ON INFLUENCE

Book OnePersonal Influence

On Influence

Book OnePersonal Influence

Guide to using this bookForewordThinking, Fast & SlowThe rules of thumb that influence usThe quantified selfThe influence of the herdSummaryContributors

03040515 25354446

Contents

2

Guide to using this book

Contributors—Nick Southgate Contributing Editor

Dominic Payling Editor

Head Office—MSLGROUP 55 Whitfield StreetLondon W1T 4AH

+44 (0)20 3219 8700info@mslgroup.comwww.mslgroup.co.uk

Each chapter in the book is presented in the same way.

There are two written sections. The first, ‘What’s the story?’, explains how and why the featured theory of influence came to be important. It captures the key ideas and introduces the prominent thinkers and writers in the area.

The second applies this by highlighting key practical insights, and is titled ‘Insight on influence’.

Each chapter ends with the four icons shown on the left.

‘Think’ gives a handful of one-line takeaways for applying the ideas. It works as a mini-checklist to make sure you ask the right questions when implementing the insights. ‘Read’ provides one or two book or article references for those who want to find out more.

‘Surf’ presents key online resources for the topic or thinker.

‘Watch’ gives a link to online videos of talks, lectures or documentaries about the topic. Collectively, we hope they make it easy to comprehend, apply and immerse yourself in each theory of influence.

Watch

Think

Surf

Read

3

If you’re not seeking to influence the way people think, feel or behave you simply don’t need us or this book. But we believe that influence is at the heart of what you do, every day. So we’ve put influence at the heart of what we do at MSLGROUP.

It’s why we’ve created this book – the first in an ongoing series ‘On Influence’ – to act as a starting point for better understanding how we can influence people. It gathers together theories and existing practices in a precise and accessible manner so you can implement them in your campaigns and communications.

This book and subsequent ones in the series are necessary because influence is a misunderstood, complex, dynamic and nuanced field of expertise. There is no single theory that can capture everything important there is to understand about influencing human beings.

That’s why we’ve looked at every theory of influence we can find. Each is insightful and perceptive in its own way, though not one of them is complete or definitive. There is no easy way to turn any single theoretical insight into a communications silver bullet.

Influence is not a dark art, it’s a fundamentally human one; it exists all around us every day in everything we do. It is important for the development of individuals, communities and societies. It’s about movements, networks and relationships, change and progress. It’s not a one-way process; it ebbs and flows in increasingly complex and unexpected ways between people, times and places.

We think influence is fascinating. We know it is important. We hope you enjoy our first book on the subject and find it useful.

Foreword

4

Thinking, Fast & Slow

Chapter 1

5

Chapter 1

Thinking, Fast

6

Thinking, Slow

7

Daniel Kahneman is the acknowledged godfather of Behavioural Economics. With his partner Amos Tversky he authored several of the most important papers in this area of study now widely known as Behavioural Economics. His status was given the ultimate accolade in 2002 when he received a Nobel Prize for his work (Tversky died in 1996 before the award was made). Every leading university in the world now runs courses on the area and Behavioural Economists, including Kahneman, advise governments and businesses on how to influence and shape the behaviour of citizens and customers.

Kahneman & Tversky’s work focuses on how actual influences on behaviour compare with the influences economists predict people should respond to when making decisions. The economists’ view is straightforward and common sense. Every person works out his or her preferences independently of each other based on what is best for him or her. However, Kahneman & Tversky showed that the ‘working out’ that really influences our behaviour doesn’t conform to logical and rational models of behaviour.

Chapter 1

What’s the story?

8

Their first work looked at loss. Consider this instinctive paradox: who is happier, someone with a fortune of £500 that has just doubled to £1,000, or someone with a fortune of £20,000 that has halved to £10,000?

The human answer is the first is happier. They are a winner. However, the economic answer is the second person. They are, after all, ten times richer than the other person despite their losses.

Kahneman & Tversky dubbed this loss aversion. People are influenced by a loss far more than the absolute reality of their economic wealth. Losing money can still upset the day of a millionaire. Further, they observed, people respond about twice as hard to losses as to gains. Roughly speaking, we’d need to find £10 to ‘balance off’ the loss of £5.

