How Neuromarketing Leads to Better Storytelling
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Presentation by Leah Eustace, ACFRE, at the Association of Fundraising Professional's Golden Horseshoe Chapter's Recharge Conference on April 14, 2015
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How Neuromarketing Leads to Better Storytelling
- 1. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge How Neuromarketing (and an understanding of Behavioural Economics) Leads to Better Storytelling Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge
- 2. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge “The cat sat on the mat is not the beginning of a story. The cat sat on the dog's mat is.” ~ John le Carré
- 3. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Maybe, just maybe… knowing how our brains make decisions can help us craft the best, most memorable, most kick ass (and revenue- generating) stories.
- 4. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Marketing + Market Research + Brain Science = Neuromarketing
- 5. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Neuromarketing in Action
- 6. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge be·hav·ior·al ec·o·nom·ics noun a method of economic analysis that applies psychological insights into human behavior to explain economic decision-making. (wikipedia)
- 7. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Concepts for Today • System 1 vs System 2 • Empathy • Emotional Contagion • Anchoring • Social Proof/Consensus • Authority
- 8. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge System 1 vs System 2
- 9. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge System 1 vs System 2
- 10. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge System 1 vs System 2
- 11. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Relevance to Storytelling?
- 12. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Empathy Empathy is the ability to see the world as another person, to share and understand another person’s feelings, needs, concerns and/or emotional state. (source: http://www.skillsyouneed.com/)
- 13. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Empathy
- 14. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Relevance to Storytelling?
- 15. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Emotional Contagion
- 16. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Emotional Contagion
- 17. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Relevance to Storytelling?
- 18. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Anchoring The anchoring rule of thumb describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions. Once the anchor is set, decisions are then made by adjusting around the initial anchor, regardless of the legitimacy of the actual anchor. (source: http://disenthrall.co/)
- 19. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Anchoring
- 20. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Anchoring Be thoughtful about what your first ask is
- 21. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Anchoring
- 22. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Anchoring
- 23. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Relevance to Storytelling?
- 24. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Social Proof
- 25. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Social Proof Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation. (wikipedia)
- 26. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Relevance to Storytelling?
- 27. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Authority We feel a sense of duty or obligation to people in positions of authority.
- 28. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Authority The Milgram experiments
- 29. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Relevance to Storytelling?
- 30. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Further Reading http://bigthink.com/ https://www.youtube.com/user/AsapSCIENCE Daniel Kahneman Dan Ariely Robert Cialidini
- 31. Leah Eustace, ACFRE, Good Works @LeahEustace #AFPGH_Recharge Questions? Leah Eustace, ACFRE Chief Idea Goddess Good Works leah@goodworksco.ca @LeahEustace
Editor's Notes
- Everyone is talking about storytelling We learn about why stories are important But, what we don’t talk about as much is the difference between a bad story and a good story
- Are there small adjustments we can make to our storytelling that will help generate the response we’re looking for?
- What is neuromarketing? For decades, marketers have sought to understand what consumers were thinking, but they’ve relied on traditional techniques — asking them what they thought in focus groups and surveys. Neuromarketing techniques are based on scientific principles about how humans really think and decide, which involves brain processes that our conscious minds aren’t aware of.
- In this book, Kahneman talks about system 1 and system 2 thinking Let’s watch a video that helps explain the concept
- Show video
- So, how can we be so sure that our intuition and emotions are calling the shots when we make a decision? Another interesting finding comes from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who studied people who had received brain injuries, in which only the part where emotions are generated was impaired It all started 30 years ago, when Dr. Damasio was visited by a patient named Elliot Elliott had gone through a surgery where part of his brain in the frontal cortex had to be removed because of a small tumour he’d developed Elliot was a successful businessman and had been a model father, husband and citizen After the surgery, something strange started to happen He started taking hours for a simple decisions a normal human being would make in seconds For example, even a decision to shave or not in the morning would take hours as he started analyzing the pros and cons of shaving and the effect it would have on his life This behavior eventually lead his business into bankruptcy and his wife ended up divorcing him Dr. Demasio was able to determine that during the surgery, one important neural connection which connected Elliot’s conscious mind with the part of his brain that controed the emotional faculty (the amigdala) was severed He was left only with his conscious mind to make decisions So, for every decision, his brain went into overdrive… he didn’t have the luxury of consulting his emotional brain to make the intuitive decision In other words, it’s ultimately our emotional brain that makes decsions.. Including decisions to give
