How to decode consumer behaviour and boost your marketing impact

Ben Walker  00:04
Hello everybody, and welcome to the CIM marketing podcast, and today we've got a fascinating discussion ahead of us with how customer interactions are changing and the powerful role of psychology in shaping these new dynamics, and crucially, what it means for marketers. And joining us today are Becky Sims, who is CEO of reflect digital and Dr Tom Bowden Green, who is senior lecturer in marketing and behavioural science at Bristol Business School. Becky Tom, how

Becky Simms  00:37
are you very good? Thank you very good indeed.

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  00:41
Excellent. Yeah. Thank you very much for inviting me onto the podcast. I'm really looking forward to this discussion.

Ben Walker  00:46
Ben, that's great. I would kick off with you then. Tom, what are the biggest shifts in consumer behaviour we're seeing today?

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  00:52
Well, obviously, there's a lot of research around how people are engaging with AI, and that's a that's a big shift in behaviour that consumers are engaging with AI and technology more broadly, there are some specific papers out there, really niche papers. There's one from the University of New South Wales, for example, looking at AI influences and how their use of colour makes a difference. There's research looking at whether virtual influencers drive purchase intention. That's from Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. There's some really specific papers out there, but I would actually turn the question on its head and actually say the fact that we are seeing these shifts is really important. That the data is there through behavioural science, but also so through the digital marketing techniques that we use today, we have data that shows us that these changes are taking place that shows how people are reacting to our campaigns, and, more generally, how they're behaving when they're, you know, on social media or on search engines, as Becky's going to be talking about. You know, this data is there, whereas in the old days, if you're driving past a billboard, there was no way of a marketer knowing who'd seen that and who then bought a product on the back of that. So the data is there, which makes a big difference.

Ben Walker  02:02
Can you see the changes in yourself when you're buying depending on what colour the marketing is? Becky Sims. Can you see the change in your customers when you're

Becky Simms  02:10
using and I think that's the thing. Data is such an important part of today, but also it's knowing what data to look at, isn't it? And I think Tom will know that well, that you could just get lost in data. We've been doing a lot of research. And at the recent CIM southeast event that Tom and I were speaking at, I was sharing some of the search pulse research that we've done looking at the changing face of how people turn to different platforms for search. So my talk was provocatively called, have we stopped googling? Spoiler alert, we haven't. We haven't stopped googling. It's still huge. But actually, people under 44 are using five or more platforms to search now, and platforms that you traditionally wouldn't necessarily call a search platform. We're searching when we don't know we're searching. I think even actually, if you think of behaviour with WhatsApp, for example, lots of people are in WhatsApp communities, and you turn to those sometimes and go and put a message in and say, can anyone recommend a whatever it might be, but actually, that might be the start of your search journey that you've asked this community of people that could be a small group of friends, or it could be, I mean, I'm in business communities with hundreds of people on WhatsApp, that then you'll get lots of responses, and then you're off looking at those things, and then you're into a journey of validation and looking into them more and touching other platforms. But actually, our search journey can start in so many different places. It's not just Google anymore.

Ben Walker  03:31
It's hard to nail down then, isn't it? If our search journey is different, we haven't quite stopped Googling, or we haven't stopped Googling, you say, but we behave in different ways. We're starting to ask questions of technology, as if they're people. We're asking questions of our friends in digital forums, which then lead to other people, almost by proxy, going and doing searches for us and finding stuff. How the hell as marketers, do we deal with that? Are the big changes much more disparate way of consumer search than we had three or four years ago, isn't it?

Becky Simms  04:00
It really is, and it does also then mean that people need to think about showing up in so many different places, but you also still need to balance that with your budget and your resources available, because I think there can be this overwhelmed feeling of I actually now need to have my brand everywhere, but you might not have the budget to be everywhere, in which case, that's where it comes back to research and really trying to understand your audience and understand where they are and try and make the best decisions. Because if you dilute your budget to be everywhere, then you'll be hardly visible anywhere, because you'll just have the smallest amount of impacts in each place. So yeah, I think people need to be able to step back from feeling overwhelmed by it and then look at, well, how can I go and put some investment behind some research to make some good, informed decisions that then mean I can really motor forward with my strategy and be in the most impactful places, and over time, grow my influence in other places when budget and resources allow.

