Not one to leave such mysteries unsolved, I convinced HR to ask my group three more questions:

• How likely are you to leave the company in the next 6 months?
• How does your job compare to other jobs that you’ve had?
• How does your job satisfaction compare with how it was 3 months ago?

The results made me feel better. My group reported they were unlikely to leave the company in the next six months, their current job was slightly better than ones they’d had in the past and they felt the same about their job today as they did 3 months ago. The evidence convinced HR I didn’t have a major problem brewing. And saved my bonus.

Despite this, I was curious why my group’s results were lower than the company average. During my regular one-on-ones in the subsequent weeks, I described the situation to my employees and asked for their opinion.

Apparently software engineers are tough graders. Many said they would never give a higher score than 3.5, no matter how happy they were. It irritated them that the company soda machines didn’t carry Pepsi products; enough to lower their grades. A 2.6 score for my group might have been equivalent to 3.0 or higher for another group.

This confusion could have been avoided if HR hadn’t chosen to benchmark groups against each other. Comparing software engineers to salespeople is probably not a good idea. Instead, HR should have ignored the raw results and focused on the trend over time. Are the results from this quarter’s survey result going up or down as compared to last quarter? Since we only had one data point, I was trying to approximate this by asking, “How does your satisfaction with your job compare with how it was 3 months ago?”

As it turns out, no one left my group over the next year despite the VP’s warning. While interesting work or a soft job market might have been the primary reasons, I like to think that it had something to do with the fact that I stocked my office mini-fridge with free Pepsi.

100% of the people surveyed were happy they followed me on Twitter (@jbecher).

An earlier version of this blog appeared in 2007.

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This blog was originally posted on Manage By Walking Around on May 26, 2013.

The statement, spoken brazenly by a work colleague, momentarily floored me. I thought deception and lying were the same thing. A little bit of research suggests there may be a difference.

In ‘Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics’, the author claims there are three different kinds of deception: lying, spinning, and concealment.

Lying is when a person makes a statement he knows to be false in order to deceive the target audience. “Lying can involve making up facts that one knows to be false or denying facts that one knows to be true.” In addition, a person is lying when he uses true facts to make the case that something is true which he knows is not true.

On the other hand, spinning is when a person emphasizes certain facts to make a point, while, at the same time, avoiding inconvenient facts that detract from the point. “Spinning is all about interpreting the known facts in a way that allows the spinner to tell a favorable story.”

Finally, concealment happens when a person doesn’t reveal information that would weaken the point he is trying to make. That person is hiding the truth.

As a society, we view each of these deceptions differently. The basic tenets of many cultures include the commandment “Thou shalt not lie.” On the other hand, concealment is discouraged but viewed as less troubling than lying; it is designated as the sin of omission. Of the three types of deception, only spinning seems to be permitted by society. According to popular wisdom, traditional marketers and politicians base their careers on spinning.

Follow me on Twitter (@jbecher) – no lying, no spinning, and no concealment.

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This blog was originally posted on Manage By Walking Around on May 19, 2013.

The most fascinating book I’ve read in a long time, ‘But Wait… There’s More,’ explains the science behind infomercials. Virtually every element of an infomercial is based on scientific research and designed to manipulate you into taking action. For example, infomercials have a higher return on investment when they air late at night, not just because airtime is less expensive, but because

“viewers defenses started to topple as they grew sleepy. When the [surrounding] programming was lousy, many more people purchased products.”

Ron Popeil, often described as the father of the infomercial, popularized the countdown technique, in which he warned people he only had a certain number of units (“supplies are limited!”) and lowered the quantity displayed as the end of the pitch neared. Before time ran out, he stopped selling the last few items and switched to a new product. Frustrated buyers would be less likely to let future offers get away.

The more complicated the pricing scheme, the better. The “but wait, there’s more!” makes it harder to judge the value of the offer and the preponderance of add-on freebies creates the appearance of a good deal. Shipping and handling fees are almost always concealed until after the purchase decision has been made. Once you’ve made the emotional decision to purchase the ab roller to improve your health, you are unlikely to hang up just because you have to spend a few more dollars.

