FIR #440: Experimenting for Influence

For Immediate Release

Even when they know it has been rigged, people assign a lot of credibility to experiments. When they see the experiment produce favorable results, for example, potential customers might be more inclined to buy. Experiments can also influence decision-makers in your company — again, even if they assume you put your thumb on the scale. The phenomenon is similar to wrestling, with audiences knowing the match is staged by enjoying it all the same. Neville and Shel review some research on the subject and discuss ways communicators can apply experimentation to their work in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

• Socializing an Idea? Experiments Can Help Convince Your Audience | Working Knowledge

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The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, December 23.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [e-mail].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

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Raw transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to four immediate release episode four 40. I’m Neville Hobson. And I’m Shel Holtz, and Marketing. Is hard. Seriously it’s getting more and more difficult to influence people. Some businesses are finding that experimentation can be a powerful tool, not just for making decisions about the marketing approach that you’re gonna take, but as an actual instrument of influence.

A recent study by Harvard Business School’s, Rebecca Karp and her colleagues, reveals that business experiments can serve. Two purposes, gathering data and persuading stakeholders. We’ll dive into how this plays out in two distinct complimentary approaches right after this. First, let’s examine how experiments influence I internal decision makers.

Carps research shows that business experiments frequently become what she calls staged performances with scripted endings. Now, before you shrug this off as [00:01:00] just petty manipulation, consider an interesting parallel. She draws from of all things professional wrestling. Just as wrestling fans they’re known as smarts.

I didn’t know that. That’s a mashup of the word smart and mark. Smarts understand that they’re watching a performance, but they still appreciate the show. Now, shift that concept to business and you get sophisticated business audiences that are able to recognize that experiments also. Come with an agenda most of the time.

Think about a startup founder presenting experimental results to venture capitalists. The VCs know the startup team likely designed the experiment to favor a particular outcome, but they don’t view this as deceptive. As one VC told carp. It’s a feature, not a bug. The ability to structure compelling experiments demonstrates a founder’s strategic thinking and persuasive capabilities.

These are qualities that investors actually value now. So how does all of [00:02:00] this translate into the practice of PR and marketing? Keep in mind, transparency about experimental limitations doesn’t diminish the their persuasive power. In fact, acknowledging potential biases while still delivering valuable insights can enhance your credibility.

The goal isn’t to present. Perfect unbiased data, which let’s face it rarely exists in business context anyway, but to generate useful information that helps decision makers make their decisions while advancing strategic objectives. Now let’s pivot to the second approach, using experiments themselves as content to influence consumers and external stakeholders.

We’ve seen a lot of really great examples of this strategy in action considered Dove’s real beauty sketches experiment. They had an FBI trained forensic artist drawing women based on how they described themselves and then drawing the same women based on somebody else’s description. What they found was [00:03:00] that the women described themselves as being much less attractive than objective.

Third parties who didn’t know them, who described them. This generated massive engagement and reinforced Dove’s brand positioning around authentic beauty. Another example, remember Blend text? Will it Blend series? This started as a simple product demonstration and it became a viral sensation. They blended everything from iPhones to golf balls.

The experiments weren’t just tests. They were compelling contents that showcased product benefits and entertained audiences. There was re’s opt-out side campaign, which offered another masterclass in experimental marketing by closing stores on Black Friday and tracking outdoor activity, REI turned their businesses business experiment into a movement.

The campaign not only generated immediate buzz, it created a lasting impact on the perception of people have of the brand. Now for PR professionals, these examples [00:04:00] highlight an important evolution in how we think about experiments. They’re not just tools for gathering data or making decisions.

They’re opportunities to create compelling narratives and build deeper connections with audiences. The trick is to design experiments, serve multiple purposes. You definitely wanna generate those useful insights, but you also want to create that shareable content. Now this approach requires careful consideration.

For experiments to work as content, they need three key elements. They need authenticity, transparency, and relevance. It has to feel genuine, even if it’s designed with persuasion in mind. The methodology and limitations should be openly acknowledged. That’s transparency and most important, the experiment has to resonate with your audience’s interests and concerns.

