Data for bluffers: Recent Episodes
GDlabs
Want to understand how data can help your growth, marketing and sales efforts but don’t have the time to dive deep? Join Dr Ed Barter and Tom Ridges as they break down the world of data and AI into bite size nuggets
Economic headwinds mean that consumers are planning to cut back on Christmas spend, and looking for discounts where possible.
In this mini “sun-lounger” podcast, we look into how spending behaviours are changing, and what impact that will have on retailers.
Are people switching to lower-priced brands? Will there be a revolution on gifting? Is there a social stigma around switching brands to cut costs?
We discuss all of this and more, plus a fair amount of chatter about cheese straws and Baileys!
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-grapevine-herdify/message
Without stock to sell, car marketers have been forced to shift their strategies – and that means keeping existing customers and prospects happy while they wait months, sometimes years, for their new car.
Looking at this through a behavioural science lens, what does this mean for consumer buying behaviour?
And with purchases becoming more infrequent, how can marketers keep their brand top of mind?
We discuss some practical ideas for increasing loyalty, getting people talking about your brand in the right way and creating an “in the club” mentality.
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-grapevine-herdify/message
According to Hopper’s 2023 Travel Trends Report, people are booking holidays at the last minute more than ever before.
In this mini “sun-lounger” podcast, we ask whether this a good thing for marketers when it comes to thinking about shoulder season? Is there still time to market to those people who haven’t yet booked for September and beyond?
And can we avoid shoulder-season discounts?
We delve into consumer behavioural changes, community networks and the true meaning of value to answer these questions.
Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-grapevine-herdify/message
It was our absolute pleasure to welcome the brilliant Richard Shotton, bestselling author and expert in applying behavioural science to marketing, on our last podcast of the season.
Richard, Ed and Tom dig into some of the fundamentals of behavioural science, and what it actually means for smart marketers.
“What motivates us hasn’t changed in millennia and isn’t going to change. Yet still not many marketers look at human behaviour as a way of influencing consumer change. Those who take the time to learn are giving themselves a headstart,” says Richard.
If you’re looking to get started with behavioural science and listen to some practical tips on how to apply it to your role, this is the podcast for you! Here’s a sneak peek:
- The more you learn about behavioural science, the more opportunities there are to apply it
- The best way to approach pricing and discounting
- The power of imprecision – people believe unrounded numbers more
- Red Bull’s growth story (it involves spreading empty Red Bull cans around nightclubs at kicking out time)
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We’re inundated with new developments in technology and automation, but does that make us more efficient?
Neil Mandell, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Samsung, believes that this is the year of efficiency.
In this week’s podcast, he chats to Tom about:
- why we need to lean into AI
- how the community of Samsung loyalists contribute to business growth
- what Samsung’s cookieless strategy might look like
As Google announces its Privacy Sandbox will be available within months, it’s a timely one!
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Sustainability and eCommerce… A contradiction in terms?
On this week’s podcast, we welcome Chloë Thomas, eCommerce guru and pro-podcast host – no pressure, Ed and Tom!
Chloë’s hot topic is sustainability in eCommerce. Surely the two are opposing forces? It’s something we’ve grappled with at Herdify HQ.
“Fundamentally, we need to consume fewer resources, and in the UK we’re amongst the worst offenders,” says Chloë. “After a particularly dark weekend of being freaked out by Armageddon stories, I felt like I was helping people destroy the planet. So now my business is about helping peopleput sustainability front and centre.”
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What can Kevin Bacon teach you about marketing?
Fresh on the podcast today, Ed and Tom discuss the idea of 6 degrees of separation, otherwise known as the “small world effect”.
We’re all six or fewer social connections away from each other. The world of Hollywood has taken this one step further – you can searchhow many connections separate Kevin Bacon from any other actor (check out “The Oracle of Bacon” for that one!).
When it comes to influencing behaviour (a change, a purchase, a call to action), that effect is reduced to “three degrees of influence” (a friend of a friend’s friend).
What can this teach us as marketers?