The greater motivation of a sense of loss or missing an opportunity is behind a venerable campaign such as American Express’ ‘Don’t Leave Home Without It’. It is also why many successful promotions emphasise wasted money or missed economies rather than savings or gains: the idea of losing or wasting money is more motivating to us than the idea of gaining it (e.g. ‘Every year you lose £200 in wasted energy bills through poor insulation’ works better than ‘Save £200 on your energy bills by installing insulation’).

9

To describe the psychology underlying this and the influences behind many of the decisions we make many times every single day of our lives, Kahneman uses an elegant metaphor – ‘Fast’ versus ‘Slow’ Thinking.

Slow thinking is the thinking we optimistically imagine we use all the time to make decisions (just as economists imagine we do). It is deliberate, conscious, calculating, mathematical and rational. What is more, it is hard work and it is slow. Although we can and do think like this, we don’t think like it very often. Such thinking is restricted in its influence over our lives.

Fast thinking is the far more influential mode. It is automatic, only slightly conscious, or completely unconscious, associative and intuitive. It is effortless and it is fast. This is how we think when we tackle otherwise complex tasks like driving, typing and swimming.

Fast thinking is also the way we screen information in the world so we only think about what’s important to us. Fast thinking tells us a red sign means ‘Stop’ on a road or ‘Sale’ in a shop before we read the words ‘Stop’ or ‘Sale’.

Chapter 1

What’s the story?

10

Our preference for ‘easy’ fast thinking is behind the ‘$300 Million Button’ story originally blogged on www.uie.com. An online retailer required people to register before a purchase. This requirement – and the anticipation of the effortful slow thinking involved – caused a significant number of people to abandon their basket. To prevent this, the site instead changed the button from ‘register’ to ‘continue’. The process then asked for delivery address, payment details and, finally, if people wanted to save these. This aligned with people’s expectations and kept them in fast thinking mode. It also, in effect, got them to register. In the first year the decrease in abandoned baskets increased revenue by $300 million, simply by changing a button. Brands can influence people by doing the slow thinking for them. Promotions like Sainsbury’s ‘Feed Your Family for a Fiver’ and M&S’s ‘Dine in for £10’ work because they take the hard thinking out of getting to a desired outcome, be it feeding the whole family on a budget or treating yourself to a nice dinner without breaking the bank.

11

Most influence occurs automatically. Consider how little you think about the can of Heinz baked beans you pick from the supermarket shelf. Hardly a life or death situation certainly. Now consider how often you find yourself at a journey’s end having driven there and wondering how you did it. How many life or death decisions did you take in that process – quite unconsciously. Now ask yourself how your communication can land successfully if most of the influencing is exerted before your audience really starts to think about something.

Communications are most influential when acting on the fast thinking where decision making happens without people paying much (or any) attention to it.

Chapter 1

Insight on influence

12

What influences people here without them really thinking about it?

What fast and automatic thinking takes place before people start reasoning and deliberating? Does this automatic decision work in your favour or against you?

How could people make this decision purely automatically?

Think

Thinking, Fast and Slow (Penguin Books, 2011)

Kahneman’s intellectually rigorous but highly accessible account of his lifetime’s work from the early studies that founded Behavioural Economics, through discussions of when the influences on ‘expert’ decision making are real, to his recent work on how memory influences us to make decisions.

Read

SurfRead Kahneman’s autobiographical essay written at the time of receiving his Nobel Prize in 2002 here:www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/kahneman-bio.htmlRead his Nobel lecture on the same site (or watch the video of the same speech). www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/kahnemann-lecture.pdf

WatchThere are many Kahneman videos to watch. In this one from November 2011 he explains his core ideas to Google. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CjVQJdIrDJ0&feature=youtu.be

13

14

The rules of thumb that influence us

Chapter 2

15

The rules of thumb that influence us

Chapter 2

16

17

Gerd Gigerenzer poses a simple question about what influences people most. On the one hand, is it their ability to understand the situation and work out what to do? After all, the world around us influences us all the time by making us respond to it. Or, as Gigerenzer’s work suggests, the far greater influence on our behaviour is a series of rules we follow – rules he calls heuristics. These are often unspoken rules we may even be unaware we know, but we use them to make rapid decisions every day.