This trend is likely to continue growing as consumers become more sophisticated and demanding of evidence-based claims experiments. Give us a powerful way to demonstrate value while engaging the audience. The [00:05:00] challenge is to find creative ways to turn research and testing into stories that drive both understanding and action.

So don’t limit your experiments to the ones that you conduct behind closed doors. The AB tests that of course we’re gonna continue to do, but you should consider how your testing and learning process become. Part of your story, could your product development experiments become content? Could your market research be turned into shareable insights?

The answer to these questions might just lead to your next breakthrough campaign. Yeah. A lot to think about there. Shel, the first thing that struck me, listening to what you were saying and indeed, I think Rebecca Kapa has done a super job with this in her studies that she mentions in that Harvard Business Review article, how experiments can play different roles in business.

But what struck me was, isn’t this something that. Businesses have been doing for years. Would it not be called thinking out loud, perhaps? Literally doing your experimentation in the open. Maybe they don’t [00:06:00] call it experimentation, because this strikes me as something that isn’t this what businesses have been doing for quite a while.

I think to some extent businesses have been doing this, but I don’t think that they’ve been doing it as a strategy. I think somebody in the marketing or the advertising department has an idea, Ooh, what if we had a sketch artist do this? As opposed to saying what experiments were conducted as part of our product research or our market research.

We can turn into content. So I think the difference is, yeah, there, there are great examples that Dove example is several years old. BlendTech you remember Will it blend? That’s what, 10, 15 years ago? So you it’s not new to see this employed. I just think it’s new to think about it in the context of experiments as.

A marketing asset to say what experiments have been conducted as part of the research for this product or service or brand identity, or whatever it is that the [00:07:00] campaign is focused on. Or what experiments could we conduct that would provide compelling evidence that would convince a skeptical audience while also entertaining them?

I think it’s considering experimentation as the focus of a marketing effort that Rebecca Karp has brought forward. Got it. So the Harvard article mentions that her in their words that her research comes at a time of consumer skepticism. And she, it also mentions that the audience the experiments cop talks about tend to be other business leaders.

They don’t expect such experiments to be exhaustive. So what do you think need needs to happen to make it far more strategic in the organization? Is there a particular thing communicators need to do to get this into a strategic approach as opposed to either not happening or happening in a limited scale that’s not no one [00:08:00] knows about?

On the internal side, I think it’s pretty much what we have been doing all along. I, yeah. One of the items that I read talked about the fact that, you’re going to do an AB test in order to convince somebody that you should be going with A and not B, frequently, you’ll make a really great, let’s say headline and B not so great a headline.

Yeah. So that. The movies shows your bus who are gonna make the decision will say of course a tested better, let’s go with a right. Yeah. So again, it’s performative. From the external standpoint though, no I think it comes down to stakeholder analysis. You really need to know your audience. Yeah.

As you mentioned, the article talks about an increasingly skeptical consumer base. In terms of the product that we want to sell or the service we wanna sell, or the brand that we want people. To appreciate what is the basis of that skepticism and what kind of. Experiment, could we conduct, what kind of [00:09:00] research could we present that would convince them, oh look, the data shows that this is true.

Okay. I’ll be less skeptical and consider a purchase. I’ll consider doing business with that organization. Design the experiment to address the source of the skepticism as opposed to just saying, Ooh, here’s a cool experiment that would look good on film and convince nobody of anything.

That makes sense. You mentioned Dove and of course they’re almost like a, poster chart for experimentation in public. I really am wondering why we don’t. Seem to do this more in organizations and do them publicly so that, is it fear of failure in public or is it that it’s, there aren’t smart people like there are in Dove?

Is it as simple as that? I think it may just be more habit and laziness. A lot of things to change. There needs to be pain, right? Oh my God, this isn’t working anymore. We need to do something different. We talk about this when we talk about the adoption of [00:10:00] technology by public relations organizations, whether they’re internal or agency.

