ResultsLab's Services




	How We’re Different From All Other Marketing Consultants & Agencies by Ron Richards, President, ResultsLab

		*ResultsLab’s Purpose* Results: Our purpose is to cause – and clearly measure – remarkable incremental results by optimizing the persuasion elements of sites and by optimizing the ads or emailings that drive traffic to those sites. We give our clients the means to win by incredible margins, to their and our delight. Lab: To quickly maximize gains for our clients, we have made a purposeful decision to take a “laboratory approach.” This means we control each cycle in our persuasion-engineering process: research, strategy and key language, creative copy and graphic theme, test design, measurement, and interpretation. And then we cycle through them all again. We drill down to fine-grain details of what happens psychologically at every moment -- at every step of eye control – as someone looks at your ad, emailing, or site page.

How is This Possible? -- ResultsLab’s Philosophy

Our philosophy is embodied in the system we call Persuasion Design. It implements three insights that defy conventional wisdom:

The product’s greatness (for an appropriate market) can always be found.
A persuasion design can be created that’s both the most powerful and at the same time guileless (devoid of hype, evasion, and manipulation).
The whole system can be researched with rigor to confirm that full trust and accurate positioning have been created in the minds of prospects. We want to prove sales gain over past best-ever results.

One of our greatest pleasures comes when prospective clients grasp these insights and how the insights support each other.

ResultsLab’s Approach

Our approach is based on a deep understanding of the psychology of communication and our obsession with proven results. Here are some of our principles that can turn the moments of truth to your advantage:

Identifying leverage everywhere

Every element of a site, ad, or email is a persuasion element. Some persuasion elements are positive, adding to the visitor’s site experience. Some are negative, undercutting the experience and the site goals. Our approach is to employ an array of Persuasion Design tools to maximize the positive value of every element, rigorously choosing each for clarity, simplicity, and persuasive effect.

How

Elements that add to the visitor’s experience build trust, eagerness, desire. One example: the words that make up a link – and the graphic that supports a link – must promise enough learning or entertainment to compel a click. But for that click to become a part of an integrated persuasion experience, it must deliver your visitors to a page that exceeds, rather than betrays, their expectations.

Even a slight exaggeration or apparent evasion in an ad, email or site element can re-frame the visitors’ experience enough to move them away from eagerness and interest – planting seed of mistrust, suspicion, and vigilance. All sites are riddled with these undiscovered elements that quietly sabotage the marketing purpose. For clients, we identify and transform each instance.

Creating a Chain of Breakthroughs

We delight in finding breakthrough solutions to cause breakthrough gains. These solutions are never singular. They are made up of an integrated system of incremental improvements in ads, emailings, and site pages – with each improvement functioning as a multiplier on the overall effect. See Multiplier Principle.

How

We tune every element to be loyal to and enhance the site theme. Then we identify what visitors’ questions and qualms will arise at each step in their journey from the banner ad to shopping cart checkout, and we answer the questions and devastate the qualms as, or before, they arise. By deeply understanding the psychology of the visitors, their likely thoughts and feelings from moment to moment, we anticipate and construct the visitors’ chain of experiences.

Orchestrating Rapid Continuous Improvement

Whoever learns fastest, wins. To maximize our effectiveness, to achieve as much as 2- to 5-fold gains for our clients, we rely on our Rapid Continuous Improvement System, based on fast and rigorous testing methods and multiple improvement cycles. Once clients have substantial volume, faster and more fine-grained measurements are possible.

How

Our Rapid Continuous Improvement System incorporates special testing methods that allow you to know quickly that the effect was due to our Persuasion Design changes – not to background rapid growth, network traffic variations, statistical noise, or other people’s work. This allows us to quickly build on winning approaches, and to purge less effective approaches, in further rapid improvement cycles.

What makes this ResultsLab approach unique? Too often, whoever on your team does testing settles for weaker experimental designs and less rigorous approaches filled with checking and validity flaws – opening the door to invalid conclusions. The damage is great. All involved carry those false conclusions into their next cycle of testing, indeed into their entire career.

