The Number One creative marketing challenge today: How to balance Seduction and Conversion?

The rapid digital transformation of marketing has created new interesting challenges. The influence of digital marketing, CRO (conversion rate optimization), inbound marketing, SEO en SEA is that we have been starting to treat marketing as a tactical discipline. We have become obsessed by the tools and the analytics. Even brand builders have fallen for this trap. Since conversion is much more easily measured than brand equity or share of voice, they have been tempted to shift their media budget from brand building to digital. Les Binet and Peter Fields have demonstrated that this trend turned out to be devastating for the ROI of marketing. (link in Dutch)

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the bigger role that data, technology and science are playing in marketing and sales. The problem is to combine the 0 and 1 of marketing intelligence with the fuzzy logic of seduction. Both disciplines tend not to like each other, or they don't understand each other. The only way to solve this problem is to get creative people to fall in love with the beauty of technology and marketing intelligence. And the best way to achieve this is to get them to understand that technology will help them to become better creatives. The opposite is also true: Persuade the CRO-squad that experts in the art of seduction can help them to get much higher open-rates, retention-rates and conversion-rates.

Joep Decaluwé from ABN AMRO Bank pointed at this blogpost yesterday on why you need both Plumbers and Persuaders in B2B Marketing. I really love this quote:

[...] if we swing too far towards the plumbing of B2B, we lose sight of some important things: Content is not a colourless, odourless fluid that we pour into our new machines, then stand back to watch the money squirt out. If the content itself does not actually change the person reading/viewing/hearing it, you haven’t moved them along the mythical buyer’s journey (even if your nurture flow says you have).

Changing a person is still as hard as it’s ever been (maybe harder).

Link: Why you need both Plumbers and Persuaders in B2B marketing
Link: SUE Behavioural Design Blog - How data designs behaviour (Dutch)
Link: SUE Behaviuoral Design Blog - I converted her into having sex with me (Dutch)

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Our Behavioural Design Method is a highly structured creative process to turn deep human understanding into strategies for changing customer, employee and citizen behaviour. Learn the method in our monthly Behavioural Design Masterclass or apply it to improve your marketing, sales or customer experience in a Behavioural Design Sprint.
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An evil design proposal for redesigning the Brexit-referendum

The Brexit psychodrama is now rapidly coming to an apotheosis. The hard-Brexit camp has been very disciplined in repeating a couple of arguments that are completely bonkers. Theresa May keeps repeating "Brexit means Brexit". And they keep referring to the "Will of the people". When you look at these arguments from a Behavioural Design Point of view, there's a couple of arguments you can make to debunk this.

The first argument is that it's really easy to manipulate people into answering a different question. The Leave-Camp re-framed the rational "Leave the EU"-question into an irrational "take back control" and "stop immigration"-question.

But more importantly: The way you design a referendum, completely determines the outcome. The Brexit referendum has been designed to get people to choose from a binary option: Leave or Remain. If they would have added a third option, like "How the fuck would I know, do your fucking homework, that's what I've elected you for", there would be no way in the world Brexit-camp would have won. This third option would have captured a lot of the anti-establishment vote that got so many non-voters to vote on election day.

As we argue in the Behavioural Design Masterclass: Changing behaviour is all about designing the way a choice is presented to people.

"Fuck it, let's do it" - A rooftop workshop in Marrakech

Astrid did a keynote, titled "Fuck it, Let's do it" on our Behavioural Design Fest in September (pwd: hub). It was about how to apply Behavioural Design techniques to design a happier and more meaningful life. It got such a great feedback that we decided to turn it into a workshop. In the workshop we create a plan to get yourself to commit and to stick to a couple of habits that will get you to be happier, have more fun and experience success. I prototyped the workshop on a rooftop in Marrakech with 10 entrepreneurs. It was awesome!

Tip: This is the perfect workshop for a team-building off-site. Contact Astrid for more information. We will create a product page asap.

Posted by Tom.

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That's all for this week, we hope to catch you next week!

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