Would you like your partner to have cosmetic surgery ? I hold a dinner party each year for a group of long time friends and partners. After 20 years, It can be quite a challenge to give an interesting speech. I don’t want to drag old cows out of the ditch (famous Dutch expression) and I haven’t heard enough about their lives over the past year to concoct an interesting mosaic of what’s up with them. But I know there is lots of interesting stuff going on. There is a great story. So this is what I did. First I thought about what the (sub) stories could be:

• The dreams that people have (isn’t it time to start doing something !)
• The relationship with their kids (what do you hate about having them ?)
• The state of people’s sex lives (does it still exist ?)
• The importance of material vs. immaterial (still trying to outshine the neighbours ?)
• Happiness with your physical apparance (how honest are you to eachother ?)

In short, everything about life. Next, I backward engineered questions for the group. So that the answers would generate a story around these topics:

• On a scale of 1-10, how well are you versed in the Kamasutra ?
• With which man could your wife have a date, Justin Bieber or Silvio Berlusconi ?
• Do you have a dream you are not actively pursuing ?
• Would you like your partner to have something improved physically ?

Over drinks, my wife and I interrogated our guests. To our surprise, all were open and actually (mostly) enjoying it. In between courses I punched the results into Excel and created an overview on my iPad. I did not have time to review so I hoped there was going to be some fireworks. I was not diasppointed. Some results (Life’s Scorecard) got people thinking, widely varying perceptions (between partners) about copulatory frequencies triggered endless, incredibly funny comments and aspired surgical improvements led people to speculate on the chosen bodily areas, followed by unasked for advice on ‘design aspects’ (size, shape etc.). There was a mix of ‘get you thinking’ and ‘get you laughing’ stuff. Which could turn from one into the other.

The most important result ? The rest of the dinner party people were talking about these topics, sharing personal stories, deepening their friendships. Which – if this would have mattered to us – would have given the outside world a great and inspiring story of our ‘brand’ of friendship.

This can work for your brand as well. I am sure you are now thinking about your next dinner party. And whether this could work with your friends (yes it will). I am hoping that someone will help me turn it into an app but before that happens I am happy to provide more detail about the questions. But hold on. You can actually use the same mechanism to spread your brand’s story and create awesome free publicity. Guaranteed.

Warning: online recommendations losing credibility… At Buzzer, we wanted people to know how much we cared for and knew about word of mouth. So I thought of ways to get that story out into important marketing publications. I followed the same pattern: first I came up with a story that would be buzzable and reflect our authority. A headline. In this case it was: “Online recommendations suffering from inflation”. I was pretty sure that any research would corroborate this.

Next, I designed a few questions around it and organized a group of consumers to answer them. In the meantime, I contacted a few marketing bloggers and asked whether they were interested in research into the lagging credibility of online reviews (yes !) and offered them a chance to include specific questions. Next, we turned the poll’s results into a story and shared it with the bloggers. Publications in various countries followed, as you can see here and here.

Help my baby shrinks ! Pampers also had a story. Very flexible diapers prevent the ‘shit hitting the fan’ when your baby’s tummy shrinks in the hours after feeding. But how to get it out ?

N.B.: when we saw Pampers’ commercial we pointed out that it basically tells parents that their baby is like a balloon. However true this might be, we thought this story would not catch on.

The story first: ‘Help my baby is shrinking’. We then supplied trial packs of the diaper with funky measuring tapes to parents and asked them to measure their baby’s tummies before and after feeding. On the Help my baby shrinks’ website parents uploabded their babies’ shrinkage as acompared to thousands of other babies. A story easily picked up by the media. And shared by parents with their friends.