Finding the Great Issue

We find ways to reset the standard and disqualify the products and services of our clients’ competitors. We want to grab, to fascinate, to make a great argument, and to imbue the communication with high curiosity. To do that, it’s essential to tap into a great issue and one or more fundamental human desires.

How

The hidden keys to this deeper level of product positioning are often tucked away in the minds of your “rational evangelist” customers. At first, they may not be able to articulate why they opted for your product or service despite all the alternatives and objections. But we know these unvoiced motives are at the heart of the true value proposition for your product. So we developed a cadre of interview techniques to help these evangelists voice a series of essential hints, quiet clues that often lead us directly to powerful and persuasive messages. At other times, we use those insights to feed further interviews and creative work which finally yield the breakthroughs. Our goal is to identify the discovery paths your best customers have taken and then to design all persuasion elements to help your prospects quickly travel down similar “value revealing” trails.


	These principles apply whether you are already a smashing success or struggling to rescue a dream. If you have a fundamentally great business idea with tremendous potential, we’d love to help you multiply your results and achieve competitive dominance.

What is great communication design?

Great communication strategists are students of human behavior, with a strong bias towards rationality and respect. We are careful observers of others and ourselves and we know that when people read about a product or watch a commercial or listen to an ad, they have vivid movies in their minds. They say things to themselves and have feelings about the topic, product, or service.

Our job is to understand and build on those internal conversations and those feelings. We put the reader, viewer, or listener rationally and emotionally in touch with the essence – namely why the content, product, or service is a breakthrough, and how it may prevent some corporate or personal disaster.

The detective must discover the great issue that taps a fundamental human desire and resets the standard. It might be anywhere. It can be buried in a client’s past communication tools – a great idea that was lost in the noise. It can come to light through skillful market analysis, or through in-depth interviews and observations within the target audience. It can simply be right there, so obvious and basic that no one thought to use it nor to dramatize it.

The lawyer must build a logical and compelling chain of reasoning around the great issue, with a clear call to action, based on key points, supported by data. Perhaps expressed as a presentation sequence or a series of questions or issues, it must lead a prospect reliably from interest, to commitment, to closure. When the argument is great, it is decisive, irrefutable, irresistible.

The poet must be sensitive to the subtleties of language and how it can affect different people. The “Argument” that doesn’t call attention to its technique must be developed to appear naturally and comfortably in the prospects’ minds, to touch them as easily and simply as their own ideas.

The artist must create compelling visuals that can communicate an entire concept in an instant, or guide the eye to a best sequence of messages. Carefully chosen and skillfully executed, they can put the reader in direct touch with a unique selling proposition, a great news story, a key learning. But with a slight misstep, their very power to instantly and conceptually communicate can undercut the visitor’s trust and severely attenuate the effectiveness of the ad, emailing, or site page.


