No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone’s eyes.
—Paulo Coelho
Commerce has always been personal, people doing business with each other face-to-face. Think about those old vacuum and encyclopedia salespeople knocking on doors. Think about a local farmer’s market. Think about Ogilvie’s hardware store. Face-to-face is the way we form relationships in the real world. And, as we have said, every sale forms a relationship of some kind. In small towns across the country, we might make a purchase at the corner store, and not be surprised to see the proprietor again at the school board meeting that night.
Behaviors in buying and selling products have evolved over time. What began as a very chaotic process (i.e., the marketplace) morphed into an industry (i.e., cold-calling, door-to-door sales, and retail) and eventually became mechanical (i.e., e-commerce). You can see what happened here—the personal nature of sales has disappeared. There may be lots of reasons for that. Ultimately, though, we believe that as consumers became more savvy and informed and salespeople continued trying to “force” them into the mysterious “sales funnel,” consumers simply stopped wanting to deal with them. It makes the whole process simpler for the consumer if they can meet all of their own needs.
This is why, more than ever before, organizations need to rehumanize buying and selling. If the buying and selling processes are so mechanical, what keeps a customer “loyal”? How can organizations ensure that they retain life-long connections with their customers? The answer to that is the reason for this whole book—relationships. Relationships are the glue that bonds loyal customers to your organization. Yet, if that is the answer, then the growing popularity of the digital buying process is undermining relationships. Think about how dehumanizing digital can be. You click. Purchase. Receive. Maybe even use? All without ever seeing another human face. It would be like walking into a store where all it had was self-service checkouts, cameras monitoring the floor, inventory stocked automatically, and, oh yeah, that cleanup on aisle seven? Say hello to Roomba. A frightening image, isn’t it? Something straight out of a science-fiction movie. Or is it? Isn’t that what e-commerce really is? Without the human interaction, or, more importantly, the face-to-face interaction, which exemplified the methods by which we used buy and sell in the analog world, it becomes harder and harder to keep people in the tribe.
So, how can we reintroduce the power of face-to-face interaction into the digital world? How can we at least create the sense of human interaction that has been the crux of business for so long?
Easy.
Video.
But before we tackle video, let’s explore why face-to-face communication is so necessary.
Before digital, at the heart of almost anything that was bought, sold, negotiated, or agreed upon was some face-to-face communication. Why? Because face-to-face interaction was critical for developing a sense of trust.
Consider the story of Jon:
In the summer of 1999, when Jon was still a junior in high school, he started working as an entry-level distributor, selling Cutco kitchen products. The job had him going into customers’ homes, selling knives. It was one of the most intimate sales situations imaginable, not in a boardroom or a car dealership, but inside a potential client’s kitchen selling them a product they’d use daily to help put food on the table.
The result?
Jon turned his affinity for serious conversation, and for adopting an advisory role rather than a persuasive one, into a kind of therapy for his prospects. “I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling,” explains Jon. “They buy from me because they feel understood.”1
In a study published in International Business Review, Sonia Ketkar, codirector of the Center for Emerging Market Policies and assistant professor of Global Business and Policy at George Mason University, and coauthors concluded that face-to-face communication plays a significant role in establishing trust between buyers and suppliers.2
Why? Because when we see how people react in conversations, we can gauge their trustworthiness and their predilection to use what we tell them against us to gain advantage in terms of the sale.
It would seem that there’s an apparent problem with digital—trust. How can we engender trust when no one can “look us in the eye”? It might seem that a good solution is video conferencing. Skype and others are becoming more popular, especially in business. But video conferencing, although solving the face-to-face issue, doesn’t scale. Imagine the staff at Ogilvie’s videoconferencing with customers around the world, trying to replicate their old-fashioned service experience in the digital world. It would take an army of them, and still would not make a dent in appeasing the face-to-face needs of all the people trying to connect to their company.
But what if we could replicate the feeling of “face-to-face” communication, the familiarity of faces, and still get the scale of developing all the relationships that digital makes available?
Over the past five years, our consumption of online video has grown exponentially. According to Cisco’s annual report on Internet traffic, mobile video accounted for over 50 percent of all mobile traffic in 2012,3 and portends to account for approximately 70 percent of all Internet traffic by 2017.4 It seems that we have a love for online video that is probably born of our love for television. In order to understand why we love “moving pictures” in the first place, we need to understand what about us as humans attracts us to the format.
Again, there is real science that explains why we like video so much. As we mentioned in Chapter 1 and dug into in Chapter 2, Susan Weinschenk, PhD—also known as “The Brain Lady”—has uncovered four core, very human reasons why we are drawn to video:
So what can video do for business? As part of a curation strategy (which improves the value of an organization’s utility in a relationship), it would seem that video is a must have. But does it have a meaningful impact on developing relationships? Well, if you think about relationships as a factor of purchasing (i.e., a more positive relationship leads to a better chance of converting any audience member to a customer), then video definitely has a demonstrable impact:
Those numbers demonstrate one concept very clearly—consumers are willing to purchase more based on the principles of face-to-face interaction. We have a fascination with video. We are wired to pay attention to faces. Combine the two and what do you get? Improved opportunity to develop a long-term relationship and, more importantly, potentially improve sales.
