How to Influence Buyer Behavior Without Feeling Gross and Get 300% Better Marketing Results

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today we have an exciting topic the power of empathy in marketing and related to that how can marketers influence buyers and how to influence customers without feeling gross about it and we have a great guest to help us talk through this today.

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He has over 30 years of experience in this area.

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He's worked with some of the biggest brands in the world.

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Chris, welcome to the show.

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All right, thanks, eric, I appreciate being here.

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Why don't we start off by you taking a minute or two to talk a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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Sure, obviously, chris Gray.

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I am known as the Bicologist that's my website, the Bicologist, my business, and I've been working in sales and marketing for 30 years.

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After achieving my doctorate in clinical psychology, I kind of figured out I didn't love being a therapist and needed to find another way to apply that, and I really fell in love with understanding how people make decisions, how they shop, how they go about filling their baskets whether that's in-store or online and all the underlying factors that influence that.

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So I work with brand teams, marketers, sales teams to understand what really drives behavior and then how can you influence that behavior in a way that is ethical but also very effective.

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Amazing, and so we're going to talk a little bit about the power of empathy in marketing.

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Why don't you start off by just giving us a quick definition of what that means?

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Sure, empathy is the ability to see the world through someone else's eyes, essentially through their experience, to understand what they're thinking, how they're feeling.

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You know what is influencing them from their perspective versus your own.

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And that sounds fairly simple, but it's actually really challenging because we typically, as humans, we tend to see the world not as it is but as it is, filtered through our own experience and perspectives.

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And so to really practice empathy, you have to be able to know your perspectives and understand how you see the world and kind of set that aside for a moment so that you can really engage with someone in a way in which you are seeking to understand their experience and how they see the world.

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Interesting, so why don't?

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you share a story with us about how you've been able to put this to work successfully?

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Yeah, so a lot of the work that I've done over the last 30 years has been in the space of shopper marketing, commerce, retail design, in-store marketing, those types of things and understanding how people make decisions and how they shop when they're actively engaging in a consumer experience.

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So a few years ago we had a project working with one of the dollar channel stores and they wanted to understand moms and what were the primary goals that moms were trying to accomplish when they went to the dollar store and so that they could create better programs, better displays and a better experience for them.

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And so to do that, in addition to a lot of data, research and that sort of thing, building out our consumer profiles and shopper profiles we also engaged in shop-alongs with quite a few moms.

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So I've been to the store with a heck of a lot of moms shopping the dollar store and after about two or three of our initial shop-alongs and we had many more to follow I met this particular mom in the parking lot of this dollar store and as I was speaking with her, it sort of dawned on me that I wasn't practicing what I preached as well, as I thought there was a bias that I had about how people or why people shop the dollar store that, fortunately, she helped me to see past, and that was I was coming in this to the situation with the belief that people shop the dollar store not because they want to, but because they have to, and you can see how that might cloud someone's perspective.

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My own perspective coming in, would really cloud the insights and the strategies that came out of that.

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And I'll never forget having this conversation with her before we even went into the store, and I was asking her about going to the dollar store.

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Was this something she did regularly?

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Yes, and I said well, tell me, about what is it you like about going to the dollar store?

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And she said you know, we don't have a huge budget, we don't have a lot of money to waste on frivolous things, and so I always end up being the mom who has to say no, and that's not fun.

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I don't want to be that mom all the time.

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And she said when we go to the dollar store, I can give each of my kids a couple dollars and they can go crazy and get whatever they want, and I get to be the fun mom, even if it's just for an hour of the day, and that really I get goosebumps even talking about it.

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That really shifted my perspective in a very fundamental way.

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Being able to see that experience not through my own of like, oh I would have to go there to buy, but to understand what the joy is behind it and what really drives someone to want to shop there no-transcript in the store, out of the store, online as well and it really it led to some big increases in sales for that retailer.

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It's easy to see how there could be a misunderstanding in the why of why people are buying from the dollar store.

