The term ‘The New Normal‘ became popular soon after lockdown. It recognises the post-pandemic world will be different from the one we knew.
But just how much of a New Normal should sales and marketing professionals expect?
While our context both socially and economically has changed dramatically, it is likely that buyer behaviour will be less impacted.
Not because buyers are immune but because a dramatic change in circumstance rarely results in an equally dramatic change in behaviour.
Rather, it is in times of crisis, that pre-existing traits intensify. Helpers help. Innovators invent. And the tough really do get going.
What is important to note, however, is buyer behaviour has been going through an intense period of change since the dawn of the Internet over two decades ago.
And if your business wasn’t responding to those changes before, it had better make certain that it is now.
In this first episode of the Not the New Normal podcast, mathematical psychologist, Martin Lucas of Gap in the Matrix look at how buyer behaviour has changed and what it means for sales/marketing.
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Podcast Text
Alex
Welcome to not the new norm, a podcast that explores the factors that drive by behaviour and the implications these insights have on sales and marketing.
I’m your host, Alex Moscow, and each week I’ll be joined by my good friend Martin Lucas, a mathematical psychologist who has developed a framework for drawing actual psychological insights from data. This week we are looking at the Coronavirus pandemic, and asking will it usher in the new normal?
Hi, Martin. It’s great to have you here.
Martin
Great to be here, Alex, really looking forward to this chat. Thanks for having me.
Alex
So I’d like to kick off our conversation today with this concept of the new normal. It was a phrase that was coined and then overused quite quickly following lockdown. It’s the idea that overnight we’ve moved into a new paradigm in terms of The way the world works. And while our current context both socially and economically is unrecognisable, and the brand’s landscape will most likely be reformed. My belief is that what buyers demand from the businesses they choose to spend their money with won’t undergo a dramatic change, not because we’re immune, but because this behaviour has been changing over a period of time anyway. And what we’re likely to see is an amplification of the behaviours that were already in place. Would you agree with that,
Martin
So nothing to do with the current situation to do with the virus and stuff like that, I’m sure we’ll come into that setpoint. But already what was what was rising and rising was the need for, for brands to be trusted more, to be more authentic and to be more real life and from my point of view, to be more relevant to individual consumers, and I think all of those factors are going to rise and rise and I think that the vitus situation is going to exacerbate that even further. I think that’s some of the biggest changes is like how to brands understand when to be real.
Alex
That’s really interesting. We’re seeing that disconnect play out in the content world where research suggests that as much as 95% of content gets relatively, if any engagement whatsoever, and I think your studies have shown that, in the world of advertising, things are not much better.
Martin
So I think that it’s fair to say that everybody’s pretty frustrated with the world of advertising. So I’ll give you an example to start covering your point, right? So on Facebook, only 1.61% of adverts get interacted with that’s that’s the best click through rate across all industries. The actual mean average is point nine, but I see 1.6 to make it sound a little bit better. So that’s 98.39% of adverts, which is $54 billion dollars of spend, and 4.832 trillion outs. And everybody’s happy, like in the business world. Because they’re similar for 100 bucks to get 1000 back, I’m happy with the economics of the Facebook advertising platform, right?
Whereas what I’m seeing is, well, nobody’s asking what it’s like from the customer’s perspective. Because that’s 4.832 trillion ads that people don’t care about. It’s not just I’m not just having a go at Facebook for the sake of it, right? You’re talking about Google adverts programmatic, which is, you know, when you look at a website, and then you just get loads of websites of products that whenever you go to other websites, you get loads of adverts for the product that you looked at on a particular website, you know, I mean, it’s like the kind of stalking advertising that’s programmatic, that gets point 000 1%. So it’s even worse, then you think about how many irrelevant emails that you receive. I mean, to my mind, it’s, it’s,
I’m not criticising technology at all, it’s actually much more when it comes back to is that people are not taking time to understand the humans that they’re trying to serve. They’re just letting the software do a lot of the work or they’re just all To mean too much, or they’re just doing lots of mass media things, and it just creates lots of irrelevant, particularly consumer experiences that people are frustrated with.
Alex
Of course, from one perspective, technology’s been a real boon, right? It’s given us insight and data. That would have been completely unthinkable 2030 years ago. So what is it about technology if you think that it’s helping to fuel this disconnect, when actually it should be empowering.