Ben Walker  04:56
It's interesting to Tom bad and green that Becky mentioned there the sort of. A lot of a search for goods or services comes often in social groups, WhatsApp, because in China, the leading messaging group is we chat, which already has a large consumer element to it. You know, there's a frictionless, or near frictionless customer experience in app. And you know, that seems to me, the things a lot of marketers are looking for now is to try and get as close to that sort of friction. Sort of frictionless experience as possible. We may never be up to the WeChat standards, but what can we do in the modern world or the way people are behaving to get nearer that?

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  05:31
I think it depends what you mean by friction. You know, do you mean fast and quick and maybe automatic? You know, almost automatic anyway, not with a lot of thought, in which case you know that doesn't represent every purchase decision. Because you may be familiar with this idea that there are two ways of thinking, system one, system two. Daniel Kahneman wrote about this, lots of other theories related to this that explain similar things, elaboration, likelihood model, heuristic, systematic model, but they all basically say that sometimes we make quick decisions, sometimes we make slow decisions with careful interrogation. And in fact, when you think about it, there are some purchases with that we are always going to stop and think carefully about money. You know, the amount of money we spend might come into playing a role there. So you know, if you buying a house, you're not going to make an automatic decision. There's probably going to be a probably going to be a lot of friction involved in buying a house, asking lots of questions, you know, taking lots of time and effort. But it's actually not necessarily about money. It's actually probably more about what I would call and what academics call involvement. How involved are you in that purchase? So even clothing, for example, which can be quite low cost these days, is something that probably most of us have a lot of involvement with because we don't want to wear because we don't want to wear something that doesn't suit us. So as a marketer, you need to kind of trying to work out, are you selling a product which is likely to generate high involvement with the consumer or low involvement, in which case is a frictionless environment really going to be suitable for that? Or actually, in some cases, you want to generate friction if you want the experience to be memorable. For example, there's a theory called elaborative interrogation, which is where actually you want people to ask questions and interrogate what they're being given, because it then becomes more memorable. And sometimes marketers might use techniques such as asking questions to make people stop and think about the information they're being given. And that can cause cognitive dissonance, which is when you have competing thoughts in your mind. So sometimes, there are times when you really want people to stop and think carefully about what they're being told. Because, you know, it's a high involvement product, and it cause related marketing. The same thing, if you're promoting a charity, for example, you want people to stop and think about the issue that you're donating towards, because that's important to triggering that donation.

Ben Walker  07:37
It's interesting, isn't it? Becky. Sometimes there's a case for increasing friction 100%

Becky Simms  07:43
and if Tom hadn't said it, I was going to dive in and say it myself, because, yeah, especially in that more early marketing phase as well. Because I always say to people we're working with that actually that friction is the moment to create the memory, and you want your ad to be memorable, especially if it's not something they're likely to click on and buy to immediately. We want to make sure that we can create a memory. So you need them to feel something. So you've got to have that moment for them to think about what they've seen. So I couldn't agree more

Ben Walker  08:11
part of this is validation, isn't it, using the process to validate our purchase? And you know, Tom's outlined a really interesting couple of use cases where that's happening through a sort of deliberately increased friction. How, in other ways, are social media platforms and generative AI say, changing how people validate information and perhaps validate their purchase decisions. So

Becky Simms  08:34
we did as part of the search pulse research, we kind of broke it down off of the back of so. And this was talking to 6000 people of the British public over the last nine months, and we found that there were kind of four human drivers that are sat behind why people search so there's this kind of taste tuning piece, which is where they're trying to discover content that already fits their personal tastes. They're trying to match their aesthetic. It's all about their aspirational identity, and this is normally on social platforms. So they're they're kind of looking, but not necessarily specifically searching all the time. Sometimes they're just browsing and enjoying their social but it might spark the start of a journey. Then you've got this crowdsourcing piece that, once you've got an idea, you might want to go and find out more about what others are saying. You might want to find what the trends are. You want to be part of a wider conversation. It's not so much about it matching your conversation. It's more kind of challenging some of those thoughts as well. And and going out to a wider pool of people, then you've got this fact finding piece where I've got something really specific I want to know, and I'm going to now go and look for the facts and look for the information, and I it's really important that that's accurate, comprehensive and unbiased to help me in my quest for whatever I'm looking for. And then there's the final piece. Is that actually, we just have some habit driven people that aren't even really thinking about any of that, and they're so automatic in I go to Google and I look for it. And I move on, and they're trying to shortcut everything, and it's probably a more automatic purchase than the others that would need you to think about it a little bit more. What I loved about