The Recognition Heuristic is a classic example of a simple heuristic influencing our thinking while also being proof of the maxim that ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’.

Working with Dan Goldstein, Gigerenzer asks people to predict the next winner of Wimbledon. People who know little about tennis have no option but to use the Recognition Heuristic. They name the only current tennis player they know. Consequently they name the most famous, who is likely to be the world’s number 1, and, therefore, very likely to win Wimbledon. In contrast, people who consider themselves informed about tennis stop and think and try to pick a winner. This means they have more choices and tend away from the obvious. As a result, it is the uninformed (who default to the Recognition Heuristic) who do better at predicting the winner. The simple heuristic is the better influence on our behaviour than the complex

Chapter 2

What’s the story?

18

processing of knowledge. This heuristic has also been tested on stock markets. German hausfrauen out-pick professional stockbrokers simply by picking companies they know: a basket of well-known companies is indeed a solid portfolio. It is also a heuristic that brands will recognise. There is an inherent advantage to being the number 1 brand.

Gigerenzer would argue that heuristics are a response to the single greatest influence on our day-to-day lives: uncertainty. We may think that the decisions we make can be thought about as a series of probabilities (e.g. Will it rain today? Will I like this product? Can I trust this company?). Yet, even with simple decisions (like whether to take an umbrella), available facts (the weather forecast) leave us uncertain and not sure what to do. Hence we adopt a heuristic (always take an umbrella or never take an umbrella or only take an umbrella when the forecast says so) and live with the consequences. Even if the heuristic results in sub-optimal choices (we get wet some days, we carry an umbrella we didn’t need on others), Gigerenzer argues it is not an ‘irrational’ or ‘bad’ decision. Over the long term it’s simplicity and average success that matter.

19

Brands have long worked to establish such rules of thumb to influence the use of their products. Alka Seltzer established ‘Plink, Plink, Fizz’ that makes it a rule to use two tablets. In the 1980s Shredded Wheat challenged the UK’s children ‘I bet you can’t eat THREE Shredded Wheat’. Public information campaigns have also used such devices repeatedly, e.g. the UK Motorcycle Safety Campaign ‘Think Once, Think Twice, Think Bike’ or the New Zealand campaign to persuade motorway drivers to ‘Merge Like a Zip’ to improve both driving manners, traffic flow and safety on New Zealand’s roads.

The emergence of new technologies means we are searching for new heuristics. The etiquette and behaviours around social and digital media require good heuristics – which tweets to read first, which sites to pay attention to, which voices to hear and opinions to believe. People will continue to use simple heuristics (like the Recognition Heuristic, hence the domination of Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, eBay, etc.) but more specific and developed heuristics will also emerge. Brands can be part of influencing this and, by doing so, influencing consumers’ behaviour.

Chapter 2

What’s the story?

20

Gigerenzer himself believes that education about how heuristics work and how we use them is possible and desirable. What is more, it is clear both private and public sector organisations have a role to play in achieving this and much to benefit from doing it well.

The area he is most passionate about is risk literacy. He believes that people can learn to deal with risk better and that naïve and unenlightened thinking about risk is a grave cost to individuals and a burden on society. Better risk education would have implications for public policy (such as people saving for their pensions and looking after their health) but also for corporations and brands whose influence is lessened and reputations damaged by misconstrued perceptions of risks about the safety and desirability of their products.

21

We adopt and adapt rules of thumb and heuristics to make simple and reliable sense of the world. The availability of these rules influences how we decide and act. Some rules are hard-wired whilst others have far higher cultural and social elements, such as choosing the second cheapest wine on a wine list. These rules are open to influence from social forces, including corporations and brands.