Martin
I think we’ve probably gone too far with technology. What I mean by that is thinking that technology’s given us all the answers I talked about. I talked about digestion periods, right. So in the in the chemical world in the pharmaceutical world, the even when the drug gets signed off by like a country’s government, it takes 15 to 20 years to understand the full digestion period of what that drug we’ll do the positives and negatives of it, which is quite skinny in itself right now apply that same kind of thing to any major thing that has happened that changes human behaviour. So the internet was obviously a big part of that. Right? And I wouldn’t say the early internet years because that was people just kind of just messing about with it a bit. So I would say like from the late 90s, if not the early 2000s to But no, which puts us right in the middle of that digestion period. Right. So what I believe has happened is that there’s a lot of evidence for this is that people are just following technology endlessly. And we’ve, we’ve almost started God defined software, like we’re looking to software for the answers instead of looking to humans, and it’s kind of dehumanised experiences, in my opinion.
Alex
And that’s really interesting about the way that we’ve almost allowed technology to take control. And, and of course, that’s not something that’s happened overnight or something that’s been happening over time. And I think that comes back to what I was saying in terms of this pandemic and Coronavirus, and this idea of the new Normal. And there’s a lot of these changes this new behaviours. Actually, they’ve been coming down the line for some time and what the pandemic is doing is kind of shining a light on intensifying these changes that are already taking place. And I just wondered, in your opinion, how much change behaviorally psychologically, do you think we are, that we will see to to the virus?
Martin
It’s part of the factors, right. So any any type of major behaviour change, like a major perception change, like brands being more authentic, or people not trusting grants and things like that? It generally comes comes about because what you’ve been doing is chipping away at whatever the problem is, right? So if you start chipping away and do things that are less trusted, and you give them people less relevant experiences, and people feel like they’re getting ripped off, or you don’t understand them, or you you’re not loyal towards them, then over time that becomes more and more until it becomes like a groundswell. So that’s it. That’s been for the past 15 to 20 years. For me that’s been some of the factors, then you’ve got the fact that with this fighter situation, though, the will it will it create systemic change, it literally depends on how long the lockdown goes on for, but it is going to take is going to take is going to create a degree of change. And what I mean by that is the consumers are going to consume less, but what they do consume is going to mean a lot more to them. And the reason that they’re going to consume less is that we’re we’re just getting our hand forced a little bit right, just look around our home or family and realise that what we’ve got is probably more than enough, and we’ve never had to actually sit and think and realise that so what we what we consume, we don’t need to consume as much as we do. And what we do will have more of that meaning and that meaning could be you know, here go darling I bought I’ve got my wife a piece of jewellery to think of some stuff because she’s been helping out with work literally arrived today. And it was personalised and I took a lot of time thinking about what I was going to get with it. In the past, not that I was throwing money at my wife for the sake of it, just to be clear, not not just buying our favourite, you know, but in the past, then I probably would have got something smaller but more frequent. Or, you know, I mean, it wouldn’t have had as much meaning to it, I thought about it quite as much.
Alex
I love that. And I have to agree. You know, when my wife and I buy gifts for each other, it’s it’s a lot less about things these days is a lot more thoughtful than that. It’s about getting time together and getting away and you know, perhaps spending a night at a hotel, which hotel we’re going to stand from what kind of experience we want to have. So I think you know, you’re absolutely right, we are we are a lot more thoughtful, discerning. It’s not about how much but the quality of those things. Do you think then that consumerism is kind of on its way out?
Martin
I think that the consumer world is coming to its kind of Apex really because it’s been going for a century, right. And I think I call these the unconscious forces that affect the the psychology and the behaviours of the individuals, let’s forget about the consumer in general. But we’ve always got these unconscious forces, like capitalism, like consumerism, always battling away. And they chip away at our behaviours without us even knowing it. So in the same way that you know, a KPI driven world where the vast majority of people are office workers, and Max Weber talked about this iron cage. And what he meant by the iron cage was people feeling that their voice wasn’t heard that they were just drones. And it’s the same thing as what we had in the factory setup, except we just replaced factory with offices, right. So all of these things along with lots of irrelevant advertising experiences that are being done under a rational setup, is literally that’s what Max Weber talked about. He said that the world was heading towards rationalisation and rationalisation was what was going to create this iron cage and it was absolutely on the money and what you’ve Is that in the same, the same way that you can talk about how people’s voice is not heard at work and employee disengagement is exactly the same setup of what we’re doing of how we advertise and how we treat our customers? So to answer your question about shopping, psychology is changing because we unless we feel that a brand understands us and has given us more relevance, then we’re not going to trust them, we’re not going to feel that they’re authentic. So they’re going to push us further away as a consequence. So it’s going to be difficult for brands to succeed, but the ones that get this right are going to have a field day.
