Conclusions Precede Decisions: 2 case studies teach the most effective way to amplify conversion

welcome pay attention immediately to the title conclusions precede decisions we're glad you're joining us but I want to take you right away to a thought-provoking image take a look at this picture of the lion and ask yourself a very important question what does the image evoke in you you may recognize the picture it comes from the latest version of the Lion King in fact I was there with my daughter but as you see this ask yourself what do you feel about that lion what does it spark inside of you because those feelings fit into a rational framework by the way which is often employed by irrational people but a rational framework that creates conclusions about the line and those conclusions will impact your behavior I want to show you another image this one is a bit more struck in it's also a bit more realistic here it is now if this picture creates a different set of feelings inside of you bear in mind that it's also creating a different set of conclusions more importantly if you're asking I just looked at a picture of a lion than another how does this relate to conversion and marketing and the answer is in every important way in fact if you were to say what is the difference between the first version and the second version I would tell you the difference is marketing because that glorious image that we saw of a lion on the left that glorious image is only a projection of those those attributes we admire most about the so-called king of the beasts but in the real version of the lion king that happens every day in the bush you may discover that that same lion looks just like the one on the right when he's in his predatory action set now why is that critical because in truth we might say that both pictures create a set of feelings that are somewhat justified the lion is regal and the lion is majestic and the lion does stand for strength and other attributes the lion represents an archetype in our societies and it's been leveraged by by authors like CS Lewis in his work on I guess it's uh The Chronicles of Narnia and you can see where the lion and by the way in that case the lion represents God in particular God in the form of the Sun in sort of the allegory that is associated with CS gnosis work do not do not think we're going to be too abstract today both of these images are correct but the first the first almost creates inside of you a sense of awe the first feels regal and majestic but you'll notice the second one has a title that was taken from its Instagram post it's viewed as a monster now we could get into Carl Jung and talk about how in every human being there are these also there are these two components and how we think about those components and how we view that human being depends on how their story is told and we could go deeper into that and what you called individuation but the marketer simply needs to know something very very important the actions that people take are grounded in decisions that they make but those decisions are grounded in conclusions that they take the conclusion produces the decision and with that decision we see the behavior data is about working backwards through the data traces through the behavioral traces into the decision and the conclusion with that information we can modify the conclusion in the same way that we can modify the way you feel by taking the same creature the lion and simply altering the way we create the observation set what you're looking here is an it's really an observation set and it turns on zeros and ones and it stimulates something inside of you now as you're just thinking about that I want you to see that on this screen we are summarizing in a single page a year's worth of research inside of our laboratory we've ran twenty thousand-plus path experiments we have built I think the largest library in the world of case studies and experiments in our field and I'm going to draw down from this learning and share some things with you today that could transform the results you're getting in your conversion and to do that I want to skip ahead dip into an upcoming case study so take a look and you're going to see three sort of banners that are working on a website in two versions a design a and a design B let me ask you which one of these do you think will produce the highest conversion is it a or B now I'm not coming to you live today which I typically do because we're still engaged in a the studio once we get it all built we'll invite somebody to come in and and connect with us but for now just look at this and imagine to yourself if you were the marketer responsible for selecting the messaging that's going to go onto this web page would you select a or would you select B you must understand that everything you're looking at has everything to do with the two versions of the lion that we just saw one will produce a response inside of you and the other will produce a different response inside of you and we can measure that with good science and with that good science we can set our creativity free to produce the most compelling hypotheses I only have one more case study we're going to unpack them using the whiteboard I'm only taking right now from the new case study another comparison and I'm asking you see a C B and select one of the other which pricing strategy produced better results now as you think about that you're creating inside of your own mind a learning space and my job is to take our research and translate it into your results and I can only do that using the bridge of your mind and I must get inside of your mind and create the right question set and open you up for the learning otherwise this is just another YouTube presentation and it doesn't actually change your world done properly understood properly applied properly we can impact your world in a very significant very positive way so then let's get deeper into a case study it's test protocol one one to sixty seventy and it's a midsize to furniture company selling mattresses I've been approached this calendar year by a number well frankly I think most of the top mattress brands asking could they see our research could we help them solve a problem this is an earlier experiment and it comes from our classic library and when they come from the classic library I can share more details newer experiments sometimes we have to we have to protect the research partner so that we don't give away perhaps hard-earned trade secrets that results from the science with this