Politicians are past masters of providing rules to simplify complex issues, for example George Osborne’s rule of thumb that fairness demands that benefits should not rise faster than wages.

The fluidity of heuristics creates an ongoing flow of changing and shifting influence and an opportunity for brands and organisations to create new rules, try to downplay old ones and shape existing ones.

Chapter 2

Insight on influence

22

What’s the rule that people use to solve this problem without thinking?

What are the rules that shape this category? Do they help or hinder my issue or brand?

What new rules could reshape the way people make this decision? How could these be communicated?

Think

Gigerenzer has published several good, popular books. The latest is Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions (Viking, 2014). It addresses head-on how we educate and influence people to make different (and better) decisions.

Read

SurfFull details of Gigerenzer’s research can be found at his Max Planck Institute webpage (www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/gerd-gigerenzer) as well as links to the two centres he directs: the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition and the Harding Center for Risk Literacy.

WatchReuters Insider has a two-part interview with Gigerenzer talking about his new work on risk literacy (registration required to watch).

Or

View Gigerenzer’s talk at TEDxZurich. www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4op2WNc1e4

23

24

The quantifiedself

Chapter 3

25

Eating

Mood

Work

33%

Fruit & vegetables

Carbohydrates

Protein

Fats & sugars

Dairy

15% 12%

33%

7%

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

(9–10)

(5–6)(0–4)

(7–8)

Chapter 3

The quantified self

26

Sleep

Exercise

5.34mi40hours worked per week 44:27

27:51

46:10

45:20

Distance Time

Time

Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun

11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

3.57mi

4.94mi

5.44mi

Sleep

Awake

Deep sleep

27

Our knowledge of ourselves should be one of the greatest influences on what we do. Our needs and desires direct our decisions. Our memories tell us what has made us happy (or sad) in the past. Yet, in the phrase of Timothy Wilson, Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, we are ‘strangers to ourselves’. Memory proves an unreliable guide to what we do and don’t enjoy. We are prone, over time, to forget bad things and look back with rose-tinted glasses. Even when presented with evidence that lottery winners tend to be unhappy (as nothing ever matches the thrill of their win), people will continue to play the lottery. We’re hard-wired to take our memories and personal insights seriously, even when we know they can be flawed.

It is not just our memories that can deceive us. No one is unfamiliar with the persuasive immediacy of thirst or hunger. Yet although our appetites influence our desires they can also lead us to consume more than we need, more often than we need it. Nature’s feedback mechanisms can lead us to conflate one need with another, so excitement or anxiety might make us feel hungry for calories we just don’t need. Likewise, in our digital world the unremitting and inexhaustible traffic of email and communications over-stimulates and exhausts our biological cycles of activity and recovery.

Chapter 3

What’s the story?

28

These all trigger appetites and desires that spur us on far more effectively than they provide direction for where to go in the world or what to do.

There is a fast growing movement of people who are looking to discover themselves more objectively and liberate themselves from the potential vagaries of our innate feedback mechanisms. This is the Quantified Self movement (usually known as QS). These are people who look to objectively measure and quantify aspects of their lives that they want to change.

Typical starting points are eating, mood, happiness, work, exercise and sleep. When an individual measures these they can start to see themselves as they are, not as they think they might be. The method can be as simple as a diary or a measurement. For example, studies have shown that weighing oneself every day is highly effective in managing weight. We might tell ourselves that those extra portions can be countered easily and comfort ourselves that – as far as our rose-tinted memories tell us – our clothes fit just the same. However, the scales do not lie and spot weight gain far quicker, allowing for swifter and simpler lifestyle corrections.

29

Smartphones have made more complex and technically sophisticated QS-inspired apps mainstream. Smartphones can provide hundreds of data points through the day that would be impractical with non-automated methods.

