Dan Monheit
Dan Monheit is co-founder of Hardhat, Australia’s largest creative agency based on behavioral economics. Dan is a consultant to many of the nation’s biggest brands and has been invited to present on the subject at premier global events including SXSW in Austin, Texas. His Bad Decisions podcast regularly appears on “top podcast” charts and attracts listeners from over 90 countries. His book on behavioral economics, “Terrible Advice for Excellent Marketers,” will be released in December 2020.
As marketers, we’re in the business of asking people to change. But as the best minds in our industry will concede, changing ingrained human behavior is incredibly difficult.
Humanity’s most intelligent mind, Albert Einstein, even went so far as to say, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. So if you’ve ever felt like a complete failure after trying and failing to change something in your life or situation, you’ll understand where Einstein was coming from.
In truth, while our aspirational self loves the idea of change, our real self tends to fight tooth and nail to keep things the same. It’s almost as if, psychologically, something is holding us back forever. According to behavioral science, yes.
At the heart of the problem is a cognitive bias known as status quo bias, which refers to our preference to keep things as they are, even when it’s not the best option for us. The term was first introduced by researchers William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser in 1988 after a series of experiments revealed that people show a disproportionate preference for choices that maintain the status quo.
This makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective. The status quo bias is so powerful because our number one priority is to stay alive. Even if the situation we find ourselves in is not “optimal”, it is still a situation in which we are there, alive and breathing – which makes us reluctant to change.
It’s the reason you cling to an uninteresting job, or why a CMO stays with the same tired agency, despite the average job for too long. The mental burden of researching and naming a new agency you’ve never worked with before seems like a riskier proposition than sticking with the safe but boring option.
Naturally, status quo bias tends to be heightened at work, where the high risk/low reward profile that accompanies most decisions keeps businesspeople on the right path. After all, if a deal goes wrong, reputations and livelihoods are at stake, making it easier to stay the course, especially in Australia’s ultra-conservative business environment.
Consider this scenario. You manage the marketing of a large multinational. A new vendor approaches you, launches the next generation of email marketing software, trying to persuade you to leave your current archaic but reliable system. Of course, they serve you all the advantages with fries on the side: it’s faster, easier to use, 10 times more efficient and above all, it’s also much cheaper.
So why don’t you take the important but obvious step of convincing your colleagues to switch to the new platform, especially when you are aware of the limitations of the current one, which is clunky, expensive and has long relied on its outdated technology laurels?
According to “Prospect Theory”, an economic theory developed by researchers, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, in 1979, the reason you are so reluctant to make the switch is that “losses outweigh gains”.
That in itself is terrifying. As a marketing manager or purchasing manager, if you make a brilliant decision to change direction and things go well, the personal benefits are limited. Maybe there’s an encouraging thumbs up from a co-worker, or a good grade on your next performance review and the possibility of a raise if you can negotiate well.
However, if things go wrong, your reputation and even your livelihood are both at stake. been able to send a single sales email in the past three weeks. Revenues are down, inventory is piling up, and rumor has it the CFO is targeting you. It’s not hard to see why we’re willing to avoid disaster rather than maximize opportunity.
Also, B2B sales can be very tricky because you’re trying to overcome not just one person’s status quo bias, but the status quo biases of an entire cross-functional decision-making team, all of whom have to sign an agreement. to cross the line. The more people involved in the decision-making process, the greater the resistance to changing the status quo, giving you a lower and lower chance of closing the deal.
So how do you cut through an entire corporate culture that inherently acts as a barrier to buying something new? While we can’t eliminate risk, we can reframe it, and in doing so, help our audience see that maintaining the status quo is actually the riskiest choice of all.
Going back to our email example, the risk of moving to a new system might seem high. But every day with the current system is one day closer to an inevitable privacy breach (due to the outdated tech stack) or catastrophic user error (due to the clunky interface). Once a team is aligned with this, the wheels of change invariably begin to turn.
Our agency recently took advantage of the crop to deliver a “first of its kind” campaign for DocuSign eSignature, an electronic document signing platform. Although using DocuSign eSignature is better on all fronts than using traditional paper contracts (faster, more efficient, more secure, saves money, better for the environment), we resisted the temptation to lead with the good side.
Instead, we chose to reframe risk by anchoring our “Next Time, DocuSign” campaign around the idea that the riskiest thing you can do is do nothing. After all, there are a lot of things that could go wrong using traditional paper contracts: they get lost in the mail, get left behind in taxis, face privacy issues, run out of toner at the last minutes, and so on.
Along with a suite of creative assets that highlighted these risks, we engaged three iconic and Australian influencers and entrepreneurs: Business Chicks Global CEO Emma Issaccs, Janine Allis of Boost Juice and Jules Lund of Tribes, for a series of videos called “That Time”. I screwed up’.
In each episode, one of our business leaders tells a story about when things went wrong in their career due to the use of paper contracts. In just three months, the campaign videos had over 650,000 views on YouTube and generated more than 15,000 new accounts for DocuSign.
By reframing the biggest risk as sticking to paper contracts, we were able to shake people off their inertia and overcome the status quo bias.