Becoming An Extraordinary Outlier; Why I Chose To Integrate Behavioral Science Research Into A Bagel Shop

I helped manage a local bagel shop, JT’s Bagel Bar, found in Tiffin, Ohio. Where they offer breakfast and lunch options by selling bagel sandwiches, donuts, coffee, smoothies, and other delightful bites! As a small business, they’ve become a unique and renowned addition to our community and have remained open since they were established back in 2014! They even were able to move locations to a prime and more prosperous spot downtown during the emergence of COVID - a huge win! Unfortunately, though, approximately 6 months after relocation, there was sparse foot traffic, and as a result, sales dipped severely during the summer months. We needed a plan to attract our existing customers back, and in the same process, hopefully reach new potential consumers as well!

One way that I addressed this situation was to work on directly reaching our customers in our social media messaging.?

My mission as the Marketing & General Manager was to find and create a brand that aligned with our current customers and then to spread our direct, newly-found messaging style to increase traffic back into our restaurant.?

To set the scene, at the time of the experiment I was taking a course through Texas A&M University’s Human Behavior Laboratory, ‘Experimental Design for Business’, jointly taught by professors Dr. Marco Palma and Will Leach. This course is what led me to create and carry out an experiment on combating our shop’s summer sales downfall. Within this Behavioral Science program, I had learned through professor Leach’s class, ‘Behavioral Marketing’, a lot about how to use Emotional Marketing (this makes us more susceptible to influence) to reach our audience’s mindstates (a temporary state of mind in which we're under high emotional arousal, which happens way more often than you'd expect). As well as being offered guided instruction on how to apply his strategy most optimally in my business's social media. I had the opportunity to tie in material I learned from this past course, Behavioral Marketing, into the class I was currently taking, Experimental Design for Business, and I am so eager to share my experiment and results with you!

When Marketing Doesn’t Work, Blame Cognitive Filtering

As covered in professor Will Leach’s book ‘Marketing to Mindstates’, we have evolved into a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world where we make 35,000 decisions every freaking day - hence, our nonconscious brains are bombarded with a crap TON of messages (thousands daily) through social media ads, posts, and even in digital content. To add, digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to 4,000-10,000 advertisements per day… WHAT!?!

In fact, 87% of social media messaging never even reaches our consciousness, in layman's terms it’s not even in one ear to begin with. As marketers, it may seem that we are already set up to fail but luckily I found a way to break through our customer’s online psychological filter, and it is through a process called Mindstate Marketing!

“Whoever said orange (Traditional Marketing) is the new pink (Mindstate Marketing) was seriously disturbed.”

- Elle Woods, probably

My Experimental Pursuit To Speak Directly To Our Customers

Using Primary Research To Build My Study

As any awesome experimenter would, I started out first by listing our strengths (i.e. these were the functional goals of our customers) online found on our Facebook and Google reviews - this provided me with a Mindstate hypothesis to work with. The keywords that stuck out were experiences centered around family (whether it be enhancing their own OR through our family-like atmosphere), a close-knit community, and as no surprise to us a relationship to our staff was also important!

After gathering this info, I prepared an in-house questionnaire that provided me with our customer's' functional and aspirational goals, their respective regulatory fit, and most importantly their motivation(s). Ultimately, this survey was the first step in bridging me to find their mindstate profile(s).

The questions that I included in the questionnaire were:

1. “Which factors are important to you when deciding which café to go to for breakfast?”? (3-4 factors were listed in parenthesis). I created answer suggestions like love (for nurturance), acceptance (for belonging), and excitement (for engagement) to guide them throughout the survey and to ensure I get data more aligned to what I was hoping to get out of the survey.
2. “Collectively, why are these important?? How do you feel when you get these factors in one place?” (I looked for answers like safety, being valued, part of a community, etc.)
3. “Why is feeling like XXX important?”.?

I ended up with an excellent sample size of 82 participants throughout the questionnaire phase and the duration of the survey process lasted approximately one week. I made sure to incentivize in order to get much better results and completion rates. The motivation (the crème de la crème of the experiment, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, haha you get what I mean) was usually found in their second or third answer. Since focusing on three motivations wasn’t feasible for us, I had to make the strategic call to list out only the ones that I felt connected best with what our customers desired. Therefore, the top two mindstates that I extracted from the survey data were optimistic engagement and optimistic nurturance (see Will Leach’s book, Marketing to Mindstates, for more background info of these).

