S08.EP15 — Customer Experience Psychology: How to Build a Memorable Brand with Si Elliott

0:00So if you want to get a Rolex, that is not simple, but that's part of the experience is I have to actually go through this process of being on a waitlist, buying four other Rolexes to be one of their key customers. Or when you look to, I think it was the Enzo Ferrari, it was invite only to purchase it when they released that. Now you would think, well, actually I've got two million pounds to pay here. Can I just have it? No, you can't.

0:30Hello and welcome to Just Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies.

0:48Before we jump in, if you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the waitlist. That's joinbba.com.

1:23Hello folks, welcome to this episode of Just Branding. Brands spend an absolutely enormous amount of time thinking about how they look, what they say, how they present themselves to the world. But we know that ultimately brands are experienced by human beings, by end consumers. And we know that those human beings, sometimes I would pretty much say all the time, are not really rational in the way that they think and behave. We're all emotional beings influenced by context and various other key things. So we're not robots. So if we want to manage meaning, if we want to build brands, it's so important that we get our heads around consumer behavior, customer behavior, you could call it, and behavioral science.

2:10Today, in this episode, we are exploring a simple question. What can behavioral science teach us about creating better customer and therefore brand experiences? And we have an amazing guest to go into this subject with. Today, we're joined by Sai Elliott, a customer experience expert who spent the last two decades exploring the intersection between digital progress and human connection. Sai began his career in marketing and today co-owns creative agency Diversity and is the founder of customer experience consultancy Fabrics, where he combines behavioural science with practical strategy to help organisations create experiences that genuinely resonate with people.

2:58On top of that, if that wasn't enough, he's also an award-winning guest lecturer at Nottingham Trent University here in the UK, the University of Nottingham and the Communication University of China, as well as sitting on academic advisory boards spanning business and psychology. And perhaps most relevantly, he is the author of a new book that's just come out this year, customer experience thinking a practical guide to using behavioral science to build deeper more meaningful customer relationships. Sai welcome to the podcast. Thank you for that introduction there's very little I can say now I think you've you've pretty much cut off everything I've done.

3:38Let's wrap it up well I think we could tuck into one small story and that's how we first met do you want to sort of uh you know open up that that that can of worms? Yeah so um 2004 I think it was our creative studio was a little bit overloaded with work so we went out to some freelance designers here in nottingham and um a very energetic young chap with a lot of hair arrived through the door did some fantastic work with us so i can yeah i can i can vouch that the work was very good and we've been in touch ever since and yeah i think it's always interesting when you have and you've just reeled off a lot of things that i've done and the reason i've done that is because I've been around for so long.

4:19But I think it's really interesting when you have more than two decades of experience in a market, in an area, in a niche, to see the people that keep coming back into your kind of revolving around your world and your ether as well and your network. And yeah, it's great to see what you're doing. It's fantastic to meet Jacob as well. And I've got a few questions for Jacob a little bit later on as well. That's a whole different thing. Well, thanks for so much for carving out some time. I think it was a couple of years ago, we were in a Starbucks, and you mentioned this book that was coming out. And now it's here.

4:55So congratulations on launching it. We're going to get into that. But one thing I was just going to touch on, I think what's interesting about our connection is that, in effect, we've both had, I would say, sort of similar but different sort of approaches in our career, which is that I think we've gone up the value ladder if you like in the sense of how are we really creating stuff that that has real true meaning and value for customers and and you know coming from the design and creative side that's where my career has gone more into the strategy side and I know your has yours has also and slightly differently but ultimately kind of ending up on on that side of things which is less about I guess the fonts the colors and the and the shiny bits and more about the the true for you the customer experience that that really kind of generates value absolutely yeah and I think you touch on the book and I'm sure we'll chat through that a little bit and that was certainly a labor of love I know you're working on one at the moment I know Jacob you've been through that process as well and um that was a commitment device I just told everybody I'm writing a book because eventually every time you see someone they go how you getting on with the book you go yeah I need to complete that but you know an absolute curse of optimism I thought I'd have the book done in a year it took three years and hopefully there's some value that people can get out from that but certainly and I know you know we haven't teed up the two letters of AI yet but we're never going to get through this without unscathed without talking about that that wasn't even in my thinking when I started the book but it's certainly become more important and the point you touched on now for anybody working agency side a designer people at the moment that maybe have some worries about what's happening in the world that moving up the value chain and adding the thinking in is absolutely critical now it's never been more important it's never and i think when we touch on what you you guys do from a brand perspective i genuinely think that now is might be the most important time in history to get brand right agreed agreed okay well look before we um we talk into some of that stuff let's just start with basics right because you know we have a varied audience that tune in and we always like to kind of lay some groundwork first we love definitions on the just branding podcast just to kind of start us off so the book's called customer experience thinking perhaps you know we could kind of get you to give us a definition of of what that is what is customer experience thinking so customer experience is just the perception of feelings that people have with the interactions or the experience have with you your product your service or your brand so in simple terms that's all it is and it lives in the mind of the customer so we're trying to influence that but fundamentally customer experience is always from the other side of the fence and a lot of brands think about what they're delivering as customer experience rather than what's been received and trying to flip that on its head and walk in their shoes a little bit more love that love that um so why is that important do you think to having that kind of mindset around human behaviour?