Martin
And that’s the key point, isn’t it? I mean, I couldn’t agree more. It’s really about getting it right. And the challenge for brands is understanding what that right looks like when I think about the work that we do in b2b. In there’s so much so many companies look so similar, in because of the way that they compete. indicate they seem to focus on very similar things, you know, the things that they say what it is that they do the things that they sell how they work. And actually, that’s not really what people are interested in. People are looking at anything they buy in, they’re trying to see themselves in it. They are trying to create a connection between what they want. And that thing does. And of course, when you talk about what a thing does, well, watch your thing does, doesn’t do anything that much different from the next person. So it’s very difficult for somebody to make that more personal decision. And I think that partly comes from the fact that in b2b people consider themselves selling to say a company, but it was none of us sell to companies. We were always selling to people. And it’s really about trying to understand what it is that they want. Why they want it. And really why they’re not able to get it. And what it is that we do that helps them bridge that gap. Right. So what is what is the problem that they need solving? And what do we do that helps solve it in terms of why should they pick us as opposed to anyone else to help them solve that problem? And I feel that, no, there is a need to get a lot more personal.
Martin
Yes, a great point. I mean, the answer, the answer is it is within the structure of the fray. The world operates inside itself. It’s one of those unconscious forces, right? So capitalism, consumerism, if you combine them together, and people say that industrialization is over, and I’m like, it’s totally not. I’ll tell you why it’s not because the same rules still apply. Because if you take all of those things together, businesses are set up to run as efficiently as possible. You said that yourself, right, like margins are being hit. Everyone’s got this perception that we’re doing things for shareholder value. We’ve got our KPIs, we’ve got our numbers to hit numbers to hit no matter what it always feels like everything’s always on sale in the consumer world. And if it’s not until your week what’s on sale? You know, I mean, like, all of these things that you’ve got going on, and actually built based on rational activity, meaning that if we send out 1000, adverts will get five customers back, and therefore will pay for the adverts because the average cost of sale, right? What nobody’s looking at is what is what I call the irrational side of it. Because 95% of all consumer decision making, because they’re humans because 95% of all, human decision making is based on emotion. And that’s from Harvard, from professors altman at Harvard, right. And emotions are what often are deemed as irrational, but they’re only irrational when it’s you judging me. Right? I might say, well, look at look what Alex is doing. He’s being irrational, right? Inside Alex’s mind what he’s doing is perfectly Normal to him as his habits, that’s his behaviours, he’s just going about the world doing what he does, right? Whereas, so what you’ve really got is a tonne of rational activity, meaning let’s just do this functional, non emotive, non trust based non understanding of, of humans that we’re in even to serve. And then people are wondering why it’s generally doesn’t work the way that it needs to. So if you think about what rational is versus a rational, rational is, numbers is practical oriented, it’s not emotion. It is a rational, which is how all of our decisions get made. So whether you’re going to look at an advert look at a product, whether you’re going to buy it or not, whether you’re going to get that bracelet like I’ve got my wife is all based on irrational emotions, meaning, what does this mean? How is my wife going to feel? What should I get engraved on the bracelet? When should I give it to her? What is going to matter about it? What does the box look like? What’s the packaging like? Did I mess this up before like, you’re gonna go into so many different parts of your your memory And your feelings and your emotions. And all of that is not a rational, really, it’s just when it’s just when one person is judging the other rights when the business looks at His entirety of customers, it thinks it’s too complex. And yet, everything we’ve just described is is how I personally want to be served to shop. And I could say what goes through your mind if you’re buying a piece of jewellery for your wife, and you’ll come up with some some stuff that’s similar to me, but most will be completely different. Right? So the point is that you’ve got a rational, rational setup in businesses going out to a market. And they’re using technology that uses rational data. They’re using software that uses rational data. Even the creative definitely there, they have seen endless amounts of data, but even the creative is quite functional. It’s quite rational. So people are missing the fact that the huge gap a huge opportunity is that if you embrace what a rational is, which is born emotions, more feelings, more understanding of them. What difference you make for people? And that’s where the opportunity sets, if that makes sense.