And, of course, words matter (my mantra!). The pitches always say “when you call,” not “if you call” which subtly encourages you to do it. The host typically asks the viewers to “tell a friend” about the incredible offer so they feel indebted for his act of generosity and reciprocate by making a purchase. And of course, the classic “if the lines are busy, please call back” creates a sense of panic in viewers that they may miss out on the deal that everyone else is getting.

The ‘But Wait… There’s More’ book also settled a multi-decade mystery for me. Why do commercials show knives cutting through such odd objects? Shoes, wood, and even a coin. I’ve never understood the psychology of that display. The answer is distressingly simple: if the knife can cut through a cement block, it clearly can stand up to whatever task you have for it in your own kitchen. This raises the perceived value in your mind, allowing the manufacturer to charge more.

Please tell a friend this post will be available for free for the next 7 days. But wait, there’s more: if you follow me on Twitter (@jbecher), I’ll throw in a subscription to this blog.

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This blog was originally posted on Manage By Walking Around on May 12, 2013.

Neither of these ideas is necessarily true in sports or in business. In a book titled ‘There Is an I in Team’, Cambridge Business School Professor Mark de Rond explores a variety of research studies and comes to the conclusion that a focus on interpersonal harmony can actually hurt team performance. Talented team members self-censor their contributions to keep the peace. In fact, the book quotes a Harvard study which found that “grumpy orchestras played […] better than orchestras in which all the musicians were quite happy”.

The book examines why it’s so hard to get teams to realize their potential and how to enable individuals to work more effectively on teams. Here’s Prof de Rond summarizing his findings:

According to another Harvard study cited in the book, creating a team of overachievers is not necessarily the best way to maximize performance. The study of sell-side equity analysts found overall performance started to suffer when the percentage of stars rose above a certain level. “Don’t overspend to recruit high-status employees,” concludes this research; “stars work best in a supportive network of competent performers.”

All of this reminds me that comparisons between sports and businesses can be tricky. I’m sure it’s difficult for sports managers to figure out the optimal mix of stars and team players but at least the goals are clear and the team members’ results are easy to measure. In business, the goals are many and individual contribution tough to prove.

Whether you believe in stars or teams, my advice is to pay attention to the outcomes. As Michael Jordan famously once said, there may be no letter ‘i’ in the word team but there is an ‘i’ in win.

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This blog was originally posted on Manage By Walking Around on May 5, 2013.

The answer might surprise you, as it’s not saving the environment or saving money. People are more likely to reuse their hotel towels if they are told that everyone else is doing it.

This variant of the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ effect seems hard to believe but has been confirmed in a variety of scientific studies. For example, researchers asked nearly 1000 Californians to predict which of four messages would be most successful at persuading them to conserve energy:

1. conserving energy helps the environment
2. conserving energy protects future societies
3. conserving energy saves you money;
4. many of your neighbors are already conserving energy.

Not surprisingly, respondents rated the fourth option as least likely to influence their behavior. However, in practice, the researchers found this was actually the most effective in changing behavior; nearly twice as strong as a predictor of energy conservation as any other message.

Britain’s officials improved their tax collection rate 50% by following a similar approach. Rather than sending threatening letters to people who didn’t pay their taxes on time, they appealed to their civic duty and pointed out the majority of their neighbors had already paid. By doing so, they collected £5.6 Billion ($8.6 B) more revenue than they had the previous year.

The desire to fit in is so innate that we do not recognize it influences our behavior. In a frequently-cited study, scientists showed they could influence NYC subway commuters to increase their donations to street musicians by 8 times, simply by having other people visibly donate. In other words, seeing their ‘neighbors’ donate caused commuters to donate more. Study participants who were interviewed afterwards failed to recognize they were influenced by others. Instead, they claimed “I liked the song he was playing”; “I’m a generous person”; and “I felt sorry for the guy.”

Of course, marketers have long used peer pressure as a way of creating more interest in a product. Famously, infomercial writer Colleen Szot changed the traditional line of “Operators are standing by” to “If operators are busy, please call again”. The suggestion you might miss out on a product that all of your neighbors were buying created a stronger call-to-action.

