Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group spoke recently at TedSalon London about the contradictions between the behavior of large companies and what their customers really care about. Using humorous examples, he suggests that organizations should look at how they interact with their customers in completely different ways. Quoting him from the talk …
“So there seems to be a strange disproportionality at work, I think, in many areas of human problem solving, particularly those which involve human psychology, which is the tendency of the organization or the institution is to deploy as much force as possible — whereas actually, the tendency of the person is to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied.”
For example
“… those strange little signs that actually flash “35″ at you, occasionally accompanying a little smiley face or a frown, according to whether you’re within or outside the speed limit — those are actually more effective at preventing road accidents than speed cameras, which come with the actual threat of real punishment.”
Isn’t that the biggest reason why large companies have so much difficulty in doing small things that really matter to their customers? A case in point being Newsday’s major site overhaul in 2009, and requiring a subscription for some content. Well, hmm, that didn’t work. In about 4 months, 35 subscribers had agreed to subscribe as per recent published reports.
Similarly, Times of London is setting up a subscription paywall. Their approach has been to accept that they would lose a large percentage of their traffic. Is this a problem, where the loss to the company has been built into the initial assumptions?
I wonder if the publishers focused on the small things that matter to the readers, how would their traffic numbers change? For example, if the site prompted the reader to pay for the one article that the reader is interested in, rather than try to sock him with a long-period commitment, how would the results change? If the site offered the reader a few bucks to try the content as well as the payment system, would that matter?
Here at ClikServ, we are working to find answers to these questions for our publishers. Please comment or contact us, should you have insight into how to get readers to engage with their favorite publishers in ways that result in win-win situations.
Raj Mehta, CEO