Alex
On on that we certainly agree, right? So that touchy feeling this that need to feel more personal in the communications to create that connection. I mean, that’s something that we always strive to do. In fact, one of the first things that we do with all of our clients is speak to their clients. They’re the ones who are going to give us the perspective that we need to sell to people just like them. In fact, it’s a mantra in our business that you know, your best customers will tell you everything you need to know to sell to people just like them, because they’ll tell you why they bought. They’ll tell you what they bought. And you know, a lot of the time that’s different what people sell or think they sell is different to what people buy. They’re always buying for their reasons. They’re never buying for your reasons. And you know, the way to increase the personality, the personalization, and the data. Connection is to first understand the customer. And then, you know, you can look at your own business and look at how best to position it because they will give you the hooks, you just need to look at how you can hook on to them. What is the, you know, where does your credibility come from? Where Where were the results that you get? What is the impact that you make, and why are those things important? And how can you tell those stories in a meaningful way? So yes, I truly believe that, but it doesn’t seem that everybody does it. You know, why do you think that is?
Martin
So I think that everybody just reached a point going back to the digital digestion period, right? Is that everybody’s just reached a point where they’re just saying there must be a better way. And I’m not talking about world changing massively game changing things. It’s just that all the dots are lined up, right where we’ve got the capability in theory to understand who a person is what do they want How do they want it? And yet, we’re not giving it to them. And the reason we’re not giving it to them is that the structure of businesses is so stuck in its ways of just doing things in a rational way. There nobody sitting there saying, Let’s go and do a rational campaign. Let’s go and use rational data. My point about this is that it’s just it’s about the construct about how things are done at the moment. And a construct means that in the same way that I’ve got this, when I’m doing stage talks, or doing webinars and stuff, I’ve got this, like, let’s play imagination game, right? So you’ve got this. You’ve got this big Tiger in a picture, right? And I get people to show what they see, right? Pretty simple. And 86% of people that are raised in the West will show a tiger and 83% of people raised in the East will show a tiger in the jungle. And they’re all looking at the same picture. But the reason that they see something different is In the West, we’re taught to look for the most dominant object, right? So we see a tiger in the East with they’re taught to look at the relationship between objects. So they see a tiger in the jungle, right? So that that is not known by the people that teach us at kindergarten, right? That’s just the construct of wedges, Western education versus Eastern education, right? It’s just one of those unconscious forces. So I guess my point is that if people understand that, what they’re doing the process, how they’re thinking, all those things are just doing it because of a rational basis. If they understand that they can easily break the wheel breaker, they think positively by just saying, Well, how do we apply some emotion to this, how to understand what the customers want from it and then in my eyes, and I spent four years researching this right in my eyes, I think that the biggest problem is that everybody’s doing everything top down, like from the brand top down, sort of mass media activity, right. And I think it needs to be customer first it needs to be from the bottom Because you can still have a brand and its values and the core of what it does. But if it comes bottom up, then it could the brand can split itself and understand how it needs to serve different types of audiences differently.
Alex
I couldn’t agree with you more. I think for me, the challenge with so much marketing is it’s so me orientated right. It’s all about the company, who they are, what they do, why they’re unique or different, what makes them better than the competition. And actually, what’s more important what’s the key elements has nothing to do with the company but about the customer what they want, what’s important to them, the kind of people that they want to be working with and and having, you know, connecting your values to their values showing, you know, a lot of chat about this concept of the why and purpose. And you know, it’s important to have a company purpose, but that company purpose needs to encapsulate the customer and I wonder if you know, Is it the challenge with the data, the overabundance of data? Or is it perhaps in the way the data is read?
