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But you'll see also that we've got ship up there and guard.
And you're probably thinking; well why's that there?
But if you remember that not only do we get the word but we also get things that are
associated with that word.
So captain reminds people of ships.
So as we get more of that sound
we get rid of more of the irrelevant things
but we are left with captain or captive so which one is it?
Then finally
the brain hears captain
and gets rid of the ones that are irrelevant.
But it still leaves the associated ideas.
So if we have the word
'de'. What could it be?
It could be deck. It could be Debt or death or deaf.
Now remember that it will also bring all the associations with it.
So when we think of death
we think of our own mortality, so we think of growing old.
When we think of the deaf,
we think of hearing aids
and so there's a link between the elderly and hearing aids because of
course they are both things that you would wear as you get older.
Now the thing is that when we hear the 'F' what should happen
is that the idea of death should go,
but as we all know that when somebody has
a reduction in their hearing,
even a mild reduction in they're hearing, they often cannot tell the
difference between a 'F' and a 'th'.
So there is going to be a very strong link
between death and deaf
that will remind people of the elderly,
always, if we carry on using that word.
Now, we come along and we reinforce that because all of our images and we've seen
so many of them over the last couple of days that show people with
grandchildren, that show people who are happily retired,
all of these things. So what are we
priming for here? What stereotypes are we reinforcing?
Now this is all based on the circular argument because we say to ourselves;
well we know that the majority of people who get hearing aids are sixty nine and
over and are retired,
so therefore we need to attract more of those people because we know that they
think hearing aids are relevant to them.
So lo and behold we try to attract them with things that will speak to them
and then lo and behold we find that those people come through our doors
and lo and behold the age never changes.
And most of the stereotypes out there we actually reinforce, we are the
worst ones for it.
We're shooting ourselves in the foot
and when we look at the statistics,
this is what one of the speakers was saying about getting a
baseline,
the statistics are
that sixty percent of people who may benefit from hearing aids are actually
of working age.
So that means the majority are of working age.
So that means that two of the people we currently
leave behind are at least of working age.
so simply by changing our messages to appeal to people of working age
is going to open up the market to us;
providing we get other things right. We'll be coming onto those in a little bit.
So when they see images of people who are elderly
what goes through their minds? Well the first thing is
that's not relevant to them.
And remember what we said about relevance and ready-made attitudes and raw ingredients?
Hopefully you're starting to think ahead of me.
They also look at that and say well I don't want other people to think
I'm like that.
Because if you think about it, the reason we like brands
is because we feel it says something about us, it is an extension of our
personality.
So if they get a hearing aid what's it saying about them?
The message we currently send out is if you're working, avoid.
If you're not old, avoid.
If you're not deaf, avoid.
But also if you do not consider yourself to be old or do not want to
be seen as old
or you do not see yourself as deaf.
So these messages are not outside in society they're coming from us.
So we are actually excluding our biggest, potential audience.
So we need to rectify this. The first thing is we need to treat these
people, that we currently leave behind, as a totally separate audience. Don't try and
bring them into everything else we are currently doing.
We need to market for them separately.
We need to make sure that the messages that we use for them
are tailored to them.
The fact that they are working for a start would be a big thing.
We also need to tailor our services.
I've realized recently, for example, that how can
people come in to see me if they are working? It was because I was trying to make an
appointment for the dentist and I was thinking
well I have no time during the day to make an appointment for the dentist.
I want to go home and make an appointment when
I've come in from work.
So what I did was I thought I want online booking.
So we added online booking to our website.
It's things like that; making sure our opening times are when working people can
come in and see us, extending our hours, opening on saturdays etc.
Also we should be keeping specific products to them
so that we don't blur the boundaries.
So that people can have a product that says something about them
that they like.
In our images we shouldn't be showing just young people, I'm not saying that, we
should be showing people of all ages
and we should be showing them enjoying their hearing.
We shouldn't show them sedentary.
We shouldn't show them going for a walk.
We should be showing them there, in the midst of the moment because their
hearing is keeping them there.
Now I did actually have an image that I wanted to show you
of a restaurant group
with lots of different people, all happy and laughing. You'll just have to
imagine it because I
didn't have time to upload it.
Also the third thing is to choose your words carefully.
Think about the thought processes and the stereotypes
that you are triggering and think about the messages that you are sending
through it
and whether you are triggering an avoid response
or an approach response.
Interestingly I read an article last night that said that
with avoid and response,
if people feel powerful
they will approach something.
If people feel weak
they will avoid something.
Now all of our messages are about how weak you are and how needy you are.
So we're automatically sending a signal that says avoid us.
So we should at least avoid the word deaf in context aimed at
these three people.
So have separate sections on websites, have separate websites, have
separate brochures, whatever.
We need to be focusing on the hearing and not some condition.
Now I'm going to look at that in more detail.
We use something called framing. Now framing again has been talked about over
the last couple of days. Now if you look at these two pictures of the
Mona Lisa, it's both the same image
but we perceive the contents to be different.
One of them looks more genuine, one of them looks more fake.
And it's all because of the frame that's around them.
So framing actually changes the way that we perceive something
and that works with words too.
If you ask somebody how long was the movie,
you'll get an overestimate of the time, whereas if you ask them
how short was the movie,
you'll get an underestimate of the time.
It was the same content
but the frame was different and so the perception was different.
