How to Start Personal Relationships With Your Customers With Roger Hurni, Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Off Madison Ave
Roger Hurni is the Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Off Madison Ave. He brings a unique perspective as a behavior strategist, creative visionary, and branding expert to the clients he serves. Roger knows that unprecedented results are achieved by optimizing the three variables of human behavior. This basis is the foundation he uses to develop behavior-changing results for organizations of all sizes. Currently, Roger is a member of the prestigious Walter Cronkite Endowment Board and serves on the global board for the Worldcom Public Relations Group, where he was its past Global Chair.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Roger Hurni provides a broad overview of his new book
Why Roger felt it was important to share the information contained in his book
Where the name From Persona to Personal comes from
What primary learnings would a reader take away from Roger's book?
How brands can truly own their relationships with customers
How can businesses use an app to personalize customer interactions?
What you’ll learn in this episode:
What’s the difference between marketing and cultivating and owning relationships with customers? How can a brand personalize its messaging to influence customer behavior? When you combine the marketing world with what drives customers, you can move them to take action.
Combining behavioral science with marketing is an excellent way to tap into practical applications for influencing customer behavior. When you create your audience’s persona and determine how to fulfill their needs, you can design your marketing tactics and strategy around it. As you form that persona, you'll want to dive deep into thinking about their pain points and the problem they are trying to solve. Want to learn more? A creative visionary and brand strategist, Roger Hurni authored the book From Persona to Personal, which translates academic models of behavioral science into practical application.
On this episode of From Persona to Personal, Roger Hurni, Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Off Madison Ave, is interviewed by Chad Franzen of Rise25 about his new book. Roger shares what readers can learn about shifting from simply marketing and creating personas to cultivating customer relationships. After reading the book, readers will have a better understanding of what makes their customers tick and what motivates them to take action. Tune in!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
This episode’s sponsor:
Today’s episode is brought to you by Off Madison Ave. At Off Madison Ave, we create meaningful moments of brand trust and influence how people interact and engage with brands.
There is a science behind tapping into your audiences’ desires and motivation. After all, if you’re not changing your audiences’ behaviors, you can’t truly unlock all of your brand’s potential.
The proven models and methods of Behavior Design is the strategic foundation for your brands’ success.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:02
This is From Persona to Personal podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by Off Madison Ave. Off Madison Ave creates meaningful moments of brand trust and influences how people interact and engage with brands. The science behind their approach taps into your audience's motivations and desires. After all, if you're not changing your audience's behaviors, you can't truly unlock all of your brand's potential. Now, let's get started with the show.
Roger Hurni 0:35
Hello, everyone, I am Roger Hurni, the host of From Persona to Personal where I get to speak with top leaders changing customer behavior so they can propel their brands forward. Now, today I have with me, Chad Franzen who is with Rise25, and has done hundreds of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, investors and CEOs. And we're gonna flip the script today, Chad will actually be interviewing me. Hopefully this will go well, Chad, welcome to the show.
Chad Franzen 1:01
Hey Roger. Thanks so much. Great to be here. Before we get started, I will let everybody know that this episode is brought to you by Off Madison Ave. and Off Madison Ave. They use behavioral science to create meaningful moments of brand trust, which influence how people interact and engage with companies. Their behavioral approach taps into your audience's motivation and prompts them to shift their behavior. After all, if you're not changing your audience's behaviors, you can't truly unlock your brand's potential. These proven behavioral models and methods are the strategic foundation of your brand success. Visit offmadisonave.com That's AVE dot com. To learn more. Roger, thanks so much. How are you?
Roger Hurni 1:38
I'm doing really, really well today. It's actually nice to be on the other side of the mic, so to speak. With being interviewed. It's a lot less prep.
Chad Franzen 1:46
Good, good. I'm sure. You also have a great insight. So we're looking forward to hearing from you. Hey, I know you have a you have a book coming out. Is this your first book that you've ever written?
