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Architecting triggers in the consumer journey to create the desired change for Whisper to win @ commerce in South Korea.
Despite being the market leader, in a highly competitive market of South Korea, competition generated more than 20X sales from ecommerce versus Whisper, and registered higher brand affinity, and a higher intention to purchase and engagement as compared to Whisper. A systems approach & a thorough audit of the brand, and its competition, revealed a problem of the brand not being able to bring in new users effectively and /or drive loyalty amongst chance purchasers. While the older converts to the brand continued using Whisper, the new entrants to the category chose competitive brands, causing the brand’s share to shrink year on year. Through an understanding of the consumer and all her context cues - cultural, competitive, connections, category, communications, community, we identified all possible sources of insights that could help embed the right triggers in the consumer journey to create the change in the direction desired. Brand Communication was changed to reflect an understanding of the motivations of the target audience, while nudges, guided by how people makes choices, were embedded along the path to purchase to engage the consumers and help close the sale. Some of the Nudges* @ Commerce
Result The human experience centered choice architectures, reimagined & recreated E-commerce Experience to create an online model for growth for Whisper in Korea that tripled the business from ecommerce within 12 months. This approach was reapplied across all other developing markets, and called out as Best in Class Consumer Experience Design by P&G. Brand desirability registered a positive rise for the first time in 3 years. *A nudge, as explained by Robert Thaler, the Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist, is “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.” (Wikipedia)
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A nudge, as explained by Robert Thaler, the Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist, is “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.” (Wikipedia).
Nudging builds on the fact that people do not always make rational and informed choices. In fact, most of the choices we make are done automatically and intuitively (Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011). This impulsive behaviour is difficult to change by arguments. What appears to work, are small changes in the physical environment. A subtle hint can have a significant behavioral effect. THE BEGINNING OF A NUDGE FOR ME. In a country like India, and more so in a less developed place like Haryana, with less than desirable hygiene and sanitation practices and infrastructure,, people would sometimes dispose their garbage in front of other people’s homes. We would often find garbage strewn next to our gate every morning (the act was usually done in the night when no one could pin the culprit down). The proper designated place to dispose the garbage was at the end of the lane that we lived on. After months of frustration, at first, by putting up signs requesting people politely not to throw rubbish & then graduating to increased levels of anger, resulting in threatening people that they would be handed over to the police or even worse be cursed with bad karma, my parents had had enough. Their final solution? They dotted the boundary walls of our house with pictures of Gods and Goddesses The garbage nuisance stopped immediately ! I guess, it is a fact that in India, Gods do wield immense power! The fear of offending Gods was a subtle nudge that caused a shift in a hitherto stubborn behavior. Soon after, the entire neighborhood adopted this practice. Garbage stopped appearing in front of people’s houses and the unknown culprits (!) started walking to where they were legally required to responsibly dispose the garbage. Soon, I became aware of the various ‘nudges’ my mom would use to get us to behave a particular way. Instead of storing our bikes in the space behind of the house, as used to be the practice, they appeared in the hallway that we crossed to go out reminding & encouraging us to bike. Those were the days of letter writing. No emails. And phone calls were expensive. Mom used to put a stack of 24 Inland letters (as they were called) on my table. 