8:01Why is that important to creating those experiences for businesses and brands? Well, let's think about why does a business exist at all? It's to serve someone and hopefully have a value exchange where you get compensated for that service to the other side. So I think modern marketing and certainly technology has really driven us down a line of thinking about conversion thinking about this user that metric and we actually need to take a step back and go we're actually serving people at the end of the day a lot of the work you guys will be doing in your day jobs is not just about selling into a business it's serving those people within the business and we've i feel in marketing we're losing a little bit of sight on that certainly with big data certainly when we look at you know think about social platforms and the ability to reach such a large audience i feel we're starting to lose a little bit of connection with the fact that it's the person the other side that we're serving and the brands that do it super well and i think are going to be really successful moving forward so those that keep that in mind and remember i'm here i'm here to serve you so my book is written to hopefully serve value to you and And therefore, it's worth the money you paid for it.

9:22And it creates that value. So I've had to write it with you in mind, not in mind of just this is what I want to say. Right. How did you come to the idea of writing a book? Well, partially, partially, there's a big personal side to it. I've got two young daughters and 11 and 14. They're digital natives. They're growing up in a world that is so different to the world I grew up in 40 odd years ago. And I now observe that and think, well, what they're coming into, how well is it serving them versus they're serving it? So how much is the technology the master rather than the other way around? So I was starting to just observe this and think about the marketing industry in general and how we're, as I say, we're starting to focus more on metrics, users' conversion rate rather than delivering out to people.

10:16and that's been accelerated in recent years but from the start of the book it was really looking at that and looking at this whole trend of we're more connected than ever but potentially more lonely we're a lot more plugged in these notifications going off i feel it when i think about starting out in a design creative studio here in nottingham i was doing two or three ad campaigns a week and i used to wait for an isdn line to slowly tick along and that's great and now I look at the speed that my team are working at, the amount of notifications going off. You've got Slack, you've got Teams, WhatsApp's going off, emails people are expecting instant answers on.

10:57Everything's ramping up, but we've still got these prehistoric brains that have been formed over thousands of years and we're not having hardware updates with our brains as quickly as the technology is. So I'm looking at it and thinking, well, us as marketeers, we have a responsibility. we fund a lot of what happens in technical development because it's us that is paying these platforms wanting to have our presence on there so it's just thinking about that and i was seeing a lot of clients having that frustration with i think the pace of optimization and wanting to build something that's a little bit more long term so that's that was kind of the two things coming to get my two worlds colliding together into uh well why don't you've got an opinion why don't you start to write a book you lecture on these things why don't you get it down to paper because there's also only so many conversations you can meet lifetime so you know hopefully people will pick this book up and go i did some interesting things in there but i'm going to move on to the next level like the great books i've read over the years that's part of my evolution in my thinking i want to just be a little one of those little ticks in someone else's evolution along the way where they start to maybe question things a little bit differently and i've given my daughters the book and ask them to think about their decisions as consumers when they're trying to buy stuff online as well love that and i think you're so right like short-termism it can be such a drug right for businesses particularly big organizations where you know people are so desperate to justify their their existence and and if they can point towards some some data somewhere you know it feels rational it feels lovely and uh you know they they can kind of justify their existence when as you say if we lose sight of the basic thing which is as a business you're there to serve someone else you're there to serve their need today but if you think just about that you've got a problem because really you want to be thinking I'm here to serve you for as long as you need me to you know that could be for years and if you've got a short-term focus and your teams are all driven for short-term short-term short-term they sometimes might make a decision which, yeah, will benefit the customer and themselves in the short term but might damage the long-term relationship.

13:09And that, I think, is sometimes how businesses and brands get themselves into difficulty. Anyway, what I was going to say was, let's shift gear a little bit and dive into this full-on, right? Because I know in your book you go through, which, by the way, just to lend my endorsement to it, I think everybody who's listening to this should definitely grab a copy. We'll give details in a minute of where you can get it. But let's just go into some of the principles that you outline. I think you go through like eight key principles of customer experience. So I was wondering if you'd be open to outlining those for us.

13:44And then perhaps we could dive in and unlock a couple and kind of get into some nitty gritty. Would you be open to that? A hundred percent. Well, let's start with why are they principles and not rules or laws? And it's, you know, I'm not necessarily the most linear of characters myself. as I would imagine many great entrepreneurs, business leaders, designers, brand strategists are as well. So their principles because my school reports would tell you this, I didn't always follow the rules, but it's something that over time that I've just crafted these through. So eight, where we look at consider every detail and how they work together, set, manage and exceed expectations, personalised for the individual, on their terms and put them in control, minimising effort and stress, considering the identity and emotions, learning and building relationship over time and considering all the senses and they'll map against whether it's accessible, functional or emotional or a series of those and they just help I think give foundational building blocks to start planning your work around.

