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Hi, I'm Szu-chi Huang.
I'm the Associate Professor of
Marketing at
Stanford Business School.
Before my academic career,
I worked at JWT advertising agency,
managing Asia Pacific market.
I've taught many courses at
Stanford and the topic that excites
me the most is behavioral science,
the human factor.
There's so much to learn about how
humans make decisions,
how humans get motivated, and
how humans connect with others.
I have five key takeaways from
the human factor to share with you
today.
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As leaders, we tend to rely on data
for our decisions, and
we think that other people also
will be motivated by the same data.
As it turns out, most of our
stakeholders are drawn to examples.
Salient, top of my examples,
become the guiding principles for
their decision making.
That is why people buy lottery
tickets, even though the actual
probability of winning the lottery
is extremely low.
We were made to remember
the examples of people winning
the lottery much more so than
thinking about the overwhelming
examples of people who don't win.
So brainstorm ways to make your
company's messages the lottery in
your stakeholder's mind
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As rational thinkers,
we see pros and
cons in everything and
can easily find the best choice.
But for many other people,
these pros and cons are ambiguous.
Therefore, every time they choose,
they feel that they're losing some.
Decisions are hard for them and
there's always a trade off.
So create a win-win option in
the set, leverage default selection
and think about how reference
points can be used to
make the choice easier.
These elements helped to resolve
decision difficulty,
and make it easier for your
stakeholders to come to conclusion.
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Recent research has shown
that while star ratings can
predict the success of books,
blockbuster movies and restaurants.
It is the emotionality underlying
the reviews that explain the sales
results.
In other words, not all five star
ratings are the same.
The ones with higher positive
emotionality will lead to
greater success and vice versa, for
reviews that have strong negative
emotionality in them.
Therefore infuse your messages with
emotion.
The more emotional people can
get about your product and
your company, the more likely
they will be motivated to stay
with you through ups and downs.
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We not now think about how we
personally feel about a decision,
we also care a lot about how others
think about these decisions.
Social influences are extremely
powerful and that is why we buy
products to keep up with our peers.
We follow so-called experts advice,
and we watch TV shows that
are rated well by others even when
these others are strangers too.
Successful leaders know how
to leverage social forces so
that people can be confident in
their decisions and even become
ambassadors for the brand.
It is good to know that a decision
is accurate, but it is even more
important to know that others think
that the decision is accurate.
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Humans do not live in a vacuum,
there is always a context.
The context of our environment
activates important goals which
shape our behaviors.
By taking people from one context
to another, we can therefore change
the key drivers of their decisions.
The context can be, one, the
physical environment such as moving
from your office to your home.
Second, the cultural surroundings,
like how many of us have moved from
one country to another?
Three, a social context and four,
a temporal context.
My research has shown that sales
team behave very differently in
the beginning of the month compared
to the end of the month as they get
closer to their sales goals.
That is a powerful change in their
temporal context.
Staying static will make you
ineffective.
Successful leaders are nimble
because they understand how
critical context is and
how fast it can change.
We can all become more effective
leaders and communicators.
The knowledge of the human factor
can be learned, and
with practice we become better at
leveraging these ideas.
When I moved from Taiwan to
the United States, and
from industry to academia,
I realized that the salient
examples are different here.
What people get emotional about
is different and
the social elements and the context
are all completely different.
So I had to relearn how
I communicate, how I teach and
how I lead.
It is certainly a challenge, but
it has also been a very fun and
fulfilling journey
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As a kid,
I did not like school that much.
I did not really like doing
homework or taking exams.
So definitely, I surprised
myself by joining Academia.
But I think it evolved because
at some point I started
getting curious and
I realized knowledge is powerful.
So that guided me back to Academia
to learn more, to get a PhD and
to become a professor so
I can share the knowledge I learned
with you all.
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