My dad is 80, and has lived a very full and successful life as a scientist and University Lecturer. But like many kids, until recently I had not had much conversation with my dad about his hopes and dreams for his life when he was growing up. It is funny how we assume our parents spring fully grown and are happy with their lot in life.
Last week while we were waiting for dad to head in for another round of heart surgery, we spent a few quiet hours in conversation. This time we talked about what he had dreamed he would be when he grew up – a journalist it turns out. And why he didn’t follow his dream, and moved into science instead. We talked about what his experience of school was like – not particularly a great experience thanks to some very abusive Christian Brothers. We also talked about his relationships – what worked and what didn’t.
Dad is a brilliant story teller, and many was the moment when I had tears in my eyes from laughing at tales of Claude the lab lion who used to tackle dad around the ankles as he walked past; and his university pranks that these days would put him behind bars. I also learnt of the untold story of how my grandfather, who was head of one of the RAAF Airforce bases, thought they were sinking a midget sub off the coast of NSW during the war – only to discover they had sunk a very surprised whale.
But the questions were not all one way. The biggest question he asked was if we had our time over again, knowing what we know now, what job would we do now? What career would we follow? What would we do differently?
These are brilliant questions, and ones we forget to ask ourselves as we travel through life. Life passes so swiftly – in a blink of an eye it is gone. We need to make sure that we live every moment to the maximum – that we are following the paths of our heart.
Dad is due for another round of more complex heart surgery in 5 weeks time and you can be sure that there will be many more questions and quiet discussions in the interim. I am truly valuing his insights and wisdom (and humour).
So what would you answer? Would you choose the same job? What would you do differently if you had another go at life? What would it take for you to do this now?
Staying with our theme of no blood and gore road safety campaigns, Vic Roads has just released a series of ads with the tagline “Don’t be a Dickhead”. The tagline has copped a fair amount of flak, but the ads themselves are also gaining few friends.
Ad lines include “If you don’t wear your seatsbelt we will turn off Facebook” shown with a man smashing a computer with a hammer. “Every time you talk on your mobile phone while driving, a redhead gets his wings”,and this one.
Yes, these ads get a laugh (when they are not offending people), but will they change driving behaviour – my guess is they won’t. There is not enough social influence in there to dramatically change how people think or act.
In all countries, people are grappling with how to bring down the road toll. Most countries go for the “blood and gore” shock ads, but they are now losing their shock value. People gloss over them and no longer see them.
What is being found to be more effective, are ads that challenge the norm that it is OK to speed (or do anti-social behaviour). That it isn’t cool – and cool people don’t do it.
My favourite Aussie example comes from NSW, where teen hoons were a real problem. The RTA heard the anti-gore message and adopted a very different approach.
So how has it gone since it was released in June 2007?According to the RTA
53 per cent of the general population and 53 per cent of young males (17-25 years) said that they would be more likely to comment on someone’s driving as a result of seeing the ‘Pinkie’ campaign.
64 per cent of the general population, and 63 per cent of young male drivers, believed the campaign to have some effect in encouraging young male drivers to obey the speed limit.
74 per cent of the general population and 75 per cent of young males revealed strong recognition of the anti-speeding message, aimed at making speeding socially unacceptable and at undermining the perceived pay off for speeding.
60 per cent of the general population and 59 per cent of young males recognised the meaning behind the message, that speeding is not cool, does not impress, or is stupid.
According to the NSW Minister for Roads
“The 2008 fatality rate of 5.7 deaths per 100,000 population is the lowest since records began in 1908 and the NSW fatality rate is now the lowest amongst all the Australian States. ” However 2009 saw an increase of 86 deaths on the NSW roads.
Unfortunately there have been no publicly reported stats on the incidence of the target group (male drivers 18-25) involved in accidents and traffic infringements, to work out the true results of the campaign.
Personally, I love the campaign and would like to see it trialled in other locations (with proper statistical studies to track outcomes). What do you think?