Martin
What What do you see the challenge? Yes, funny, because the irony is that some stereotypes exist for a very good reason. Right? So no offence to data people, but the vast majority of data, people don’t have very good emotional intelligence. Because they’re very, they’re very machine oriented in terms of their thinking, very practical of mind. Right? So they, they rational, in a very strong way, right? They’ve got a rational mindset. And the same is true for programmers in software. Right? So if you think about that is that most of the people that are that are looking at data, or managing the tools are doing it naturally, because I’m not criticising them? Because they’re very, very highly skilled to different industries, right? And I respect them a lot. So I’m not criticising them. I’m just saying that the stereotype is true. The vast majority of them have a rational practice. mindset. But what that means is that they then miss the core things that would create that type of change that we’re talking about. The thing that I always look at with data is that I probably cost myself a lot of profit, right? Because Big Data projects, people charge a tonne of money to do big data stuff, right. And the first thing I say to a client, when they present that kind of project to me is that, well, the first thing that we’ll do is we’ll take 70 to 90% of your data away because it’s irrelevant, which means that I won’t charge them as much right? I should maybe do that after the, like the third invoice or maybe not tell them you know. But my point is that when if you understand how humans think, then it’s about what data to look at, and I call it data to stories,
Alex
Data to stories. I really like that it has got a great sound to it. Give an example of what it means.
Martin
So we finished a big project for the high growth, jewellery brands that grew and 30% year on year. I like them a lot. They’re like they’re really good team. And one of the day it’s a storage unit. was not data in terms of numbers, it was actually the trustpilot reviews. Because what are trustpilot reviews? Is your customers voice, right? So what we did was actually analyse and we put data onto language, meaning that if we see a call, we can then take it and say, right, this call is about people that associate UK brands right. But here’s a call somebody from the US as in how fantastic that service was. And they were really surprised how quickly the product came. Right. And then we had another quote that was talking about the military precision because they’ve got military collections to their jewellery. Then there was other courts of vote there that they use the same metals that go on to spaceships, right, there’s an there’s an aerospace collection, right. So we took these hundreds of trustpilot ones, and then we separated it based on the audience’s that it was most appeal to seeing. Right. And that’s a great example of data to stories where you’re taking what is quite flat in terms of people don’t really use customers voice that much and it’s the number one behavioural economics nudge theory type thing, right? So nudge theory is how do you move people along from a decision, right? And the best one, particularly whether it’s rational or irrational, the most powerful and you can use is the social nudge, which is your customer proving something to a similar type of customer like them, quality of product design, a product, delivery of the product, whatever it is. So that’s a good example of data to stories. And no, we sent it across to the client literally this morning. And they’ve now got 380, social nudges, split by different audience types, which is now going to go into every part of their creative. So it can be in their adverts, in their email, on their website, on their product pages, all of it.
Alex
So again, we’re very much on the same page here. And I think, to a certain extent, maybe at a superficial level, people get this idea of third party endorsement. And, you know, we, we talked about in terms of social truth, although I love the idea of a social nudge, you know, it’s more than just evidence, right? It’s actually something that’s going to propel action. So I think it’s really powerful to talk about it in those terms. And I guess that’s, that’s the difference, right? Because as evidence within, you don’t really need to look at what’s being said, you’re kind of ticking a box, when you’ve got the testimonial in place, right? Just the fact you’ve got it is, is is a tick. But actually what you’re doing is you’re saying, Well, what is it about what’s being said, That’s important, and what can we take from that was the language that we can use. And again, I come back to this process that we use the we’re always talking to our clients clients, because they will give us that information. And it’s not just about getting that information, but it’s about analysing it, and looking at how you can use it.