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  10:09
that report Becky is how you sort of overlaid emotional and rational with internal and external, I think, as well, which is obviously, you know, two different theories are system one, system two there, but there's also self determination theory, intrinsic versus extrinsic, to identify times when people do stop and think carefully about things and when other times when they don't. Just in that particular area of digital marketing and in search, I thought it was really interesting research that you'd produce there that's

Becky Simms  10:36
really good to hear. And you know, our behavioural team will be very pleased to hear you say that, so they'll they'll be happy to listen back to this but, but I think you do have to think about it in all different ways. And I think there's so many different biases affecting as we make these decisions and and sometimes we are out there just looking for it, to to search, to match up with what we already think, whereas other times we are out there wanting to be challenged and wanting to find new information, and it's that for a marketer is also important to understand, because then it brings into the thought of, well, who is the best messenger to have across these channels, and how do I best get this message out there? Because it's not always brand first, and I think we've got so much choice now as marketers of how we present our messages in the world that having some research or some theories to put behind it helps kind of rationalise making those decisions. Is

Ben Walker  11:25
it the same people behaving differently at different times, or different types of buyers behaving similarly, but in different groups? I would suspect

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  11:36
that very often it's people acting differently at different moments, depending on what the product is that they're searching for, depending on what stage in the search they're at, what stage of the funnel. And you know, there's a lot of talk about whether a funnel still exists, but I would say, well, consumers still start at the awareness stage and get to the conversion stage. Okay, there is maybe a messy middle in the middle, but you're still talking about a funnel. So it probably depends at what point in the purchase journey that consumers are, and what what brand or product. So I mentioned involvement earlier on, for example, and I think that probably plays a role in whether that person is going to do a particular type of search. How much information do they already have? How much do they want to have? How close to making a purchase are they in that? I mean, you can get down to the nitty gritty of what specific search phrases they're using, what keywords they're using in their search, for example, which would be probably a signal of what stage of the funnel they're at. If you're saying, Where can I buy this product at the cheapest price, then clearly you're about to convert, hopefully. So lots of different variables that would play into, you know, which of those four categories you might fit into at that particular moment, I would say I don't know if Becky agrees with that.

Becky Simms  12:39
I definitely do. You might find pockets of people that are always the same way, but I think I would say most people will move between all of them. I think like an example where you might dive straight into crowdsourcing. I think I use this in my talk. Your washing machines just broken at home and you need a new one. Well, you're not scrolling through Instagram hoping that someone's going to inspire you about a washing machine. Obviously, as soon as you start searching for a washing machine, Instagram picks up and is going to help along that journey. But you're off straight away trying to find out what's the best washing machine for me, what's got the whatever features it is that you're looking for. So you're in that crowdsourcing space, probably, and trying to see what other people say about it. Then you're into fact finding, and then you're probably habit driven well off to Google type the name of the one I want cheapest price, as some just said, and buy it. So it's very different then than if I went aspirationally looking for a holiday that's probably happening over a long period of time across my social and again, I use this example, I'm constantly being presented with the next beautiful beach that I might like to go and visit and building up that picture until maybe I'm at the point I'm ready to buy, then I'm going to start to get more serious and actually look in detail. But that taste tuning has been a huge piece of that going on in the background until I'm ready for it. Does

Ben Walker  13:53
that make it more difficult? You can't just segment the world into sort of, you know, four categories of buyer that each person is a Jekyll and Hyde, a Jekyll hire jack and a Jill, depending on what time they're buying it, how they're buying it and what they're buying