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On the podcast this week, hear from Mike Taylor… In his own words, a “recovering agency owner” and author of the upcoming book, “Marketing Memetics”.
Tom, Ed and Mike go deep in 30 minutes. Is marketing art or science? Do ideas evolve in the same way that genes do? Is any idea ever original? Is creative optimisation the only lever left for performance marketers?
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What makes one song a massive hit, and one a flop? What sets apart the popular kids? Why do 1 billion people own an iPhone, more than any other brand?
It’s all to do with social proof.
In this week’s podcast, Tom and Ed pick apart an experiment that answers these questions. Entitled “Leading the Herd Astray”, the study created an online music marketplace, mere months before Spotify was launched.
Participants were placed into groups and asked to rate various songs, armed only with the ratings from the rest of the group.
The guys take the findings and chat through what they mean for marketers. Find out how to:
- appear bigger than you are
- apply the tactics used by Uber and Airbnb to grow social networks
- create virality, even years after launch
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If you missed the two days of Performance Marketing World Unlocked, we’ve distilled it all into one hour!
In this week’s The Grapevine podcast, Ed and Tom pull out the three hot topics of conversation…
- Cookies: how are marketers making the most of the data that’s left?
- Cross-platform attribution: what’s the answer? Will there ever be an answer?
- The intersection between brand and performance: where’s the line in the sand? Can any marketer answer the question, “If I spent more (or less), what would happen?”
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.com
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-grapevine-herdify/message
Did you know that a conversation in the pub can drive 200 x more sales than a creative your team has laboured over for weeks?
In this week’s podcast, we delve into what word-of-mouth (WOM) really means in the modern marketing world.
These stats might surprise you ⬇️:
🔥27% sales are driven by WOM
🔥200 x more sales driven by WOM than traditional ads
🔥2/3 of WOM happens offline
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.com
--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-grapevine-herdify/message
“Your brand is not what you put down on a piece of paper, it’s what people say about you”
Supercharged referrers, retention incentives, the impact of discounting… On this week’s podcast, Ed and Tom meet Arthur Guinness, Head of acquisition at Mindful Chef.
It’s one of the best conversations yet, and could have gone on for a lot longer!
Here’s what they cover:
- How to change behaviour and incentivise purchases
- How to ramp up social proof with “super referrers”
- How to tune social media advertising with super referrer UGC
- What discounting really means for subscription boxes
- Whether the cost-of-living crisis means that customers are trading down
And in a first for us, the guys come up with a new experiment to test on air.
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.com
Like many ecommerce businesses, Thomas Hal Robson-Kanu's journey from professional footballer to experienced marketer and owner of The Turmeric Co. didn't happen overnight.
From creating the "golden elixir" in his father's kitchen to over 1000 athletes now using his product every day, Thomas shares his story with Tom and Ed on how he earned his business stripes.
Discover how he set out to reach 100 million people globally, by:
- leveraging communities to grow awareness
- building a digitally native brand
- moving from elite athletes to "everyday heroes"
- investing in data
- understanding true LTV and CAC
Plus: Thomas shares his thoughts on expanding into retail, "heavily exploring" TikTok Shop, and the viral growth of PRIME.
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.com
This week, Ed and Tom dissect Shopify’s Commerce Trends 2023 report.
As usual, the guys take a behavioural science view, and they don’t pull any punches!
They talk about:
- How Shopify anticipates marketing will change over the next year, as CAC continue to skyrocket
- The impact of tougher privacy legislation (hello, £300+m fine for Meta from Ireland’s DPC)
- Shopify’s drive to help brands improve their marketing once they land on site – and why that’s too late
- Why Shopify’s “collaboration” idea probably won’t work
- What Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have to do with any of this
If you want to start thinking about how to replace third-party cookies at the top of the funnel – and how to look at data in a different way – have a listen!
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.com
Happy New Year from all of us at Herdify, we have very exciting podcast plans for the upcoming year. if there is anything you'd love to learn about data science, or if you have any questions, follow us on social media or reach out to us at Herdify.com
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.com
Our feeds have been flooded with marketing predictions for next year. But does anything ever really change?
