Curio #1

Happy new year! Here's this year's first 🧠🤖👩‍🔬💡

Jan 3

Happy Monday morning!

Today’s Curio includes:

🧠 Our beliefs are like possessions. [Consumer Insight]
🤖 AI is helping us be nicer to each other. [Digital Trend]
👩‍🔬 Sales pros want to be involved in content planning. [Market Research]
💡 Nike & Dick’s integrate their loyalty programs. [Case Study]

🧠 Our most cherished possessions.

Everyone has a favourite side of the bed.

And it’s not something we easily give up - even when we’re sleeping in a hotel.

We’re especially reluctant to give up our beliefs when they’re challenged or discredited completely.

Beliefs really do be like that tho.

And according to psychologist Daniel Katz, this reluctance serves a purpose.

Four, actually:

Knowledge: Provides us with a sense of stability, meaning and helps us make sense of a complex world.
Value expression: Helps us communicate our values and goals to influence others who share our values.
Ego defence: Makes us feel safe, protected, and confident that good things will happen to us and bad things will not.
Adjustment: Promotes decisions that increase pleasure and avoid pain.

Let’s start with Knowledge-based beliefs. (I’ll cover the rest in the coming weeks).

Knowing what people already believe to be true is the first step in changing their minds.

What happens when we’re answering a question that challenges our current belief system? Or making an important decision for which we’ll be held accountable?

We become picky.

We choose the information that confirms what we already know and reject everything that needs more thinking.

Psychologists Webster and Kruglanski called it ‘seizing’ and ‘freezing’.

We seize on readily available information to get to a decision. (You believe that Volvo makes safe car)

And then freeze on that information as long as possible. (You are convinced that all cars made by Volvo are the safest)

You can thaw people out of their ‘seize and freeze’ by using factual and logical arguments that are more likely to appeal to their knowledge-based beliefs.

And once you believe that Volvo makes the safest cars, it wouldn’t take much to convince you that all Volvos are also the fastest.

A study found that a persuasive argument that successfully changed a single specific belief someone held about a product also changed other related beliefs, even when the other benefits were not mentioned in the argument.

This means that next time you’re working with someone who is under a lot of time pressure, and making a decision that will impact others in their organisation, focus on facts and provide details about the specific benefits you know they already value.

The same study also showed that persuasive arguments about product benefits written horizontally (each idea presented next to the other) stick harder and are more resistant to counter-persuasion.

Throwing new specs into the mix will largely go ignored.

In case you missed…

🤖 Could algorithms help us be nicer to each other?

The answer is yes.

Apps like OurFamilyWizard, a scheduling and communication tool for divorced and co-parenting couples, use sentiment analysis to help parents be on their best behaviour.

And it’s being court-mandated in 75 countries.

AI mediators are already helping thousands of families stay out of the court system and helping parents build better relationships with their children.

And that’s not all.

Algorithms are also making us lazy.

Take Gmail’s Smart Reply. A feature that suggests how to respond as you’re typing the email. (Outlook has a similar feature, just not as good.)

A study done in 2019 found that:

[The] language people used with Smart Reply skewed toward the positive. People were more likely to roll with a positive suggestion than a negative one—participants also often found themselves in a situation where they wanted to disagree, but were only offered expressions of agreement. The effect is to make a conversation go faster and more smoothly.

The suggestions made by the algorithm also made people in the conversation feel better about one another.

At least until they were told that an AI drafted the replies.

👩‍🔬 This is where sales and marketing collaborations need the most improvement.

Here’s the link to the research.

Nike integrated its loyalty program with Dick’s e-commerce site.

Recently, Kohl’s & Sephora and Target & Ulta have made similar agreements.

The obvious benefit: Combined CRM strengthens both brands, and their customers end up with fewer apps on their phones.

The not-so-obvious benefit: Loyalty programs = First-party data.

Partnerships like this are one way a brand can get access to retail data.

And since retargeting costs are constantly on the rise (and the impact of performance marketing for brands is anecdotal at best), sharing purchase history and product engagement data can help both the brand and the retailer produce better creatives and drive better marketing ROI.

Have a great week!

Aliyar

Curio