Roger Hurni 1:56
It is my first book, I've had five or six books in my head for 20 years. And there's always that one day I should write a book. But this got to the point where the work I was doing with behavioral marketing and clients, enough of them and said, you know, it'd be nice if this was more of a guide into like a practical application that we can refer to all the time. And so yeah, so that's what really prompted it.
Chad Franzen 2:25
Great. Give me a, so it's called from Persona to personal, it's got the same name as this podcast, give me kind of a a broad overview of the book.
Roger Hurni 2:33
So in my work, there are a tremendous amount of behavioral science behavioral models that people have always had a difficult time translating the academic models into practical application. And I spent a lot of years doing that very thing. The book is a summation of that work so that you have a good understanding of how to translate those academic models into practical applications. And the path to follow a methodology so that you can move your company into a behavior driven organization that can transform marketing, but also go into areas of operations, employee communications, sales. And there's a little bit of that stuff in the book, it mostly focuses on marketing, but it is a great guide for what you need to change so that your company can see unprecedented results.
Chad Franzen 3:28
Why did you feel like it was important to kind of share this information with the with the readers?
Roger Hurni 3:33
Well, a lot of it was the clients pushing me because I can only have, they only have so much access to me. But I recognize the fact that there are a lot of companies I'm never going to speak to one of my favorite things in this business is to actually help small companies and entrepreneurs getting started my own companies, a lot of times those clients don't have the capacity to hire a company like mine, or even me personally. And so the book allows them to at least get started on the right foot. And I thought that was one of the ways after so many years in the business have have kind of given back to the community a little bit and allowing this information to be out there.
Chad Franzen 4:16
So it's called from Persona to personal the same title as this podcast. Give me a little background on that title and why you why you chose that not only for the podcast, but obviously for the book.
Roger Hurni 4:27
Well, it's actually started when I would look at audience sets in determining campaigns I would develop as a creative person and brief history. You know, there, there was always like, hey, we need to have a certain demographic and then moved to maybe psychographics or some sort of combination over the years. And then you had a lot of good research companies come in and develop some sort of cohort audience. Clara toss does prison clusters for example where you can have like suburban dads with two kids and a dog and you've got, you know, urban dinks, you know, double income, no kids and what their needs are, we eventually got to a point. And while those are had some value, and they're still around today, most companies will end up developing personas. And it is usually a customized persona of the three, four or five audiences that really interact with that specific brand. And while those personas cover, demographics and geographic psychographics lifestyle choices, they're real fake people, what they don't do is get down into the behaviors of those real people, what motivates them, what their needs are, their thoughts, their feelings, their pain points, actions they take because of that. So from Persona to personal, it moves from that persona type into these behavioral archetypes that include all these implicit and explicit behaviors that we see. When a organization does that. It allows their stakeholders the audience's that they're going after to recognize themselves in their communications and their experiences with that brand. It makes it feel extremely personalized and relevant to those individuals.
Chad Franzen 6:17
What are some of the primary learnings that the reader would take away from the book?
Roger Hurni 6:22
Well, again, there's going to be some explanation on those academic models. So you can understand what constitutes a behavior, what human elements make that up, how those need to be shifted, so that you can actually create the right kinds of communications and strategies. More importantly, there's a process for a number of steps that an organization can go to, to get from organizational alignment within behaviors to a marketplace alignment, and an execution. And it covers behavior strategy, and how you define outcomes and those aspirations and how you prioritize and create those behaviors that you want to see happen. It moves into design alignment, which allows you to develop the product and service the campaign, you look at behavioral audits and refine those sorts of things. And the fourth part in that process is problem analysis. It's not just demonstrating the ROI that is critical, but it is optimizing and looking for shifts in behavior that can happen in real time based on market conditions competitive, you know, shifts, and what they might be doing from a communication standpoint. So you need to have a process that you're constantly refining. Yeah, I'm gonna go on a little bit more, be verbose. But too many companies think the campaign is this big idea that folds in half, and you put a stamp on it as direct mail becomes a banner ad for digital is a Facebook post is an Instagram post is now daughterboard. And if you're looking at things behaviorally, you're going to see that behavioral marketing is about creating all these small opportunities for these little tiny campaigns that shift and change over time as individual customers interact with them.