14:49The second half book dives into behavioural science which takes it to a slightly different place but that start point is things that we've been working with clients for years on trying to put a little bit of a structure behind it but i refuse to call anything beyond principles because i don't want to be held to it in the fullness of time we're allowed to rethink at some point but certainly you know those are the important things that for me when you guys are in a brand exercise i've got to i've got to live up to your brand exercise putting them through this lens of these eight principles and really testing my mettle against that yeah i mean some some of them particularly for the designers who are listening in will will be really obvious like that first one consider every detail and how they work together right i guess from a visual perspective a lot of people are familiar with that but it goes beyond that doesn't it absolutely so as as humans we're kind of hardwired to notice differences in environment and things that don't quite join up.

15:45Usually that could be, and I'll quite often talk about our prehistoric roots where you were a caveman. You'd be looking out for those cues. You're like the third guest recently that said that I'm a bit caveman-like. I will accept it, but I'm getting a little nervous. Carry on. But you, evolutionary, have to look out for risks. So you look for inconsistencies, slight things, and then you go, do I trust this now and it will be the same in any brand exercise as well where we need to be consistent across the piece because otherwise I won't believe your claim if in three places you say it but in one place you contradict it and that's when I just think about wording and the things that you're promising before then I look at what you're doing visually so if I think about consistency visually if you say we are an authentic people first brand and then you're using AI I generated content on social.

16:43I don't believe your first claim now. So consistency is really important. And I think that's a tough one for designers because you like novelty. You like to change things up, freshen things up. So for then someone to go, no, no, we need to be super consistent, it's tough. And a couple of episodes ago, and I can't remember your guest's name now off the top of my head, but when they talk about Marlborough and then designing things in green, everything's got to come back consistently it's a tough one it is a tough one because we also like novelty ourselves and when you're working on something so much you forget that it's a hundred percent of your headspace but for the consumer it's that fleeting thing that they see once every four months for three seconds that's a great point and i see it all the time like you know on a macro scale you get a new cmo and they want to stamp their authority upon the brand literally take it in a different direction and you know again going back to that first point like is this how we serve people you know well like i'm working on a big project at the moment in the us and um it's a brand relaunch and it's going to market we've got ad tv spots and all sorts going out and i had to have a really serious conversation with the brand director over there because they asked for, in this particular project, for example, different strap lines to the end of every ad.

18:08And my position was, look, you know, we should stick to one really strong because we want to kind of be really clear about what we stand for. And they were like, yeah, but, you know, don't you think consumers will get bored? I was like, literally, someone's going to see one of your ads and then not see it again or see anything to do with your brand for a day or two, right? You know, even with the best funding in the world, that's the reality. So what we need to do is we need to think exactly this, you know, consider the detail and be really, really clear about the experience. And yeah, I think I won that one.

18:40But hey, we'll wait and see. Time will tell. Yeah, time will tell. I also think like there's a new rebrand that's been echoing around the interweb of, you know, the way Coke has been refreshing there. I don't think they've gone live with it yet, but there's been some sort of leaked Coke things. And what I think is phenomenal about, if you think of a brand with the longevity of, say, Coca-Cola, how the level of consistency around, you know, some of their key brand codes has been absolutely locked in for many, many years. The red, the ribbon, the way the can and the bottles work and all of that stuff.

19:17For years, consistency pays off. And now, yeah, they've tweaked a few things. The typography's tweet, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately, look at brands like that, I would say, and consider your business, your brand, and consider how frequently you've changed over the years. You know, a lot of B2B brands change every two, three years, and they think this is what it's about. But perhaps it's not. Perhaps it's about consistency. There has been some dilemmas around with the packaging design and Coke Zero. I don't know if you've seen that, but they can't tell the difference between Coke Zero and regular Coke because the black is gone and people are picking up the wrong thing.

19:55And, you know, sales are going to go down because of that. So when we talk about how things all work together, I think that is one of those things. Even though the system would say to do that, we have to make a decision of like, well, does it actually help the brand and sales? I don't know. Time will tell on that one. And that's where behavioral science comes in. And we're going to get to that. We're going to get to that, but let's keep going through these principles, right? So that was number one, consider every detail and how they work together. Number two, set, manage, and exceed expectations.