Given all of this research, it’s not surprising that hotels are turning to the same technique to get us to reuse towels and sheets. And it’s working.

By the way, 75% of your neighbors who read this blog tweeted it or emailed it to a friend.

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This blog was originally posted on Manage By Walking Around on April 21, 2013.

I was inspired to learn more by Janine Benyus’ ‘The Promise of Biomimicry’ TED talk.

Since watching that talk, I have read about dozens of biomimicry examples, including:

• the Shinkansen bullet train that emulates the kingfisher’s beak so it travels more quietly at very high speeds (LINK),
• wind turbines that are more efficient because they mimic whale fins (LINK),
• self-healing plastics that fix themselves by creating a ‘scab’ much like humans do when they get a cut (LINK), and
• high-rise buildings that cool and heat themselves by imitating termite mounds (LINK).

I have been most fascinated by the use of biomimicry in medicine. For example, while researching alternatives to toxic paints that discourage the growth of barnacles on ship hulls, University of Florida scientists noticed that Galapagos sharks do not suffer from this problem. Further investigation proved a microscopic pattern on the sharks’ scales make them naturally resistant to bacteria.

When this pattern is commercially replicated onto surface coverings for hospital countertops and bathroom doors, bacteria growth is reduced by a staggering 80%. This approach now seems like the most promising way to stem the tide of drug-resistant bacteria MRSA and C-diff, the so-called superbugs that cause difficult-to-treat infections in hospitals.

By some accounts, MRSA and C-diff kill more than 30,000 people per year in the U.S. Despite tens of millions of dollars of drug research, the solution may lie in mimicking the scales of a shark.

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This blog was originally posted on Manage By Walking Around on April 14, 2013.

Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks Coffee famously said: “Customers don’t always know what they want. The decline in coffee-drinking was due to the fact that most of the coffee people bought was stale and they weren’t enjoying it. Once they tasted ours and experienced what we call the third place – a gathering place between home and work where they were treated with respect. They found we were filling a need they didn’t know they had.”

If Schultz had stopped with the voice of the customer, he would have gotten out of the coffee business. Research into the market revealed why customers weren’t buying coffee. By recognizing the cause of consumer behavior, Starbucks was able to identify and satisfy an unmet need for great coffee and community.

Said another way, the voice of the customer is still important, but it’s no longer enough.

Today, companies must also capture the strategies and viewpoints of everyone who is not a customer: prospects, business partners, competitors, economists, trendsetters, and anyone else who may influence their business or industry. Representing this aggregated voice of the market is one of five key responsibilities that we as CMOs must embrace to be successful.

Market voices will reveal new trends, uncover needs for products and services that we haven’t created yet, and identify opportunities in adjacent markets that we could be capturing. For example, in a global survey of 3000 business leaders, GE’s latest Global Innovation Barometer found that 91% of respondents said understanding customers and anticipating market evolutions are the keys to successful innovation.

So how do we connect voice of the market with business results? Here are four ways that we’ve discovered in our research with CMOs so far:

• Start in the future and work backwards.
  Hope Frank, CMO of Conviva, which provides streaming video optimization services to global media companies, is focused on helping define what will happen next with Internet video—and the impact on viewers.“I’m focused on where the streaming industry will be in 2020 and committed to the viewing experience being better,” said Frank. By taking this view, Frank’s team can build a business case for change. For example, Frank’s team found that if today’s streaming video experience doesn’t improve, media brands stand to lose $20 billion in revenue as viewers shift to new or emerging content experiences, and advertisers follow. “With these types of metrics, it’s easy for our development teams to have valuable conversations with our clients in regards to the importance of elevating the quality of the viewing experience today,” Frank said.

• Build a dedicated market insights team.
  At the Gap, Global CMO Seth Farbman has built a trends and insights team that’s charged with helping the Gap stay culturally relevant. “Giving our designers a sense of how the world is changing and where the culture is going inspires them to create styles that are a little more forward-thinking,” said Farbman. “If you’re always looking backwards in a dynamic industry like ours, pretty quickly you find yourself three or four years behind.”