- Emotion over logic Now we know that all our actions and decisions, good and bad, are guided primarily by intuition Our conscious brain has a very small part to play in how we think and act What does that mean to fundraising? In simple terms People give when they’re emotions are engaged Decisions are activated by unconscious part of our brain (called the limbic system) . The rational part, which governs our logical thoughts and the language, only comes into play afterwards to justify our decision. In other words, we make giving decisions emotionally, then justify them logically
- According to Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard, the biggest empathy generator is cuteness: features such as large eyes, a large head, and a small lower face. So, yep, photos of babies will increase empathy. This is pretty great news if you're a children's hospital. As people age, their cognitive patterns become less abstract and more concrete … in other words, they become more right brained This results in a sharpened sense of reality, and an increased capacity for emotion They become better at feeling empathy and sympathy for others, taking the viewpoint of the one who speaks, seeing personal experiences and first-person stories as important way of learning, and embracing an ethic of caring
- Peter Singer the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and he writes about sharing the following puzzle with his students, and I quote: "I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class. I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do. Once we are all clear about our obligations to rescue the drowning child in front of us, I ask: would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost – and absolutely no danger – to yourself? Virtually all agree that distance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation. I then point out that we are all in that situation of the person passing the shallow pond: we can all save lives of people, both children and adults, who would otherwise die, and we can do so at a very small cost to us: by making a donation to aid agencies like Oxfam, we overcome the problem of acting at a distance. At this point the students raise various practical difficulties. Can we be sure that our donation will really get to the people who need it? Doesn’t most aid get swallowed up in administrative costs, or waste, or downright corruption? Isn’t the real problem the growing world population, and is there any point in saving lives until the problem has been solved? These questions can all be answered: but I also point out that even if a substantial proportion of our donations were wasted, the cost to us of making the donation is so small, compared to the benefits that it provides when it, or some of it, does get through to those who need our help, that we would still be saving lives at a small cost to ourselves – even if aid organizations were much less efficient than they actually are. I am always struck by how few students challenge the underlying ethics of the idea that we ought to save the lives of strangers when we can do so at relatively little cost to ourselves. Seth Godin points out that Marketing helps explain this: 1. CLOSE & NOW: The child is dying right in front of you. The shame you'd feel in walking away is enormous. 2. GRATITUDE: Even though it might not be at the top of mind, the fact is that once we pull someone out of the pond, we anticipate that they will thank us, and so will the community. This is the problem that all of us face as fundraisers: we're trying to solve a problem that's far away (and by far away I mean anything outside of our donor's eyesight on a particular day).
- The most successful stories make the reader feel empathy, so let's talk a little bit about what we know about empathy. But in all seriousness, there are things we can do to increase empathy: we can tell uplifting stories about sacrifice; stories of despair and hope; we can bring people in to our facilities to get close to our beneficiaries, we can remind donors of their good fortune. So how do we make our cause close and now, and how do we express immediate gratitude? Probably the best tool at our disposal is storytelling.
- One day in October 2010, at a school in Bangladesh, a pupil noticed that the label on a packet of crackers she was eating had darkened. Fearing the crackers were contaminated she almost immediately fell ill, complaining of heartburn, headache and severe abdominal pain. The condition quickly spread among her fellow pupils, and later to other schools in the area. Yet toxicologists could trace no contaminant, and all those affected were quickly discharged from the hospital after doctors found no trace of illness. The following week, investigators diagnosed “mass sociogenic illness,” otherwise known as mass hysteria. The children, it seemed, had developed their symptoms simply because they had seen their classmates succumb. Mass hysteria is thought to be an extreme example of a phenomenon that affects us all day-to-day: emotional contagion. It is the force behind fuel crises, health scares and the spread of public grief (for example in Britain after the death of Princess Diana in August 1997). It is the reason why you are more likely to be obese if you have obese friends, and depressed if you are living with a depressed roommate. We mimic without thinking, and at remarkable speed. An experiment carried out in 1966 with students at the University of Pittsburgh revealed that people emulate each other’s body movements within 21 milliseconds. When we emulate the look on someone’s face, we begin to experience the emotion behind the expression.
- Interestingly, we can feel emotions and physical reactions simply by reading a story (“The Storytelling Animal” by Jonathan Gottschall) Brains on fiction “catch” the emotions enacted on the page or screen. When we watch Clint Eastwood get mad on film, our brains look angry too; when the scene is sad, our brains also look sad. Research shows that whether we are watching a passionate kiss on television, or receiving a passionate kiss ourselves, our brains react the same way… we live the story And, in our fundraising, don’t we want to make people feel (after all, giving decisions are often made on an emotional, not logical, level) Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic? We all have a set of left hemisphere brain circuits that force story structure onto the chaos of our lives. When these circuits run amok we get schizophrenia, wild conspiracy theories and, sometimes, immortal works of poetry and fiction.