There are many ways that you can use video as part of the content you publish to attract people’s attention. You can create animated whiteboard videos. You can create cute little animations about your company. But you can also opt to focus more on the human element of videos. You can create video content that features company executives, customers, people using products, customer testimonials, and so on. What does this do? It invites people’s brains to judge the intention of the person in the video (even if it is rehearsed). In fact, researchers found that when presented with rich media (video) and non-rich media (text) information, “users chose the rich media representations because they considered them to give the best insight into the trustworthiness of a piece of advice. . . . For designers interested in high levels of trust (even at the risk of inducing media bias), video is the best representation. . . .”10
Too much of any one thing isn’t a good thing, and the same goes for any single style of video content. People will get bored. And if we haven’t punctuated it enough, online audiences are fickle and easily swayed by the latest shiny object (i.e., a new video from a competitor).
That’s why we have to keep our entire digital presence fresh. The best way to do that with video is by having a stable of video formats to choose from:
Source: Google.
It’s clear that face-to-face communication is important because it helps us generate trust, the most important element to relationships. In fact, according to psychologist J. B. Rotter, “The entire fabric of our day-to-day living, of our social world, rests on trust—buying gasoline, paying taxes, going to the dentist, flying to a convention—almost all our decisions involve trusting someone else.”14 It’s a sentiment that everyone can relate to when they step back and think hard about how they interact with the world—the ability to form relationships and operate in the social world is completely predicated on trust.15
In the digital world, that face-to-face is embodied in video, which, thankfully, we have a real penchant for watching. In fact, we love to watch moving pictures, which probably accounts for the fact that we are watching more and more as we migrate from traditional TV to a more multiscreen behavior. Thankfully, there are lots of different kinds of video we can create that will add variety in a world where attention is so fleeting.
Developing a strategy to incorporate video into the way you engage with your audience will undoubtedly have measurable business impact—more time spent on site, better conversions, and improved engagement. But the real win? When you incorporate real people into your videos, you build the trust that you’ll need to develop the relationships you want with your audience. Here are some helpful tips, tricks, techniques, and things you can do today. Note that these aren’t in any particular order.
Notes
1. Susan Cain, Quiet (New York: Broadway Books, 2012).
2. S. Ketkar, N. Kock, R. Parente, and J. Verville, “The Impact of Individualism on Buyer-Supplier Relationship Norms, Trust and Market Performance: An Analysis of Data from Brazil and the U.S.A.” International Business Review 21 (2012): 782–793.
3. Cisco, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2012–2017,” February 6, 2013, www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.html.
4. Cisco, “The Zettabyte Era—Trends and Analysis,” www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_WP.html.
5. R. E. Mayer and R. Moreno, “Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning,” Educational Psychology 38, no. 1 (2003): 43–52.
6. Adam T. Sutton, “How To: Content Marketing: Videos Attrach 300% More Traffic and Nurture Leads,” MarketingSherpa.com, December 14, 2012, www.marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/videos-attract-300-more-traffic.
7. Amy Dusto, “Online Videos Help Build Confidence in Purchases,” InternetRetailer.com, April 5, 2012, www.internetretailer.com/2012/04/05/online-videos-help-build-confidence-purchases.
8. Internet Retailer via www.invodo.com/resources/statistics/.
9. Daisy Whitney, Product Videos Drive Online Purchase Rates; Nine Times Increases in Views,” Mediapost.com, January 11, 2012, www.mediapost.com/publications/article/165580/product-videos-drive-online-purchase-rates-nine-t.html.
10. Jens Riegelsberger, M. Angela Sasse, and John D. McCarthy, “Do People Trust Their Eyes More Than Their Ears? Media Bias While Seeking Expert Advice,”www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.riegelsberger/lbr_188_do_people_trust_2_final.pdf.
11. Maya Pines, “Sensing Change in the Environment,” Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling in the World: A Report from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, February, 1995, www.hhmi.org/senses/a120.html.
12. www.facebook.com/RobertScoble.
13. http://chris.pirillo.com/.
14. J. B. Rotter, “Generalized Expectancies for Interpersonal Trust,” American Psychologist 26 (1970): 443–452.
15. E. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton & Company, 1950).
16. Rishon Roberts, “This Beer Can Proves That FOMO Makes Us Buy Things,” Business Insider, August 8, 2013, www.businessinsider.com/psychology-of-buying-exclusivity-drives-purchases-2013-8.