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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.
Now if I show you this, what brand springs to mind?
We look at the red,
we look at the cowboy, we look at the Montana imagery
and we automatically
think of Marlboro.
And it's no accident because
Marlboro have spent billions of pounds getting us to think that way.
We talk about hearing aids being a negative thing and I can't think of
anything more negative than cigarettes. They kill you. In fact they have to replace
the customers that they kill every year with new customers
and they have to target the people that don't know any better
so they tend to go for teenagers who can't even smoke legally.
But they don't use this and they don't
sort of say this is a negative to us. Intead they say:
Right, we're going to turn this negative
into something that we can use on the market. So because teenagers can't use it we sort of say
if you smoke, you're a rebel,
you're grown up. You see what I mean?
They take the negative and they turn it into a positive.
I'll just say as well that when they came up with these
associations they didn't sit round the table and say:
Okay let's gather in a lot of people
who smoke and ask them how they see themselves,
what type of people use cigarettes and lets show more people
like that. They said:
What do we want people to associate with our product?
And that's what happens now. So if you smoke Molboro
then you will be associating yourself
with all of that imagery - the free spirit, the independence all of those
things and also you will know that because
everyone knows about that, then society will be seeing you in the
same way.
Apart from obviously the lung cancer and everything else.
So we have to say what associations do we want people to have with hearing
aids and don't take the lead from society.
So we have to put those associations there.
So who uses hearing aids currently?
This is the association:
It's the deaf,
hard of hearing and the elderly. Agree?
And that's because there's been such a strong association over the years
through classical conditioning,
usually from us.
Some of its history
that sort of says we associate the hearing device
not with hearing, but with the condition.
In fact, all the talks we have heard,
there have been lots of talk about the condition.
We also reinforce the idea of the elderly.
Whereas when we try to reach the three people we currently leave behind
they look at this and they see it as being irrelevant
because they do not see themselves...
Actually, I'll just explain why this is there.
Vegetarian
appeals to the attributes of an individual.
Whereas meat free is the attribute of the product. Can you see the subtle
difference there?
So when we have a product that is associated with the attributes of the individual
we will exclude everyone that does not see themselves as having those attributes.
When we do the attributes to the product we widen up our audience.
So they say; Well, we're not deaf,we're not hard of hearing and we're not elderly.
So basically they're going to avoid all of those types of messages.
Now we think that they're in denial or something, don't we?
We think it's because they're being stubborn or proud.
But actually,
the three people we leave behind, there's something else going on.
And it's called the Actor-Observer Effect.
It sounds very technical but all it is is, say for example you see somebody
bash their car,
what runs through your mind is: "They're a lowsy driver".
So we think it's caused by their attributes.
But when it happens to us
we say it is something to do with the situation.
So when we bash the car it's not because we're a lowsy driver,
it's because the sun was in our eyes or we were distracted etc.
Do you see the difference?
So when we see somebody having a problem with their hearing
we look at them and sort of say: "She's going deaf it must be their hearing.
It must be something to do with them".
But by contrast, when we have a problem with our hearing,
we blame it on the situation.
And this isn't some trickery by the way, it's not
from hiding from the truth,
it's actually something called The Availability Heuristic, which I
haven't got time to go into now, but is very interesting if you wish to look it up.
So our approach though is to try and
convince them that they have a problem that they do have a condition.
Whereas what is running through their minds is that if I admit that I
have a condition that means I'll need hearing aids and hearing aids are not relevant to me
because I'm not deaf, I'm not hard of hearing,
because for me it is the situation.
Now, those words in the red there are
all labels. Labels are very powerful in shaping peoples attitudes. Stereotype is
a type of label as well.
If you look at these cans here,
we have no idea what's in them because there's no label on them
and so we don't know whether we're to approach or avoid that for our dinner.
The labels enable us to seperate out our thoughts and tell us what
to approach and what to avoid.
For example if one of them says Cat food
and one says Pineapple, we're not going to approach Cat food for our dinner,
so we're going to avoid it.
But if we're a Cat and we could read
then we too would be approaching the Cat food
and we'll be avoiding the pineapple, I think.
I don't have a Cat so I don't know for sure.
Labels are a type of mental shortcut so they bring up all extra information just
as we saw with stereotypes.
But also labels can be deliberately stuck onto a chain of thoughts.
So if we take normal hearing
that's a label that's been stuck onto an idea or a concept. Deaf, hard of
hearing is also a label.
So we take these three people that we currently leave behind,
where do we put them? How do we label them?
Do we label them over here?
That's where their family would label them isn't it? Or over here?
Because from their point of view they've got normal hearing, they just find that
in a few situationS they have difficulty.
Because our labels create gaps for people
we can actually classify people by the labels
so they will say well that doesn't apply to me I will avoid or I will approach.
So we use labels to create ready-made attitudes.
We know of course that there is a gradience. You're not either normal hearing or
deaf and hard of hearing.
There's a gradient so you can be just outside the range of normal but the thing is
that we've got nothing to put in between there to show a label for that gradient.
In Optics they do have labels.
On one side you have twenty twenty vision and on the other side you go blind or
partially sighted.
Interestingly
twenty-twenty vision doesn't say normal eyesight, although we all know that it
probably means that.
An optician we'll tell you the different grades.
But twenty-twenty vision to us means normal eyesight.
But the label is actually telling us
what we can do with our sight.
Ours by contrast, we haven't got something like that.
Inbetween you've got short sighted and long sighted.
But look here, the framing is based on
division.
You're sighted, you're not long blinded.
You're either long or short sighted.