Martin
And you know what, you know why people don’t do that, because I’ve like you’ve I’ve complimented you many times, about your amazing skill of asking the right questions, extracting the right information, but you know why people don’t do that as brands right? They’re scared in the same way that if you think about pretty much every human walk In this planet, do we know what other people think of us? Not really. We don’t, because we feel it we don’t want to find out or we just never really thought about it. Or for a lot of people, like all of our decision making inside of our brains is, is based on our archetype, right? It’s the young thing stuff, right? And an archetype basically means that forget about work life, emotion, whatever, it’s how you’re going to make a decision. Right? So for me personally, I’m, I’m an individualist. So if I even get a hint, in a retail experience, as an example, that somebody is telling me what to do, then I’m out, I’ll walk out the stories and if I love it, even if I love the brand, even if there’s a jacket, I’m about to spend a lot of money on and gone. So these are subtypes exist within us, right? And it’s one of those things that a brand is a collection of humans, right? So it behaves like a human with so we’re scared to find out. And when you add to that this with somebody that looks after email, advertising, customer service, I guess a little bit like most of them are not encouraged to Go and find out that they’re not doing something well, that’s the fear. And even if they do find, though, they don’t know what to then do with it, like the customer success team might be getting loads of amazing quotes, but they just keep it internal. Whereas it could be worth millions to the people on the frontline that are doing the advertising and sales. Right? It’s it’s that that classic thing that, first of all, that people are scared to find out. It’s very true. And the second part is that the ones that do find out don’t realise that you spoke to this other silo, it would help them and silos are scared because they’re scared to ask one another. Right
Unknown Speaker
So we talked quite a bit about this disconnect between brand and buyer, let’s say whether it’s b2c or b2b.
Unknown Speaker
What do you think the impact will be one of the consequences of not taking action? Well, they’ll be they’ll be continuing to work on that
Unknown Speaker
risk and the bottom and meaning that all they’ll be focused on his his price and what they perceive as value. And if they can’t win from them, they’re going to keep driving. And then the price because they don’t understand why else would work. And that takes us into what’s been going on where the consumer world always feels like there’s a sale going on right? One of my very, very all time favourite brands, which I’m not going to name because it’s not a positive story. But they do lamb’s wool blazers, they have what I call the blazers that I try to pretend that I’m something I’m not to know. I mean, I’ve tried to be more than why right. So I’ve got these lambswool blazers by love them. And my buddy and I one of my best mates, he loves it as well. And these places like 400 quid, right, so there’s a reasonable amount of money to spend, right? So get one once in a while. And if I saw one in a collection that I absolutely loved, I just wanted to want it again with tempt me, you know, and then my buddy and I spotted that eventually, they started having more sales and more sales more often. And we realised that even if we absolutely loved the blazer, we could just wait and we would always get for 100 bucks. So we just started doing that. So even though both of us genuinely absolutely love the brand love the brand, so much that we refuse to tell others about it do not mean that selfish and self involved.
Unknown Speaker
We work like blushing. But
Unknown Speaker
that’s that’s what we did. We just wouldn’t we, we ended up getting stuff for like 100 bucks. But humans aren’t stupid. And if you think about the factors that you give them, if you’re not giving them meaning, which is the number one thing for me about the emotional side, the 95% how we make decisions, if you don’t allow somebody to interpret, you know, I want the tiger in the jungle versus a tiger, right? Stuff like that. If you don’t allow somebody to apply meaning to something, and what’s left is value in its price. Right? So the cheapest wins, but how long can the cheapest win for you know,
Unknown Speaker
and I think it’s that concept of meaning that so often missed, right? So, you know, as we make our way through our lives, we collect brands, you know, they choose us, we select them, based on very specific criteria. It could be different things Sometimes it’s familiarity, right? So they, we look at a brand and it feels comfortable it feels like that that’s us as who we are, we can see ourselves very much reflected back. And sometimes it’s it might be aspiration, right, then the brand reflects a life or person or a concept of ourselves that we want to grow into, that we want to become. And so by earning a piece of it, we are we progress on that journey. We feel like we’re making it, making it forward. You know, you You gave the example of the jackets that you buy in it. It’s a great example of, you know, not that it’s someone else, but it’s the people that we want to become. I think that, you know, brands need to whether they’re b2b or b2c, they need to put a stake in the ground. And they need to say, this is who we’re looking to attract. That’s our, those are the people that are most reflective of who we are, what we believe in and who we want to help.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, no, it’s a great, it’s a great point. It’s one that I’d be very excited to explore with you. I think that is one thing that comes to mind is that an economist friend of mine that said that he spoke about in 2010? Let’s imagine a bell curve, right? So let’s let’s focus this on consumer mainly fashion. So in 2010, there was a bell curve. And if you’d imagine a tonne of fashion locals, they all sat with inside the bell curve, right so one end was high street. And at the other end was luxury. And in the middle, you had some premium stuff so you had to you know, your diesels your replaced stuff like that and look series you, Louis Kahn and your Gucci and your high street was your is your next and your Kevin Milan, right stuff like that. In 2020. And most people would shop they might drift between one or two right but it was kind of like a class based system and you know, I mean, it was like High Street occasional premium premium occasional luxury luxury elite, you know what I mean? And what he was saying and I felt that this was absolute bliss, even when school by the way should call him out is a non disruptive thought leader, one of the world’s top 10 on customer experience.