There has been an increasing trend in the past 12 months of businesses using contact forms on websites to “share information” to the website owner. It seems like many people new to business are not getting the message about Spam – and what constitutes spam communications.
Spam is not just about selling viagra or phishing scams. Many small or new businesses can unwittingly find themselves caught up spamming people, without realising it. The funniest one I received was from a Brisbane company selling double opt in mailing lists. Now given I did not consent to receiving any of their marketing material I had to wonder about their understanding of what they were selling.
So … if you are in Australia, before you hit the send button on your next email read over the information contained on the ACMA government website about Spam. If you are in the USA – then the Can – Spam Act is for you.
No matter where you are the basics are still the same:
Use accurate from addresses & clear subject lines
Explain how people can unsubscribe from your mailings (and honor their requests promptly)
Include your valid postal address in all emails
Only send emails to companies with their explicit consent (and no, grabbing their business card at a networking event doesn’t cut it)
There are gray areas relating to inferred consent – and you would want a pretty good lawyer to be able to argue them. So when in doubt, don’t use contact forms or email addresses on websites to contact people and tout your wares. In the words of the ACMA – you cannot infer someone’s consent just because you believe your product or service will benefit them.
It’s election year in Australia and the first of the political debates on Health Reform just aired. One of the TV stations (channel 9) uses “the worm” to track real time audience response to comments during the debate. It is a fascinating insight into people’s minds. Channel 9 had 90 allegedly undecided voters hold keypads while they watched the debate and give feedback on whether they approved or disapproved of what was being said. Individual scores were aggregated and then shown as a continuous “worm” to the TV audience at home. Individual audience members cannot see the worm and where it is heading, so the results are not influenced by peer group pressure.
Now there has been a lot of debate in the past about the algorithm that drives the worm and whether or not people really were uncommitted voters. Putting that aside and assuming Channel 9 learned from their debacle a few years back, the worm still gives some insight into how a cross section of people think.
So what did the worm respond to today? The clearest responses were when Tony Abbott (Opposition Leader) took the chance to put the boot into Kevin Rudd (Prime Minister).
Repeated negative comments about “can’t trust the parliament to install Pink Batts” and school hall rorts gathered more and more extreme negative responses. Each time Mr Abbott made the same negative comments, his approval scores plunged further. People are turned off by negativity and repeated negativity only serves to embed the feeling of being turned off.
People were also turned off by attempts to get a laugh at the expense of the other person – not everyone has the same sense of humour.
The worm jumped when concrete, practical information was presented from either side. People want specific details – they don’t want fluff.
The worm also took a major jump into the stratosphere when the Prime Minister stated that people really didn’t care who was to blame – they just wanted the health problem fixed.
What can business learn from the running of the worm today? Simple really:
Be positive. If you don’t have something good to say with someone – shut up.
Be specific. Give your customers details and facts, not platitudes.
Don’t blame. Commit to fixing any issues you have without finding someone to blame.
If you get a chance to watch the debate, I certainly recommend it – not necessarily for what the politicians said, but to observe what people responded to.
One of my favourite debates over the years has been with people who with hand over their heart tell me how to improve my decision making – or to put it another way, how to become more rational and logical and therefore make more effective decisions.
What neuro-psychologists and other researchers of the mind are finding is that no decision is purely rational – that there is always an aspect of irrationality or emotion that colours our decisions. That’s the reason why smart people make some really dumb choices. Yes, we can attempt to reduce the variables and reduce the impact of emotions on our decisions, but at our core there will always be a little piece of humanness that can derail our best intentions.
Dan spoke at TED about some of his findings and his talk is both funny and enlightening. If you want to learn how to get people to choose an option in a subscription form, or why certain people are chosen for dates, these are all topics that he covers in a brilliant way in his talk.