Chad Franzen 8:13
So So basically, you know, part of the book is teaching brands, how to personalize their messaging and their marketing. So what if a listener who does marketing for a brand hears this podcast? And thanks for what, you know, I already do that. What would you say to that?
Roger Hurni 8:27
Well, one, if you think you really do that, and you actually do that, more power to you, in my experience, I would say that that is more lip service than practical application, often I will come across people that might do a component. And it's more instinctive, and they are they got lucky, rather than methodical and planned out. And that that doesn't lead to a consistent change for that organization, or consistent way of doing things everyone can have a quick hit. But that consistency is what helps companies and brands grow. And so what that learning for that person would be here's a process and a way of thinking and shifting your thinking so that you can do that kind of behavior change on a continual basis.
Chad Franzen 9:15
So can I give you an example of messaging and ask you whether you think they have, they're speaking to me personally, or they just got lucky with the way they do their messaging, like other big sports radio listener? So obviously, you know, they would, or advertisers would probably target like middle aged guys. You know, a lot of the primary products are like hair loss, low testosterone, you know, there's there's a low testosterone ad where they list the symptoms, they talk about the benefits. I feel like they're talking directly to me. Have they just chosen the right channel and it's obvious that they've found the right listeners, or is that or do you think that's a personal message?
Roger Hurni 9:57
No, I they've gotten lucky in a job. Oral sense because there are common denominators among age groups. So delivering a message like that to you, you check certain boxes simply because of your age, right? Then regardless whether it's sports, or whether it's like, Hey, you're over 50, and you need to get a colon screening, right, like, enough people fit into that group that you can do a generalized message. And it might relate to you, but it necessarily doesn't relate to everybody, you know, you know, like the hair loss thing I know, a lot of men in their 40s and 50s, half of them have amazing heads of hair that that message would fall completely deaf on, and others don't, if you're going to deliver that in a very personalized way. It's not, this is something you should fix. This is an opportunity for you to change a part of your life, that messaging can be more refined. And in radio, specifically, it's a really big general audience, what you want to be able to do is find these micro moment opportunities to where you have more of a chance to interact with that brand. I mean, honestly, that's one of the reasons why digital is so so powerful. But the bigger that umbrella, radio, TV, it's harder to do that, because you just don't have that same refinement of delivery.
Chad Franzen 11:24
So what else are what can you tell us maybe one more thing about the book that might make people specifically interested in it?
Roger Hurni 11:31
Well, one thing I go into quite a bit in the book is the opportunity for brands in that own space, to really own the relationship with their customers. There's something in marketing called the PESO model p e. S, O, for paid, earned, shared and owned, owned encompasses things like your social media channels, right, the brands on Instagram channel. And while true, it is technically owned, that you own all the content, and you're putting it out there, you don't own Instagram, you don't own Tik Tok. And so the ability to really control the environment and the conversation that you're having with customers on a one to one basis, it's there, but it's not there fully. And if there's any pivot or shift in that organization, like tick tock decides to change the algorithm or Instagram decides to change the, the the user experience and the way that looks, all of a sudden, you don't have that same control. And you've got to pivot as an organization. The one area where a brand has tremendous opportunity is mobile apps, particularly in like the QSR, space personal services, casinos, they control that app 100%. And yes, there's some rules on Apple's App Store and Google's App Store. But what I see from brands is they use that channel in a new, utilitarian way, much like the beginning days of the web, where it was just a brochure on the website. And so while you can order food on it, and while you can, you know, get sent a deal that may be generic, or find a location of a restaurant, it never examines the implicit and explicit behaviors of the customers, and then determines what the next interaction should be for that customer, either on the app or in store, or through a push notification. And that's where behavioral marketing really takes hold. Because now you have a brand have an opportunity to have this incredibly powerful one to one relationship with every customer at scale. And that's always been the holy grail of advertising, right? How do I how do I talk to every single customer on a one to one basis, that's possible now because of technology.