- The more vivid the story – through narrative or through imagery – the more emotionally arousing. And emotions are what triggers the impetus to help. The more surprising finding is that showing statistics can actually blunt this emotional response by causing people to think in a more calculative, albeit uncaring, manner. Another important emotion is sympathy which is a function of changes, not states. This is why we respond more emotionally upon learning that someone has lost their home than upon learning that someone is homeless. This might help explain why certain conditions trigger greater sympathy than others. A natural disaster or war causes losses in others’ welfare, whereas chronic conditions such as ongoing famine do not. For non-profit fundraising, it is important to frame situations in terms of changes or losses, not states.
- Anchoring is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgments. Once an anchor is set, other judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor, and there is a bias toward interpreting other information around the anchor. For example, the initial price offered for a used car sets the standard for the rest of the negotiations, so that prices lower than the initial price seem more reasonable even if they are still higher than what the car is really worth.
- One study looked at how setting purchase quantity limits affect buying behavior. We’ve all seen the sign before, there’s something on sale with a sign reading “Limit 12 Per Customer.” Most people conclude this limit is there to protect the store from being wiped out of the sale item of overly-eager bargain hunters. However, this limit serves a very different purpose. Wansink, Kent, and Hoch designed a field study using end-aisle displays to advertise Cambell’s soups for $0.79 per can. A sign was then placed on the display stating “Limit of 12 per person.” The results show that purchase limits can increase sales; shoppers who bought soup from the display with no limit purchased an average of 3.3 cans of soup, whereas buyers with limits of 12 purchased an average of 7 cans of soup. The brain anchors with the number 12 and adjusts downward.
- Kahneman reports powerful anchoring effects when people choose how much to contribute to a cause. In an experiment he conducted at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, participants were told about environmental damage and asked about their willingness to make an annual contribution to save 50,000 offshore seabirds from oil spills. Some of the visitors were first asked an anchoring question: “Would you be willing to pay $5….”? Some were asked “Would you willing to pay $400…?” Those who were not given an anchor were willing to pay $64 on average. When the anchor amount was $5, the average contribution was $20. When the anchor was $400, the average contribution was $143 Anchoring is why all direct mail fundraising experts advise asking for a specific amount based on that individual’s history of giving and capacity.
- But we can only anchor if the reader is actually taking in the anchor Check out how people read copy online F pattern
- And this is how people read direct mail
- How can we use the anchoring concept in storytelling? Points to the critical importance of your very first sentence, your design, your P.S. Anchor your key points where people look first
- Paper tearing experiment
- You see this principle of persuasion in action all the time. Everyone slows down and looks when an accident happens. People gather around when they see others gathered around looking at something. You start clapping because everyone else is clapping. When you see something online that has a thousand likes or hundreds of thousands of views you're much more likely to share it because everyone else has already done it. People will do things that they see other people doing.
- Testimonials from donors show your target audience that people who are similar to them are supporters. Giving clubs, bandwagon effect of major efforts. Telling the success story. Once you get some critical mass going, use fundraising tickers. Show how many people are giving, in real time. Count your community: Show how many people have taken action to create a sense of a growing community of like-minded people. In your call to action, choose wording that demonstrates that others are already participating, e.g. "join millions of other generous Americans" or "hundreds of other concerned members in your community".
- People respect authority. They want to follow the lead of real experts. Business titles, impressive clothing, and even driving an expensive, high-performing automobile are proven factors in lending credibility to any individual. Giving the appearance of authority actually increases the likelihood that others will comply with requests – even if their authority is illegitimate. When people are uncertain, they look outside themselves for information to guide their decisions. Given the incredible influence of authority figures, it would be wise to incorporate testimonials from legitimate, recognized authorities to help persuade prospects to respond or make purchases.
- One of the first people to actually test this was a fellow named Stanley Milgram Controversy surrounded Milgram for much of his professional life as a result of a series of experiments on obedience to authority which he conducted at Yale University in 1961-1962. He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks--up to 450 volts--to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive shocks, and this fact was revealed to the subjects at the end of the experiment. The results of the experiment surpassed all estimates of the percentage of people who would be willing to administer the increasing dosage of shocks even though their subjects were begging to have the experiment stopped. Those who administered the shock found it difficult to disobey the instructions of the lab-coated researcher. In fact, many subjects protested that the shocks should end but still carried out the researcher's orders. So far, these have all been dramatic examples of obedience to authority. Most of the time, however, "Information from a recognized authority can provide us a valuable shortcut for deciding how to act in a situation
- Celebrity endorsements, research and partnerships are all ways to use authoritative figures to build trust, confidence and respect in your organization. Use quotes, pictures, videos, signatures, etc. from authority figures that support the work you do in upcoming fundraising appeals. If you use email as a way to solicit gifts, try making your next email come from the person who has the known name. Essentially, find ways to have authoritative figures tell your community of supporters how great the work you're doing is.