So when we think of people wearing glasses or spectacles we don't say: "Oh,
that means they're going blind
or partially sighted".
We say that they can see well because they're wearing glasses.
So when we come back to here
we need a label for this bit here because otherwise these three people,
they don't want to be deaf, they don't want to be hard of hearing but at
the same time their family
want to put them somewhere because they certainly don't have normal hearing,
because of the actor-observer effect
and also the medical side of things too.
so what should we be using there? I actually don't have an answer for this,
although I do think that maybe we should be considering something like
high-pass hearing or low-pass hearing. High-pass hearing will be
where you can hear the high frequencies but you can't hear the low frequecies and
low-pass hearing is vice-versa.
When we come back to glasses, glasses as a tool enable you to do all the
things that you'd be able to do if you could see well.
So it keeps you seeing well.
By contrast when we talk about hearing aids,
they have such a stronger association with the deaf and hard of hearing,
as we saw before,
that it's almost as if you get your hearing aid and become a member of
the deaf and hard of hearing club
and that's why people avoid it because they don't want to see
themselves that way.
But it's not a membership card. We should be thinking of this differently.
So when we bring out beautiful instruments like this that really do
look the part, that really are discreet and they work well and things like that.
What happens
is we say things like:
It's so discreet nobody will know.
And we make the mistake of calling it a hearing aid.
Because when we call it a hearing aid
we make such a strong connection back
with hearing aids of the past.
Our practice goes back to eighteen forty one, we started doing hearing aids in
the nineteen twenties,
so we've got a whole collection of old hearing aids.
This links to all the memories of hearing aids that people have seen in the past
and because hearing aids were so obvious in the past they would always associate it
with the problems. Even if someone was using an ear trumpet they would still say "er..what?"
And so that instrument became associated
with the condition rather than the solution.
So we say: people don't like hearing aids
because they don't want people to know that they are deaf or hard of hearing
but actually they don't see themselves as deaf or hard of hearing
and that's the problem.
So it's a problem with relevance here.
The other problem is that we create a ready-made attitude because what we
say to the rest of the world that aren't yet ready to be in that category,
we say to them well actually it's a bad thing to wear hearing aids,
nobody should see it because it's an embarrassing thing
so we're reinforcing another negative stereotype.
What we really need to do is link
the hearing device
to normal hearing because it enables you to have normal hearing.
And I know that most of you are thinking
you can't solve normal hearing,
but that's not the point, the point here
is that if you use hearing technology
you'll be able to. Certainly in the categories that we're talking about,
of those three people we currently leave behind,
because often they have a much milder reduction in their hearing
and according to what Harvey Dylan has said,
with current technology some people are going to be
able to hear better
in background noise than those who have got normal hearing.
So this is incredible, we're moving to another dimension now.
So we shift the associations and these people feel much more happy then
with getting hearing technology
because it's linking them to normal hearing.
And we'll come back onto this in a moment to see how we do it.
So now for our ready-made attitudes, who uses hearing aids?
Not the deaf and hard of hearing.
It needs to be:
who uses hearing technology? Maybe we should just use a different term so
we're not triggering those stereotypes.
I actually have another word that I think we should be using but i'm not
ready to reveal it yet.
I won't be revealing it today, sorry.
But the associations we want is those who want to keep their hearing working
at its best.
That's why people should be using hearing technology, not to say I have got
a condition.
But why would they want to keep their hearing working at its best? Because if you can
understand that then those are the things that we want to bring in.
And it comes back to our two friends avoid and approach.
Remember that people avoid loss,
but they approach gain.
So at the moment what loss of people avoiding by using hearing technology?
They're not avoiding hearing loss,
they're not avoiding that at all, they're actually getting hearing loss in their minds
because it actually says I've got that deaf and hard of hearing badge.
What loss do people avoid
when using hearing technology?
They avoid missing the best conversation of their life for a start.
They avoid missing the punch line. They avoid missing
the opportunity in business, they avoid missing lots of things
and we actually ran this as an advertisment and we had it on the back of buses and things
and it definitely changes peoples attitudes towards hearing technology.
Because people don't want to miss
anything in life because they're losing something.
If we take this: people avoid social isolation.
Okay well we all know. We all see people around us who look as though the world
is drifting them by.
People don't want to be like that.
so one of the things that they will do is they will avoid
being a fade away.
They don't want to fade away.
We avoid threats to self, so we don't want to take a hearing instrument
because it says we're deaf or hard of hearing,
which is a threat to ourselves because of mortality and all of the things
that we have talked about
and it's a condition which makes us feel needy,
not powerful, which makes us avoid things.
But also people approach things to be consistent to themselves. So how can
people use hearing technology to be consistent with themselves?
Again this is one of the lines that we use:
All that I am, all that I can be, I bring to the moment that's why I keep my
hearing working at its best.
Let's come back to this idea of avoiding loss.
Now there's lots of research out there
that shows us that human beings are loss averse.
There are all these clever experiments out there that
we touched upon yesterday in one of the presentations,
where people actually avoid loss as much as they can.
Now the thing is we call it hearing loss
and we've been banding it around over the last two days and we'll be
banding it around for the rest of the day I'm sure, because it's become part of
our vocab.
But whenever we're talking to the three people we currently leave behind
we should never be talking about hearing loss
because automatically that sends a signal
to avoid.
But we say things like this.
so we have to get in to the habit
of just as we're about to say hearing loss
can we re-frame it?
So that's why I keep saying reduction and hearing range.
It might not be the best terminology but at least it gets away from this loss
that has such a strong association with the grieving process.