Becky Simms  14:09
Yeah, and I think that's where we need to think more across, thinking about behaviours and not the individuals. At the time you need to make sure you have content ready. That's happening always on for people that are taste tuning, you then need to have content that's happening always on, that's around crowdsourcing and having a point of view in your industry and putting that information out there regularly for people to find, etc. Then you've always got to have your fact finding content and your more detailed, interesting content there that can help them make their decision and gives them all the rational information they might be looking for at that point, and then you need to be showing up in the right places that if they're just habit driven, you've got to be there for those queries on Google that they're ready to buy. So you need to know how the person might move through that. But it's got to try and have all those different types of content ready. And we shared a model as well to talk about kind. Of the mix between written content and multimedia content, having videos and podcasts and webinars and different things people can go and look at and watch and engage in. Because people aren't just looking for the blue link on Google that gives them the text they can read anymore. They want a lot more than that, and they want to get to know your brand.

Ben Walker  15:17
Becky, I should say to the audience, appeared at Henley business school event recently, and Becky, you came with this very memorable phrase which speaks to some of what you've just been saying, which is design for behaviour, not for algorithms. And that's quite an important lesson for marketers, isn't it?

Becky Simms  15:34
Yeah. And you know what I've been saying for years, that actually the trick is that you do design for humans, for the behaviour of humans, because if you go back to the very early days of how Google was working, we could absolutely trick the system. I mean, early days of SEO, you had people writing white text on white backgrounds, putting just whatever their keyword is, and writing it as many times as they could, and it would trick Google. And that's before Google started to really work out what their algorithm needed to do. And actually what it needed to do was represent what human brains would do and how we look for information, and what things we're weighing up, which is where it's evolved into having their kind of expertise, experience authoritativeness and trust that they look for. So actually, the algorithm is trying to mimic what humans want, because the search engines, and I imagine this is the same for the llms, albeit it's all very new still, and we're not really quite under the hood enough yet to work that all out, but they're trying to make sure that they can present the best information that us as humans want to find. So therefore they have to think like humans. So actually you almost need to forget what they need and just go back to thinking about humans, and then you'll be pleasing all of the different platforms, albeit there's probably a bit of technical stuff in there that you've got to make sure your website and your content set up in a way that it can be read, etc. But the main focus needs to be, am I creating the content in the format that's needed and placing it in the place that it needs to be from the right point of view and the right messenger to attract my audience and to give them what that is they're looking for.

Ben Walker  17:05
Dr Tom balling green, design your stuff for humans, not for machines.

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  17:09
It's a point that I regularly remind my students that, yes, there are algorithms that change all the time that will determine whether your content gets shown to a large audience to a certain extent. And you know, there's all sorts of experts online that will tell you, should you include a photo? Yes or No? Should you include emojis, yes or no? Should you have links, yes or no? And it's changing all the time, but at the end of the day, a real person needs to see and engage with that content, and even if they do click like or they comment on it or they share it, you've still got to think about whether your main call to action is going to resonate with them. So if you're selling a product, will they still buy that product? They might click, like or share. They might find, I don't know, the advert really funny, or your photo really well taken, but will that affect their brand perception, and therefore, later down the line, change whether they're going to actually purchase the product? So psychologically, you've got to think around how will a real person eventually engage with this? I use LinkedIn quite a lot, as I'm sure many of your listeners do too, and I often think quite carefully about the impression I'm trying to give on LinkedIn, for example. And personally, I try to post content which is quite useful to other people, but I often see, you know, posts and videos and photos that are very, very popular, but actually don't necessarily portray the person who's taken that video or photo in the best light. They've just got a lot of attention and a lot of interaction, but at the end of the day, you're going to form an impression of that person based on whatever it is that they've posted. So think about that carefully, and obviously from a brand perspective too, but I'm thinking maybe, personally, on LinkedIn,

Ben Walker  18:43
this is a really important dichotomy to be aware of, isn't it? It's possible to like something. It's possible for something to grab you, but then you don't buy it. That's very possible. It's a real unpleasant risk for a lot of marketing is that people like it, or at least their attention is grabbed by it, they don't buy it. There's two separate parts of the science there. Absolutely.