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In that story, for example, you could make an assumption or have a bias that people are just doing it because they're frugal or that they like to get a great deal, like.

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That's a very different thing from what you described, right.

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Yeah, exactly, and I think that that would have made a very fundamental difference in the way we approached our communication across the different communication channels of that retailer.

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And so you know, I think that it really made a big.

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It was a very big, pivotal moment in how we thought about and how we were strategizing for that client.

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So what was the hardest thing about implementing this, that kind of empathy, once you had the insight?

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I think one of the biggest challenges was in making sure that that message and that experience was consistent across all the touch points to their primary customer so in-store, out-of-store, online on television, et cetera.

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Because this was initially just an in-store project, and so the challenge, I think, was in working across the organization to make sure that that synced up across all the touch points so that they all led to this idea of you can come here and have fun and be a fun mom and have a fun time with your family.

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So let me ask this question, Broadly speaking how can marketers do the same sort of thing that you did?

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How can they bring empathy into their marketing?

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What's the secret?

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Well, I think the good news is that empathy is something that you can develop and strengthen.

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It's like a muscle.

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You know the more you work at it, the better you'll become at it.

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I think the first thing as individuals is to develop.

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We psychologists like to say this fancy term, metacognition, but really that's just self-awareness.

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So metacognition is the ability to think about how you think and so being able to take a step back and assess your own perspectives, assess your own biases and prejudices, so that you are able to kind of again set those aside and go into an interaction with a customer or a client, whoever that might be, with fresh eyes and seeing from their perspective.

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So that's really kind of the first and most important step.

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You can develop that in a number of different ways.

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You know things like active listening, things like role playing, even storytelling key customer and they would tell the story and almost every time it would be like from their own perspective and we say, okay, now what we want you to do, put yourself in their shoes, see it from their perspective and now retell that story.

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And it was amazing how much difference there would be in being able to do that.

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I've done a lot of in-store exercises with my clients where I give them a persona, I give them a budget and they have to go shopping based on this persona and then justify why they made the choices that they did.

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Again, what it's doing is strengthening that empathy muscle, where you have to be attacking problems from not your own perspective but from the shopper's perspective.

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And one thing I always say is that experience is undeniable.

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You know, it's one thing to talk about customer challenges and pain points.

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It's another thing to put yourself in those shoes and experience them firsthand for yourself.

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Is there a trick for marketers to use to set aside their own biases?

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There absolutely is.

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It's a great question.

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We use something called bracketing and it's something that, as you're taught in psychology when you're becoming a therapist, bracketing is literally the idea of envisioning, creating a visual in your head of your perspective, your biases, whatever those may be, and literally thinking about putting brackets around them and setting them aside for a few minutes.

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And it sounds kind of silly, but it actually is a very powerful way to develop your awareness and just be able to say okay, I know that's what I think.

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Let me set that aside, let's find out what they think.

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Yeah, I think we all have biases from our experiences, like you said, and some of them are stronger than others, and so some of them may be harder to set aside than others, but often when I've done this in marketing, I have to say I'm really not the target buyer here.

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So let me just try to get into that person's shoes and try to imagine, like you're saying, what their challenges are and what they're thinking, a very astute observation that you just had, which is we all have biases, we all have presuppositions, so there really is no shame in that.

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It's the ability to work through those, work around them, see through them, that really makes it powerful to develop that insight into someone else.

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And so I think that developing that empathy, what that allows you to do is be more relevant to your customer, because now you're looking at it from their perspective, and so you can create whether that's messaging, communication, displays, you know whatever that may be in a way that is really relevant and meaningful and motivating to that person, because relevance is the golden ticket.

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If you're relevant to someone, you're going to get their attention more quickly, you're going to hold it much longer and you're going to be able to motivate their behavior much more effectively because it matters to them.

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And by doing so, you're creating a win for yourself, but you're also creating a win for your customer, and so is this the key for marketers to influence people without feeling gross about it.

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It is absolutely step one, it is the foundation.

