Nudging: How to influence the behavior of your customers | Dirkje van der Ven, Shift | S02E04 The Better Different | We Kill Mediocrity

In marketing there are a lot of psychological tactics you can use to influence the behavior of your customers. Whether you’re Booking.com trying to scare you’re visitor into booking a hotel room or the government trying to get your people to eat healthier, there are a lot of ways to influence people on an unconscious level. In this episode of The Better Different Podcast, we talk to Dirkje van der Ven about a lot of those marketing tactics to change the behavior of your customers.

Podcast summary:
-What is nudging and how can we use it to influence behaviour?
-How duct-tape can change our behavior!
-How our brains work when it comes to making decisions
-We learn how people’s actions are unconscious 95% of the time
-What psychological techniques a marketer should know when creating a campaign?
-Discuss a lot of psychological techniques like the Low-Ball, Scarcity, foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face, social proof, authority and many many more
-We learn what the intention-behavior technique is
-How Booking.com scares you into buying a hotel room
-Cognitive Dissonance and how to deal with it
-That our brain is divided into two systems and how that helps us from not getting punched in the face
-How to recognize barriers that your customers may have
-How to deal with the ethical side of nudging

Thank you so much for listening! If you like it, please help us by giving us 5-star reviews on iTunes. Any suggestions, feedback or Star Wars jokes? Let me know on Twitter @Dennisvdlo or send an e-mail to Dennis@thebetterdifferent.com. To learn more about Joris van der Waart and CM.com, you can visit their website www.cm.com.

What do you learn in this episode?

Dirkje is the co-owner of Shift Behavioral Change, a company that specializes in helping different branches of government and companies to influence the way that their target audience act. We start our conversation the conversation about one of the most hottest words in marketing psychology: Nudging. It means you make small changes to the context of the situation that the consumer is in to steer their behavior in a certain direction.

We talk about how they did that quite literally on one of the biggest round-a-bouts of The Netherlands in Nijmegen. The way they used just a little bit of duct tape to change the behavior of cyclists makes a great story.

Marketing Psychology: Using system 1

After that we get a little more technical on how the brain works and how 95% of our actions and decisions are the result of our unconscious 'system 1’. It is our automatic behavior what makes us so vulnerable to these marketing psychology tactics, which we go into in-dept. Dirkje describes the tricks a car salesmen use like the low-balling technique, which makes people say yes to a higher price than they actually bargained for. After that about techniques like scarcity, social proof, foor-in-the-door, door-in-the-face, social proof and many more.

Intention-Behavior Gap

We also touch on something called the Intention-Behavior gap. It means that we will not actually do what we say we will do, although we think we absolutely the intention of doing so. It is the big reason why many products fail, in spite of positive market research where test subjects say they will absolutely buy something. This contains a big lesson for marketers when they build a campaign or do a new product launch.

Of course there’s a lot to say about the ethical side of influencing the behavior of consumers, especially on a subconscious level. Dirkje gives us some great tips on how to deal with these issues, so us marketers can still sleep without feeling guilty.

For more information on Dirkje van der Ven, just clink on the links below...

Shift Behavior Change Website: shiftgedrag.nl
Dirkje van der Ven LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dirkjevanderven/
The Duct Tape Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ziqlGgc8_k