Samsung, for example, supply pedometer apps as standard in their Galaxy phones, and they have recently run a push campaign with BUPA to get people to look at their health more objectively. An app like Sleepio (Sleepio.com) uses a smartphone to measure sleep patterns and help people learn to sleep better. It does this by measuring the user’s movements during sleep which can be analysed to measure both the amount of time slept and the quality of that sleep (i.e. how restless it is). Advice is given to users by a friendly doctor avatar who compares their sleep patterns with norms and the user’s expectations. Sleepio has undergone clinical trials that prove it to be effective, and it is marketed via Boots as well as via app stores. Apps like Headspace (headspace.com) use technology to bring the benefits of mindfulness and meditation to a wider audience and promote the benefits of learnt self-awareness.

The high-profile launch, and subsequent withdrawal, of Nike’s FuelBand technology shows that there is latent demand for QS technologies, but that even the biggest brands haven’t yet made them intuitive or reliable enough to become mainstream.

Chapter 3

What’s the story?

30

However, with many more projects being backed by tech giants like Google and start-ups like tictrac.com (whose sites elegantly combine all of a user’s digital footprint into a personal dashboard), the rise of QS into the mainstream and its growing influence are inevitable. Many commentators point to the new Apple watch as an important milestone in solving these technological issues. QS is approaching an influence tipping point where the technology will become seamless enough to be invisible.

The next leap is for people to begin benefiting from measuring themselves without consciously choosing to adopt a measurement regime. Imagine analysis that uses your email routines to plot your activity and mood or supermarkets that track the calories being consumed by your household or a bank account that learnt and could help shape your spending and saving habits. Google already processes information into more useful forms, for example searching websites to post core information on the search page (such as the opening hours of a gallery). It is a small step to start doing the same with information that reflects other behaviours and moods.

The future is one where brands are primarily concerned not with how consumers see their brand, but how well the brand lets the consumer know themselves.

31

Our innate ability to know ourselves – and influence our own behaviour – can be significantly enhanced by technologies that help us measure, and analyse what we do so we can see ourselves as we really are. This enhanced knowledge is more powerfully influential on an individual than memory or desires. In the past, brands and organisations acquired large amounts of data to better understand their consumers. The future of influence will be brands that use this data to help consumers better understand themselves. This will enrich the individual and, in doing so, make them more valuable customers. For example, gyms could use analysis of exercise patterns to help members fit more exercise into their routines. The result is that members get fitter and increase their attendance, loyalty and overall value.

Chapter 3

Insight on influence

32

Knowing yourself objectively exerts more powerful influence than knowing yourself subjectively.

What does your brand or organisation already measure about your customers’ lives that could be easily shared to help them see their own behaviour more clearly?

What could your brand or organisation start to measure and share for customers that could create mutually beneficial insights into people’s behaviour?

Think

To understand the problems the QS movement looks to solve, read Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves (Harvard University Press, 2002).

Willpower: Why Self-Control is the Secret to Success by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney (Penguin, 2012) has useful background theory on how better self-knowledge helps drive better decisions, meaning that people can influence their own behaviour more successfully.

Read

SurfThe online hub of the QS community is found at: www.quantifiedself.com

WatchSalman Khan is a high-profile advocate of the power of self-assessment and self-measurement to liberate and democratise education. Watch his TED Talk about how the Khan Academy is changing education this way. www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education

33

34

The influenceof the herd

Chapter 4

35

The influence of the herd

Chapter 4

36

37

Social Psychology is well established and its results well known in the academic community. It is clear that human beings are not just individual agents but social agents. We are not a solitary species like sharks. We are a social species like our close relatives the great apes. We are ourselves when we are part of the herd. Yet, we also have a negative view of the herd. It is an insult to be told we are sheep-like in our opinions and bovine in our tastes.

The picture is not helped by the most famous Social Psychology experiments.

Solomon Asch conducted seminal studies of small group influence in the 1950s. He planted five stooges in groups of six people. The stooges conspired to give the wrong answer to a simple task, for example matching the length of lines on a diagram. Remarkably the sixth person, the subject of the experiment, and the only one not aware of its nature, would prefer to agree with their mistaken peers 75% of the time – even when they knew the answer was wrong. Fitting in by being wrong appeared to trump standing out by being right.

