pregnancy test - negative (Photo credit: slayerphoto)

How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.

This is an absolutely fascinating article on how marketers in large companies figure out brilliant ways to target specific people at specific times in their lives. It is also an incredible insight into how we work as humans and for average marketers like us, it also gives us something to think about when we are releasing a new product and how we can best approach adoption of that product, by being where people already are in their daily habits.

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel’s lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.

Are you asking customers to change their habits without layering on top of their existing ones?

 In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results.

The most compelling thing about this article is how Target could find out when women were pregnant and when they were due, without looking at public records and without them saying anything about it.

Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

Now go read the entire article, because I guarantee this one will really make you think.

This is a great piece by Ron Johnson who built the Apple Stores. I don’t usually post things about retail, because it’s not my expertise, but this paragraph sums up everything that is changing about marketing, selling, relationships and more whether online or in retail. This is the future and strangely enough, it’s the past. We are returning to the days where you counted on your local merchant to help you, know you, and provide superior service. It will be the death knell of those that don’t get it.

I am an Apple Store customer on a regular basis, because they make it easy and helpful and I TRUST them. There are great lessons here that I try to impart to our Miami Internet marketing clients and the primary one is, no matter what you sell and how many you sell, you better be about the relationship and the value you can provide before, during, and after the sale. The benefit to you is huge, because it means you don’t have to work nearly as hard to get repeat sales and referrals and you gain loyalty.

But if Apple products were the key to the Stores’ success, how do you explain the fact that people flock to the stores to buy Apple products at full price when Wal-Mart, Best-Buy, and Target carry most of them, often discounted in various ways, and Amazon carries them all — and doesn’t charge sales tax!

People come to the Apple Store for the experience — and they’re willing to pay a premium for that. There are lots of components to that experience, but maybe the most important — and this is something that can translate to any retailer — is that the staff isn’t focused on selling stuff, it’s focused on building relationships and trying to make people’s lives better. That may sound hokey, but it’s true. The staff is exceptionally well trained, and they’re not on commission, so it makes no difference to them if they sell you an expensive new computer or help you make your old one run better so you’re happy with it. Their job is to figure out what you need and help you get it, even if it’s a product Apple doesn’t carry. Compare that with other retailers where the emphasis is on cross-selling and upselling and, basically, encouraging customers to buy more, even if they don’t want or need it. That doesn’t enrich their lives, and it doesn’t deepen the retailer’s relationship with them. It just makes their wallets lighter.

via What I Learned Building the Apple Store – Ron Johnson – Harvard Business Review.

Related articles

• Sales – the Apple Way (laf.ee)
• The Apple Stores: A Playground For The Apple Geeks And So Much More (granniethegeek.com)
• Apple’s grandiose retail store in Grand Central Station set to open in next few days (edibleapple.com)

I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.Ten slides. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting

via How to Change the World: The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.

Hat Tip to my blogger “friend” Guy Kawasaki for the link.

PILOTed: What I Learned Buying a Rug in Turkey

According to Robert Cialdini, there are 6 weapons of influence. We can all use them, and they are used on us, either knowingly or by accident:

1. Reciprocation: we try to repay what another person has provided us
2. Commitment and consistency: we desire to be consistent with what we have already done
3. Social proof: we tend to rely on what other people are doing to determine our own actions
4. Liking: we tend to go along with and follow people we like
5. Authority: we feel a sense of duty to follow someone who has authority
6. Scarcity: opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited

You can see how the rug salesmen used practically every one of these weapons in getting me to purchase the rug.

I sent this link to our call centers, because it makes a lot of sense. I know I will use this moving forward.

Hotting Up On Cold Calls | Aussie Rules | BNET

Not surprisingly, the biggest reaction that’s generated by cold calling is the fear of failure.

<snip>……………

Running a close second, is the fear of rejection.

<snip>……………

The third fear is that of giving offence.

<snip>……………

Imagine instead, you had approached the exercise with this goal:

‘To attract people who are genuinely interested in hearing about my work’

<snip>……………

By listening out for those ‘who are genuinely interested’ it is possible to quickly disqualify anyone appearing unsuitable or disinterested. Through these means, you’ll move more quickly to the next call and with a greater sense of purpose. What’s more, you’ll do so without being rendered inactive through fear.