Behavioural science and the art of focus

I recently attended a workshop hosted by Unity & Motion around the concept of Behavioural Science and how it can be put into practice to help business and their leaders to succeed in a highly competitive landscape.

First coined in the 50’s, Behavioural science is a collection of various disciplines that deal with the subject of human action. It’s no surprise to see how the marketing industry has adopted many of the principals and practices.

In fact, in digital marketing, we are witnessing highly sophisticated targeting platforms that can analyse customer behaviours based on their browsing history, their purchasing patterns to predict intent and improve sales conversions.

With marketing technology (ad-tech platforms etc.) and marketing automation (platforms which enable planned sequence of automated actions) converging, this sophistication will have a range of impacts in our industry both good and bad.

And while technology is helping us to increase our ability to optimise and improve marketing effectiveness, it also comes with a human cost.

Our hyper-connected age has meant that as humans we are expected to multi-task to achieve greater levels of productivity.

I had anticipated a workshop on how to embrace this new golden age of technology, how to use the new platforms, techniques that would have a positive impact. Instead, we were asked to pause and take stock by our keynote speaker and facilitator for the Workshop session, Martin McKenzie, CEO & Founder, PPN a pioneer in behavioural science:

1) Understanding the motivating drivers that motivate our clients, customers and ourselves.

Using the learned needs theory developed by David McClelland can help you build stronger client relationships, greater empathy with your employees.

Regardless of gender, culture, or age, we all have three motivating drivers that affect the way we behave or respond. And while they are not mutually exclusive, we have a dominant driver which affects how we interact with other people.

Ever wondered why some people are on your wavelength or you have an uncanny ability to build rapport with them effortlessly?

• Achiever– a strong need to set and accomplish challenging goals, takes calculated risks, likes regular feedback on progress and achievements and often likes to work alone
• Affiliation– wants to belong to a wider group, wants to be liked and will often go along with the wider group’s decision. Prefers collaboration to being competitive and doesn’t like high risk or uncertainty.
• Power– wants to control and influence others, likes to win arguments, enjoys competition, winning and likes status and recognition.

By understanding our own primary driver, we can adjust our responses to clients and colleagues accordingly.

2) Taking a long-term view of our goals

Martin discerned that many of his ultra-wealthy clients make long-term plans for their wealth, 150 years into the future.

Taking this macro view changes the perspective of what is important to you today, the goals and priorities that you have assigned to your work and personal goals could radically alter once you assess what’s truly important to you and your family in the decades to come.

3) Apply the 80/20 principle and achieve greater productivity

If you are not familiar with Richard Koch’s 80/20 principle, the book is about concentrating attention on results that will yield the greatest results.

For instance, try locating 20% of the customers/clients that yield 80% of the revenue or profits for your business, you can look for more clients that have similar characteristics.

How about identifying 20% of the tasks that generate 80% of output or figuring out 80% of the tasks that can be delegated to free up more time to focus on the tasks that lead to meaningful results? The workshop supports the research by cognitive psychologists about basic limitations in our psychological make-up. Being busy, multitasking, switching between tasks is not without consequences such as reduction in memory, productivity and performance.

Taking stock to focus on priorities requires us all to switch-off our devices, remove distractions to be able to think effectively.

The most surprising and inspiring aspect of the workshop was Unity & Motion. Co-founded by Charles Parkinson and Ashely Samuels McKenzie who met while studying human behaviour.

The first time we met, Charles had described his business as a new video production company. I was already impressed by his enthusiasm and drive.

It turns out Charles and Ashley have more to offer than just producing great videos for their clients. By integrating behavioural psychology, the art of story-telling has been given a re-boot for today’s hyper-connected audiences. One form of how Unity & Motion uses behavioural science (specifically NLP in this case) is incorporating Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic learning types when planning, shooting and editing content.

“If you don’t incorporate emotion in the piece if you don’t have a captivating sound design or audio cues, if your content is not visually captivating, you will lose huge segments of your audience whether you’ve matched the values of your customer persona or not. From a behavioural science perspective, these customer personas are fairly meaningless on their own, but in combination with behavioural insights, you can drastically increase the effectiveness of a campaign.” — Charles Parkinson.

For their client, BOSH, applying behavioural science techniques paid off dramatically, by reaching their 2M+ audience, in a way that would drive pre-orders for their new cookbook. Their client reached #1 on Amazon’s pre-order list beating the Hairy Bikers.

“We believe it’s our responsibility, as storytellers, to communicate our client’s message in a way that resonates with the people they want to speak to. As content creators, you are constantly working out how the viewer on the other side of the screen will respond. When you look at how we communicate, only 7% of communication is the words we use, 38% is our tonality, and 55% is our body language. These are very important statistics for creating a compelling piece of video content. When working with KPMG, we trained a number of partners how to communicate their screen through non-verbal communication techniques.” — Ashley Samuels

Behavioural science has helped Charles and Ashley focus on building their business and a whole new approach to creating a supporting ecosystem to help other people and businesses to reach their goals.

For more information on the work by Charles and Ashley visit Unity & Motion

Originally published at www.ravenintegrated.com on April 20, 2018.