Customer Crossroads

Think your e-mails are good? Check out Don Cooper's newsletter

How many of the e-mail newsletters you receive are truly useful? Truly add value? And how many of them place such a high value on your time that they tell you how long it will take to read the article? Don Cooper has such an unusual newsletter that I asked him to tell me about it in an extended interview earlier this year. We talked about a great many things in addition to the newsletter. In the spirit of Don Cooper, this whole article will take you about six minutes to read. Or you can just scan it for the juicy quotes in about 45 seconds.

Don Cooper's roots in sporting goods and ladies apparel

If the name seems familiar to you, there's a good reason. Don started his business career in the family business sweeping floors for five cents a day. As he says, "Long days and low pay, excellent early training for an entrepreneur." The family business was Cooper Sporting Goods, at one time a world leader in hockey equipment, and a Canadian icon with over 3,000 employees.

When manufacturing began to move to China, the family believed the shift in the industry would change the success dynamics. "We had 70% market share without ever paying a professional athlete a nickel because we made better stuff." In the future, however, they believed it would all be "about who could write the biggest cheque to an already overpaid athlete. We chose not to play."

The next business was a small ladies apparel boutique in Markham, a satellite city of Toronto. A few years after opening it was voted Outstanding Innovative Retailer. A succession of awards and honors for this small retailer led to many requests. "The phone started ringing," Don says, with people saying "Can you come and tell us how you did it?"

Don shifted his career again, and is now a speaker, a consultant and a writer, something he's been doing now for two decades, and clearly loving it. And he has a newsletter. An unusual one.

When surveys don't work

A recent international study about blood donors shows why asking direct questions of people is not always a good basis for decision making.

The background

International guidelines prohibit monetary incentives for blood donation, based on concerns that any form of incentive may actually reduce motivation, at the same time as it puts the blood supply at risk from those motivated only by the cash rewards.

Extrinsic rewards (i.e. cash) can sometimes interfere with intrinsic rewards (feeling good about yourself).

The surveys showed one result

These policies have had support from surveys that ask people if they would donate blood based on receiving cash rewards.

"Policies that prohibit monetary incentives have been based primarily on population surveys in which respondents were asked if they would donate blood if offered a cash reward, and the majority nixed that idea. But Lacetera said responses were based on a hypothetical premise, not on studies of actual potential donors who were offered an incentive."

Nico Lacetera quoted in Globe and Mail

The real world experiments showed another

Actual experiments showed very different results. Donations increased for all sorts of things, like a day off work (Italy), a $5 lottery ticket (Switzerland), a $10 gift card (USA.)

What it all means: be careful with hypotheticals

We need to be careful when asking people direct questions about hypothetical situations. Human beings are great at coming up with answers, but our own ideas about our behavior are not always accurate. The futher removed we are from the real world situation the more this is true.

Running small experiments is a much better approach, whenever possible. In digital marketing and in things like loyalty programs, it is pretty easy to do this, and marketers are learning a lot from testing approaches.

But what if you can't run an experiment? 

You should still try to avoid just asking the direct question. As a researcher, what I try to do is set up tasks that are similar, ask indirect questions, observe actual behavior, and otherwise try to overcome this problem.

Topics that are most likely to give you problems are direct questions involving motivation, hypothetical situations, and any topic where there are strong social beliefs or taboos, or where people might desire to paint themselves in a positive light. (A great many things, in fact!)

Resources

Here's a more detailed discussion from researcher Nicola Lacetera written in 2008

Here's the source of the scientific article in Science: Economic Rewards to Motivate Blood Donations published in 2013