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I have a seven-step process for influencing customer behavior without feeling gross about it, and step one is develop your empathy, because it is that important and, like I said, developing that empathy empowers relevance.

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That relevance allows emotional connection, and when a brand is emotionally connected to their customer, the return on investment of their marketing dollar is 300% more than those that are not.

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Interesting that it would have that big of an impact, isn't it?

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It's interesting to think about your own experience.

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You know the brands that you love, the things that you buy over and over again.

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It's probably because you're getting something important out of it, and usually there is an emotional component to that.

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So give me an example.

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I'm a surprise.

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I'm a big Converse lover.

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I love Converse.

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I got my Chucks on right now and, yeah, some of that is rational.

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Sure, they're cool shoes, but part of it is also a very emotional connection that developed when I was young.

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I have worn Chuck Taylor since I was a kid, so there's some nostalgia.

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It's also kind of defines your personality.

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It's a little bit rebellious, and so you think about those things.

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And because Converse knows that they can promote their products to me in such a way that really connects on an emotional level, not just a transactional level.

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And give us some visibility into the other six steps, just so people can get a feel for it.

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They should check out the full seven step plan you have.

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Yeah.

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So I think the first obviously develop that empathy.

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And that's an ongoing process where all you know, continue to develop that muscle.

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After 30 years I'm still working on it.

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But then you have really have to define.

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Even before that, you have to define who it is that is your target, right?

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So that's kind of marketer 101, know who you're talking to develop your empathy.

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And then there's really two things.

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If you want to influence behavior, there are two key things you absolutely have to do you have to motivate that customer and you have to facilitate that behavior.

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So motivate the customer means how do you get them to understand and want that product?

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Why would they want this?

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Why would this be important to them?

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Why would this matter?

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Why would they engage in this behavior?

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So if you can develop that and understand that again from their perspective, because I can tell you how I want you to behave, but if you don't care because I can tell you how I want you to behave, but if you don't care, it doesn't matter, right?

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That just usually leads to resistance, to resentment, eventually avoidance.

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And if you're a brand and that's how your customers are responding to you, you've got a lot of problems ahead of you.

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So it's understanding why would this target customer want to engage in this behavior, buy my product, buy this particular product, buy more of this product, buy it more frequently, et cetera.

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So once you've established that, then you have to understand how do I facilitate that behavior for them?

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And what that means is how do I make it easier, simpler, faster, more enjoyable, so that I'm taking away the pain points, I'm taking away the potential hurdles and barriers that might get in the way of that behavior.

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And if you can do that, you can create strategy that both motivates and facilitates that behavior.

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And that's where the real power comes in.

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But you have to do both.

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If you do one without the other, you're not going to get the results you want.

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If you motivate someone but it's too hard to buy your product, they're just going to be frustrated.

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If you facilitate, make it easy to buy, but you haven't motivated them and understand why they want to do that, they're not going to do anything.

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They're just going to have apathy towards you.

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And so those two really go hand in hand together.

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And then from there it's about identifying where are the touch points, where they're going to be open and receptive to our message and our product, then strategizing around those and then understanding how do we implement and execute in a way that is going to work for that customer.

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And then how do we reinforce that behavior?

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Because we all you know we don't want to just be selling to people once that behavior, because we all you know we don't want to just be selling to people once you know the return on investment for repeat customers is much higher.

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The cost of having customers return is much lower than constantly going after new, new customers.

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And so how do we reinforce that behavior in a way that really works for them and gets them to come back again and again?

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I really love this concept of making it easy for people and facilitating, as you said.

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One expert recently pointed out to me that almost every company that is disruptive has been successful because they made things easy, they facilitated it, and I thought that was an excellent point, because I think of things like uber.

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They make it really easy, cars there before you even get outside and then you want to do it every day.

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But I'm curious on the motivation aspect of it.

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Is it possible for marketers to motivate people?

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Are there keys to doing that in the right way?

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What's the secret to really motivating people?

