Stephen Shu, PhD

I don’t know if folks saw the article, "In Heeding Health Warnings, Memory Can Be Tricky" in the NY Times (use BugMeNot if want to bypass compulsory registration), but there is some interesting organizational behavior-like research alluded to there as done by Dr. Ian Skurnik in the marketing department at the University of Toronto. Here’s a passage from the article:

"You notice that your grandmother has been taking useless medical
treatments, and you’re worried," he said. "You tell her, ‘You know,
Granny, shark cartilage doesn’t help your arthritis.’ You tell her three times to make sure she understands, and she seems to."

He
continued, "But a few days later you talk to her again and find the
warnings have had precisely the opposite effect of what you intended."
This common problem arises, Dr. Skurnik said, because in laying down a
memory trace, the human brain seems to encode the memory of the claim
separately from its context – who said it, when and other particulars,
including the important fact that the claim is not true.

While the article is about heath topics, the implications are actually more general. The basic gist (without capturing all of the necessary pre-conditions with rigor) is along the lines of this:

When you tell someone not to believe a myth, in the short-run that works to help him/her remember. In the long-run, the opposite effect can [likely] occur. The person ends up thinking the myth is true.

I find this to be an important thing to be aware of because I touch on both marketing and management consulting. Marketing tends to involve trying to be catchy, stand out, gain top of mind awareness, etc. True consulting is oriented towards having empathy and about helping a client in the long-run. When debunking myths, is seems as though there can be competing effects if one is not focused on both near-term and long-term effects (and the pre-conditions as to when things can backfire).

So is there a problem with debunking myths? Yes … if a person does not remember the context of the situation. Read more of the article to get some tips on how to get people to remember the right thing.

Motivated a little by my prior post on using blogging to imbue culture, I have a post over at my 21Publish blog to try to imbue some culture (in the public eye) on people performing inside sales and marketing functions at 21Publish. As I’ve mentioned before, the sales process and the role of cold calling (if any) depends on what type of product or service is being sold. There is also a lot of detail on optimizing sales operations which I do not go into on this post. Yet some may be able to imagine how things need to be segmented out so that skillsets of employees are used properly and so that customer prospects are engaged the way they want to be engaged.

Update (9/30/05) – Here’s a snip of a blog post I did about a year ago that sheds some light on different sales processes as related to the type of product being sold. I believe sales operations is something that every entrepreneur and general manager should better understand …

Where things can go awry is in the implementation of marketing and sales operations, and I’ll only address two activities for brevity: cold calling and networking. A popular saying is that networking is the most effective way to generate sales. While I think this is true, I think that such thinking ignores some underlying core concepts. Better understanding the core concepts is helpful because a spectrum of marketing and sales techniques may be used in an organization.

On one end of the spectrum, cold calling operations are generally better for those types of offerings that are more commoditized, common, and well-defined. Cold calling operations are also better for those cases where the customer’s problems are not that confidential. Thus, as you can imagine, since customer prospects can be contacted at any moment by telemarketers (aside from do not call regulations), if the prospect has a common and well-defined problem, there is very little risk to having an unknown, telemarketer give the sales pitch to them.

On the other end of the spectrum, problems of an infrequent nature and with a confidential slant to them (e.g., merger integration, company turnaround, new business launch) – these types of problems are better matched to sales and marketing processes involving networks. Use of networks and trusted people are the people that get invited to the party. Since problems faced by customer prospects are more confidential and infrequent, networks serve as feelers into the marketplace for suppliers.

So this is just another way of thinking about sales and marketing. At which end of the spectrum do your products and services sit? Do you have multiple products that require different operations? Does a blend apply? What should the balance be?