12 of them for me to write to my maternal grandparents’ and 12 to write to my paternal grandparents. Part of the nudge worked (I wrote regularly to my maternal grand mom). Part of the nudge didn’t – I used all the 12 letters that were meant for my paternal grandparents to write to my maternal grand mom instead. Maybe the nudge would have worked better, had she pre-addressed the letters? The Nudge Continued to Intrigue The interest in behavior – the irrational & the supposedly rational, the inter relationship between environment and person and how one can be modified by affecting the other, led me to pursue my education in Psychology and then in Medical & Psychiatric Social Work, with specialization in Behavior Change. This was a time of many ‘live’ experiments in nudges to affect behavior change. I spent a year working with people affected with chemical dependency as a counsellor & social worker. One of the interventions involved the strategic use of buddies. People who were buddied up together to do an activity of combined choice (sports, exercise, meditation, arts & crafts) stuck with the activity for longer than those who weren’t buddied together. And showed a lower relapse rate than those who were on the path of recovery by themselves. Having a buddy – and a shared activity to reinforce the connection – served as a nudge in relapse prevention. I spent another year as the counsellor in an Old Age home. To encourage the residents to get walk more we had lined the longer route to the cafeteria with plants and with pictures of various deities that they prayed to and left the shorter route untouched. People took the longer route to their destination and walked much more than otherwise. These simple (almost rudimentary) nudges affected a behavior change much more than any talk therapy did. The newly admitted residents were depressed and reeling under a deep sense of rejection & ‘not mattering’ (In India, parents expect to either live with their children or be taken care of by them in some way, and, being sent away to an Old Age home – and that too a facility that was meant for destitutes was a blow to their sense of being). Asking them to volunteer for duties – either cooking in the kitchen, or watering the plants, or teaching children at the neighboring school, gave them a sense of responsibility – and a nudge that helped restore their sense of dignity. While doing my internship with in the area of mental health, at a leading facility, many of the interventions for people dealing with mental health issues involved ‘nudges’ embedded in their physical environment to drive positive behavior change. Nudge. Some more? In my 20 years of work as a Strategist, this idea of making positive tweaks in a person’s environment to enable (not force) a behavior change in the direction desired, continued to surface through my work.
Small changes in the environment can affect people’s choices and decisions significantly. When thinking of the behaviour change you want to effect, think of the environmental changes you can create to enable & accelerate that change in behaviour. That nudge could be the idea that galvanizes people into action. *Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, first president of Turkey, wanted to modernize the Turkish people’s dressing. He wanted people to stop wearing the veil, but knew that a ban would result in strong resistance. So he tried a softer approach, which was to make it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil. People soon stopped wearing it. The prostitutes wearing the veil was the nudge - a psychological solution that solved the problem at hand. This example is sourced from the TED talk by Rory Sutherland. Richard Thaler, the American economist was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017 for his contributions to behavioral economics, and in particular for his Nudge Theory. The Nudge theory (or nudge) is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. The a poster child example of a Nudge was a a fly painted on a men’s urinal, nudging them to aim correct. The idea understood human psychology (if you have something to aim at, people will aim) and created a small change in environment (the image of the fly painted on the urinal) to cause a behavioral change – that of aiming correct to reduce spills.
The world of advertising & communication has always been conscious of this truth, and has used it extremely well & with incredible creativity, often to build the brand with relevance & meaning in the lives of consumer ; and admittedly, at times to lure people into taking a certain decision. An example of a brilliant brand building nudge is Alka Seltzer’s Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz campaign. While this nudge dates back before the formal rise of behavioral economics, Alka Seltzer’s slogan, “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz” is a brilliant case of nudging consumers via advertising. The line “Plink Plink Fizz” was written at the bidding of a psychologist who suggested that, if you could create a social norm around using two Alka Seltzer tablets at a time, sales would double. The Coca Cola Company distributed refrigerators to shops in remote areas of India & in areas that suffered the worst summers. Since Coca Cola products were the only cold / chilled drinks in these places – it nudged people to pick coca cola versus other brands that were also available but just not chilled. A