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That's a great question.

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So, yes, absolutely, and this is where I've spent the vast majority of my career in doing this.

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First of all, it's important to understand that almost everything we buy and I would argue, everything we buy but I'll give a little wiggle room Almost everything we buy is based on an emotional need, and that is the key to motivating people.

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So if you can understand again, why would somebody want to buy this, why does our target want this, why would they want to do this?

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And you can get to that emotional, because if you continue asking why, why, why, you will eventually get to an emotional need.

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So, for example, a new pair of sneakers.

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Well, why do they want those?

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Well, they're a runner, okay, why, as a runner, do they want those?

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Well, they're a runner, okay.

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Why, as a runner, do they want these?

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Well, they're looking for something to make their runs more enjoyable.

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Okay, well.

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Why?

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Well, because the shoes that they have now are not comfortable enough, they don't allow them to go long enough on their runs, and they really just want to enjoy the run and not have pain as they run.

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Okay, why is that important?

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Well, because they're a runner and they identify as someone who's a runner.

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So now we're getting into some emotional territory, because now we're talking about self identity, right, and just like I talked about my Chucks, part of that for me, you know, is nostalgia, part of that is self identity.

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It helps me define who I am, right, and so you can always get to an emotional need to fill.

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And I believe me, I have worked in every category, from dish soap to diamonds, and there is always an underlying emotional need.

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I will never forget a conversation I had with a brand manager in the dish soap category prior to doing some work with him, and he's like it's a drive-by category, nobody cares, there's no emotional connection at all, they just barely stop their car as they go by.

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And I said, okay, we're going to talk about this after this project.

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And what we found in this case was one of the emotional drivers of that was this need for mastery and this need to get it right the first time.

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These were busy people, oftentimes moms, who just would say look, I need this to work, I need this to work the first time.

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I don't have time to run the dishwasher again, I don't have time to do the dishes again.

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It's got to be done the first time Otherwise.

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Otherwise, my life gets chaotic and you think about that.

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So the reason why they were just driving by is because they were just buying the thing they bought last time.

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That worked good enough and they weren't willing to risk that something else would work as well or better, and so we had to do a lot of work around proof points and showing in displays and commercials and messaging this works and it will get it right the first time and that really made a big difference in that campaign.

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It's super interesting getting to the emotional need.

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I think that can motivate consumers, and it's also really interesting that it's for everything, it's not just for the things that you might immediately think about, and that makes a lot of sense.

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I'm curious does it also apply in B2B marketing?

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It does actually.

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Yeah, in B2B marketing I've done quite a bit of it myself, and there are similar principles in place.

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So the seven steps for influencing behavior without feeling gross.

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Actually, the cool thing about this is it works in every aspect of your life.

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If you're a parent and it's not your kids, if you think about your spouse, if you're thinking about your employees, this model works across all of those situations.

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It also just happens to work very well for consumers in this situation as well.

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But in B2B it's a similar thing.

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There's just a different frame around it, which is in this case we're talking about people who are business owners or business managers, and they have a similar set of needs that are often based in emotion.

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It's not to say that there aren't needs that are rational, that are transactional or that are based in real, tangible thinking.

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They are, and those are important too.

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But if you really want to motivate someone whether it's a B2B situation or a direct-to-consumer situation, whatever that may be it's a B2B situation or a direct-to-consumer situation, whatever that may be having that understanding of their emotional need as well also will motivate their behavior.

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So, again, if I'm someone who's managing an office, well, depending on what you're trying to sell me.

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There are certain things that I need my office to work and function well.

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I want to be seen as someone who's in charge and has mastery over everything people can trust, and if I'm buying the wrong products, if I'm making mistakes that way, that undermines that trust from my employees, right?

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So that's just one example that might be relevant to many people.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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I think you get to the same place, asking people why, in the B2B sales process, I want more people to buy my product?

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Why Because I want my business to grow?

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Why Because I see myself, I identify, as a successful founder and entrepreneur?