And so on. As you can see, the trick is quite simple:

1. Think up a buzzable headline that connects with your brand’s domain
2. Create questions that will generate anwers that create the story
3. Get the results from your research and synthesize into a story
4. Share the story and your brand will benefit in the limelight

The creativity challenge lies in choosing a buzzable headline and designing the right questions to make sure the answers could deliver the story. In my experience disruptive headlines always work: something that’s counter intuitive or going against popular belief. Read Steve Knox’ article about the power of disruption here. Timing is usually critical here (before you know it popular blief has changed). Part of the success of the approach can b that the people that supplied the answers are now part of the story and will help to spread it. One key success factor: do NOT talk about your brand or product. Let it be in the background.

Although it is not in any way a new technique I am still surprised that not more people use it to get their story out. Against the background of an ever more impoverished media landscape, you’ll never have to buy mediaspace again.

I met an old friend who was working at EZGov at the time. He told me how they had tried to show the benefits of e-government in Italy (EZgov sure knew how to pick a challenge) by doing a kind of participatory theatre play in a small city’s central courtyard: on one side you could line up to get a passport ‘Italian-style’, meaning 23 steps that would take you 3 years, on the other side you experienced the smooth-sailing e-process. I immediately spotted the opportunity.

In the phonecall with the civil servant I excitedly explained that we would create a timemachine for the EU-citizen. Which would allow them to experience key activities (paying, getting permits, crossing the border) in the EU over the course of history. This, I explained, would make it possible to experience what otherwise could not be experienced as it had gradually evolved in 25 years: the benefits the EU had brought us. The civil servant exploded in enthusiasm. Of course, the whole project got lost in the Ministry’s hallways. When I taught an MBA class at the RSM (see the slideshare below, slides 41 & 42) I put the EU challenge among the cases the students had to solve. They came up with a promising alternative: experience the EU through the eyes of someone outside of the EU.

Next patient was a pet health insurance company (did you know this was an entire industry ?) that was seriously insecure about their buzzability. With good reason: their product had not changed in 15 years and was the same as the entire industry’s. People only experienced the product under dire circumstances (loved pet suffering terrible disease) and would focus on the chances of recovery rather than the policy when speaking about the situation. The solution was simple: introduce an annual health scan for your pet. Great extra experience (pet is likely to be ok), you chat with more people because you can show you’re a caring boss and lastly: you’ve created a better product. Hallelujah ! Shouted the insurance person. Obviously, he faced the same type of people as the Ministry when he got back in th office and never got it passed his colleagues.

More examples followed. A job (invite people to experience a day with a person in a similar job. In our times you could even put a GoPro on top of that person’s head and follow him/her online), an online investment product (play with fictitious money), A charity that builds houses (put webcams at the building site when they put in your window sill), loneliness (take away all their Facebook friends temporarily and block their smartphone). Patterns started to emerge:

1. Some product benefits are experienced over a longer time. Losing the ‘triggering’, compact impression that gets people to talk about their experience. You need to shrink time or zoom in on (set of) a small sub-experiences.
2. Some experiences are not immediately suitable for sharing. Meddling with the product and/or adding new experiences can do the trick.
3. More abstract concepts (feelings, ideas) are more situational and thus do not have a concrete experience associated with them. But these can be simulated, provoked.

A savings account buzzable ? Recently I sat down with a large bank. In their eyes most of their products had no potential for being remarkable. I disagreed. They said no one would talk about their savings product. But what if you would save for something specific ? That you would like to talk about, like a trip around the world, a new business or another kind of experience ? And what if your savings product would tell you each period how much closer you had gotten to doing it ? Or explain how you could get that moment closer by taking certain actions ? Or even: which other ‘savers’ have similar plans and which parties can help you realize your objective ? A savings account that talks, listens to you and brings you in contact with others. Imagine that.

It’s National Burglary Day ! If you sell a DIY burglary kit, you are effectively selling a rather abstract feeling, namely home safety. Get a group of people to test it and organize a National Burglary Day. Your testers invite their neighbours to try and break into your house while you see the kit in action lying in waiting on the first floor. Your neighbours’s videotaped attempt will go online and further boost the buzz. Proposed to a large utilities company that loved the concept but went for brochures instead ; )

I made you read a lot. Sorry. Now just undergo the last recent and brilliant example while watching the video. How do you make Alzheimer’s buzzable ?