On a larger scale, the Stanford Prison Experiment (www.prisonexp.org) conducted by Philip G. Zimbardo is notorious for the way that students assigned to be prison guards became sadistic

Chapter 4

What’s the story?

38

and students assigned to be prisoners became depressed and highly stressed. The influence of taking on a role was so disturbing that the ‘Big Brother’-like experiment was aborted less than halfway through. Such social effects remind us of mobs, riots, and what Charles Mackay, in the title of his 1841 book, called ‘The Madness of Crowds’.

Yet there are many positive aspects to Social Psychology. Our ability to share, imitate and copy is one of the strongest ways that we influence each other. Indeed, mimicry is so important to socialisation and learning that as early as seven hours after birth babies are able to copy their parents’ movements and facial expressions. Likewise, when we watch a Mexican wave move around a stadium we see the effortlessness with which we can participate in a group, influencing each other simply by copying.

The champion of the positive side of the herd and the pioneer in applying these insights to marketing and communications is Mark Earls. His book Herd brought the insights of group behaviour to a marketing industry typically preoccupied with influencing the individual.

39

Various brands have succeeded in amplifying their influence by making their use socially visible. The white headphones supplied with iPods helped spread the now ubiquitous device in its early days (the visibility of the earphones was even picked up in Apple’s billboards). Magners is more visible because it is served over ice, and therefore the customer is given the bottle to pour from. An older example is the lime in the neck of a bottle of Sol, making the beer stand out in even the most crowded bar.

However, the influences do not have to be visible. The choice of baby names is something every parent will tell you they try to make independently. Indeed, when they hear a friend has chosen the same name they might abandon previous choices. Yet baby name trends clearly and distinctly emerge with waves and rashes of Rubys, Olivers or Graces, for example. We are influenced by what others are doing even when we think we aren’t.

Earls has developed a four-part model to show when social influence is most powerful. Social influence is strongest when we believe there are experts to copy (e.g. the choice of a musical instrument) or when many people are making the same choices (e.g. fashion). There are certain choices where we do assert ourselves individually

Chapter 4

What’s the story?

40

to some degree (e.g. music we listen to) or when it’s hard to copy peers (e.g. underarm deodorant is a truly independent choice).

Lastly, though, there are choices where we find it neither easy nor possible to understand the many available options nor can we effectively observe other people’s choices to guide our own.Good examples of these choices are insurance, energy and mobile telephony markets. In all of these a wide range of prices and products presented in hard-to-compare formats and tariffs is combined with a lack of any useful social feedback (we can see which mobile device people have, but rarely ever know if they get good value from the contract they are on). As a consequence, even though nearly all consumers claim to be looking for value for money or the lowest possible price, the vast majority of people are paying more than they need for products that do not fit their needs. Solutions as simple as comparing an individual’s use to the average can help reintroduce the missing social influence and guide better decisions.

41

Influencing the group is one of the best ways to influence the individual. This is contrary to the common-sense view that suggests that groups are merely aggregates of the choices individuals within them make. Social norms, compliance and ‘outsourcing’ of decision making effort mean that people often choose with the group rather than for themselves.

For example, US fundamentalist Christians have been hostile to scientific arguments about man-made climate change. However, reframing the issue as one of good stewardship of God’s creation for future generations, which fits with the groups’ beliefs, has turned them into some of the fastest growing and most vociferous campaigners on climate change issues. This was done by influencing the group, not by persuading individuals to change their views.

Chapter 4

Insight on influence

42

How do I influence the group first to get to the individual second?

What groups does this person belong to that form the context of the decision and behaviour you are trying to influence?

Understand what groups value and how influence travels through that group.

Think

Herd by Mark Earls (Wiley, 2009). Still the best introduction to the insights and influences of groups for the general marketer and communicator.

Also read the follow-up, I’ll Have What She’s Having with co-authors Alex Bentley and Michael O’Brien (MIT, 2011), for full detail of the baby names example.