brilliant nudge that drove Coca Cola’s consumption exponentially. Other commonly used nudges include adding the label ‘most popular’ to the product marketers want to sell on their pricing page. Telling site visitors what other people have liked in the past, works in selling a product because as much as we believe that we are unique, we tend to like things that other people like. Amazon was one of the pioneers in the use of this nudge. Comparison is also a nudge that been used extensively in the world of advertising. In an ingenious exploitation of framing effects, one salesman sold Rolls-Royces at a yacht show. Seen alongside a $10 million yacht, a $500,000 car seems like a bargain. Restaurant owners often use the trick of having one very expensive item on the menu to increase the average value of dishes ordered, fully knowing that while the most expensive item of the list will never be chosen, the tendency to order the second most expensive item and order more increases when people feel that they have avoided buying the most expensive stuff on the list. Simplifying choices is another great nudge prompting action in an environment where people are burdened with just too much information. Using numbers, using competitions, restricting options are some of the other ways that marketers try to game people’s choice architecture. As is the idea of using limited offers and timed discounts to nudge people to make a purchase. These are just few examples of nudges that the world of advertising uses most commonly. While Behavioural Economics as a discipline has just walked into the spotlight, the Madmen (and women) of the advertising community have not just been aware of its potential all these years, but have also, actively used it to drive behavior change. And now with programmatic, adv. serving has become almost a 100% addressable – making it one the biggest nudges ever to be felt by consumers. It, of course, needs a compelling idea for it to become an equally effective nudge. My prediction? The next big winner in the field of marketing & communications will not be the one with the latest technology – but one who can combine the new (technology) with the quintessential (human psychology) with creativity & ideas that move people. And the super engineers of today & tomorrow? Madmen (and women) powered by technology and rooted in Psychology. References & Additional resources and examples https://www.usimprints.com/blog/7-nudging-examples/ https://enginess.io/insights/5-examples-of-nudge https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/why-advertising-needs-behavioural-economics/949585#ypWrWhSWwX1jbLLR.99 https://econsultancy.com/blog/67941-10-nudge-tastic-examples-of-persuasive-copywriting-from-charities/ Lessons on Choice Architecture. Pampers, India.
The Issue at Hand? Despite product superiority and more than five times the media spends of its main competitor, and a higher number of well-tested pieces of communication, Pampers, the market leading in diapers, registered decline in sales and a slower growth than its key competitors in India. A systems approach auditing all available information showed that high awareness scores for Pampers, was not being translated to high enough sales in store. It was as though, all the effort made by Pampers in driving awareness and consideration was being brought to a naught. The task at hand, was to Drive Positive Engagement and Conversion in store. The Opportunity? Using principles of Choice Architecture, and through a deep observation and understanding of the consumer and all her context cues, we identified different sources of barriers, that when overcome, could help create the change needed. Who’s the Shopper? While all communication in media targeted was towards the mom, the actual shopper especially in tier 2 and 3 cities in India, was, in fact, the dad. Also, these dads came to the store, more often than not, on two wheelers. And even if they came to the shop with Pampers on their shopping list, they left with a Mammy Poko or a Huggies (competitor brand) because a pack of Pampers was hard to carry & transport on a two-wheeler while both Mammy Poko and Huggies had big plastic carry handles that they could use to secure the product to their two wheelers. Recommendation included a change in packaging that allowed the pack to be carried easily on two wheelers. Pads and Diapers! Not Same, Same! Pampers and Whisper (fem care) were placed in the same aisles in store, stacked next to each other. Their packaging used the same color palette –blue and white. Dads would come into the shop with Pampers on their shopping list but on seeing it placed next to the sanitary pads would change their choice at the POS & go for a visibly different brand - the orange colored Mammy Poko or Huggies rather than risk the embarrassment of being seen standing next to a fem care product. Recommendation included clearly separating the fem care