20:24Kind of like, how does that work? Like, that's a tough one, right? Like, how do you exceed expectations, Si? Before we get into that, Si, I just had a question because you mentioned these like building blocks and we want to make them usable and practical. But before we get into this, for the context of how we actually apply this using these principles how do you generally work with clients if you're going through these principles and like make it usable so typically a client will either come in and go let's look at the whole of our experience map it out so customer journey map it right the way through or alternatively the may the spark point might be we don't think this bit's working can we have a look at that and then you end up you end up expanding out from there so they're looking to sharpen up a certain elements they might see that they are customer satisfaction scores are through the floor or our NPS all of a sudden has gone massively backwards we don't know why or alternatively we're having this issue over here yeah we used to get this response rate is now dropped down to this or we're seeing a higher churn in some of our customer base so it could be any one of those and for anybody doing this as well you don't always need to grab someone like me and you can just start to pick this up and look at it yourself but i would always say where you think the problem is is rarely where it actually is and you have to expand it out so they'll be like right our conversion rate there's bad okay why and that does kind of come on to matt's next one then which is about set manage and exceed expectations which we often talk about right let's exceed expectations but that's firstly the start point actually is to take a step back and go does Jacob actually understand what is required so let's think about getting a mortgage do you know the component steps when you're a first-time buyer of getting a mortgage no you don't so from the outset we're going to be super clear and go right okay Jacob it's a nine-step process first bit you're going to get dead excited because we're going to tell you exactly how much money you can borrow so then you're going to jump over if you're in the UK to some right move and start searching for properties and get all excited at that point but by the way just to give you a heads up there's going to be a really boring point where we ask you to show us all your credit card statements all your bank statements go through that process of due diligence and that's a real emotional low point in the process so we're going to work really hard at that point so to start with in a lot of purchases we don't have background record or history to know what we're doing yeah going to pick up a can of coke you know in a local supermarket we've done that a handful of times so we know what we're doing although if we picked up coke zero it's a bit disappointed now because of the color scheme but we know what we're doing but in a lot of cases we don't if it's the first time you're engaging in the space you don't or alternatively if you are the first direct when they first came out from a banking perspective you're doing things differently to the other guys oh you've got no branches it's all online well I'm gonna have to walk you through that process so starting that out and personally when I think about that I want to lean back in on the team that's done brand creation to go right what are we setting in how we talk to people what are we setting those expectations and expectations will also be set from external factors so i am setting up a little shoe shop here in nottingham doing lovely tailored shoes yeah jacob you're like i want next day delivery because amazon prime has got me on that page i can't deliver on that so i need to explain to you very early on these are tailor made they're going to take us two weeks to create the shoe we're going to send you out a measuring chart so we get your size of foot absolutely right and then it's going to be delivered out to you and then ideally if we can deliver that in one and a half weeks well that's why we've exceeded the expectation but we've got to set it and then manage that along the way as well and if any brand leaves a gap in the management of expectations and things and we're not going to be too clear we don't need to mention that one of your competitors who's more aggressive in any space will have set a different expectation.

24:37Amazon, as I say, has changed all expectations and changed a lot of consumer behavior. So we plan less in advance. So now my boutique, you know, shoe shop, all of a sudden has to work really hard to overcome that and give you the story of maybe the individuals who are making your shoes behind the scenes as well. So you get that emotional warmth to it and you go, this is what I'm buying into. I'm buying into this experience. If you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it.

25:20If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list. That's joinbba.com. There's communication, it sounds like, to manage expectations up front, try to manage those external factors as well is so important. So you also mentioned personalization sounded pretty key there. But how do you do that at scale? Yeah, personalization is a tough one. And it happens at scale when you have longer relationships because you have more data to put on and more understanding. and things don't always have to be at a huge scale uh you know there'll be a lot of small businesses that will get a lot more data points quickly because of the nature of their transactions with people and b2b very much so uh so b2b for me when i look at personalization in b2b so everybody in marketing goes all right let's personalize right so we've got a first name tag on an email great okay but actually have we thought about our clients who are buying from us and those individuals of Jacob and Matt and actually what their needs are and how we're now presenting to their needs.

26:33So we've got this advantage now where technology allows us to tailor things a lot more, but only if you've got really good steer on the person first. And that's where, with a lot of the brand work we do and a lot of the planning work we're doing, it's looking at building up customer advisory programs and things like that to start to understand cohorts of customers. but then it is about a lot of it is data driven but doesn't always have to be big data it can be the things that if you're having a conversation with me and i'm your client you'll be making some notes about things that it might be science cmos have a real battle with the cfo because they're trying to drive more performance metrics in the next six months because that's really important for these reasons over here okay i now know with my proposal how i personalize that so depends where you are and obviously when it comes to mass marketing i'll probably talk about an american brand called zappos quite a bit because they are literally world world class in customer experience so i'll talk about those guys a bit but they're the one i will use to people when they go but this doesn't scale because they sold to Amazon for 1.2 billion so that that's enough scale to evidence it but you have to have the desire to really want to get close to Jacob to understand his world to be able to deliver a really personal service I think that's such a great point I mean sort of the gimmicky side of it you've got like Starbucks writing my name on my cup and I just love that like you know with a little kiss or a little smiley face always makes me feel wonderful that's personalized but I think with the rise of AI and the tech space like you were saying the data that we can now use and then leverage it goes beyond that like I was excited to see Hilton doing um you know they have like smart rooms right so you go into your hotel room you can set the temperature you set the lighting and most people set that and they don't really change it beyond like turning it off at night and then they go out the next day and then you know you fly over to New York, you go into Hilton, flip, you've got to set it all up again, right?