Chad Franzen 13:53
So what's an example of kind of an app, making your relationship with a customer more personal rather than, you know, your, your, your filter, you can order food from wherever you want, whenever you want
Roger Hurni 14:03
more personal on, I'll give you two examples more personal on the QSR side, that restaurant side is if there's going to be a deal for that restaurant. And I'm a vegetarian, I don't want to see a meat dish. Right? But if you just send out a generic thing is it's just, it's not appealing to me. Or if you're prompting me in the app to come back into the restaurant when I was in last night, you're not really looking at my behaviors, right. Consequently, I know and I work with one organization called Lighthouse PE, who does this mobile marketing automation software for mobile apps. And, you know, one of the things that they do incredibly well is with casinos, where they can look at pulling customers back that are at another casino who maybe just arrived or, and I really find this great is because sometimes the best marketing message is a human. So instead of using the app to send a message to that individual player, when that player steps on property, they're there to play, they're exhibiting a certain set of behaviors, it will send that message to a host to come up and greet them in a very personalized way. So you walked into the casino, Chad, and I'm the host, and I get a message like, oh, he just walked in the west entrance. I may have never met you. But I'm customer trained well enough to come up and say, Hello, Chad. My name is Roger Hurni, one of the hosts here, I recognize you because I know you're one of our best players. I wanted to let you know that. Say thank you for all of your patriotism, why don't you just have a free drink on me tonight, or $50, and sloppily? Or whatever it might be that personalized VIP experience? That's behavioral marketing, executed in a way that a brand can own 100%?
Chad Franzen 15:50
Yeah, that would have been me, as a customer that would have a huge personal effect on me. Are people just not our, you know, businesses who are able to use this technology is just not aware that it's possible.
Roger Hurni 16:01
It's still in its really beginning stages. I think most people don't know that that's out there. Did you think about email marketing in the early 2000s, you know, it was a batch and blast atmosphere, people didn't realize that you could create these algorithmic decision trees that allowed you to make the next email personalized, based on what you opened, or what you read how long you stayed on a page, so that the next email had better content on a on a, at least a group perspective, some of them on an individual perspective. Mobile apps just hasn't gotten there. It's in that utilitarian phase where people are like, they finally got to a point in the last four or five years where they realized I need to have a mobile app in order to communicate with customers or allow communicate customers to interact with my brand. And then, quite frankly, the pandemic, particularly in the QSR space, nobody used QR codes before 2020. And now they're a thing everywhere, their Superbowl ads. And so it's it's a natural evolution. And if a brand were to adopt that kind of mobile marketing automation software, they would be at this stage far, far ahead of the competition. A year from now, I think everybody's going to be doing it.
Chad Franzen 17:18
Well, it sounds like people can learn a lot from the book, maybe even be a game changer for a lot of people. How and where and maybe when can people find it?
Roger Hurni 17:28
Well, I would love for you to like find it right now and buy it. the publish date is looking at early May. And it'll be available on Amazon. And you can always pay attention to this podcast, because we're gonna have a lot more announcements about it. And then I have a personalized website, Roger hurni.com. They'll have information about it in the coming months.
Chad Franzen 17:48
Okay, sounds good. Hey, Roger was great to talk to you. Thanks so much. We'll look forward to reading book
Roger Hurni 17:52
Chad, It was wonderful having a great conversation with you. You have a wonderful day. Thank you.
Chad Franzen 17:57
So long everybody.
Outro 17:59
Thanks for listening to From Persona to Personal, the podcast that takes a closer look into how organizations personalize their marketing. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.