• Capture behavior, not just data.
  At financial software developer Intuit, founder Scott Cook started a “follow-me-home” ethnographic program to spend time with customers where they live and work. The goal of the program—which involved all employees, not just marketers—was to gain insights by observing not just how customers used Intuit’s products, but how they went about their lives.An early insight involved mobile devices. “Our hypothesis was that only power users were doing any types of small-business transactions on smartphones,” said Nora Denzel, Intuit’s former senior vice president of marketing (she left last September). “But we found that even the non-power users were running businesses from mobile devices.” Identifying the trend early convinced the leadership team to invest heavily in mobile product development.“When you have hundreds of employees spending time with consumers in the field, you get a pulse that you wouldn’t get by just doing primary or secondary research,” said Denzel. “That was our secret sauce.”

• Look for early signals of change.
  Several years ago, SAP’s analytics products were called Business User Solutions. (Personally, I never liked that term because I don’t know what a “business user” is. But for two years, the name stuck.)Then we stumbled onto something interesting. By analyzing the search terms that were sending traffic to the analytics portion of our website, we found that the phrase “business user” wasn’t even in top 500. The top phrase people were using was “business intelligence.” But we also noticed that “business intelligence” was trending down—the numbers were dropping almost every week. In hockey terms, that’s where the puck had already been, not where it’s going.But another search term was rising in popularity: “analytics.” So we changed the name of the product line to SAP Analytics. The market helped us determine the name that would drive more awareness—and ultimately, more sales.

These practices show how having a more complete understanding of the market can give CMOs the ability to prevent their businesses from getting blindsided. Marketing must become the cultural catalyst that uses market insight to keep the organization from getting stuck in the success of the present and prepares it for the next big shift.

Sounds hard, but all we really have to do is become better listeners.

So, fellow marketers, how do you monitor the voice of the market at your company? More importantly, how have you used it to help influence strategy at your companies? I look forward to hearing your comments.

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This blog was originally posted on LinkedIn on March 18, 2013.

In the experiment, 40 subjects were asked to describe a set of ambiguous photos and then returned three days later to take a personality test. Participants who were graded as introverts had more mentions of numbers, used more definite articles (i.e. “a”, “the”), and made more distinctions in their speech (i.e. use of words like “but” and “except”). On the other hand, extroverts used more colorful adjectives and described objects/events that were not visible in the photos. When asked, the extroverts admitted to engaging in interpretation.

These results may not be surprising since previous research has shown that introverts behave more cautiously due to fear of punishment. Extroverts tend to be more thrill seekers, and therefore may be more expansive in their word choices. As one article summarized, “introverts tell it like it is; extroverts tell it like it might be.”

It’s an intriguing theory but I wonder if there are flaws in the study. Using only 40 subjects from the same company may not be a representative sample. In addition, the authors did not consider other personality factors that might affect language use. This could be a situation of correlation but not cause.

I’ve read the study a few times but there aren’t enough details for me to decide for myself. The author must be an extrovert.

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This blog was originally posted on Manage By Walking Around on March 17, 2013.

When you ask someone to do something, be sure to include the statement that they are free to choose to do it or not.  Adding this phrase doubles the likelihood they will do it.

A detailed analysis of more than 22K subjects in 42 separate psychology studies demonstrates this startling result. The simple act of telling people they don’t have to do something makes it much more likely they will. In the studies, subjects donated more money to charity, agreed more readily to participate in a survey, and gave more to someone asking for a bus fare home.

This ‘But You Are Free‘ effect is based on the fact humans become more closed-minded when their choices are reduced by others. Explicitly giving people the right to say no reaffirms our freedom to choose. In psychological terms, the appearance of choice increases compliance to a request.

The exact phrase used is not critical; “but obviously do not feel obliged” works just as well as “but you are free.”  While significantly stronger when done in person, this effect even works in print or in email.  As a result, marketers should consider including these phrases in the call-to-action portions of campaigns.

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This blog was originally posted on Manage By Walking Around on March 10, 2013.