A: Captology is all about understanding how technology can be designed to change people’s attitudes or behaviors. This is an area I started researching in 1993 at Stanford. In late 1996, I gave it a name — captology — which is sometimes controversial. People think it comes from “capture,” which strikes a negative response. But I actually created the word from the acronym for Computers As Persuasive Technologies.
A; Some people don’t need to be persuaded to use social media. In fact, some parents have to persuade their teens to not use Facebook or MySpace. I’m not a fan of persuading people to use Facebook. Eventually people will find their own reasons, their own motivations. I do believe a big part of behavior change is making things easier to do. That’s why my sister and I teach parents how to use Facebook. Many parents don’t lack motivation; they just lack the ability.
A: Social media can share information about where to find the best prices. The first part of the conversion funnel — getting people to your location — could be driven by friends sharing price info with friends. Not everyone cares about price, but certainly people who do care about saving a few cents are friends with others who share this view. Social media can help tap into these friendship connections. How to do that could be the topic of exploratory testing. The options on Facebook range from Groups, to Fan Pages (fans of cheap gas), to applications (apps).
In the coming months, I would expect to see gas price information overlaid on maps, available on the iPhone. That represents a power mix: A mobile device, giving me info that is filtered through and shared with friends, coming to me at the moment I need it. This combination is the holy grail of persuasive technology. A good solution for this will not only affect convenience stores, but many other industries.
Convenience stores can either be innovators or fast followers of these solutions. You just don't want to be a laggard and let someone else own this user experience. If they create this solution without you, they will become a layer between you and the consumer. That's good for them but bad for you.
I've talked about the initial lure of low gas prices. But there are hundreds of products inside a convenience store that consumers can be persuaded to buy, and at bigger margins. Certainly these products can be promoted via social networks. For example, recently Dave Morin (a key player at Facebook) posted that he loved PopChips in his status update on Facebook.
I had never heard of PopChips, but when I saw that Dave mentioned them on Facebook, I searched PopChips online, and I clicked on the first few links, which included a user-generated video about these snacks. I didn't see how to order the chips online, so I made a mental note that the next time I saw PopChips, I would try them. I may see them first in convenience stores.
Note what's going on: A friend I respect expressed enthusiasm for a new product — at least something new to me — and I found this info because it came through Facebook. I wasn't looking for a snack; I was just keeping up with friends. This simple post was more effective than any commercial or print ad because it came from a trusted source, and Dave apparently had no motivation other than helping people learn about a great product.
Dave, the PopChip fan, has 3,835 friends on Facebook. While I don't know how many people read his PopChip status message, perhaps a thousand people got introduced to PopChips this way.
Let me explore an aside...rather than trying to promote what you currently have in your stores, perhaps a better strategy would be to track closely what is becoming hot — what is being discussed via social media (like PopChips) — and get those items in your stores ASAP. Social media would be excellent for this kind of tracking. In fact, that's a huge strength of Twitter. They call it "trending."
I would be surprised if convenience stores don't already have a nimble inventory strategy. Tie this just-in-time inventory to trending in social media. It would be sort of cool — in a weird way — if I walked into a store and I saw a shelf of products "As Seen on Facebook" — a play off of As Seen on TV. I'd pay attention to that shelf. At least until that idea got tired.
A: Many big companies don't seem to understand social media. Social media runs counter to what has worked for years. It's not just the format, but also the pace and style of sharing and innovation.
A striking example where companies fail is Facebook applications. While my students created apps — projects for class — that won 16 million users in 10 weeks in late 2007 (with no money invested), the big brands that spend millions on TV airwaves couldn't get a single hit with Facebook apps. Of the top 50 apps on Facebook not one was from a big brand. Facebook just wasn't in their DNA. In the summer of 2007, I phoned two of my big forward-thinking clients and I advised them to get going with Facebook. Both said, "No, that's not our market." I pushed back and said yes it is — or it will soon be. They didn't listen. Now they are trying to come back from behind.
To break into social media, most big companies should hire people who are already super-fluent with social media. Bring in the natives, the social media enthusiasts, and task them with your company goals. Outside experts in social media live and breathe Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. Social media changes quickly. Staying on top of all these changes is a big job. But on top of that, you need people to make impact on your behalf in this shifting landscape.
The key channels are these: social media, online video and mobile (right now, mobile means texting, soon it will mean iPhone and others).
A: My approach would be to map out and prioritize the behaviors you want customers to take. Once you have a clear view of your target behaviors, then simplicity becomes important. You can look at what’s “stopping” people from performing the behaviors you want to happen. Almost always the barriers have to do with simplicity.
In the past, simplicity has been a vague concept, so I wanted to make simplicity concrete and actionable. I created a simplicity framework that has six elements, such as time, money and mental complexity (or what I call “brain cycles”).
Suppose the target behavior is to buy coffee each morning at Store X. You don’t need to motivate people to buy coffee. Instead, the key is in making it simple to do. As you look at each of the six simplicity factors — and this means careful thinking as well as working with customers — you’ll see which factor (or factors) are creating the problem. Is the coffee costing too much? Does it take too much time to get? Do people have a competing routine for getting that caffeine kick? Is it somehow uncool to get coffee at a convenience store?
If any of those six factors is not working, then the behavior won’t happen. What I’ve found is that usually more than one aspect needs fixing: For example, you may find you need to make it (1) faster to get coffee and (2) less socially deviant to buy at a gas station.
The offers you make and the brand you project need to address the precise simplicity factors that are lacking. In other words, use your promotions and innovations to target the barriers for the behaviors you seek.
A focus on simplicity should be with a goal in mind: achieving the most important target behaviors.
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