Unknown Speaker
He was saying that in 2020.
Unknown Speaker
What’s happened now is that any brands that are left inside the bell curve are going to fail. And what you’ve got is at one end outside the bell curve is your fast fashion. So you’re boohoo, you’re I saw it first, you’re pretty little thing, right? And then the other end is luxury. So still, you lose tonnes and your Gucci’s. But the ones that are still inside that bell curve, need to decide which side they’re going to be on. Because this premium doesn’t happen as much and consumer behaviours, Chin’s know that you’ll get people that might do 90% of their shopping with fast fashion, but they’ll still save up and buy themselves one luxury item. And I thought that was phenomenal, because just a great way to see that. So the world’s changed in the past 10 years, which also talks towards that change in the digestion period and a generation that buys more ecommerce than what our generation would
Unknown Speaker
you know, people listening to this.
Unknown Speaker
They might feel that it’s more relevant for b2c brand right? This this whole idea of touchy feely ness is more at home in consumer than it is in b2b sales. But in my mind, we’re seeing a closing of the gap. Not that b2b necessarily is going to be like b2c. But there, there are elements that the b2b people can understand and learn from b2c that we do need to get closer to the personal.
Unknown Speaker
How do you see b2b communications changing? It’s
Unknown Speaker
you’re starting to see more consumer oriented decision making comment into the b2b space in terms of customer demand, right? So people are looking for more meaning and understand the difference that something’s going to make. Before we used to buy things on perception. You know, I’ll download the zoom account because I need to have online meetings right now people are getting to that point where they understand well, what’s in it for me, like why should I pick zoom? How much easier is going to make my life because I have problems when people join calls or I guess zooms on my mind because I’ve always been a huge advocate of it. I mean, one of the world’s largest agencies, Olga v uses zoom because of my recommendation. And yet today’s zoom just put in a change that they didn’t give anyone a decision on where single user accounts, which is what I have at the moment because my team’s got their, their own ones, because it’s lots of suppliers and my team, right? single user accounts no have to have a password to join a call. Which means that I need to update every meeting that I’ve got, because I use the same link and the so I’ve got like 50 different meetings over the next month using that link. And when people join, I’ve now got to monitor as the host and accept and admit people coming into the course. Right? So what they’ve just done is taken a really easy service that works way better than than Cisco and Microsoft and all the other products that are out there. And now just put in a blocker that’s no make me think about switching away from them. It’s such
Unknown Speaker
a good point, and I wonder how many If people actually consider how easy it is for the customer to disconnect from us as a brand, we don’t even know that necessarily that our behaviour is causing people to disconnect. We just have to do, you know, put one foot wrong. And another disconnect. And I guess that’s partly because of choice, right? There’s so many they don’t have to stick with us then have
Unknown Speaker
to remain loyal.
Unknown Speaker
And so we’ve got to be very, very careful. So it you know, it really is becoming so important to understand psychology. So I’m guessing why people are bringing in psychologists more and more often and why, you know, your, your branch of mathematical psychology is going to be so important as we move forward.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. And I think to your point as going back to where we started, right, what is the new psychology? The irony is that it’s actually just understanding psychology. Because we’re just getting to the point, I think not even not even begun to fully open the door, we’re just getting to the point of understanding how the mind works or decision making works, how feelings work, what triggers emotions, how our memory is such a huge part of our experience, and on and on. So if we’re just beginning to understand that then of course, it can’t be part of the structure of business, because that’s not how it works, right? It goes, science discovery into education into a generation into a systemic change after that next generation. So we’re still many years away from it, which is what the opportunity is for people to grasp right now.
Unknown Speaker
A great way to finish off there, Martin, thank you. It’s kind of bringing us full circle and ever as ever, really, really great talking to you. And I’m looking forward to our next conversation,
Unknown Speaker
as ever loved, loved the insights and love having the interactions with you, Alex. Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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