one we can go deeper and so we shall and that's why we've picked it and I want you to see essentially what we were trying to accomplish so there is the page these are both redesigns against a control you can see a variable cluster test we teach about that somewhere else I can't get into it now but we're changing multiple variables but all clustered around the same hypotheses which allows us to test faster get bigger results produce deeper meaning now you can see the guarantee warranty and return tax policy you can see the free shipping and the supportive media let's look at design B it's different and I'm gonna drill down on these boxes in a moment a promise is made try your mattress for a hundred nights and sleep better or your money back there's a conversational question presented with a guarantee and reinforcement and there's messaging directed at reducing customer anxiety now I'm gonna put them side-by-side and I'm gonna ask you once again with this new level of information ask yourself which one of these will produce the highest response rate the highest conversion rate because when we say response and when we say conversion or Metanoia in the Greek what we're really saying is a behavioral change that changes somebody from one status to another from perhaps a prospect to a customer and if you understand conversion in that way you can see its application to every area of your life - winning a promotion - getting the next job - getting that campaign to produce greater than it ever has in the past - communicating more effectively with your teenage child or teenager I don't know if joy was the right word but you know what I'm saying my point is this is a profound understanding that if you lock into you can apply into many other places now when I say profound I'm profoundly confused about a lot of things so don't let that come across as if to say we have brilliant answers that you need to hear we're on a journey you and I this audience my team myself the only Empire I want is in the mind I'm not interested in a giant company I'm not a nurse in a giant YouTube audience I only want the right people on now with that said if there are people here that can learn invite them if they would participate or opportunity bring them and and share and and and like the video but just scaling an audience it's just not enough you and I I as a teacher and you even in your business we need to find the right people get the right message in front of them at the right time and scale is a dangerous goal that may blow your vision and hurt your ultimate meaning and significance well how does that apply to this how does that apply to two lions let me ask it every question what does a bloody lion matress a website and a tiered pricing model what do all three of these have in common and how does the combination of the three help you and I learn something today that could transform our results while you're thinking about the answer let me guide you towards it by looking a little bit further at what we have so ultimately what you're really doing is seeing three sort of communication spaces and in those communication spaces think of them as points in a dialogue we are employing two separate hypotheses to separate communication strategies and it becomes clear when we show them side-by-side so to get deeper value out of the time you're spending with me right now you need to really look at this slide you need to ask yourself what's the difference between the two approaches now as you ask that I want to try to help you to understand something and that one thing will guide everything that we do in the balance of our remaining time so in the balance of our time take a look now then at the way the first and I am looking at two boxes and I'm going to talk about the first one it says three things 109 Comfort exchange 25-year warranty 100 night return policy now go to the right try your mattress for 100 nights and sleep better or your money back do you know which one of these will work better it may not be apparent but the next one that is the next box the next banner free shipping try it 400 nights and then this other sort of approach on the right not sure if a botanical bliss is right for you why not sleep on it 109 money-back guarantee the the B version is following the same psychological model as the banner above the try your mattress 400 night Manor so though they look different there's a similar strategy a uniform hypothesis that applies to each side of this equation of the designing the design B approach now when you think about that let's unpack it first of all which one you think will work best well I'm going to share that with you just moment but let's nail down the strengths and weaknesses of the first manner that's the top banner across both design a and design B now the top banner does not use a single sentence to communicate meaning but bear in mind it is not a headline either that approaches a headline has failed every time I have tried it it is on a page at a certain point in the sequence of thought and so the the marketer is taking the risk of communicating in a different way so the weakness is it doesn't communicate in a single fluid complete thought like the form of a sentence even if it's an understood subject on the other hand design B does that try your mattress for a hundred nights and sleep better there's even a potential promise there and or your money back which one works better well let's talk about the weakness of be compared to a B is conversational but it also is so informal it doesn't look as credible because it's not important it's not important enough that I just understand your message this is where I'm going to start to unpack the two approaches of the banner and explain how it connects to a lion in the one approach let's take design B top banner you're achieving clarity now in the design a approach so I'm going to put B here the way it's laid on the page feels like it's an official policy of the business and so in a certain way you're achieving credibility and I am only going to abbreviate so clarity by the way is not a condition do you hear me it's a conclusion until it's a conclusion the fact that it's a condition doesn't matter if it's clear it doesn't matter unless I conclude I understand it the condition of clarity is insufficient it's necessary but insufficient you must go beyond the condition to the conclusion that conclusion is deep inside even at a subconscious level I understand it and it's very fast we tend to dwell that conclusion when we don't understand it it