Bottomline. Many marketers believe their products will never inspire, trigger people and benefit from word of mouth as the experience does not allow that. I believe they are wrong. It is not just possible to make these products, ideas and concepts more remarkable, it is relatively easy to extremify your experience. If you take that step, your customers will love you for it and the world will pay attention.

If you are still in doubt or want more examples, comment with your example and I’ll give it a go !

The bottomline ? Small changes in our behaviour can bring (significant) benefits. And here’s how understanding the underlying dynamics can help you innovate more succesfully.

Most business success stems from innovation. And innovations always require people to change their behaviour (a little). But we hardly ever adapt those changes to reap the benefits. Or it takes ages, as happens with the shoelace tying technique. I doubt whether 1% of the 3,840,534 viewers of the video has changed their behaviour. So if we understand why we resist changing our behaviour we might find a way to influence that and use it to achieve world/market domination. I think of this as ’creating buzzable behaviour’.

To understand why we find it so hard to change our habits you need not look further than the book ‘Power of Habit’. We are all animals of habit. Caught in ‘habit loops’. Trigger, habit, reward. Quick & dirty summary of the book: as the trigger will still occur and you still crave the reward, you need to replace the habit. With which one ? Yours obviously.

I have come across two ways to actually go about doing this. There is a deeper, more difficult path with greater conversion ratios and sustainability and an easier route which will get you some quicker returns.

Disruptive Fun Therapy. If you watch the Bottle Bank video first you’ll understand intuitively what this approach is all about.

You create a fun, disruptive (deviates from normal patterns) experience which teases people to try a different habit. It shakes up your thinking: Hey, changing my habit to a new one is actually not so hard and could be fun ! It works by boosting the actual benefit (get healthier by taking the stairs) through fun additions such as entertainment, storytelling, games. And by lowering the barrier of trying (the cost for the user).

This is a great tool to use when your product or proposition (habit) that you would like to take the place of an existing habit (product) is not too complex, engrained in culture or otherwise ‘big’. Say change your breakfast from bread to a fluid equivalent with cereals. At Buzzer, we created hundreds of ‘BuzzTools’ with similar mechanics that helped consumers discover products and change their consumption patterns.

Customer Transformation. To understand this route, check out the video first.

This is the big one. You need vision, conviction, business cojones to travel this path. Like Google and/or any seriously ambitious startup wanting to become Google. The aim of this is to change your customer. Literally. Make him/her a different person. And the way to do it is to invest heavily in teaching, coaching, supporting your customer to adapt new behaviour. Ask yourself: what were we before we became Googlers ? We were Yellow Pagers. Time Atlassers.

Michael Schrage convincingly describes how Google and other companies focused on changing their target audience’s behaviour through education, not traditonal marketing. Google took us by the hand and transformed us to expect accurate search results in 0.00012 seconds. It helped us discover and adopt a new habit, routine to replace the old one. And take that as the norm. Reaching the holy grail of marketing: loyalty.

A year ago, I designed a customer transformation path for an international financial institution. After great initial enthusiasm and 6 months of creating the first building blocks, the project halted. The company did not have the longer term vision or stamina to pull it trough. We should have gone for the less ambitious road.

I am currently teaching my youngest daughter Mae to open up bananas the right way. She’s picking it up slowly but held back by all the other people doing it wrong. I estimate that it will take a few generations to get large groups to adapt this. I am thinking about a Fun Therapy technique that will speed this up.

Most companies convince themselves that traditional advertising will do the trick. “Exercise with our Absolute Abdominal Apparat 20 minutes each week and you will have 200% more energy”. This assumes that the lure (promise of the benefit) is sufficient to adapt a new routine (exercise). But the cost (machine, changing your schedule, finding a place for it, exercising, muscle aches etc.) is not addressed.