products from baby care products and influencing choice through differentiated color and visual cues, and a differentiated in store display. Visuals Override Words. Superior much? In order to indicate superior absorbency, Pampers packaging showed 6 cups of water being poured into the diaper at one go, while Huggies showed 1 cup of water being poured with a sign that showed it being multiplied 5 times ( 1 glass X 5). Consumer reaction to the Pampers? “No one pees so much. Which child pees 6 glasses at one go? Unbelievable! The diaper must be so thick and uncomfortable. I don’t need a diaper to absorb so much” Whereas the reaction to Huggies? “My child pees about a cup every time. So yeah, that amount of pee being shown is just right, Also s/he pees about 5-6 times during the day. This feels right for me”. Recommendation included changing the language around superior absorbency visually communicating absorbency through better cues. Too Expensive! In crowded retail environments, and within the context of other brands communicating price, Pampers appeared more expensive because of the way information was visually communicated, leading people to switch their choice in store. At Rs 560 for a pack, Pampers appeared much more expensive than Rs. 475 a pack for Huggies, except that the fine print shows Pampers having 30 diapers, while Huggies had 24 in the pack – making it actually more expensive than Pampers. Recommendation included presenting price information in a way that communicated the price parity with clarity & the discounts available in a manner that enabled easy comparisons. Benefit communication A key consideration in choosing diapers was in the words of moms, “its ability to allow air to pass through” and “for it to be as elastic and flexible as underwear”. Recommendations included highlighting these two benefits with visual cues in packaging & through reiterating it across supporting print material. Reducing Attribution Confusion. Simplifying Brand Architecture in Store to help consumer pick the right SKU’s through visual demarcation of an age – stage approach. Driving Complementarity. A key problem that new parents face is getting the little ones to sleep undisturbed through the night. Pampers equity & strategy linked the product superiority to a night of undisturbed sleep but online & in store environment did little to bring the equity to life. Recommendation included putting Pampers next to bath time products and bundling them together with massage oils and lullaby music in supermarkets. An equity driving nudge in store. Nudging through Connections that Matter. The prevalent situation was that most of the media spends for Pampers was on TV, and almost all the digital spends were on promotions and discounts. The reality of moms indicated a different need, however. Observing moms as they navigated their day, we saw that they ‘caught’ TV rather than watched TV, and used TV more as a radio than a visual medium, pointing to the importance of auditory cues. Also, Mobile was to them, the Modern Day Pacifier - the one device they needed to manage their child, as they craved for content to keep their child meaningfully occupied, especially when in any kind of transit and to provide inspiration on things to do with her child. Recommendations included diverting investments to mobile content that mom could use to choreograph fun times with her child. And the Result? Through mindfulness of the actual user experience, various nudges were inserted across the consumer journey. Also, context and content cues were used to help influence people’s choice of the brand. These nudges drove significant changes in people’s behavior. The high awareness that Pampers enjoyed, now, translated into high engagement scores and healthy conversion at the POS & without an increase in marketing budgets, and helped reinstate Pampers back to the strong leadership position in India. *‘Expecting Error’ is a key feature of choice architecture. Translated to the world of marketing and branding, this means paying disproportionate attention to all the cues that drive receptivity, to all the interactions that influence choices, right up to the last mile, to the in store experience, to all the cues emanating from the brand, including packaging - to help people navigate their choices, and drive conversion with simplicity & ethics. And, through all of it, being cognizant of the fact that Choice Architecture is not about ‘acting’ only in the interest of the brand, but also about acting in the interest of the people that the brand wants to super serve. The challenge was to launch Olay Anti-Ageing solutions, in a fiercely competitive, crowded, market, such as India, with the added dare of heavily reduced reliance on traditional media budgets. To add to this was the fact that reeling under choice & attribute overload, and a battle of who shouts the loudest, to most, Olay felt undifferentiated & functional.