amplifies its impact on the conscious mind and whereas when we do understand it it's subsumed into it in fact great writers tell you that the writer should disappear in the work I agree see us this is one of those great writers now backing up that's clarity but the credibility thing again credibility is a condition can be it strongly monitor but it's not the external let's say evaluation that matters it's the internal conclusion that matters credibility is best understood as I believe it now if you've trained with us on the value proposition you know a lot about this but I'm not going there today this is not what I've taught in the past if you want to understand the value proposition go to our playlist I took a 12-week course and summarized it in one hour and we may put a link to that here somewhere so that you can watch that piece and learn from it I can't teach it right now or we won't get the payoff for today's energy investment instead I want to point out that both of these are necessary and with the design a109 Comfort exchange 25-year warranty 109th return policy you're dealing with a mind that's already been trained to understand that so easily we encountered so many places that we might conclude that it is possibly possibly sufficient enough so if B wins on clarity and a wins on credibility we might also say it may be sufficient on clarity if it is sufficient we're going to see that it is better than the other because it is both clear enough and more credible let me test it in a different way suppose I tell you something very clearly but you don't believe it does the fact that I was clear matter very much at all not really on the other hand suppose I tell you something and it's both clear and do you believe it well you can see that's better but we don't really see how to arbitrage the difference until we take it a step further so to watch this with me one is sufficient or at least necessary it requires both of these to get a conclusion but which is preeminent can I here's where I'm going can I believe it before I understand it No so there is a sort of preeminence even though both are required first I must understand it only then can I believe it if I understand that and I believe it you can win now because our time is limited I could take all three of these on the right they strive for clarity and a conversational tone what you often teach is the very best approach however those on the right are clear enough but they have additional impact on the I believe it conclusion because of the way they're structured because of the language choice and even the visuals I'll give you an example just so you understand before I show you the results not sure if a botanical bliss is right for you well you're you're asking a question I came with a question don't bother me with your questions don't think that I identify with that that just sounds like stels language you wasted the that sort of tone and meaning approach on words on a phrase that isn't actually advancing your cause in terms of the micro guesses in conversion why not sleep on it there's another useless question if you just tell me with one hundred look here free shipping try for three hundred nights that actually communicates more value what is it really implying it's applying a sub conclusion and I'm getting technical but if you learn from this you can see it remember I'm gonna put this together I'm gonna show it impacts pricing I'm going to relate it to the Lions stay with me well the free shipping sense to me I really can try it for free because AI can return it in 100 nights but I'm not even going to lose the cost of shipping now that then adds double impact to the conclusion and its meaning in my mind well where does all this go it's fascinating before the internet we didn't have a digital way we could see into millions of decisions and pattern and do not think of the Internet as a channel it is a living laboratory it is the greatest breakthrough in the history of the world when it comes to understanding how people make choices and I've spent 30 years after you one question why do people say yes and here's a glorious example using science to understand life and in particular its life in commercial application so here we go there's the difference design a because it is understood enough so I understand it but it is believed more we pause it that's the reason produces a hundred and sixty-seven percent increase now if you are one of those unusual people that I'm trying to find in this community your mind is now racing at 100 miles an hour you're not just thinking about a hundred and sixty-seven percent you're starting to think about implications for all of your communication you're wondering how it could impact the headlines your calls to action you're wondering how it could impact other areas in your life so many times when I teach people say wait a second this applies to every area of my life it does it's the primary reason we began to study in our research program I'm more interested in spiritual values than I am in just commercial values and when you get the one right the other tends to follow stay with me because I got an interesting experiment to connect to this one I think you should come away here when you're trying to summarize what you've learned from this is that we want to achieve a certain conclusion about you to psyche a conclusion about the lion people make a conclusion about you before they do about your offering so there's two parts to this process I'm going to put them on the board as they observe and that happens as they interact with your site let's just let's just leave this to a landing page but it's also true of a television commercial it's also true of a lecture it's true in the science community when you're trying to get people to believe you're late stuff hypotheses or at least to believe in the value of your work science is marketed never forget that I'm not the first to say it read Thomas Kuhn and there's a wonderful article on the subject that just blew my mind by someone who saw through all the posturing and realized wait this is just marketing but come back with me here they make a conclusion about you and then about your offering it's very hard to separate the conclusion one from the other if I conclude you're dishonest that impacts my thinking about your offering if I conclude you exaggerate that influences my conclusion about your offering and in fact human beings are wired through them through their biology to make conclusions about a person very fast what we can do with the subtle