Of course, people are changing their behaviour all the time without any apparent use of the two methodologies. But then we confuse ‘changing behaviour’ with ‘copying behaviour’. In ‘Herd’ Mark Earls explains how strong our copying tendencies are. But people can only start copying behaviour once others have changed theirs, right ?

To get the benefits from innovations people need to change their behaviour. This is difficult. To speed up the process you can apply at last two different techniques, suitable for smaller innovations and quicker wins or for more radical innovations and greater gains.

If you know of other approaches or good examples, let me know !

Buzzable fact: the prequel to the pebble, InPulse, was only compatible with Blackberry. Why ? The founders worked just down the road of Blackberry HQ. Everyone there had a Blackberry at the time…

They have now sold 300.000 pieces. They are incredibly successful. But is it truly buzzable as a product ? I have now used it 7 months. I hardly ever wear it. I hardly know where to get new apps. As a result, I hardly ever talk about it. Except when people ask me when I wear it because it’s design sticks out. And when I talk about it, I tell people a 3rd screen has potential but not like this. And I am not the only one who is disappointed, as this story will show.

The allure of the Pebble was – at first glance – 1) the fantastic apps it was going to give us and 2) the convenient notifications of incoming messages on your wrist.

The notifications are ok. But as we are desperately trying to Unplug from information technology, it is not necessarily the killer app.

The apps are really, really disappointing. At last, up to now. If you read the “8 must-have Pebble apps that will make you never want to take off your smartwatch” posting you’d think that the author was on acid when writing. Space Invaders on a watch ? Not only is that so incredibly outdated and done before, it simply does not work. Cool watchfaces ? Come on. A stopwatch ? You’ve got to be joking.

So what’s going on ?

What makes the Pebble buzzable is two things: the fact that it is a crowdfunding success and the fact that is signals – as Google Glass does – the rise of third screens. The first one is simply a fact.

In my opinion, it fails miserably at showing the real potential of the second topic. But does that matter for the Pebble ? No. their timing is just terribly good. The Pebble connects to two topics that are really buzzable so it’s performance matters less. And that is one of the key secrets of buzzability: if your product fits in a buzzable context, it will do wonders. Malcolm Gladwell called this ‘stickiness’ in ‘The Tipping Point’. Another case in point ? Nest, the company recently acquired by Google for gazillions. The stickiness ? Not the applish thermostat or the smoke detector. No, The Internet of Things (great title for a horror movie by the way).

So can you become a stellar success with a mediocre product if the stickiness is tremendous ? Yes, temporarily. Floating on the hype. And maybe you will gain enough momentum and resources to reinvent yourself into something truly buzzable, that will have lasting power and creates real value. Maybe the app-ecosystem recently launched will finally start producing apps that show the promise of a 3rd screen on your wrist. My wishlist for now:

Calendar Notifications – Maybe it exists, haven’t found it yet. You are used to looking at your wrist to check if you are on time for your next appointment. So it’s a mystery to me the Pebb; did not launch with calendar notifications in the first place.

Pick Up Support – You’re in a bar trying to get a girl/boy interested in you. But you’re very weak on good text. Let your smooth-operating buddy listen in on the conversation and give you great lines via your Pebble ! (challenge: how do you mask looking at your watch all the time ?)

Find your (Pebble) Buddy ! Walking in a crowd, the Pebble shows you where to find your Pebble buddy with directions on your wrist. More vibrations when you get warmer/closer

Lie detector. Let your smartphone camera detect whether the person you are talking to is lying. You’ll know when it vibrates.

As you can see and to be perfectly honest, I am also finding it difficult to come up with real stuff. Maybe you can ?

Willem (Pebble owner)

P.s. just out: Google is up next on the smartwatch front. And this looks more buzzable.