28:40So what Hilton are doing is these, I can't remember what it's called, I think it's called Hilton Connect, this concept where they know you, they know your preference in terms of temperature, heat, lighting and stuff, and that's just automatically set when you walk in the room. That to me is like hyper, you know, hyper-personalized, such a beautiful thing for them to do as a service to their customer. and then I don't know if they're going to do this but I imagine they're going to leverage that as a differentiator right so that now if I have to choose a Hilton versus uh something else and I have a travel lodge or something I'm going to choose the Hilton because I know I'm getting that extra level of kind of service so that's where I think we can get to if you really as you say get close to the customer and look for opportunities to to build brand experiences that go beyond so yeah why have they come up with that because of course that will be linking to a a loyalty program where I can get you to sign up and obviously then I've got you on that database but why they've done that because they've walked in the shoes of people staying in hotels and thought of those points of annoyance those little points of annoyance and friction points and gone right how do we make that just that little bit easier like the observation of that is is is super smart isn't it like they would have as you say like would have had to have spent some time either as customers themselves or with customers to see oh yeah and and notice what i think's smart about that is it's not like they followed a customer into one hotel right as you said earlier they've sort of zoomed out they've followed customers throughout you know maybe a year of interacting with the hotels or six months and then figured out that this is a little pain point that the customer might not might not have even thought that they had right because like who who would expect the same room setting uh from when you last visited hotel you know how interesting or they may have borrowed that idea because someone in their leadership team might have been an uber and know that in uber you can put your settings in of temperature whether you want a conversation whether they want music and they might have gone why aren't we doing this and and so you can borrow i'm all about borrowing from other brands and seeing what other people are doing around in similar spaces in different space and going like how can we apply that to what we're doing as an ex-designer i can vouch for borrowing as a very exciting way of leveraging your work i'm gonna um that was number three by the way to personalize let's let's get into number four you've said like on their terms and put them in control as principle four which i guess is what we're talking about here as well isn't it absolutely and look we all like the autonomy we love freedom don't we right and that's our autonomy to be able to make decisions well if you're selling to me but it's all on your terms so the way i can communicate with you is only via certain channels i had a real annoyance of being stuck in copeneggan airport when he threw out they had a fire um so the airport was shut for the first time in decades i couldn't get in touch with ba to have a conversation sadly I could only do stuff through the app and I was getting a lot of contradictory advice on my terms at that point means I have the ability to press a button to bring someone 95 % of the time my interaction with them is great through the app but in those moments I need to do that all the power was taken away from me so I was hugely frustrated that's not really the brand's fault there's a big factor influencing them externally but it didn't meet up to my expectations of a premium carrier and so it took the control away from me in the moment that adds stress just builds up your annoyance and of course i'm not gonna blame myself it's never my fault so i'm just i'm not irrational i'm not unreasonable so that that's their fault so it is really important where possible you can't always put people in control so when jake's getting his mortgage with me i can't say yeah don't worry about sending me the credit card bills i don't need to see those there are certain things that you have to do but i just need to go how's the best way to serve Jacob what the best channels for him to get in touch with and if there's a point where I go yeah this bit's going to be frustrating how do I sweeten that a little bit soften it a little bit when I need to get that information but yeah absolutely everything is about putting you in control which is why your sat nav will offer you three different routes to go somewhere even though it knows the optimal one it knows you're probably going to hit the optimal every single time we don't want the machine telling us what to do i want to choose from it so it's curated me three options and i'll choose the option it's the one that was in the darker blue that was the fastest route by six minutes anyway so it always knew i was going to do it but it gives me the options rather than just presenting one and i think that's a really important thing as well is that the choice and allowing people to have that opportunity to have choice doesn't let them feel in control of the decision even if they're always going to go down that same darker blue six minutes.

33:38Right, but it gives them the option on the one in a millionth time they might want to try something different. They know that that option's there. So as you say, they don't feel trapped or pushed into an area. I think as soon as you start feeling like a brand or a salesperson or anyone is pushing you, at least for me, with my, I don't know, is it a British thing? I don't know. It's like my wife. If we ever go into a carpet like a retailer or something and there's a salesperson that's overly eager, she just walks out it's like it's like brutal brutal response to that so if you feel pushed sometimes it can have a real negative negative effect um principle five is minimize effort and stress which again kind of it's interesting how these sort of all feed into each other and i just wondered like if you what are your thoughts on like like is it is it often with your work that removing things can actually enhance a customer experience or like what are your thoughts on sort of minimalism absolutely look we live in such a busy overloaded world wherever we can make things simple for people when we come on to behavioral science we'll talk about kind of cognitive load a little bit um which is just our thinking yeah the amount of thinking we have to do there are so many decisions we need to make in a day so where you can make things a little bit easier for me remove the stress out of it then i'm absolutely going to welcome it and that just take friction out that loop i think that's really important and I think nowadays we do try and overload too much of everything and just pairing it back is is really important now there will always be as well these are principles and you're right because it's almost like if you pick up a fishing net all of them are you may pick up the one where you go this is about identity and emotion but everything else comes with it and this is how you see how these work together but yeah if you start to think about how busy and how overloaded right how can I pull this back and make it easy except if I'm in a space where I actually want to make the cost of entry difficult so if you want to get a Rolex that is not simple but that's part of the experience is I have to actually go through this process of being on a wait list buying four other Rolexes to be one of their key customers or when you look to think it was the Enzo Ferrari it was invite only to purchase it when they released that now you would think well actually I've got two million pounds to pay here can I just have it no you can't and so some some brands and in some spaces will go the other way so if you wanted a Porsche 911 GT3 RS you have to own I think at least four or five Porsches before you're allowed to go in and spend the 300 ,000 pounds on it um so all of these things as well you have to look at context of where you are and what your experience is because some things you would ramp that up because that should be part of the experience but in but in 95 of the cases you want to be trying to just make it as easy as possible for that person to make the best decision for themselves that's an important factor not the one that makes matt the most amount of money on his sas product but what is the right one for Jacob to be buying let's make that right loyalty will come longer term recommendation comes longer term so we're not just trying to upsell him into the enterprise tier because he's never going to use it and eventually he'll drop off we go you're in the pro tier that's the exact right one for you so how do you make it easy for him to get to that decision point yeah I think that's that's so smart like and also it's about serving the person so for luxury brands like you mentioned like the Porsche or Rolex examples, you know, scarcity is part of that identity that you want to create for that individual, right?