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  19:05
So the book I've just written with my friend Luan is called Marketing and psychology, and it goes through all the different considerations that will lead to someone eventually, hopefully converting, making a sale, maybe even becoming loyal and coming back. And yeah, there were so many different stages. Attention and awareness is sort of top of funnel. And whether you believe in the funnel still or not, at the beginning of the journey, you need to make people aware that your brand exists. And there are all sorts of things you can do, you know, audio, visual, memory, etc, around that. But as you work through you need to think about, okay, when it gets to the point of sale, how will they assess value? How will they reflect on previous experiences with this brand. Now there's all sorts of things that might affect them further down the funnel, so just grabbing their attention is probably not going to be enough in business, people often talk about turnover and profit, turnover being vanity, and profit being insanity, and I often think the same with certainly social media, but online marketing generally is just getting a lot of attention is vanity. Getting sales at the bottom of the funnel is sanity, really, that's how I might phrase it to students that I'm teaching.

Ben Walker  20:06
How can we stay sane in our marketing? Becky Sims,

Becky Simms  20:09
it's such a good point, isn't it? It's also going to get harder and harder where we've got things like llms or the AI overviews on Google, people are getting answers without coming actually onto our website. Might be our content that's helping provide the answer, but we're not getting them to our website. So I think then you have to work even harder to think, How can I get them to my website? How can I provide enough information that they're interested, but then they need to carry on through because once you get them onto your website, it's trying to find some kind of hook that you can get them to properly engage with you, whether that's getting them to follow you on social media so you've got a chance to build a relationship, or getting them to give you their email address so that you can then follow up with them with communications. But all of that needs to then be as tailored as possible, and not a blanket approach that everyone's getting all the same thing, obviously bit harder on social is a bit more blanket, but thinking about the different channels, and how maybe your Instagram audience might be different to your ex audience or your Facebook audience and and not just putting the same thing on all of them, because actually, that's probably different groups of people there for a different reason. I think brands the big thing is having that data, their own data, being able to be connected to people themselves is going to become more and more important, and then being able to build up that dialogue and making sure that's not just sales based, but it's actually building a relationship, so that then when the people are ready to buy, you're the obvious choice to come back to and buy from. So it's but I suppose there's a fine line there as well of making sure, as long as you're being kind of educational and friendly and building a relationship, that you also make sure they're still aware they can buy whatever it is that you sell, but not overdoing it, that they're like, this is too salesy. You're gone. So it's, it's hard work being a marketer. It

Ben Walker  21:54
is hard work being a marketer, it's hard work being a psychologist. Because what you're trying to do when you're blending the two disciplines, really, is you're trying to sort of tweak people's cognitive levers. You're trying to personalise the product so they think it's all about them, and they want to buy something that which works for them, meets their tastes, and so on and so forth. And then the danger is that someone looks from outside and say, well, you're being manipulative, you're being invasive. But how do you strike that balance that you're personalising. You're making it about the customer, but they don't perceive it as manipulative and invasive.

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  22:27
I think manipulative is obviously quite a loaded word, and generally is perceived as a negative thing to do. In reality, there are so many variables I think that would have an effect on a consumer making a decision that it would be, I would imagine, pretty much impossible for a master to control every single variable. Now you can't change the weather, for example, and yet, there is research showing that the weather affects consumer behaviour. So whether you can truly manipulate every variable that is going to change the consumer's view of your product or service, I think is tricky. What I would say is, thinking of this first of all, from a consumer point of view, is it better or worse to have adverts, for example, shown to you, which are relevant to you? Personally, I would prefer to see adverts that are relevant to me and therefore that have been tailored to me and are designed to engage with me. I think that's personally my choice that would be better. And then, from a marketing perspective, actually, there's an opportunity to make marketing far more efficient by helping people to make a decision which they were perhaps already going to make. Maybe you've got a product which is attractive to them, but in the old days, you would have wasted a lot of money showing the advert to people that were never going to buy it and it wasn't relevant to and even today, if I'm watching TV, I see adverts for things that I'm never, ever going to buy. I'm just not the right demographic for it. And it's probably better to have, you know, specific, micro, targeted adverts which are relevant to me. You know, someone might claim that's manipulating me by understanding my, you know, my my traits and my behaviours, and then appealing to those. But actually, you know, if, in the long run, it saves money in marketing, then that's probably better for the business and probably better for society, rather than wasting lots of money on doing things which are

Ben Walker  24:07
ineffective. One man's manipulative is another man's efficient and targeted. Becky Simms.