signs on a human faith baffle scientists to this day so much is communicated in an expression that it's stunning and in a situation where I'm not sure about the offering I'll fall back on the area that I am most sure about and that's my conclusion about you if you run up to me on the street with a trench coat on and offered to sell me a Rolex watch and you open up your coat and it's full of Rolex watches and you speak in a conspiratorial tone to me and you look to the left and the right I'm doubting those watches are really Rolexes but watching the way you behave is confirming my suspicions because I first make a judgment about you before I do about the watch so we saw lying at any given point that lion could look like picture a or picture be when we emphasize picture a we create a different set of conclusions inside of you which produces a different set of decisions I don't think for instance you're gonna look at the second image and say wow I've got to show my four-year-old this is an amazing picture of a lion but we crammed theaters to see the cartoon eyes version of a lion and by the way most all biographies are cartoons and half of what I hear in marketing is cartoons it's two-dimensional when it should be three-dimensional and because it is flat in two-dimensional it doesn't really capture the truth or the reality now I watched Lion King with my little boy he's now 26th doing courses at Harvard and coming back to the Thailand tomorrow but when I watch Lion King it was a cartoon two-dimensional when they watch the theater it was three-dimensional but the story is two-dimensional that's okay we're using the story to communicate something of value about family and all of these things I'm not criticizing the Lion King I'm trying to help you understand that a master marketer could take the same lion and pick two different points in his own life story and present him in two different ways produce two different sets of conclusions and produce a different set of decisions and a different behavior we're going into political Wars right now the other side is trying to control the observations so they can control your conclusion about that candidate it's as old as mankind itself and there's nothing in this lab I want to study with you that won't apply to a thousand years from now and wouldn't have been valuable a thousand years ago I may get that wrong but I'm not nursing in fads I'm interested in the depths of human nature so then let's get more practical let's apply it to presenting your price our time is running out there's your big win here's a new case study test protocol 1107 for software-as-a-service there's a membership a lot of this today everybody wants you to comply with a recurring revenue model even if it doesn't make sense but here we go this is a pricing approach that offers four tiers and you know perma clams methodology it emphasizes one pier over the other which sounds like you're applying what we might have taught in MEC labs ten years ago but it really isn't because the way you're emphasizing price you're just emphasizing the first one and you're giving no roll reason why I would actually value that over the other three so why you think you're helping me here's what you're really doing you're putting me off I look at it and think of course you want me to take the most expensive so if I put it in blue and make it a little bit more dominant you know that's the marketers thinking maybe more people will opt for that that is not the way we intended to teach this principle years ago it is important to wait one option but make sure that option that's being waited makes sense in the communication of its value proposition there is no body proposition here the the marketer assumed that that was accomplished earlier in the process big mistake but that's not what I want to dwell on I want to show you something strange weird something that may cost you to think twice about how your positioning price in the future there is the approach and I can give you one number I'll write on the board everything about the second approach is based on this number so the goal here for this organization was to get a lot more subscriptions what's their plan let's discount the price twenty two percent now you're looking at a treatment everything's identical but the pricing the big difference here is that the pricing has been dropped by twenty two percent all the way across the board and as you can see the difference in price the question you might ask is well what one will produce the greatest conversion rate oh this is all about lions bloody lions and and and majestic lions it's all happening the same way on this page you are showing me a set of observations and that set of observations ie those two pictures pictures of lions are producing a conclusion and the conclusion is influencing your decision but what's really happening well I will tell you this there's a fulcrum going on and there's an approach here that someone just took I've topped the fulcrum but if you see it now with me I'm going to use the fulcrum to unpack what's happening beneath the surface deep in the mind so I'll erase all of this and I'll simply say here's the marketers task for those of you that are new this is the first time you'll see this but for those who could have seen it bear with me because I'm gonna take it to a new place with you here's the fulcrum imagine that we have this fulcrum think of it like a seesaw and and on this side I have will make that different on this side I have perceived cost on this site I have perceived value now obviously that fulcrum needs to extend so that we're at the same exact leverage point one day I'll teach what happens when you move that when you move that you change context it's magical I've never taught it in the last 30 years I haven't taught it yet still doing research but I want to talk to you right now imagine this is even perceived Fuss perceived cost it's tilted not at all because right president they're equal and one is equal you're losing if perceived cost and perceived value are the same you're losing now look at the subscription right now there is no almost no value only cost on the page but don't think that cost is price did you hear me cost is not price cost includes every negative that would factor against your decision to purchase it could be risk it could be a fear that you're not going to be able to cancel easy enough can be fear that the products going to be disappoint become you fear that you're not paying a fair price there's a lower price somewhere there's