We needed to understand people’s realities better & creatively discover the best solutions to respond to them. Data helped identify the best potential source of growth - our High Value Audience as the Active Maintenance Seeker, women between 25-35 yr. keen to fight the telltale signs of aging and feel on top of their game. Context Architecture to Drive Emotional Relevance Anti-ageing, is not just an issue to fight to preserve one’s skin. It is a fight to preserve one’s dignity, strengths, quirks, and above all, to be acknowledged and respected for one’s achievements & knowledge. There was nothing more frustrating than for her to know (fully well!) how smart she is – but for others to not know it well enough. She was thus constantly engaged in a cycle of collecting and sharing knowledge, the all-important cycle of “Batana –Batorna”; ‘sharing to collect’ & ‘collecting to share’ knowledge. The perception of being seen as ‘knowledgeable’ to her peers being the ultimate social currency she desired. This insight helped prioritize social strategy, while placing disproportionate efforts on enabling sharing of her opinions, reviews and experiences. Connections Architecture to Deliver the Message at the Right Place
Content Architecture to Co-opt People in Telling & Extending the Brand Story When it came to beauty & anti-ageing, it was all about the feeling that she was a part of an inner circle of celebrities/ brand and that she was being invited into their lives for her to share what she knows and to gather more information to fuel her social connects. Recommendation included equipping her with beauty information & inspiration, the back stories she loved, and facilitating peer to peer sharing of information she had to offer, so that their receptivity to brand messaging is enhanced exponentially. The intention was to help her in her goal to be seen as ‘with it’ and ‘in the know’. And the Result? With the challenge to create superior consumer experiences and reduce the reliance on traditional media budgets, this equity based Communications Plan laid the foundation of digital first launch in the Marketing Plans for Olay in one of its biggest markets in APAC, India. The Experience Centered Path to Purchase, provided actionable ideas to drive relevance and move people through the purchase funnel right through to advocacy with a digital first launch that got social and search to talk to each other in aiding the journey of Batana (sharing)–Batorna (gathering). The work influenced creative development with stronger audio cues being put in place & influenced in-store experience design and training of the beauty consultants. Called out as being ‘the exceptional agency deliverable’ by P&G in annual evaluations, the work was scaled beyond India, and influenced marketing plans for Olay across APAC. Most importantly it helped illustrate the point that digital First should never come to mean Consumer Second. The Challenge? Drive consideration & conversion for Olay’s premium range in China.
Defining the Problem. In a highly competitive market of who shouts the loudest, the attack on Olay was two pronged; one, from local brands with a homegrown and heritage story and two, from luxury brands with a strong science story. Together, both communicated trust, credibility and relevance- issues that were the biggest barriers for Olay to bust. Identifying the Opportunity The key to driving behavior change was to uncover and understand how people made their choices along the path to purchase - and - to understand the most potent triggers of all to design the right nudges along their decision making journey. Trust is a Real Person Like Me. From a perspective of Choice Architecture, there are two key factors to consider here. One, the fact that people trust ‘real’ people, and two, that people find safety in numbers. The food stall with a longer line outside it is always perceived to serve much better food than the food stall with a shorter line / no line. This heuristic was used to create peer-to-peer recommendation system for Olay. The insight was also the cornerstone of the strategy to use Power Claims on the storefront using real consumer reviews. A constant moving tracker at commerce that indicated the number of women that bought Olay. Every time the tracker moved, it communicated the fact that women were reposing their trust in Olay. KOLS and local Chinese opinion leaders – real people, (no celebrities) were used to tell, extend and live the Olay brand story to communicate efficacy & trust. This was all about driving trust using real stories versus using ‘cold’ technical R&D claims. Overcoming the Choice Overload. “Some choice is good, doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better” Barry Shwartz. With multiple steps in their beauty journey already established, we used the Regimen Story to bundle individual SKU’s to drive sales for the brand as a whole. Combinations of Moisturizer, Cleanser, Toner, Serum, etc. were bundled together as a total beauty solution drive brand habit. The story was one of total beauty solutions that helped simplify choice and drive habit. Driving Relevance through Association. This meant identifying one of the biggest problems that people faced in China - Pollution. Everyone in China checks the air quality & pollution levels almost everyday on their mobile devices. It is a way of life for the pollution fraught Chinese. Positioning Olay as the solution to skin stress brought on by urban pollution, with recommendations that included messaging in the context of weather & pollution apps to communicate the skin dangers of living in an urban environment, offering skin tests to show tangible proof that she is suffering from urban skin damage and helping her prevent skin damage with the right products from Olay helped drive heightened relevance. And the Result? Olay registered a significant positive on the think metrics (consideration, purchase intent) as well as the do metrics (conversion, buy, share reviews and ratings) metrics. The Experience Centered Path to Purchase, with the right nudges embedded to trigger conversion, drove increased relevance all along the purchase funnel and helped fortify Olay’s position in market as one of the top skin care and beauty brand of choice. |
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