	What’s at the Core? What makes Persuasion Design unique? How is Persuasion Design capable of improving selling economics by several fold? Why are its outcomes so much more powerful and reliable than other sources of creative work? And how can it create unheard of outcomes such as the total elimination of objections? The answer to these frequently asked questions about our service are easy on the surface, but more complex at heart. It’s easy at first glance because our approach combines three elements that sound familiar: A deep understanding of the psychology of persuasion. Years of experience developing interview & probing skills. Research techniques for rapid continuous improvement cycles. *In our hands, these elements take on new meaning.* To illustrate this, let’s examine three ways of developing a new banner, emailing, or site element. We’ll compare the usual approach, to a better approach, and then to the ResultsLab approach. *The Usual Approach* Some ads, emailings or site elements are developed based on a conviction by the creators that “We know best; we know the product and why people should buy it.” This Ivory Tower approach leads, inevitably, to the “Throw Stuff Against the Wall to See What Sticks” method of development. The process is called creative – but the result is usually a series of new ads, emailings, or site elements with eye-catching glitter, exaggeration, and high-sounding adjectives playing major roles. Even when this approach is taken with the best intentions, with no thought to mislead or deceive the prospects, it is a seductive trap. “Surely,” the creators think, “if we try lots of ideas, hammering away at the features and benefits, and design a great ‘look and feel,’ some of the ideas will yield good results and we’ll be able to build on them.” The name of this trap is clear to any computer buff: “Garbage in, Garbage out.” Unless the foundations for the new ideas are solid (as explained in “The ResultsLab Approach” below), the results will be meaningless. Some of the ads or emailings are almost certain to get slightly better results than the others, but the creators have no standards by which to know what attributes of the ads or emailings caused the differences, so they are usually unable to “build on them.” This usual approach is a *creative dead-end. It’s the resting place for many current web advertisers, and it’s giving web advertising a bad name. A Better Approach* At best, some new media agencies recognize that their own ideas about why the public should buy a product or service are not necessarily reliable; so they do research to discover the felt needs or expressed needs for the product in the marketplace and then design persuasion elements that are responsive to those needs. There are two shortcomings to this approach: First, most competitive marketing on the net – and in the brick & mortar market place – is founded on felt or expressed needs. In that vast arena the competition is fierce and the players are legion. Many products in a category can satisfy felt or expressed needs, so the race is often won by marketers who promote benefits, such as brand recognition or price, not directly related to product quality or value. These ‘marginal’ benefits can achieve some level of market dominance, but only at the cost of higher marketing expenditures or lower margins. Finding a winning strategy in that crowded playing field is the marketing issue that most conscientious advertisers consider to be their greatest challenge. Second, felt needs or expressed needs are easily eclipsed by deeper, more fundamental, and unvoiced qualms. Far more prevalent than most marketers realize, a qualm is unvoiced when a person thinks nothing can be done about it or feels embarrassed to bring it up. In fact, it can be a ‘buried’ concern that the person is not even aware of. Unanswered, these qualms are the real barrier to sales. Since they are not uncovered through standard research techniques, they usually stay unanswered. If, somehow those qualms were answered, that product or service would be differentiated from the crowd, causing it to be highly attractive. This is the marketing issue that actually is the greatest challenge to success. *The ResultsLab Approach* We begin our work by recognizing that felt or expressed needs are only prologue. We find those easily, then find ways to go beyond the obvious – to discover the deep qualms, the unvoiced concerns, and develop a way to reframe, transcend, eclipse, or answer them. But, that is not enough. Sometimes knowing the deep qualms gives us clues to the ultimate goal, and sometimes we have to dig further. Our real goal is always to find the product or service issues, felt or not, conscious or not, expressed or not, which tap a great issue, a fundamental human need, a hidden greatness – yielding a compelling news story. These are the core values that will devastate all the qualms, reset the standard for the product or service, and disqualify the competition. *An Example* In our Persuasion Design for ACT!, the largest selling software to help people work with their contacts all day, we quickly identified the strong voiced motives for users as saving time, being more productive, and avoiding detail. But we knew something deeper, more fundamental and more powerful might be there. So, using an array of interview techniques, we went after it. We asked the best ACT! users why the product was so valuable to them, and we weren’t satisfied with their answers until we knew we’d reached that most fundamental level. The answers, when we found them, were simple and, with the benefit of hindsight, seem inevitable: The users didn’t want to be confused and embarrassed when they answered the phone and didn’t have all the information at their fingertips. They wanted to sleep better each night. They wanted to enjoy an experience all day akin to driving a high performance car – knowing that they were performing at their personal peak. Based on these deep, fundamental human desires, we created ads and emailings unlike any that had gone before, and beat all previous sales records. *Our Rapid Continuous Improvement System* Since that success for ACT!, we’ve added another element to the Persuasion Design process – one that takes our best work and makes it even better. It’s our Rapid Continuous Improvement System which we call “Ricky.” Simply stated, we begin with ads, emailings, or page designs that represent our best research and creative efforts, then put them through rapid cycles of placement, measurement, evaluation, re-work, and re-placement to bring them to the highest level of results. *Persuasion Design is “Total Quality”* Persuasion Design is to marketing what Total Quality Programs and Continuous Improvement Programs are to other functions of a company. It shares with them an extraordinary commitment to: higher standards, measuring results, and using a quality approach to create economic breakthroughs and customer/prospect satisfaction. It builds on two core disciplines: creative work steeped in the psychology of persuasion and rapid continuous improvement cycles.