Not all geeks are boring people who live in cubicles communicating with pixels. The team from Neurofocus have put together this brilliant rap to help explain the concept of neuromarketing. Warning … it’s like peanut butter. It sticks and you will find yourself humming the lead line hours later.
After you have done, you may want to check out the rest of the videos by the Neurofocus team – lots of great food for thought about ways to boost your marketing through the power of the brain.
If you have ever managed people, you know it is rarely “one big thing” that results in someone being sacked. Rather it is the accumulation of “little things” – the cross word here, the missed result there that build up over time. They build and build until finally the person gets enough negative strikes against them that the boss decides to sack them.
So too with business. It is rarely the big things that lose you customers, rather it is the little things, the petty annoyances that build up over time until one day your customer sacks you and moves on. The problem is that customers rarely complain about the little things.
One of my colleagues mentioned in his blog post four little fees of less than $5 each that had been levied when he had his car serviced. It was enough to annoy him and trigger him to change mechanics. The servicing was fine – it was the little things that prompted change.
I have had my own share of little experiences. I have a dentist who 4 months ago changed the girl who issues the orthodontic accounts. So far not one account we have received from her has been correct. Each month she gets the name wrong, forgets to include the name of the dentist or the treatment number. Each month the mistake is different. The orthodontic work is fine, but the irritation of each month having to hassle to get accounts printed with correct details on them is enough that as soon as the braces come off my daughter we will be changing dentists. Like I say … little things.
I have heard of customers changing businesses because front displays are too wide so prams can’t get past them easily. Other people have left service businesses because calls were not returned within a reasonable time, or because customer toilets were not regularly checked throughout the day. People hate dirty floors in shops. They complain to their friends when they can’t hear the girl in the drive-through … but they never complain to management.
But it is not just in the physical world. People get irritated by spelling and grammatical errors in documents and websites. Slow loading sites make them click away. If they can’t easily find what they are looking for on a site, they leave. Website studies by neuroscientists suggest this is because it generates stress and increases concentration demands on people. Whatever the reason – people leave.
Humans are funny things. They can deal with big things, but it is the little things that are the straws that break the camel’s back. It is the little things that change behaviour.
What are the small things in your business that are costing you customers? Take stock today and fix just one small thing.
This is a truly inspirational and amazing story about a vision impaired, intellectually impaired young man, in a wheelchair – who ended up a one of the lead trumpet players in a marching band. The story of Patrick Henry Hughes makes you take a whole new look at gifts, the power of music and the wonderful love of a Dad for his son.
I really loved the quote – “the music of opportunity and the sound of potential”.
For years I have been nagging the kids to “turn the lights off, you are wasting power”. “Don’t swing on the fridge door – you are letting the cold air out” “Turn the TV off” nag nag nag. And my results – nothing short of spectacularly zero. The lights stay on, the TV plays to itself and the fridge constantly has to get re-chilled.
You see, it’s one of those human nature traits – you can tell someone that something is true, but unless they can see something happening with their own eyes they doubt. So, I tried showing them the electricity bills. But that is a lag indicator – it is a performance measure that shows past results and so therefore has little effect on behaviour.
So yesterday I had the Climate Smart people install a real time energy monitor. It shows in real time how much electricity you are using, how much it costs and how much carbon you are putting into the atmosphere. The kids were enthralled. They wandered around the house turning stuff on and off – trying to find the appliances that used the most, through the least. They opened the fridge door to see what happened. We did the sums to work out how much each thing cost each year to run – and I then equated it to i-pods, i-tunes vouchers and other items of kids currency.
And then … they started wandering around turning things off. Last night was the first time that the light-bulb went off – literally.
I will work on reinforcing the message, but it goes to show the power of real time performance measures to change behaviour. People see the results they are getting and move to change their behaviour.
People like to watch – how can you work with this understanding? What real time measures can you put into your workplace?
sheds light on a number of examples where our brain gets in the way of our making good logical decisions.It is a must read for any manager, business owner or just anyone interested in why they make the decisions they do.