37:22You don't want, it's like, I was listening to a podcast bizarrely. I listened to all sorts of podcasts as well as the Just Branding one, of course. Listen to all the back episodes every single time, don't we, Jacob? But it was on the royal family, right? The British royal family. And one of the things that this commentator was saying was that, you know, it's a scarcity thing right like like the royal family part of their success is that they create that that sort of very scarce interactions with the royal family they're not they're not going to be walking down the street with a with a plastic bag full of shopping right it's it's it's curated and it's scarce which makes it an attraction to to certain people so i think that's that's that's a great point sometimes it's not about removing things but it is if you're going to put things in the customer's way i think what your point is is that you should design them carefully so they service that customer and what that customer wants in terms of the value it's getting from the brand.

38:17So scarcity being one of those, rather than what I see a lot of brands and you probably do as well, Si, is like there's frustrations in the customer journey that they're not even aware of, right? And therefore, if only they could just become more aware of that, then they could take steps to remove that stress. And I think that's your point, isn't it? Absolutely. Yeah. Brilliant. It perfectly leads into the next one around their identity and emotions. I see what you've done here. Sorry. Smart. Hopefully it flows quite nicely. And that probably answers why it took three years to do the book. Yeah, I mean, look, every purchase really is partially us signaling what I want the world to see about me.

38:59So before we came on this, Matt was like, are you on Mac? So I'm like, no, I'm on PC. Oh, that old debate goes back decades. Yeah, whereas Jay could be like, okay, here's how we do the settings. whereas mac couldn't have a pc because he needs to be on the train to london with everybody seeing that he's creative and a little bit different and that's what the mac immediately screams but i jest with that a little bit but it's so true those choices and decisions we make are often with brands is what this says about me to the rest of the world as well so that's why we are thinking about identity car purchases you are buying into not just a car but what the car says about you so it might be that you're you want to be seen as sensible family man you've got the Volvo or something along those lines whereas you know maybe it's I'm going through my midlife crisis I go out and buy the Ferrari or something and I want therefore I want people to see oh he's successful you know he's liquid he's got money he's got a Ferrari he likes design he's a good driver although you know you probably question that latter one and so thinking of people's identity is really important because again you put yourself in their shoes and then when we think about emotions how much in certain moments in time does the emotional state change the reaction from someone and how can we help be sensitive towards that back to my point at copenhagen airport i was just frustrated so the first person i speak to when I've got back seven days later, I'm probably not as reasonable as if it was just a normal call to find out about some points or how I can claim a reward seat.

40:42So yeah, identity is so important. And we like to think, we love to think that we're totally logical, and we're not driven by emotion. And that, you know, we're not these kind of egotistical people that have to show the world I'm brilliant but the reality is we've kind of got that bubbling under the surface we need to be aware of that and aware of the people so if you've got a product let's say in a construction trade category and you talk about it's the professional product well that's going to attract people that want to be yeah they might pay the premium to be buying those professional products because they want to be seen to be that and when we think about the construction trades it's very tribal when it comes to what tools you're using and what you've got on site and you can see the tribes separate out and well you know they'll mock oh that you've got the red tools oh you've got the green ones but again that is them virtue signaling when they go on site this is who i am and this is the kind of tribe i'm part of so principle seven is learn and build the relationship over time which i guess almost brings us full circle we were talking about short-termism and and long-termism But what changes, Si, when brands and brand leaders start thinking longer term about the customer relationship as opposed to short term, do you think?

42:03I'll give you one executional point that you get straight away. You don't have this crazy first sign-up form that's trying to extract 18 different answers and therefore has a really poor conversion rate. Because you're asking for that information over time. You're building up. You've got value exchange in there as well. so to be able to do the whole thing of personalization i need your information but don't be too over familiar too quickly and don't start asking matt for every bit of detail back to jacob and we're doing that mortgage again to start with i know i need to get him in gradually by going right what's your earning so i can give you a number so you can start to look for properties and build the excitement from there not right now give me your credit card details all of these along the way as well so it is building those bits out and some of those bits within that mortgage process will be very much around these are functional things i need to deliver it for you but other things is how do i enrich it so back to my shoes well start with i just want to know about jacob's feet so i can send him those lovely brogues out and then eventually it's like okay start to understand right i've got a young family okay right we do a range of kids shoes these will be nice for Christmas start to build that out but I'm not going to ask him that when we're first talking about the shoes he needs for a meeting in a month's time not the day after because otherwise sorry head to Amazon Prime you know in a month's time I'm not going to start extracting that but over time as he gets to know the brand he's going to be a lot more comfortable and there is quite a hesitance especially the younger generation as well on their data and protecting their data which I think is great.

