People are way more afraid of shark attacks than we should be. The reason we are is the same reason branding works for your organization to attract customers.

However, before we get to that, consider the following statistic. Since the year 1580, aka the year we started charting shark attacks, there have been a little over 2,000 shark attacks, of which 471 were fatal. Averaged over the whole period, that’s about six attacks per year, one of which is deadly.* It’s a remarkably small number given how much headspace it takes up for all of us. We fear sharks killing us, even though the amounts are objectively small.

We encourage clients to research their customers all the time. Late last year, we decided to take our advice and study our customers and prospective customers, and well, anyone. Some of the research told us what we expected to hear, but some of the revelations might surprise you. We talked about this research in a recent podcast.

Have you ever made a snap judgment about another person only to discover you were wrong? I have. Psychologists call this a Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), and it can wreak havoc on your customer-driven growth.  

We explored FAEs in our latest podcast and the effect they can have on your Customer Experience outcome. We also discussed why recognizing them is essential to your bottom line and some steps you can take to prevent them. 

We have all been in line or on hold for customer service, waiting for a company to get back to us. We tap our toes and roll our eyes as we wait.  Then, when our wait time runs long and our patience runs short we get cranky and think, this customer service crew is really inept today.

Or are they?

Last February, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) published, “Why is Customer Service so Bad? Because it’s Profitable.” To summarize, researchers learned that lousy customer service is not always the product of ineptitude on the part of the company but instead sometimes a deliberate strategy to save money. Long phone queues and poor response times cause customers to give up, at least for the time being and try again later. However, a percentage of those people who bailed out of the process won’t try again later, which saves the company money.

The wealth of information within academia and doesn’t get used by business is amazing. I blame their naming. Academics have great information, but a terrible naming skills. 

Take Hyperbolic Discounting (please!), a significant psychological concept that plays into many decisions we make, that we discussed on a recent podcast. You might think the term describes super-exaggerated markdowns, but it doesn’t. 

Hyperbolic Discounting is what happens when we have the choice between a reward now and a reward later. It describes how we disregard the value of something when we have to wait for the benefits of it over time. In other words, we would rather have an immediate reward than one in the future, even if the future reward is higher than the one today. Moreover, Hyperbolic Discounting is why we expect a much higher reward when we have to wait for something. 

We recently learned about the inventor of the hashtag Chris Messina’s concept of Conversational Commerce and how it has changed the way brands interact with their customers on social media platforms. Today we will learn about how this relationship will continue to evolve as we move into a new year and a new decade. 

We spoke with Messina in a recent podcast about how a brand can humanize itself for its customers. As you recall, the future of interaction on social media is for a brand to respond as if it were a person, and it will likely be AI-powered in the future. However, before you can have this AI, you have to know how you want it to respond as “your brand.”