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Why Because that helps me achieve the goals of my life.

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You know, you know, I think you can get to that same same thing, and some people might argue to me that like, well, it doesn't really apply to, I don't know, accounting software, but I think it does.

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Yeah, I think.

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I think it actually does Like.

00:23:23.593 --> 00:23:28.769
It just depends on if you ask the right questions you know to get to it.

00:23:28.888 --> 00:23:32.153
So and if you have the patience, because sometimes it does take a little more effort than others.

00:23:32.153 --> 00:23:40.094
I mean, you know it's much easier to get to sort of the emotional needs when you're talking about, perhaps, cosmetics or apparel.

00:23:40.094 --> 00:23:53.855
When you're talking about things like dish soap or cleaning supplies it's a little more challenging, but because we're not really used to talking about things that way and so it can be a little harder to extract that from a consumer.

00:23:53.855 --> 00:24:01.898
But I would be hard pressed to tell you of a category that I've worked in where there is not an emotional need that people have.

00:24:01.898 --> 00:24:05.695
And another way to look at this is we all have aspirations.

00:24:05.695 --> 00:24:14.537
Some of those are big aspirations, some of those are small aspirations, but everything we buy is in the hopes of a better future.

00:24:14.537 --> 00:24:18.894
Now, that's a big statement, but it's one that I stand by.

00:24:19.736 --> 00:24:20.617
That makes a lot of sense.

00:24:20.617 --> 00:24:28.019
I'm going to link to your website so people can go and dig deeper on this and learn more about this.

00:24:28.019 --> 00:24:33.316
I think it's a fascinating thing for business leaders and marketers to dig in on.

00:24:33.316 --> 00:24:41.451
Is there anything else you'd like to share on this topic that I didn't ask that you think would be helpful for listeners to know?

00:24:41.785 --> 00:24:42.446
You know, I think.

00:24:42.446 --> 00:24:44.334
First of all, thank you for linking up.

00:24:44.334 --> 00:24:50.932
I appreciate that I am starting a newsletter in a few weeks, so that is something that people can sign up for.

00:24:50.932 --> 00:25:00.550
If you are someone who is curious about consumer behavior and really interested in what drives it, then you're my people, so you should sign up for that.

00:25:00.550 --> 00:25:06.834
It's only gonna be twice a month, so I'm not gonna bombard you with things and everything I send will be, I promise, interesting.

00:25:08.467 --> 00:25:30.997
But I think, too, another aspect of empathy that's really important, where you get benefits from, is around innovation, and innovation that really works for people is based in a place of empathy for their situation Again, like understanding their frustrations, their pain points, what they want, what their aspirations are.

00:25:30.997 --> 00:25:36.186
The better you do that, the more able you are to innovate in a way that's going to be effective.

00:25:36.186 --> 00:26:16.733
And Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, recently said and I'm paraphrasing, so I'm not going to get exactly right, but he said that the quality we all have that is the primary driver of innovation is empathy, and that's how he looks at it, and I think that's why Microsoft has been very successful recently in being able to kind of come back from being seen as sort of a brand to one that is more exciting and interesting, bringing new things to the world, and so I think that leadership and that ability to think about empathy as a fuel to innovation has really paid off.

00:26:18.257 --> 00:26:18.738
It's interesting.

00:26:18.738 --> 00:26:21.865
I wouldn't really think that that's the driver of innovation.

00:26:21.865 --> 00:26:25.233
If you asked me, I would not have gotten that question right prior to this episode.

00:26:25.233 --> 00:26:27.789
All right, we've all learned something today.

00:26:27.789 --> 00:26:29.557
Excellent, awesome.

00:26:29.557 --> 00:26:38.162
Well, thanks again for being with us today, sharing your stories and your insights, especially your insights on the power of empathy and marketing.

00:26:38.162 --> 00:26:38.962
We appreciate it.

00:26:38.962 --> 00:26:40.707
All right, thank you for having me, eric.