Read

SurfEarls blogs regularly and insightfully at:www.herd.typepad.com

An interesting article looking at an evolutionary perspective on the herd and potential social costs. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/darwin-eternity/201306/human-herding-how-people- are-guppies

WatchA very practical application of group theory is vaccines which are only effective when enough people use them, giving a disease no place to go. Adam Finn’s TED Talk explains this succinctly and why social communication is therefore essential to social protection. www.youtube.com/watch?v=55wOg9fe_Ms

43

There are two assets any business should protect assiduously – its reputation and its relationships. But in an online world, mediated by Google, we all have less direct influence over the multitude of conversations that can affect our reputation and our relationships.

More than ever, business success depends on influencing conversations and sustaining reputation across many channels through continuous insight, ideas and action. We may not be able to control the story but we can influence the way it is told.

In this, Book One of MSLGROUP’s series ‘On Influence’, we have discussed four theories of personal influence with strong bodies of supporting evidence that have immediate practical applications.

Chapter 1, Thinking, Fast & Slow, showed that to land our communications we must tap into the automatic human decision making process. The second chapter, on Gerd Gigerenzer, provided an explanation of the rules of thumb that people use to help them make decisions and the opportunity that these present to us as communicators for adaptation and modification to effect behaviour change. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that the third chapter on the Quantified Self reflects a growing appreciation amongst individuals that the very techniques they use to make decisions are less than perfect, and may be too subjective.

MSLGROUP On Influence – Summary

44

Hence their desire to get to the objective data that underpin their decisions – their Quantified Self. The final chapter on the Influence of the Herd begins to build a bridge from the individual to the group or community that will be covered in Book Two of the MSLGROUP ‘On Influence’ series. It explained why it is unwise to see group behaviour as the aggregate of many individual choices and why it is useful to influence the group to influence the individual rather than the other way round.

So, influence is complicated. It demands more than a simple theory of how influence works in the world. The old dictum to be single-minded appears merely simple-minded when influence is driven in so many ways from so many directions.

What we need instead is a wide understanding of theories of influence and a clear and pragmatic idea of how they can be applied. That is the role of the MSLGROUP ‘On Influence’ series.

45

Nick SouthgateContributing Editor

Nick Southgate is a leading practitioner in the application of behavioural sciences to marketing and communications. He has worked with MSLGROUP on projects for Nestlé, Coca-Cola, P&G, Lego, Netflix and Danone on topics ranging from storytelling to corporate reputation.

Nick became the IPA’s Behavioural Economics Consultant in 2009, helping give evidence to the House of Lords inquiry on Behaviour Change policy and running workshops in conjunction with the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team. He has served as a judge on the IPA Effectiveness Awards and has been a judge on the MRS Excellence Awards since 2004. Nick has been a guest lecturer on this topic at Cambridge Judge Business School, Brighton Business School and Warwick Business School. He also teaches at London’s The School of Life.

Contributors

46

Dominic PaylingEditor

Dominic Payling is Planning Director for MSLGROUP. He believes that without trust a business cannot grow and without reputation a business cannot be trusted. Without influence neither can be achieved.

Dominic has 20 years’ experience in both consultancy and in-house positions. He has worked client and agency side in B2B, retail and consumer markets. Some of his past and present clients include Amex, Audi, Coca-Cola, HSBC, Novartis, P&G, Philips, Rolex, Tata, Virgin and Vodafone.

Dominic and Nick have worked closely together for several years.

47

A second book in the MSLGROUP ‘On Influence’ series will follow shortly. It will focus on Networks and Social Influence. Topics covered will include Rumour Theory, so-called ‘Persuasive Technologies’ and what became of the Tipping Point, amongst other things.

As we said in the foreword, if you’re not seeking to influence the way people think, feel or behave, you simply don’t need us or the MSLGROUP ‘On Influence’ series. But if you are seeking to exert influence in some way then we hope these books act as inspiration and guidance to support you in your role and communications challenges and goals.

DesignMSLGROUPwww.mslgroup.co.uk

PrinterGavin Martin Colournet

© 2014 MSLGROUP

About Book Two

48

£5.99 MSLGROUP.CO.UK