43:44Understanding the value of your data and how it's shared with people, I think is something that should be taught in schools. I think it's really, really important. So we as a brand want to get that from you, but I've got to do it slowly. Look, I'm building up, hopefully, a long-term relationship rather than one night stand with you. So I'm not going to ask too much straight off the bat. I want a marriage with you eventually as a brand and as a business. That's where I want to get to. not a series of one night stands that are just you know constantly churning through people but it does take time and and our impatience often means that we are trying to extract that too quickly i think you've really got to pose the question how much i'm asking for matt jacob's benefit versus how much i'm asking for my benefit right it's it's a good way to put it values in it okay last principle should we do that absolutely consider all the senses so this is an interesting one i'd love to get your thoughts on this in relation to the digital world that we're in right because obviously with digital we we we sometimes kind of limit the senses to what the the sight possibly hearing i guess but like how can brands start to do this and think about all the senses, particularly in a digital world?

45:04That would be my question. You've got to work hard in a digital world because the senses are, at the moment, at the moment, who knows where we're going to be in 10 years' time, the senses are fairly limited. From a brand perspective, I would say that vision is the sense that 99 % of effort's gone into and the others come for the ride from time to time where possible. but if I'm an online retailer of clothes I've got to make sure the copywriting really brings the fabrics to life so that's where I want to work with really talented writers to achieve that otherwise it's very hard for you to go well this woolen knit sweater okay and I'm not a copywriter so I can't give you you know a great description right now what how I should write that but I would want to try and bring that to life I would also want to make sure that I'm investing in really great photography to get the right angles to bring that to life as well so to start to build out those senses it is tough as I say for digital brands and in some space it doesn't lend and there's wider principles because somebody's gonna need to forget but when I look at a brand who spans digital and the online and and in real life i look at uh there's a guy called matt siebeck who's chief experience officer uhst louis city soccer club i went spend some time with them and those guys the mls new boys so they've been around four or five years now and the way they've set up their customer experience is anybody gets a chance to go and watch a and i will try and call it soccer because i have to remember to do that to you know pay homage to them and talk about on the on the pitch and things like that as they would they would talk about it but they looked at every sense when they would they would design the stadium so the rake of the stand the angle of the stand was designed to be still safe but the best acoustics that will bounce the noise back from the other end they've got a chief flavor officer so a guy who curates the retailers the food retailers that's like my kind of job i'd like that yeah what a great job yeah what a great job even when i met him he was also one of the happiest men i've ever met and i know why but and matt was talking to me and he was saying you know what we've done as well is we want the best smelling stadium in the world so most stadiums will take the exhaust fume from where you're cooking and fire it out the stadium he's like i've got such good food vendors i send it down the concourse so but he's thinking about all of those elements and ultimately it's just a soccer match right people are just turning up to watch that but in doing that 65 % of revenues before the game kicks off they think about simplicity through they've got contactless supermarkets at half time they've got city pay that's on their app that speeds stuff up but they've thought about all of the senses when you go to the stadium and really given a low thought and then how they're bringing them back into the app experience as well so yeah it's tough in a digital interface to get all of those across and if you can't don't worry about it but you do need to start to think of those and actually as i say going back to the retail i went with thinking from a clothing perspective don't just ai generate some functional copy bring it to life what am i going to be feeling when i pick that item up and really spend time on that done a lot of work over the years with dulex paints just look at the name of the paint colors that they come up with you know that's what they're trying to do they're trying to make it feel more of a sensory experience yeah i think i think everyone can learn from that and even even did like i guess you'd call them primary digital brands often could if they had the desire enter the physical space potentially as well jacob i'm thinking of your i've just got this here before me this is jacob runs a community called the Brand Builders Alliance, right?

49:03And I'm a coach on it. And I remember, Jacob, you sent me this lovely, like, medallion coin. Like, I'm a resident coach, and it's there. And it's kind of like, this is like, you didn't have to do that, right? But, like, it kind of connects me in a different way. You know, I've got a feel to it. I'm just sort of spinning it around in front of random people. But, you know, and it's true. There's opportunities to build longer-term relationships to enhance brand meaning through different senses. So I think that's absolutely, and we often overlook it. So that's super smart.

