behaviour

Communication is the key

If you can control perception, then you can control behaviour. If you can dominate the narrative so people are only hearing one side of the story or one version of the story then you are going to dictate the perceptions of vast numbers of people, especially if they haven’t had any other angle to consider. This is so easy when you are addressing a population who do not question anything:


Q: How do you know that? 

A: I saw it on the news

Q: How did they know that?

““In times of change the learners will inherit the world, while the knowers will be beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.” ”
— Eric Hoffer

Shaping the future

As time goes on, an increasing number of business inquiries will shift towards behavioural and psychological aspects. I think this shift is due to the growing recognition that relying solely on past data to forecast future behaviour is becoming less reliable. Consequently, a significant portion of business inquiries will essentially transform into marketing questions, and as a result, it will become essential to give marketing a higher priority in the business hierarchy. The significance of marketing in terms of driving innovation and facilitating change has now been amplified by a factor of five.

Elements of value

The value pyramid is usually represented in building blocks and fall into four different categories: functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact. The elements of value pyramid are a marketing tool that identifies the key elements customers value when choosing to buy goods and services. I think organisations can leverage this tool to improve the customer experience, target specific psychographics, and increase their value proposition.

Emotion drives behaviour

Smart people often change their minds. I think that it’s unwise to assume that objective reality holds significant importance in human behaviour. What truly influences people’s actions is the interplay between objective entity, the contextual framework within which it’s perceived, the perception of that context, the emotions or significance evoked by that perception, and ultimately, the emotions that propel behaviour. Unlike the orderly mapping observed in physics, human behaviour entails a convoluted process involving four or five intermediate stages, making it anything but neat.

““In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.””
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It becomes a different thing

““Change your story, change your life. Basically, that’s what it is.” ”
— Deepak Chopra

In B2C decision making we are trying to minimise the risk of regret and in B2B decision making, we are trying to minimise the risk of blame. If you change the story about something, you change its meaning and if you change the meaning, you change our visceral response to it, and if you change our visceral response to it, you basically change our evaluation of it. This is essentially how decision-making works. Things are not things, we respond to things in a context from which we derive meaning, the meaning derives an emotion, the emotion drives a behaviour, and the behaviour then drives an act of post rationalisation.

Third quarter overview

c/o Nasdaq

As we enter the third quarter, it’s time for the annual look at your messaging and product offering. It’s time to break free from the myopic way of thinking to focus on what your customers or potential customers are looking for now and in the next 12 months. Whenever you next bring your team together, examine your organisation as it stands now. Revisit your mission statement, core values, your product assortment and ask yourself: What is the value your customers are seeking from your products? Why would people buy or use it?

It’s important to understand who your customer is in terms of psychographics, behavioural factors and to a lesser extent demographics. The world around us is continuously changing in a whole variety of ways, therefore, you always need to be visionaries and remain forward thinking to stay ahead of your competitors.

A deep human focus

There may be things present in our lives and our habits that we are not happy about. We want change, yet as hard as we try, sometimes, we are just not seeing the level of profound change we desire. Is there an area of your life you’ve tried changing, made some progress but somehow ended up in the same spot you started in? Real behaviour changes are very difficult to bring about by effort and willpower alone. Contact me via e-mail for 1:1 consultations.

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
— Aldous Huxley