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How should you deliver bad news?

There’s a lot of bad news being shared right now. In Australia we are experiencing various degrees of lockdown across the country, and our political leaders are grappling with how best to share bad news.

New South Wales, for example, started with a relatively light-touch approach that has become more stringent the longer lockdown has lasted.

In Victoria’s latest lockdown, conditions were restrictive from the get go.

While I won’t go into the relative merits o...

Richard Branson was sharing a story about introducing TV screens to the back of airplane seats.

He went to his board and the banks but couldn’t get the $10 million loan he needed to retrofit his Virgin Atlantic planes.

So instead he called Boeing and asked “if I buy 15 new planes, could you include seat back video screens?”

“Of course!”, came Boeing’s reply.

Branson’s point was he couldn’t get a loan for $10 million, but he could for $2 billion.

Sometimes a ‘small ask’ is easier to refuse

Nudges are all about subtly influencing behaviour. In this video, I talk through my top five principles from behavioural economics to apply to your business right now, to improve results.

You'll see examples from Twitter, eBay, Noom and others.

More about my Influencing Action course:

https://www.briwilliams.com/about-influencing-action-course

Additional Framing resources for you: -

• https://www.briwilliams.com/blog/concrete-language-sells
• https://www.briwilliams.com/blog/helping-custo...

There’s a truckload of research on how best to frame messages to appeal to your audience.

For example, ads that are framed positively work best for people who are promotion-focussed – in other words, they seek to maximise the probability of obtaining a positive outcome (Lee, Liu and Cheng, 2018).

This was true regardless of whether the product was hedonic (like a massage, or holiday, or aesthetic attributes of a product like a laptop’s design) or utilitarian (think calculator, car wax, suitcas...

Could telling yourself to do more of something be the worst thing you can do?

New research suggests so.

Framing your goal

We live in a world of more — of ‘shoulds’, particularly when it comes to wellbeing.

I should exercise more, save more, eat more healthily.

But maybe that pressure is backfiring on our ability to achieve our goals?

Researchers Tuk, Prokopec and Van den Bergh (2020) set out to see whether it would be more motivating to tell yourself “I’ll exercise three days per week” or ...

Text messages are a big part of how organisations communicate with customers.

So you do you get them right?

Behavioural science of text message effectiveness

Not only are text messages a cost-effective tool, but there’s a significant amount of behavioural science available that proves how effective these messages can be.

In one study, the UK Behavioural Science Team were able to reduce missed medical appointments, or no-shows, by 25%.

The best performing message pointed out how much the no-...

Want an inexpensive way to bolster customer satisfaction and sell more? Use concrete language.

That was the finding from “How Concrete Language Shapes Customer Satisfaction” (2020) by Grant Packard and Jonah Berger.

In the study, Packard and Berger tested whether referring to items using abstract (e.g. “pants”) vs. concrete (e.g. “blue jeans”) descriptors impacted satisfaction, willingness to buy and purchase behaviour.

Abstract language is the realm of the conceptual or intangible, like a wa...