To quote Jeff Bezos: “I do get asked, quite frequently, ‘what’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ I rarely get asked, ‘what’s not going to change?’ You can work on those things with the confidence to know that all the energy you put into them today is still going to pay dividends in the years to come.”
In this week’s podcast, we compare the Forbes’ ecommerce trends lists for 2013 and 2023.
What’s changed? Not a lot! Ed and Tom discuss what consistency means for our marketing strategies.
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.com
Ed kicks this one off by talking about terrorist recruitment. Bear with us…
People need to be influenced multiple times. As marketers, we need to reach people multiple times through multiple channels of influence to really make – and create – an impression.
On this week’s podcast, Ed advises marketers to:
- Work with influencers in overlapping communities
- Encourage referral chains
- Show the aggregation of reviews to highlight how many reviews you’ve got overall
- Target adverts to word-of-mouth areas, to add another impression to the mix
Listen to the podcast to find out why all of this matters, and what a study on terrorist recruitment can tell us about marketing.
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.com
We copy people who are similar, and the idea of who we deem to be "like us" might surprise listeners!
This week, Ed and Tom discuss re-using towels in hotel bathrooms. Studies have found that placing cards in rooms to highlight how many other guests re-used their towel (rather than asked for it to be washed) helps to encourage guests to copy.
Even more impactful: "XX% of people who have stayed in this room have re-used their towels"! In this example, encouraging guests to copy was much more powerful than using a motivational message about saving the environment.
This week's episode explores how marketers can use the notion of copying to enhance influencer, referral, review and word-of-mouth campaigns.
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.ai
“Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats”.
We can do it – but we’d rather not! The main way that we avoid thinking is by copying people around us, and Ed Barter, lead data scientist at Herdify, spoke about exactly that at our recent event on influence in Bristol.
In this week’s podcast, Tom and Ed take a closer look at one of the topics raised in Ed’s talk – being genuine.
Thank you for listening!
Find out more about influence, behavioural science and Herdify:
- Visit our website
- Find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
- Email us on hello@herdify.ai
Post-Black Friday, you should have a raft of new customers. This week, Ed and Tom dive into:
- the behavioural science behind understanding those new customers
- how to adjust your strategy quickly to maximise their lifetime value
- how to turn spontaneous "bargain" hunting customers into loyal ones - preferably before the Christmas buying season
In this week's podcast, Ed and Tom turn to this month's Sober for October and the events of Queen Elizabeth II's funeral to examine how herd mentality can influence behaviour and change.
For marketers, changing behaviour is most effective by influencing groups, as people imitate and follow those around them. How can we apply this to our campaigns? To find out, the guys dive into research by Stephen Reicher that investigates how the wait to see the Queen's coffin transformed people.
People are more likely to cheat if they know others are having an affair too, a new study claims. What does this have to do with marketing? This week, Ed and Tom discuss:
- How so much of our behaviour is owed to social norms - and what this means for product choices
- What rational product choice really means
- How customers react to stories rather than stats
In this week’s podcast, we turn our attention to a court case that’s dominated the headlines in recent months: Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard. After documents from the case were unsealed, revealing previously private information about Johnny Depp, celebrities in their droves “unliked” his Instagram statement, originally posted (and one of the most-liked posts of all time) after he won his libel case. We dissect what prompted this response and why other people’s perceptions of us are so key to us making decisions. As ever, we turn the lens on marketing – how can we use our need for consistency to help us boss our campaigns?
We create 1 trillion MB of data each day, so trying to be heard as a marketer in a noisy world is hugely difficult.
Learn how the behavioural science behind marketing means that we filter out the noise unconsciously – and how we can circumvent this brain filtering using the “new car effect”.
Tom Ridges and data scientist Ed Barter join Harry and Jon on The Tech Marketing Podcast to discuss their AI audience targeting intelligence platform that delivers insights from first-party data to help you find your next customer.