49:44I'm just mindful time is running on rampantly. And we've kind of got through the first half of the book, but there is the whole second half, which we've been alluding to. So I definitely want to touch on that. That talks about behavioral science, talks to us about biases and how behavior is influences it is influenced and um and how that kind of uh changes our understanding of brands um i'd love to just dive into a few random random ones if i might off the card so i'm gonna pick like a handful and then perhaps um you know folks if you want more they're all in the book but let's let's i'm gonna pick randomly like a loss aversion let's talk about that for a moment yeah so in the book just give a little bit of context eight category behavioral biases that we frequently use in customer experience there are far more but we need to keep things simple otherwise the book would have been far too long and probably a little bit too dull of me droning on by the end of it in eight categories but yeah loss aversion so this is in that anxiety which is the first kind of negative behavioral bias yeah Yeah, so anxiety is a category where we worry about stuff.

50:52And, you know, you will, if I ask you something that you've been ruminating on for the last week that happened to you last week, it's usually the negative things that come to mind first. And that's normal. That's a survival instinct. We should focus on the negatives because the threats are the things that probably used to take us down more than the positive things. So be mindful of that big lion over there rather than the fact that there's beautiful sunshine on the far side of us. But loss aversion really looks at the fact that psychologically we feel the pain of a loss twice as much as that of a relative gain.

51:24So you losing£10 feels the equivalent psychologically as you gaining£20. So you can start to think about this and people will protect themselves against losing. And with the behavioural biases, like that idea, you put on one, loads of other ones come up that are interrelated to it as well. So then that will take you down the route of things like status quo bias, where the best way to not make a mistake is to make no decision at all. But we find that in language and terminology and car phone warehouse here in the UK, mobile phone retailer, did it where they just changed it from rather than saying saved, saying you could be wasting£194 a year on the wrong tariff.

52:09We can help you. so straight away that's actually more more powerful psychologically so we look at loss aversion and we look at the things i've got and i've built up a mine and giving them away is quite painful so it is just that considering that even in some of the language and some of the copy that you use and just the way that you're phrasing your benefits to people might be not always about what they're saving them but you may be bringing them and anxiety is a difficult one because you don't always want to lead with a negative you don't want scare tactics all the time so you've got to be very very cognizant of how you're presenting it but you've got to know it's there because if we know people got these things you can provide reassurance so with anything anxiety based i'd say you need to address you need to address it with reassurance rather than just going deep in oh man you're going to lose out on all these things because that's quite a scary space and i think some companies do this quite well like car companies where you can borrow the car overnight and you get to try it out you don't want to give it back apple i put my laptop into repair they gave me one to use and i didn't want to like trade that back in for my older one so that sort of thing they get you yeah i mean a car salesman is you know when you look at some of the let's say they're behavioral science nudges tricks or hacks use car salesman some of the best because they give you the car key they take you on the test drive you're absolutely right you're that's now my car for the time in and then it's like oh you've got to give the key back now there's just that little there's that little trigger of psychological pain that helps maybe convert you a little bit more and i will take a step back within the behavioral science element as well to remind everybody we are here to serve others we are here to create the best customer experience for the customer so it's not how we make the most out of you by using these as tricks or you know using the dark arts to try and get you to spend a bit more we're just going to try and simplify your decision making using these biases to allow you to process and make that decision as easily as possible and be able to figure out what's best for you yeah i've had people throw that at me sometimes like are we being manipulative it's like no we're not being manipulative we have to write the instructions for downloading and using the app right we might as well write it in a way that will help people with what we're trying to serve them with so you might we might as well do it in a way that's kind of easier for them like you were saying so i think that that makes complete sense um the the second sort of behavioral bias that you were that that's that you mentioned is about being right and you go through things like confirmation bias so um that one's really like quite interesting as well I mean we could I'm like a kid in a sweet shop like so we could we could go on forever but I'm just kind of mindful that we're running through I'm gonna I'm gonna jump to number three which is about context because this is one I'm particularly like excited about and can we dive into framing like that's a behavioral sort of bias that we have how things are framed I wonder if you could talk to that briefly yeah I mean no decisions made in isolation is that everything is within the context that is around us so how you frame your offer can be incredibly powerful or incredibly demotivating depending on what sits around that as well so if visually you've got a really busy web page and someone's already you know overloaded and then you want them to absorb your message or that structure to the offer that you point forward that's going to be really tough but you know when i think of context as well i like to think you know if you want a nice ice cold bottle of beer you're going to go into the supermarket you might pay a couple of pounds for it maybe three dollars for you jake i'm not sure but now you're on the beach you're on a holiday it's absolutely boiling someone walks up with a bucket of ice cold beers and offers you one for 10 pounds you're probably going to buy it that bottle of beer is exactly the same the temperature of the beer is exactly the same but everything else in the context has changed so all of a sudden your value case of what you're willing to pay because you wouldn't do in the supermarket your value case has changed so we often think i've really got to work on the pricing element of my offer but what's all the other stuff around it and how does that whole influence it and you get into things like when you look at anchoring so the first number you see you then adjust you anchor to that number you adjust around it so if i was like you two and you know i might be teaching how to suck eggs here like you know a super successful brand consultant doing massively high value add stuff i would start with the client by saying and in getting this work right that we are going to create an incremental five million pounds worth of value so then that when i'm asking you for a hundred thousand pounds you go well that feels really good value whereas if I start asking you for£100 ,000 and then try and build up the value case, I've anchored to that first number.