Blog Archives
Want to Change Audience Behavior? Give ‘Em a Nudge.
Effective public relations and marketing stems from understanding human psychology. We spend hours, days, months brainstorming unique campaigns and strategies to mobilize people and prompt action based on perception of an audience’s past and future thinking and behavior.
We’re also big idea people. With any new client or project, there is a natural tendency to assume that a campaign or idea needs to be drastically BIG, BOLD and revolutionary. We pride ourselves on paving new ground.
The reality is that many business problems can be solved when a moderate change is made and effectively implemented. In other words, a solution is devised to address the exact problem. Easier said than done but think about the number of times your team has created a big idea to win a piece of business, only to end up implementing the idea on a much smaller scale that focuses in on effective tactical execution.
In short, we don’t always need to create ideas that move mountains. Instead, think in terms of creating a “nudge” – a small change that generates the desired impact on target audience behavior. Huh? Let’s look at a very practical example of a nudge.
I would imagine that when you open the fridge in your office’s kitchen, it is stocked full of sugary liquid goodness ranging from sodas to fruit juices, Rockstar energy drinks and beyond. Not exactly the dream setup for a company HR rep looking to establish a healthy office environment. Now imagine if those eye-level shelves staring back at you were filled with bottled water and the other sugary drinks were a bit harder to reach. Naturally, people will begin drinking more water because it’s the first option presented and easiest to access. That’s a nudge (see the Nudge blog for plenty of more examples). No drastic cost. No drastic change in methodology. Rather a simple adjustment from what’s deemed the norm.
But how does one figure out how to arrive at what creates a good nudge? Great question.
There are many approaches that can be implemented. One method is to think in terms of negatives. It’s always easier to get a group to think about the ways or reasons something can’t work or reasons why your target audience would not do something. From there, you can flip your ideas and see which ideas surface as really strong reasons your audience would take a certain action oriented towards your desired goal. So in the example above, an HR rep would start by brainstorming all the reasons someone in your office would not want a bottle of water. From that list, the HR rep would reverse engineer positioning around why water is an excellent first choice.
Think about your client base and the business problems you’re working to help clients solve on a daily basis. What can you do to step back, simplify and start thinking nudges as opposed to revolutionary change?
*Photo courtesy of Ben Terrett.
Creating the Conditions for Creativity – by @djgraymatter
Earlier this week, good friend Joe Gray (@djgraymatter) posted a video presentation around the topic of organizing a company to foster creativity. As an imperative element within any business culture, creativity is often siloed to titled creatives or a creative team at a company or organization. But how does one go about encouraging ALL team members to proactively think outside the box and consistently bring new ideas to the table?
Check out Joe’s insights below and be sure to watch the excellent TED talk he included at the end.
Old Spice Another Proof Point for Capturing Production
We all love good content. The perfect combination of text, audio and images delivered at the right time to the right audience is something content marketing pros strive for on a daily basis.
A huge chunk of campaign planning is typically devoted to developing the overarching storytelling framework and the crucial content that supports that framework. Without targeted content, you’re left with a great story but no actionable plan or vehicle for connecting that story with your audience.
A post last week on PR Daily highlighted the excellent video Old Spice recently published that provides the public with a “behind the scenes” look at their continued “Old Spice Man” campaign. Uploaded to YouTube on March 1st, the video has already garnered more than 500,000 views.
A similar successful “production capture” video was created last year around the Guy Walks Across America Levis video. I mentioned this in a previous post last year but I love the video and it’s great context for what Old Spice pulled off with their own effort.
Why Does It Matter?
In short, it’s a smart tactic and simple way to beef up your content framework to leverage your storyline beyond initial campaign execution. If you’re going to dump a lot of money into production, it makes sense to capture and tell the story about how that production came together and was executed. Both cases above demonstrate that there will always be a technical or brand enthusiast audience that craves more than the initial content/brand touchpoint. Give ‘em what they crave.
Note: This post also appears on Weber Shandwick Seattle’s blog.