Becky Simms  24:13
I'd agree, I would I completely agree that I would much rather see marketing that suits me. But I think the other really exciting thing about the world we're in today, and when we think about social proof is that actually bad businesses and bad products, they might do a really good job of maybe doing a bit of the manipulative stuff, but they can't hang around for long, because you sell a Duff product to someone, they very quickly then go and tell the rest of the world about it that no, this looks really good On the ad, but actually it's not very good, and then suddenly it doesn't work. So actually, I think businesses are so much more accountable now for having a good product, and I think it is efficient marketing, and it does make sense to create the choice architecture, to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy your products and to use what we know about them where we can. And I think is okay to do again. We're not forcing them to buy. We're just creating the environment for them to buy. But on the other hand, they will know that over time, if there's lots of good reviews, they're hopefully buying a good, strong product, and it's within their wheelhouse that they can go and do all this research and make sure what they're buying feels like it is the right thing. So yeah, I do think we're in a better world that actually, hopefully we do have better products out there than than we used to. It was easier to get away back in the day.

Ben Walker  25:29
Let's call it tailoring. How much, how much of this tailoring requires human skills. I don't mind saying Becky before the show, I researched you and I found a clip of you on Sky Television. It was not to do with this. It was a was about a work programme your agency had run about four day week. But the first thing I noticed from the tape was a video of your agency, and it was full of lots of people, because you're a digital marketer who works digital first, but you are surrounded and work with lots and lots of human beings. What's the role that human marketers bring that can't be done from AI as an automation?

Becky Simms  26:06
It's a good question. It's one we keep talking about in the agency. So reflect digital is part of a group that I own called the human first collective, and we are we're human first in everything we do, including things like a four day week, and one of our positioning statements is around using technology and AI to make space for human brilliance, then we've been kind of debating what we mean by human brilliance, and I was put on the spot the other day to say what I thought that was. So I still don't think I've got the eloquent answer to this, but I think it's interesting. You can use AI and AI can come up with a statement that might move you and might make you feel something and is brilliant. But AI, doesn't actually know that it's moved you or that it's brilliant. It's just using its intelligence to go this. Feels like it might do this, but actually we as humans, we're the ones that have that empathy and have that understanding. So I think we're trying to use it like for us, it's people are the heartbeat of our business and and I can't imagine a world without that, but we are embracing technology and AI and using it as much as we can, but using making space in our brains where we're not stuck doing the administrative tasks and the real nitty gritty detail of updating spreadsheets, etc, to make space for that more feeling and that more connection piece and actually being able to analyse things at a level that an AI won't be able to replicate that human feeling.

Ben Walker  27:29
Do you think automation will ever be able to replicate that intuition and empathy that Becky's talking about? Tom? Will we be in a world someday soon, or someday in our lifetimes, where Becky's agency, which is staffed by lots of lovely people, will no longer be staffed by lots of lovely people.

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  27:47
I should caveat my response by saying, I'm not an AI researcher, you know. So technology. I'm really interested in the psychology around how we interact with technology and how we can use technology to understand psychology. But, yeah, my response really is not specifically around the technology itself, but what I would say, just from observation of the way things are progressing, is that we're at quite early days. I would have thought in terms of the AI that's available to us. I don't know how long we've had chat GPT, but it doesn't feel much longer than a couple of years or so. I don't think we had it during the covid pandemic, for example. So I can see a time when we will get to a point where artificial intelligence is much cleverer than it is today. But if you just bear in mind that there are inside each of our brains around 100 billion neurons. That's brain cells, and that generates around 1000 trillion processes or connections. I think it's going to be a while before a computer of some kind is able to not just do those processes for one person. Maybe, let's say you could take a scan of my brain and recreate my brain, but to do that for everyone in the world just seems a long, long way away. So I think perhaps we will get to a point one day when AI can do some, or a lot of the things that humans do. But we're, I think we're a long way away from that. There's a really good documentary on the BBC iPlayer at the moment, by Jim al Khalili, all about the brain. There was one about 10 years ago now. I think David Eagleman did one. I think that's probably also on BBC as well. So if you're really interested in how brains work, and understanding where we are in terms of understanding the connections and things there's there's lots out there. So yeah, my answer is that perhaps one day, but I think it's probably