Why would we learn a new technology when our billings are high and our clients are happy? It’s not until money is taken off the table by a boutique that. Learns how to make websites or do social media or whatever it might be that the public relations people say, oh, we’d better learn how to do this because either the clients are demanding it or they’re hiring other people besides us to do it.

So I think it’s the same thing here. Where is the pain that’s going to drive people to try something different when the approaches that we’re using now seem to be selling product? Yeah so then it comes down to perhaps the art of persuasion. Actually prior to that, it would come down to, do you see this I whole notion of experimentation or say, project X that we’ve been working on for a while.

Why don’t you do this with Project X? And therein is the hurdle that everyone seems to fall at. [00:11:00] If that’s true. Is it? I, that’s a good question. But perhaps we need to undertake an experiment to convince the powers that be, that experimentation would be a good communication or a good marketing approach.

I can see it from a PR standpoint where you’re not trying to sell, where you’re just trying to persuade that here’s an experiment that helps. Persuade you that this is the appropriate approach to take? Yeah, so in the strategic planning where you’re looking at the strategy that you’re going to employ in order to achieve the goal one of those strategies might be to present the results of an experiment that demonstrate the value of what we’re talking about.

So it’s thinking about it at that stage of your planning that I think might get the ball rolling on this type of thing. I’m, it comes to mind that the kerfuffle that arose in recent weeks over Jaguar, the car maker and the reader design of their logo and the introduction of concept car I.

That [00:12:00] created a huge amount of online chatter with opinions being ventured every which way you like on what a disaster it was. What are they thinking of, they’ve ruined the brand, et cetera. And then a few, I would call them smarts in Rebecca Rebecca’s cop description who said, hang on a second.

This is actually quite good. They are reinventing this. It’s a whole new approach, et cetera. All that’s been going on, this to me is in this realm now. Of course, not knowing anything about what the plans are they might say to me, you’re crazy. This is totally not that. But it looks like it to me.

This is in the do area. It seems to me of some really keen. Ideas are being are executed with significant resources behind. This is not like a quick petty cash operator. There’s se serious budgets behind this kind of thing, and it either fail or not, but they’ve got, I suppose you could argue from a brand point of view a whole lot of conversations about the brand [00:13:00] has been has been mentioned in mainstream and social media globally.

And that may be what is their goal, perhaps? I don’t know. But that’s big scale, right? And not everyone’s able to do that. So what about little things that might work in niche markets? And again, to your point earlier you mentioned you, you need to understand your audience. Exactly. I’m just wondering what’s really, what is preventing people doing more of this?

Or is it simply that it is a niche no matter what Rebecca Kas research shows, this is just a niche idea. It’ll never gain major traction. Yeah. A couple of thoughts. First on the Jaguar side that could well be an experiment, but it would be a different type because they’re not presenting the results of the experiment to the public.

Not yet. They’re engaging the public in the experiment. It’s covert experiment. We’ve decided to experiment with a new logo to see what kind of reactions we get from the public if that indeed is what they did. In, in terms of smaller organizations doing this, a again, I think it just doesn’t occur.[00:14:00]

To people. You don’t need to spend a ton of money. BlendTech spent whatever it cost to buy the item that they blended. They didn’t have a huge studio set up. It was all pretty simple. They needed one of their blenders in a golf ball, one of their blenders and an iPhone.

Most companies can afford the budget to do that sort of thing. So again, I think, when you’re doing your strategic planning, if your strategy says we’re going to. Use an experiment to present. Experiment results in order to help persuade people that this is the solution that they wanna, that you know they wanna spend money on.

Then when you’re developing your objectives being measurable approaches that you take to achieving the strategies that you’re putting in place. One of them would be that the experiment can’t cost more than. $20,000. That would be part of the measurable element of the objective that you set so that you can, stay within your budget.

But I would think that a couple of good [00:15:00] communicators could look at the whatever it is that they’re trying to communicate and come up with some ideas for experimentation. And if you can’t, you can always just go ask Chachi pt. Good advice there. Shel, and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

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