all of these other factors that weigh in on the negative side of the fulcrum and as they weigh in they tilt it down we're down we're downward and when it tilts downward conversion also goes down and you lose now you've heard me teach this and I'll say it again because it's going to apply to this lesson but there's only two ways to tilt this fulcrum it's physics you're tracking with me you might arrive with those on your own before I say them imagine the fulcrum evenly weighted what tilts it to the left or tilt it to the right only two moves this is not duh philosophy this is physics you can take weight off of one side or you can add weight to another side now if you're following that what you to follow the logic of this we did not reduce cost in terms of people's friction or anxiety with the with the new version of this page all we did was reduce the price and there's a difference between reducing price and reducing cost when you reduce price without cost you created an inverted here me this is the point it may not make sense yet but I'm gonna say it and I'm gonna explain it you created an inverse impact on perceived value in fact you confirm their suspicions which is a bad move it's one of the reasons newspapers all over the world have gone out of business it's another reason those that are thriving are thriving because they learned that discounting their way into a customer is a dangerous even deadly practice they learned this is say the Boston Globe we've worked with for many years and the New York Times we worked with for more than a dozen years when you add perceived value it changes everything in that fulcrum as it exists in the mind of a prospective customer but let's look at what happens here here all we did is throw some weight off of the price and we hope by throwing weight off of the price we would win this is the lazy marketers way not gonna go back and communicate and value more effectively I'm just gonna lower the price so across the board we lower the price by 22% what happens well I shall I shall show you by calling your attention to slides and let's see whoa is this good or is this bad I'm asking you that question it's clearly a 19 percent improvement and wouldn't you expect that we just lowered the cost but we lowered the cost with no what we call PVD no differential between perceive value and actual value that's a dollar-for-dollar drop it was this number and now it's this number that 22% cost me 22% and it gives you 24 two percent there's no difference to arbitrage if I gave you a special video that you were attracted to it might cost me two dollars and feel like it's worth $29 and the difference to be arbitrage to tip the fulcrum but since we did not do that all we did was impact people's equation in their mind when it comes to the price and it comes to the promise on the left hand is the promise and that's what producers perceive value on the right hand is the price and that's what producers perceived cost and we diminished it by 22 percent so did it work did we make money the answer is no no because total revenue in the test dropped by nine point seven percent now if you focus on that small amount of dollars if you focus on anything except what I'm going to say next you may miss the point of all this discounting the price just confirms the prospects suspicions that you're not as they're not worth as much as you're saying when you when you approach the problem in a different way when you learn how to change the picture of the lion and people of us change their conclusions and thus change their decisions which is the same as saying their behavior if their behavior doesn't change it wasn't a real decision if the decision and the behavior align as a difference than you've achieved Metanoia which is called conversion a change of Stacey's they're no longer a prospect or a customer but it happened then by improving their perception of value here all that was done is we confirmed their negative evaluation of our offering now I was teaching at the Boston Globe and I say this only as a compliment and particularly to Peter who said is now no longer there but probably is the most brilliant newspaper marketer I think you know that I know of anywhere in the world you should find Peter or reach out to us and we'll help you find Peter if you need to I'm just sharing that with you because I worked with him for many years at the globe and he ran all of this testing program but what Peter was able to do with his team just before he left the globe was raised prices by 74% when newspapers everywhere else are discounting to $1 trying to get you somehow into their funnel I saw that with the biggest newspaper in Canada we work with him but their only strategy up until that point was discount discount discount discounting is not a strategy in most cases it's a concession that's a difference that concession cost you more than you may know but while other newspapers discount the globe raised prices 74% and they raise prices 74% why because they got the picture of the lion right what do you mean well whatever picture I show you of a lion it's going to produce a certain sort of impact inside of the large exactly are you the stochastic sample that I'm reach with my marketing that same could be said for this choice of words on the banners that we saw in the early experiment the same can be said for the way we approached the discount methodology here ultimately until you truly know how to increase the perceived value on this side be very careful about a price reduction strategy indeed I'll just take this one step further and I'm going to close this out over here if we can influence what they see and we call that observations then we can influence what they conclude and we call that conclusions and then we can influence what they decide and we call that decisions and when we influence that we are Apes so de facto influencing behavior and we will call that conversions that is the point of today's session when I teach the next session I'm not certain yet but I think I'm going to be unpacking it an FBI hostage and kidnapping negotiation to show you how one brilliant agent marketed his way out of a disaster of a crises and by the way it is as applicable to your webpages as anything else you'll ever read because it comes down to understanding what happens in the mind do not optimize your website do not optimize your landing page optimize the sequence of thought see beneath the page into the mind transform the perception of value now watch your conversion rate get amplified [Music]