Ben Walker  29:31
a little while away. Has technology enhanced our creativity at all? Becky, has it helped us become more creative in some ways, even if not in the core points of empathy and intuition,

Becky Simms  29:42
I would say I think it has because I think it creates space to be creative. Because actually, in a in a busy working day when you're running from meeting to meeting and and there's so much administrative tasks that have to go into bit working in the world of marketing to be able to. Take some of that away, or to be able to, even today, I've got my chat GPT trained on all of the latest research we've been doing and latest articles I've written. So actually getting something like some podcast questions, you can feed it in, and you can say of what I've been working on recently, give me some talking points. And actually, I can absolutely see my brain in there, in what it's done. It's not given me someone else's answers, but it's helped me to bring that clarity of thought out that actually, when, again, you're running around, busy meeting to meeting, that sometimes you're like, Oh, I can't get that to the front of my mind. So I think 100% it's helped me to be more creative, personally, and I think our agency, the team, are using it a lot. We did an AI day recently, actually, we had a trainer come in and show us some tools that maybe some of the team might have been played with before, some hadn't. But we had a day where we set a task in the afternoon, once everyone had played with all these different tools, where they basically, we'd ask them what they liked about popular culture and whether they were into gardening, etc, and we'd grouped everyone off into things that they were interested in. So I was in the music group, and we had to create part of a digital magazine, and just to have the creativity of being able to bounce off of AI, but to be able to create something like then and there in the moment that would have otherwise either not been my skill set, personally, and same for people in the room, or you'd have to have waited, it would have taken hours to create, to create that and then go, oh no, do it a bit differently, or to become that art director or creative director. I mean, it's incredible the technology that we have at our fingertips. I think it's just about using it ethically and using it in the right way. And actually, just rolling back to the CIM conference, there was a really great question from someone in the audience who was a young person that's just getting into the industry, and he said the worry for him and his generation and those younger than him is just that they haven't got the battle scars we've all got of having done it all manually and not had technology to help, and his worry was not ever learning how to do some of this stuff himself, and whether that's going to hold that generation back. And I do think it's something we need to think about and be really responsible about. And I know we're working hard with more junior people in our team to make sure they know how to do the graft, but then when to be able to use AI to support them, but still understanding what that looks like to do it properly and do it themselves without technology.

Ben Walker  32:28
It's a good colleague Tom, but it's not a master, and it may never be a master.

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  32:34
I wouldn't go as far to say as it may never be a master, and I can see a time when it's a lot more advanced than it is. Now, probably in my lifetime, it will be a lot more advanced than it is. Now, we'll probably look back to Oh, do you remember when we just used to have to prompt engineer chat GPT to get the right response? And I can see it becoming a lot more advanced. So, yeah, I wouldn't go that far, but I just think there's when you consider how complex the human brain is. I think it's going to be a long time, probably. So whether that means five years, 10 years, 50 years, I couldn't say for sure. There is actually, if you're really interested in how far advanced AI is and is going to get, there's a really good article on the BBC website by palab Ghosh talking about the debate within academic circles around whether AI will ever become sentient or conscious, and how close to that we are, and if it will ever get to that point. So if you are interested, I'd recommend that, you know, all of this is out there for public consumption, but I can just see that it's going to be probably, you know, quite a lot of work before anyone can actually map every single human brain to the extent that we understand the human brain is is wired.

Ben Walker  33:43
But nevertheless, despite the fact that that still remains in the future, change is happening, and change is happening at a huge rate. There's the proliferation of tools we've spoken about. There's this very noticeable and discernible change in consumer behaviour and how they're purchasing and shopping online. And then there's the rampant advance of AI. So it's a colleague, not yet a master, given the massive changes Becky Sims and Tom what are your top tips for markets? What are your three key takeaways for marketers looking to survive and thrive in this transforming landscape?

