively if you actually know what you’re trying to achieve.

You go to senior management because they make decisions, but you’ll only get the decisions you want from them if they have a clear understanding of what you’re asking for and how it fits with what your organization is trying to achieve. So, cut out the tangential data, the colourful anecdotes and side stories. And start with why what you’re saying is related to what they’re doing.

2. Don’t play fast and loose with percentages

Percentages are great for clarity and comparison. However, they are also abused by those desperate to impress.

Never, ever use the percentage change between two percentages. It is the last resort of those with unimpressive results and the first choice of chancers and charlatans. For example, if you’re market share has gone from 20% market share to 24%, don’t call it a 20% increase. You’re padding out your 4%.

Moreover, if you’re going to talk about percentage increases, you need to anchor them to hard numbers. How large a market are we talking about? What’s the actual value? That 4% from the earlier example might be worth thousands or millions, we don’t know without context.

3. Understand your sources

There’s a lot of shoddy data out there, there’s also a lot of good data that’s shoddily treated. Understand your data sources: how they’re gathered, what assumptions underpin them, and how those assumptions affect the final output. Know things like sample sizes and sampling methodologies. Only then can you reasonably draw conclusions and confidently assert opinions.

4. What does it look like in the real world?

Stats are great but they are too abstract for most people. Share relevant real-world examples to make your data relatable. Make sure your examples highlight challenges your organization faces and the value in overcoming them. The plural of anecdote might not be data, but anecdotes help make data relatable.

5. Peer pressure

You don’t want to be following your competitors but it’s important to highlight where you are in the market and what others are doing on similar fronts. If you can identify others moving in the direction you propose, it can help reassure people about your plans. Similarly, if you think you’ve spotted a gap others haven’t, highlight it by comparison.

6. Caveat venditor

Beware of what you’re pitching and don’t oversell. If you go in with bold claims, you will be held to them. So, go in with your caveats. Tell them what you don’t know and what factors might limit success. It doesn’t undermine your pitch, it shows you know what you’re doing.

Be prepared for tough questions but don’t try and blag your way through if you don’t know the answers. It’s better to say you don’t know, than to make something up and be pulled up on it later.

7. Details, details, details

Titles, labels, sources, etc. You must put them all in. Your presentation will go in for pre-reads, or people will ask for a copy. It will be disseminated (unless it’s terrible) and you want to make sure that people know how you came to your conclusions.

There’s another reason for including all the details too: you want questions to be about your proposals not about sample sizes, or where you got the data from.

8. Take a definitive position

Finally, the boardroom isn’t the place for options. It’s your job to filter through the options and choose one. Execs only need to give approval. If you go in with options, you’re abdicating your responsibility.

 

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash