Last week we explored the difference between promotional and prevention motivation and how this might impact messaging. This week the debate continues as neuroscientist Tali Sharot reveals the latest findings on how we digest information. On this morning’s BBC Radio 4’s woman’s hour she explained that human beings are actually hard wired to be optimistic. So what does that mean to us as individuals and how does that impact on how we communicate with one another?

As is often the case, this discovery was made accidently when Sharot was trying to examine whether the same part of the brain responsible for remembering the past was also responsible for imagining the future. When asked to picture future events, the test audience had an overwhelming bias towards the positive, automatically assuming the best possibly scenario, be it that their plane journey would be smooth or a haircut fantastic.  It transpired that approximately 80% of people in the western world are innately positive, whereas only 20% will expect a negative outcome to future events.  The majority of people, therefore, are fuelled and enticed by what’s to gain, rather than what’s at risk.

Who are we kidding?

So we assume the best for us as individuals and, at least in this part of our brain, put ourselves above the rule (“That happens to others, but that will never happen to me”). So much so, that our brain will trick us into believing we’ll live to be 100 years old and live a life of health and happiness, even when our own life experience and statistics should teach us better. Tali Sharot gives the example of a couple about to get married predicting a 0% chance that they’ll one day get a divorce, even though the statistic in reality lies at about 50% in the western world. Optimism is a surviving mechanism, perhaps a tool that allows us to take risks that as rational human beings we would not take if it weren’t for the belief that we’ll be fine, against the odds.

The stubborn optimist – how to reach people

After being presented with the real statistic, the test audience was then again asked to make the personal prediction. Interestingly, the facts did alter their belief, but only when the real statistic was better, more positive, than what they had initially predicted. Data that was negative (i.e. a 30% chance in getting cancer as opposed to a predicted 10%) was perpetually ignored. We therefore do not relate bad news to ourselves and we don’t learn from negative information.  This has implications on how we communicate. If we are aware of our mental blind spots, we can ensure to craft our messages in such a way that will stick as opposed to being ignored and filed in the “not relevant to me” bin. It’s important to note that factors such as age and cultural background will also have an impact on our optimism (at least on how conscious we are of it). As a conscious optimist, it’s reassuring to know that a positive message will have a larger impact than a negative one – now go and have yourself a nice, oblivious day!

Smiling in the face of reality – Youtube

One-phrase slogans can have a profound effect on how customers see your product or service. One key factor in crafting that phrase is matching its content to the customer’s mind-set, and in particular to the way they view opportunity. The Harvard business review recently explored the two fundamentally different kinds of consumer motivation: prevention and promotion.

Promotion Motivation – what’s to gain?

Research in psychology shows that some people are more energised by optimism and praise. They see their goals as opportunity for gain or advancement. Research also suggests that these people are also more likely to embrace risk, seize opportunities and excel at creativity and innovation.  Generally speaking, younger people are more promotion-minded.

Prevention Motivation – what’s to lose?

A different type of person will view opportunity to avoid loss and / or stay safe. The prevention-minded are more driven by criticism and the possibility of failure and are risk-averse, but thorough and accurate in their work.

So which approach should you take with your product and its tagline? Products, activities and ideas can have different motivational focuses just as people do and it’s simple if your product is obviously in one category or the other. If you are selling term life insurance, you will be dealing with prevention-motivated buyers; high-return but risky investments, on the other hand, will be purchased by promotion-motivated customers. However, many products and services fall into a broad middle ground and can be presented in either way, as The Harvard Business Review illustrates:

“The nuances in description can be subtle. If you are selling cars, you can choose to talk about “better mileage” (promotion) or “lower fuel costs” (prevention). You can emphasize the “bonus” features customers get if they buy the Limited Edition, or what they’d be missing out on if they didn’t buy it”.

Knowing your audience is key and research pays off. People will pay more for a product or service if you describe their choice in a way that matches their view of opportunity. You will increase engagement and your customers will ascribe more value to the product or service in question, as shown in changes in attitude, behaviour and spending.

Segmenting Your Customers

It’s likely that that you have both kinds of people within your target base. An effective approach would be to segment your customer base. A financial organisation may find that younger investors are strongly gain oriented, whereas older investors with substantial assets would tend to be far more protective of what they have. Hence, direct mail or Web ads targeted at younger customers could emphasize gains and long-term growth potential, while ads for older customers would stress safety, particularly in terms of avoiding losses and preventing a reduction in future income.

Motivational fit is powerful. If applied successfully, your audience will find your story more compelling and your arguments more convincing on an intuitive level. Like goes to like and will continue to endorse your idea, product or service to others. So, are you feeling motivated?

You are far more interesting than the average TV programme and that’s why your television is now watching you. The technology to have a webcam observe your facial expressions exists and may be deployed in ad platforms, games and other areas. It’s only a matter of time before ads will change or linger according to how you respond to them emotionally.

“Facial coding” techniques have been used for a while by academics and marketers to analyse the emotional reactions of people to stimuli. Apparently, we’re incapable of completely hiding true emotions and experts are able to tell whether we like or dislike something by the most minuscule changes in our expressions. Now companies are automating the process of gauging emotional reactions. By combining emotion-monitoring and conventional eye tracking, one can accurately measure viewer engagement with web ads, web sites, print ads, etc. UK based firm ‘Realeyes’ is currently conducting tests across the US and Europe.
In an interview with The Economist, founder Mihkel Jäätma says:

“our system is able to gauge a person’s mood by plotting the position of facial features, such as eyebrows, mouth and nostrils, and employing clever algorithms to interpret changes in their alignment—as when eyebrows are raised in surprise, say. Add eye-movement tracking, hinting at which display ads were overlooked and which were studied for any period of time, and the approach offers precisely the sort of quantitative data brand managers yearn for”.

While initial applications may be geared to analysing ads and other content, the real potential of these tools could be realised if they allowed ads, games, and websites to react instantly to changes in viewer emotion. Thanks to the power of image-processing software and the ubiquity of tiny cameras in computers and mobile devices, ads will soon know when you’re looking at them and how you feel about them. Uses for this technology will of course not be limited to advertising. Areas such as security, computer gaming, education and health care could all benefit greatly from it. Advertising agencies, however, are among the first to embrace the concept in earnest to help improve online campaigns. Therefore, there’s not much left for me to say here other than: I can see you!

On this morning’s BBC Radio 4 ‘today’ show, James Dyson talked about the shortage of Engineers in the UK and supported the campaign to keep Design and Technology a mandatory subject in the school curriculum. The national curriculum is currently under review and business leaders fear that removing the subject may have a serious impact on Britain’s competitiveness in the field.

In our work in schools and graduate recruitment campaigns for financial services companies and related professional bodies, Slam has been aware of concerns in recent years over the lack of applicants for science, maths and technology subjects. 2011 has seen an improvement in university applications in these areas probably more due to tougher economic conditions and concerns over fees than our own single-handed efforts. However, changes to the core curriculum that deflect focus from these hard subjects could negate the small gains that have been made.

The UK currently produces about half the number of engineers required. In fact, the whole of Europe is experiencing the same issue. Despite being valued more highly as a career in comparison to the UK, the Association of German Engineers (VDI) reported earlier this year that there were over 76,000 vacant engineering jobs – an all time high.

James Dyson is part of the group ‘We believe in DNT’, campaigning to maintain and improve the subject. It should be high-tech, preparing children for the fast changing world of technology and should be underpinned by the other, more theoretical, science subjects.

Engineering, technology and design professions may want to get behind the fight to keep Design and Technology in schools in order to ensure future success.  There are many opportunities today to link industry with schools through talks, sponsorships, inspirational campaigns and careers packs. There needs to be an increase of general awareness of the range of design and engineering career options currently available, along with inspirational and creative methods employed to build understanding and excitement.

Dyson invests heavily in research and development and recognises the importance of filling the current skills gap. In the interview he concludes: “We have a real competitive problem her: If we don’t engineer and design our products better, we’ll be importing everybody else’s and not exporting our own”.

Slam Branding is the winner of the Digital Impact Award for Professional Services for its client, the Actuarial Profession. As part of an integrated campaign, Slam Branding created a Facebook page to provide a platform for graduates and members of the Profession to come together, ask and answer questions, exchange information and get careers advice. The nomination recognises Slam’s skills in social media as well its expertise in content strategy.

Slam Global worked closely with the Actuarial Profession to devise a long-term strategy to build community links between the Profession and graduates. The Facebook page helps to educate the graduates about the multi-faceted nature of actuarial careers by creating a dynamic and interactive experience. The page now has over 9,0000 members, an impressive number given the membership of the Profession is just over 20,000 members, and the page continues to gain an average of 100 members per week. The award acknowledges the importance of having a solid content strategy in order to run a successful social media campaign that supports all other on- and offline activities. Slam Global has demonstrated exceptional research, understanding the intricacies of the actuarial profession, its history and its future.

The Digital Impact Awards is the UK’s leading established program that benchmarks and celebrates excellence in digital stakeholder communications and has seen a large increase in number and quality of entries this year. The ceremony was held on the 20th of October at the Grange St Pauls Hotel in London. Shiela Lumsden, Director at Slam Global said:

“We’re delighted for both the Actuarial Profession and ourselves to have been successful against what the awarding body described as strong competition for the professional services award. There is often resistance to Facebook as a platform for professional services companies and the Actuarial Profession showed great foresight in accepting Facebook as part of the strategy, and the page has certainly proved its value in strong relationship building for their audiences.”

A few months ago we discussed developments in face recognition technology and mused about the mindboggling opportunities it brings for advertising. With the Metro’s ‘behind the idea’ featuring the newest innovations around the technology, face recognitions makes the headlines once more.

Software that was once used for border control and anti-terrorism is now being used by New Zealand’s Pedigree adoption drive to match up dogs with new owners. With the tech help from NEC, the organisation created a ‘human canine pairing software’, wittily entitled  ‘Doggelgaenger’.  People who are looking to adopt a dog can upload a photo or scan their face via webcam and the technology will recommend a pet with matching facial characteristics from their database of homeless dogs. We’ve had a lot of fun trying it out this morning and suggest you have a go!

Facebook’s recent dive into Face recognition technology had more serious repercussions than the smile inducing ‘Doggelgaenger’. Earlier this year it quietly introduced face recognition technology in photo tagging, so that friends in pictures were automatically scanned, recognized and tagged. After causing a worldwide debate on privacy, Facebook has now been ordered to remove all biometric information and facial profiles it had stored. With technology evolving at such an exponential pace, it’s not surprising that society is finding it hard to keep up.

In other corners of the world, the ‘minority report’–like technology has already found its place in everyday advertising. In Japan the first digital billboards tailored to passing shoppers already exist. Not yet truly personal, the ad signage uses software to identify the shoppers’ gender (with 85%-90% accuracy), ethnicity and approximate age (see previous post for details). The Metro reports that Adidas will soon install digital billboards throughout the US as well as in British shops that will be able to recognise a man in his twenties and then display the appropriate sportswear. I’ts only a matter of time before technology fully catches up with science fiction and presumably the Adidas advertisement  will already work better than the ‘Doggelgaenger’, which paired me up with my least favourite kind of dog… be sure to let us know whether your canine match was a success!

For professional and financial services firms, success depends so much on presentations and the pitch. Teams on the front line are responsible for delivering the business through the impact of their words and emotional engagement with clients. Individual’s skills vary and each presenter has to play to their strengths, but do the corporate messages get lost in the process and are audiences left with a clear understanding of the most important takeaways?

Defining key messages at a corporate and product level and ensuring they are understood and shared throughout the organisation will not only ensure consistency, but will have a direct affect on your lead generation and sales team’s win ratio.

Opportunities to get direct and truthful qualitative feedback from potential clients on the quality of pitches are rare. In our experience of researching audiences for lost and won pitches, it is in most instances a lack of clarity in explaining complex ideas and processes and a tendency to focus on what the teller is interested in rather than the audience that results in pitch failure. Presenting is all about building trust, at both a personal and corporate level and this requires a natural flow, focus on the audience and an understanding of their needs. In order to seal the deal, the sales team needs to ensure that the takeaways of the pitch are the main messages you want to make. The challenge is to pin point the key messages that convey exactly how you differentiate yourself from competitors and the value you bring to the market. Whilst these things may seem obvious, we’ve found that many organisations struggle in getting the story right and telling it in a way that is compelling and memorable.

Converting leads into business is easier when people are already familiar with you and your offer. A lot of trust has to be built to take potential clients from a cold sales lead to selecting your services and consistency in messaging at every touch point along the journey is an important element in building that trust. Prospects are very likely to waver when they find promises made by the first sales contact are contradicted by someone at a later stage. A small percentage improvement in conversions at each stage of the sales process adds up to a significant improvement in the ultimate number of pitches won.

While crafting messages and improving the sales teams’ ability to deliver them is just one element in building the trust demonstrated in our graph, there’s a great value in perfecting every aspect of your pitch team’s approach. Messages serve as a backbone to all forms of communication and a strong set of messages work as a marketing and selling engine, fuelling and maximising lead generation.

In our last blog post we expressed concerns on the ever-increasing use of personalisation on the web and were debating the possible impacts this could have on society. Just about a week later the topic seems to be in everybody’s mind and Google results, not least due to a Ted Talk by Eli Pariser on his new book, The Filter Bubble. A good opportunity for us to explore the topic further and share more ideas on the future of web development with you.

The tides have turned and hardly anybody noticed. The web was supposed to bring us all together, to provide us with information and to allow us to share knowledge and ideas. The role of the web and social media networks in the recent political uprisings in the Middle East has been widely discussed and the shift of power from top-down to citizen journalism is one of the most significant sociological changes in recent times. The idea, considered in The Filter Bubble, that the web is becoming a censored, stylised window onto the world and primarily a tool for soliciting and analysing data seems diametrically opposed to this.

Mr. Pariser describes it as the “invisible, algorithmic editor” orchestrating what we can and can’t see when we log onto the web. Giants such as Facebook and Google are using relevance as the main deciding factor in their algorithms. This means that the feeds you see in your news feed and the results you get on searches are tailored to you and are based on your previous activities and interests. In his Ted Talk, Eli gives the example of several of his friends conducting the same search on Google, all of them getting significantly different results. Controversial topics would have different outcomes depending on the individual’s search history. More and more, we are being shown what algorithms calculate we should see rather than what we might want to see.

Be careful what you click for

A study by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the top 50 websites can install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons when you visit them. A massive new market is rising behind the pages you visit for information about what you do online. The study revealed that tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. However, the Journal found new tools that scan what people are doing on a website in real time and instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some of the tools re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.

Where’s the democracy without information and ethics?

If the algorithm is going to curate our world, or at least our virtual view of it, it must contain more factors than relevance and can’t just be based on what we “like”, want and are familiar with. It must serve to broaden our view by considering things we find challenging, uncomfortable and ideas that are new to us.  While citizens of the global village may be pulled unsuspectingly into sharing their most personal data on a web whose values are encapsulated in Google’s much publicised corporate value, “do no harm”, the age of web innocence may be short-lived when users begin to feel exploited and share their feeling on a global scale. The web may be viewed as a democratising force, but you can’t have democracy without a full spectrum of information. Ethics (a topic discussed by Peter Kruse at last year’s Re:publica), should be moved to core curriculum for the tech powerhouses and the next generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

At the last Facebook Developer’s Garage we attended, a gentleman was introducing a new app for tourists and travellers, one that introduces you to restaurants and sites you may like, recommended to you by people like you. It is hard to imagine that the Facebook “like” button was introduced just over a year ago, when it seems it’s always been the way we’ve shared our digital preferences. Listening to this presentation (and numerous similar ones over the last months), I couldn’t help but feel a little unnerved that app developers are equating similarity and familiarity to good and, inevitably, the unknown and different to bad. Has nobody stopped to wonder where this may lead us?

At our recent presentation on the future of design at Brunel University, we explored the evolution of empathy, which starts with the finding that humans are neurologically soft-wired to be empathetic to one another and explains how through evolution we’re continually expanding our circle of empathy (from early tribalism and blood ties, to religious ties, to the fiction of the nation state, etc). The theory went on to ask whether technology could possibly be the next thing through which we learn to broaden our sphere of empathy to a global one.  I’m a fan of this concept and see many examples of how technology is helping us evolve in a positive way, for instance, in IT4DC (Internet Technology for developing countries).

To me, this seems harshly at odds with us liking and therefore moving closer to things, places and people that are “like us”. Surely recommendations based on what I’ve previously experienced and enjoyed will eventually narrow my horizon, steering me towards the known and away from the unknown. On social networks such as Twitter and Facebook I am quite obviously surrounded by people that I know, like and share certain views with. The more time we spend online, the more the Internet becomes like us – your personal online window onto the world, reflecting your experiences, likes and dislikes.

How about an algorhythm that on every tenth recommendation suggests something that you are unlikely to do or to like according to your previous data? As in a “try something new” or “broaden your horizon” app, instead of “You have previously purchased a book on gardening, here are 10 other gardening book you might enjoy!”

We’re not getting any younger, that’s for sure. While I feel my proverbial beard growing, I’m trying to imagine the United Kingdom of 2034, in which, according to the Office of National Statistics, almost a quarter of our nation’s population (23%) will be over 65 years old. One of the most prevalent trends currently discussed in design is inclusiveness, finding innovative solutions to the challenges of an ageing population.

“Inclusive design is just better design” (Professor John Clarkson from Cambridge Engineering Design Centre)

Last autumn, the Technology Strategy board and Design Council announced the launch of “Independence matters”, a £2million project dedicated to finding innovative technologies, systems and approaches to help the elderly stay well and independent. The project invites designers, strategists and developers to work together in order to demonstrate how design-led solutions can enhance independent living and quality of life for older people.

One of the main challenges is to keep people living happily and in the comfort of their own homes for as long as possible. The other is to keep people socially (and digitally) connected. In many ways, “inclusive design is just better design” (Professor John Clarkson from Cambridge Engineering Design Centre) as many tools, be they kitchen appliances or digital apps, can cause frustration even to users who are young and able. The simpler products are to use, the better the experience is and the easier it is to integrate the product into our daily lives.

Despite the exponential increase of digital natives, there are still 9.2 million people in the UK that are digitally excluded, i.e. have never used the Internet, of which 6.4 million are over the age of 65. Not for profit social organisation ‘We are what we do’ recently launched a tool designed to help people get online. At internetbuttons.com, you can set up a home page for someone who may find it hard to navigate through the Internet. Similar to setting up a speed dial on a telephone, you can customise easily visible buttons as links to important pages or pages of interest. The aim is to get people from different generations to come together and, in this case, help open up different communication channels that can make life a lot easier for the elderly in many ways.

By nature, technology and design is becoming more inclusive. Many of the newer technology products already feature more organic functionalities that are more easily relatable to an older audience, such as touch screens, speech recognition and speech to text. Technology and its design will become increasingly more human / organic. For instance, if you’re reading Crime and Punishment on your kindle the device could feel heavier than when you’re reading the 192 paged The Man and the Sea.

Whether in web or product design, it’s important to be aware of the large percentage of our audience with disabilities and age related disabilities, be it impaired vision or limited mobility. Too many websites and print products feature font sizes that their target audience find hard to read. Content dictates design; even the most compelling message is nullified when it’s not easily legible and you want to be heard and seen by ALL your audience.