Phase 2: Utilizing an A/B Test Via Our Social Media To Analyze Which Motivation(s) Drives Engagement

I created an A/B test (a user experience research method that tests two competing conditions) to see which of these two mindstates aligned best with our customers in order to find the most optimal messaging system. The experiment was structured as follows: I created 16 total posts that spanned 4 weeks (therefore, 4 per week) to test the social media engagement of each of these alternating motivation styles. To elaborate, each week had its own ‘theme’ and it’d stay consistent (as the control variable) to accurately give me data on my A/B variables (nurturance vs engagement posts). On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would use words, emojis, and pictures within my posts that fit with the engagement-style. Then on Wednesdays and Fridays, I created these same kinds of posts but just in a nurturance-style. In order to combat the circadian rhythm and account for randomization of participation/engagement of the posts, I would interchangeably post a morning, as well as an afternoon, post for each mindstate every week.?

For example, in the cover of this article, I've posted one week’s content. This specific week we promoted a movie contest where we reenacted scenes from our favorite movies to have customers guess, and gave away that DVD plus a free donut for each post/day’s winner.

Before you ask, yes that was me trying to act in the top left picture, haha! As you can tell through the words used, this post was written in an exciting manner to help guide the readers to feel that desire of engagement. To add, I made sure that the movies that I picked for those days corresponded to the style written. Therefore, Jurassic Park, pictured above on the left-hand side, as we all know is more action-packed and engaging, so that movie choice fit perfectly with the engagement-styled post. And in contrast, the heart-warming E.T. classic pictured on the right-hand side, was structured in a nurturing-style since it is a nourishing and charismatic film.

Results Of My Case Study

After I published all 16 posts, then came the most crucial and lucrative part of the experiment: finding out which motivation was most optimal! I first started by plotting the Facebook and Instagram data (I dual posted these synonymous posts through each of these platforms, so it just gave me the chance to collect more data) by listing out each post’s’ Facebook likes, comments, shares, and reach/views, along with the post’s’ Instagram likes, comments, and reach/views.

However, once I collectively summarized the social media metrics for each motivation, I was able to prove that BOTH motivations were equally likely to drive engagement to our bagel shop - and this was because each motivation had almost equal post interactions.

I had discussed the results with Professor Will Leach and he had recommended that I apply a 70/30 ratio by leaning in with an engagement-style, then bringing in elements of the nurturance motivation to stand out among our competition. Since JT's Bagel Bar is in the restaurant industry and rely on great food and experience (table stakes) to succeed, it makes sense that we'd drive the engagement style home in our social media messaging. In terms of nurturance-styled messaging, I feel that with living in a small, close-knit town, with most of our customers being ‘regulars’ and going out of their way to support local, this motivation will help us stick out from our competitors and foster relationships with our community (hence, engagement and nurturance are playing hand-in-hand and work great with one another).

Conclusions of Experiment

What I took away from this experiment was that it is important to understand that people’s behaviors are directed at their aspirations. We simply don’t make choices without our aspirations pointing us in the right direction, even if most of the time these are subconscious to us. And that is exactly why it is pertinent that we, as marketers, understand what influences our customers and to find and create a desired experience for them to enjoy along their customer journey!

Since I had nailed down how to reach customers best, I actively worked on applying this strategy in their social media messaging! In fact, I even hired and trained a social media intern this Behavioral Marketing strategy, to apply a 70 (engagement) and 30 (nurturance) ratio model when creating our content. I instructed this intern on how to form these posts to break the nonconscious barrier and talk directly to our customers and I am so very proud to share what we have learned and how we excelled our online presence in the process.

My Advice On How To Ensure You Carry Out A Similarly Fruitious Experiment

Lastly, here’s what you should know if you want to be successful with your test:

1. Make sure to have an adequate sample size because 20-25% of results typically don’t give you much info to work with.

• You can use a sample size calculator on google in order to ensure you get a precise result(s).

2. When conducting a survey, connect with the participant, it is crucial especially if you are in a small business. Memorize the questions, walk them through it, and maybe even tell a story to form a bridge to help them answer the questions; this should be a personable experience.

3. Have fun with it! If you choose to do a social media experiment, you aren’t limited to specific guidelines like only informational posts or ads, be sure to include contests, promotions, giveaways, and of course, pairing incentives with it isn’t a bad thing either.

4. Read Professor Will Leach’s book “Marketing to Mindstates” to set you up for success!

If you feel that my work could also bring your company value, contact me at?[email protected]?or via my LinkedIn profile at https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/katelinromick.