It's used in politics. Drilling for oil
is replaced with exploring for energy.
It happens in marketing where instead of saying vegetarian, supermarkets
will now say meat free.
They're framing it differently
because if you say vegetarian you will only attract vegetarians.
Whereas if you say meat free you'll attract vegetarians, you won't lose them, but you'll also
attract other people.
And so they've actually found that it increases their sales.
We find it in health messages. So if you frame something in one way you get a
bigger response than if you frame it in another way.
If you look at all the
brochures that we had leading up to this conference,
we would have seen all of these words in there. We've heard them a lot during the
conference as well. Now what's the most important word up on the screen there?
Ok. Lets change those words.
Now. What is the most important word on the screen there?
That's the most important word because that is a noun.
You can't have an adjective without a noun.
An adjective describes the noun.
Let's bring it back.
Where were we framing?
Okay. So we're focusing on the condition.
And what happens when somebody has a condition?
Or what happens if we tell somebody that they have a condition?
Does it make them feel powerful or does it make them feel weak?
(Weak). Okay so what are they going to do?
Avoid!
Okay. So we've got a serious problem here, haven't we?
Whereas if we change it to hearing, hearing is attractive. Why? Because it
makes us be ourselves.
We can bring that hearing to whatever situation. It means that
if we're a witty person
we can respond with the right punchline.
It means that if we're a caring person we can show that we're listening and
respond correctly to people. If we're good in business it means
that we can
pick up on those opportunities before anyone else does.
And so that is an approach signal.
So looking at some of the language that we currently use, we've changed
everything that we say. For example we don't say 'detect a hearing
loss' when we're talking about
hearing tests for example.
We say 'detect changes in your hearing', because 'change' is a neutral word,
it can be good or bad so it's not activating
a stereotype.
It's also putting the focus on the hearing.
We don't say you have a high frequency hearing loss,
we say some of the speech currently falls outside of your hearing range, we're
putting the emphasis on their hearing range.
Because they still have a hearing range. Okay, they may have a hearing loss to you and me,
but they still have a hearing range
and they can do things with that hearing range but there are just a few things
out of there that we need to bring back in.
We don't say test your hearing.
Michael Maslansky picked up on this yesterday.
So we say baseline you're hearing
because everyone understands the idea of a baseline.
Or we say profiling your hearing.
Because it says what your hearing range can and can't do.
We don't say you need hearing aids because 'need',
does that make people feel powerful or weak?
Weak. So what will it do? It will make people feel they should avoid.
I tested this on my daughter
and I said to her:
Kara, if i told you that you needed some special shoes
what goes through your mind?
Her face fell and she said;
That there's something wrong with me.
So the word 'need' is a very powerful word and we need to
frame it differently so we say;
We want to bring those sounds back within your hearing range. It's far more positive
and it's also framing for hearing.
So we keep the focus on the hearing and
we don't hand them a condition that they'll want to reject or run from.
Now I noticed, for example, as I came in today
that there's a poster up there
and it sort of says: Let's take the fatigue out of life.
Now fatigue. Does that make somebody feel powerful or weak?
[Weak] Okay. So will they approach or avoid?
[Avoid].Okay. So we're almost there but we're not quite.
What we need to do is we need to change that message to be
something more like:
"You shine, others fade".
In other words we're putting the focus
on what someone can do because of what we enable them to do.
So the way that you'd run an advert with that
is that you'd show, for example,
the perfect host of a dinner party,
going here, there and everywhere.
Everyone else fading throughout the day
but the host still being full of energy
and then you'd say: 'You shine others fade...
...The Oticon Intiga'.
Now we see this in other things. For example we don't say;
Are you fat? Come to us and we'll help you.
We have messages like this: "I just lost two pounds". In other words we put the
focus on how people want to see themselves, even if they're not there yet.
So if I respond to that message I'll be
saying: "Well that's how I want to be".
We don't see things like this...
Instead we see things like this...
Yet in our profession we do things like this...
Or we see things like this...
There are so many ready-made attitudes that we are giving to society
that are wrong here and we can change it.
Look at all these things here for example,
the lady there. First of all there is a transfer of emotion, so we look at her
and she's struggling so we relate that struggle to
ourselves and then whatever we see about the advert and the message.
Also we're using stereotyping there. I've got plenty
of clients who are my age and
the thing is that they don't see themselves as being old.
Even older people don't see that.
If you take what we've already talked about framing for the condition,
we've talked about testing - we'll come to that a little bit later on - and this is
something else that is very important, it's the associations that we make.
For example this is called the classical Conditioning
and even if we're not familiar with the term, we'll all recognize it.
This is Pavlov's dog Okay? I don't think it's the real one.
Pavlov was a Russian scientist who for some strange
and bizarre reason (I think he had his reasons really),
wanted to collect dribble from dogs.
And what he noticed was that whenever he gave them food they dribbled or drooled.
So what he started to do, because he was a scientist,
he started to
ring the bell whenever he gave them food.
He started to do this over and over again
so eventually when he rang the bell
the dog dribbled but there was no food.
So what was going through the dogs mind was that there was an association with that bell
and food.
So it activated all the same behavior as if those two things were
still there.
So this is called classical Conditioning
and it's very, very important to us as one of the tools that we use to shape
attitudes.
And basically we
take two things and we associate them together
and we repeat it and repeat it and repeat it
and then eventually you show a person one thing and it triggers all of those
things.