Becky Simms  34:21
So I would say, stay curious about behaviour. I think putting that first and foremost of understanding your audience. And I would always say, get someone to help you that knows how to do that, because I think it's one thing to just pop a survey out and try and use the data, but Tom will know this from his psychology and behavioural background, that to do that properly takes some skill. So I think making sure that someone helps you to unpick that, because that will then give you the basis of everything else you do. So then it's about building a strategy to to work with what you understand is your baseline, but also being fair to your budget, because I do think there's a lot of push on market. Officers at the moment around budgets, so that research will give you the ability to advise internally and give your board direction as well. Because again, I think there's a lot of push internally. You hear of we need to be everywhere, and we want to be here, here and here, but we don't have the budget. Well, actually, if you can put some data behind that to say, Well, no, this is why we've chosen to go in these directions, and this is what we're doing to think about our LLM strategy, as well as Google and social and everything else, then at least you've got the kind of research behind it, rather than we're just guessing and hoping and yeah, just stay human, because the machines aren't going to take over everything. We need to. We need to understand where it fits in. But remember, you're selling to humans.

Dr Tom Bowden-Green  35:42
I would totally agree that there's a great opportunity to learn a lot more about human behaviour. There are probably 1000s of papers out there, academic papers, research papers out there, if not millions. So it can seem quite daunting to really try to understand this in some depth. And I'm on a mission to try and help people to understand this really I mentioned earlier, there's a book, marketing and psychology, which is about to be released. There's a website, marketing and psychology.com, there's a newsletter. So that's one starting point. And what we try to do in this book, Luanne and I, is try to explain around 400 theories, but break it down and understand how you might apply those theories in different places, at different points in the funnel, and really with practical examples. So we want to try and make it easier. There are lots of other great books out there, and we signpost people to those on our website, and there's podcasts out there. So my recommendation would just be to engage so that when you get this data back from your digital marketing, it makes sense. You can see, ah, okay, so I can see why someone clicked on that and they didn't click on that. I can understand why that particular profile of person reacted and that particular profile didn't. You know, the answer to all of these things is, is psychology. And whilst we can't look inside someone's brain with an MRI scanner, certainly we can't do that for every consumer that we are selling to. There are broad patterns of behaviour, which we call psychological theories, which you can start to understand. And yeah, as I say, make the data make sense to you, and then design campaigns which are more effective. So I guess if I broke that down to three, it would be books listening podcasts like this one, and probably blogs that you read online. There's so much out there that will help you to understand this in more detail.

Becky Simms  37:21
And I think just one final point on everything that I said and Tom wrapped up there beautifully, is then it's test and learn like you can't just because you've then read it in a book. You then need to actually test it in the world with your audience. You can't assume that then it's just going to be perfect. So none of this stuff is perfect first time round, it's an evolution, and having that test and learn and fail fast mindset, but knowing how to do that properly is critical because, because we've got the data, as we said, it's not like the data billboards where you don't know how many people steal it and what they felt about it, use the data in the right way and just keep testing and go and run amazing campaigns and get brilliant results for your Business.

Ben Walker  38:00
Go ahead. What a great call towards a great call to action. That's Becky Sims, CEO of reflect digital and Dr Tom Bowden green, Senior Lecturer in marketing and behavioural science at Bristol Business School. Becky Tom, thanks very much indeed for coming on the show. Thank you for having us. Thank you very much. That's all the time we have for this episode of the CIM marketing podcast, you can find detailed show notes and links to additional resources mentioned by our guests@cim.co.uk forward slash Content Hub, forward slash podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and find it helpful, please consider supporting the show by leaving a rating and review. It really helps grow our reach. The CIM Marketing Podcast is hosted by me, Ben Walker, and produced for CIM by Brindley Walker, no relation. Thanks again for tuning in to the CIM Marketing podcast. We'll catch you next time. Secure

Karen Barnett  38:58
your ticket today@cim.co.uk forward, slash events. We look forward to seeing you there. The contents and views expressed by individuals in the CIM Marketing Podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the companies they work for you.