Original episode here: https://open.spotify.com/show/02WqHjR0JIGOFAQlPNKpSB?si=d65a54bb3b494f66
This week, we're joined by the head of data science at Andy Aldersley at anything is possible to discuss attribution in a post-cookie world. First we cover what is attribution and then some of the ways it's evolving to cope with the phasing out of cookies and also the questions to ask to get the most from your attribution team.
www.linkedin.com/in/andy-aldersley/
What does word-of-mouth (WOM) really mean for your marketing strategy and why should we care?
In this episode Tom and Ed discuss the big stats that matter, whether our brains have evolved since cave(people) days and why this matters for marketing, how WOM could be the answer in a world without third-party cookie data, and how influencer marketing can seed and enhance WOM (and why it’s not social listening).
Visit GDlabs at https://www.gdlabs.ai/
And in the spirit of WOM, please share if you like what you’ve listened to!
With the economy facing hard times and consumers changing their buying behaviour, how can marketing continue to support and drive the business forward? This week Tom and Ed discuss a simple framework developed after the '07/'08 recession on how data can do just that and show that marketing can be the saviour during the tough times and not the first department to be trimmed.
For more, visit https://www.gdlabs.ai/
This week, Tom and Ed are joined by Ben Salmon from We Are Crank as they discuss the data behind e-commerce and traditional retail and how e-commerce retailers can use this information to drive sales.
Visit us at https://www.gdlabs.ai/
You're probably familiar with the concept of social proof but doing it wrong can have big consequences for your campaign as one university found out.
In this episode Tom and Ed are joined by Phill Agnew, host of the consumer psychology podcast, nudge.
In the episode you'll learn that social proof is much more than just testimonials on the website; how the relationships between your customers are more important than you might think and finally, how not to do social proof with some practical examples to help you avoid the traps.
Phil can be found at https://www.nudgepodcast.com/
Visit GDlabs at https://www.gdlabs.ai/
Every time you run a campaign it's a chance to learn, but how do you know if your last success was random? In this episode, Tom and Ed cover some of the common pitfalls that could skew your results as well as a framework to help you produce great ones.
2 years later, what has the pandemic done to our behaviors and routines? Have things “snapped back”? Are we spending our time in different ways? And should we be thinking differently about how we reach customers? This week, Tom and Ed discuss this and point towards some free data that might just help
Why do some campaigns work and other fail? How does your product type influence how you should target your marketing activity? In this episode, Tom and Ed discuss how opinions and ideas move between people and how you can harness this to have more impact from your marketing.
Do you think your customers make their decisions based on the great creative or product features? Listen to Tom and Ed discuss how people do in fact make decisions and how you can influence them.
What can Kevin Bacon teach you about marketing? Why William the Conqueror being your not-so-distant relative can give you a leg up in the way you reach new customers. This and more in this week's episode of the data for bluffers podcast
How can the R number we heard so much about during the pandemic drive your marketing strategy? Why are the groups your customers hangout in so important to understand? This week Tom and Ed cover these questions, and much more
Find out more at www.GDlabs.ai
oh, and here is our blog: https://www.gdlabs.ai/blog/top-3-books-for-marketers-looking-to-understand-data/
Learn how writing a pub quiz can make you better at marketing as Tom and Ed discuss how bias can be good and bad when it comes to data in sales and marketing.
It's time we settle this once and for all...maybe.
This week Tom and Ed get to the bottom of the question "what is AI?"
This week Tom and Ed discuss how we can use different types of data to gather intent, and how to capitalize on it.
This week Tom end Ed discuss how to growth teams can use the tactics that led the likes of Slack, LinkedIn, and Facebook to acquire their massive customer base as we discuss the book, “The Cold Start Problem” by Andrew Chen
What’s going to happen to privacy in 2022? Will data FOMO dominate? And why will small data rule the data conversation? Listen to our predictions of how data will impact growth teams in 2022.
What is an algorithm? How do they compare to models which we hear about daily on the news? Why do they go wrong? All this and more in episode two.
What is data science? How does this differ from statistics? How can you get the best from a data scientist? All this and more in our very first episode of the data for bluffers podcast