	. Three Seductive Traps Agencies Often Fall Into Agencies and marketing consultants often approach their assignments in ways that, even when done with the best intentions, build disabling elements into their “creative” persuasion tools. We learned this when we conducted a series of consultive seminars on Persuasion Design technology called Whirlwind Critiques. In these sessions, we reviewed and critiqued the work of agencies and marketing consultants for more than 100 CEOs, 5 groups of marketing executives, and some 30 in-company groups. We discovered hidden stumbles, missed bets, and blatantly damaging elements in virtually every item, and we were able to show our audiences what the errors were and how to correct them. *Where The ‘Disabling’ Elements Come From* One of the most prevalent culprits in this widespread epidemic of errors is hidden away in the over-use of the word, ‘creative.’ Whether by design or default, in many agencies the creative folks have come to run the show, and they somehow grow to believe that advertising and other forms of persuasion are the only creative activities. This problem is compounded when the client is intimidated by the agency’s confidence and accepts their judgment too quickly. When creative people apply this shaky “creative” principle to their treatment, verbal elements, and graphic design – and when the client trusts those insights despite their common-sense concerns – it can lead to lots of mischief. *The ‘In Vogue’ Trap* If creativity is the heart and soul of promotion, then a new trendy phrase or image or look can appear to some agency people to represent an important creative breakthrough that must be capitalized on at all costs. “Copied Creativity” should be an obvious oxymoron, but it isn’t. We see it far more often than we should, and it’s far more damaging to the marketer than you might think. A persuasion tool that relies on some momentary pop-culture trend or phrase or image says, we’re different – like everyone else. So it carries an implication of “me too” that gets transferred to the product it is trying to promote. How many “me too” product winners do you know of? *The ‘Creative Revolution’ Trap* The best creative people don’t fall into the “in vogue” trap. They seek a creative revolution. But creativity can’t stand alone in campaigns. Elegant words and arresting visuals must wait until the solid, disciplined work of identifying the fundamental messages required for each persuasion task is done. If creativity attempts to be the persuasion message, instead of helping to illustrate it, it will certainly be counterproductive. All too frequently, the very elements thought to be the most creative (and sometimes winning awards) include distractions, off-positioning elements, poison language and graphics, and other disabling elements. These “creative” campaigns may attract audience attention, but they do so at the expense of bringing up destructive qualms. Then, when the campaign results are disappointing after an initial burst, the agency may point proudly to all the audience and press attention, and their awards, and say, “Not our fault. Maybe you should re-think the product.” Attempts at humor often take the focus off the product and the (ideal) persuasion goal. This is abundantly proven in the advertising-impact research literature. There is a place for humor, music, and arresting visuals in promotion. But unless those elements support, enhance, and are carefully integrated into the product message, they will fail. You have to know exactly when, how, and with what products and markets to use them. *The “Best of the Weak” Trap* All too often, marketing and advertising professionals’ ideas, themes, arguments, copy, offerings, etc. are not tested. They are sent out into the world to make their way as best they can. Sometime later, a new campaign is developed, and the old one is retired. Often the new campaign is the product of a new agency, because the results of the old campaign were “disappointing.” Sometimes testing is done. Test marketing on small audiences is used to reveal the “winners” among several or many variations. But when creativity was the defining principle behind all variations, when “look and feel” was the overriding persuasion consideration, none of the contesting variations will have been deeply persuasion designed. So none of them will receive a high response from the target prospects. Yet, by the nature of things, some will do better than others. It’s unfortunate that when the best of these weak approaches wins, the agency and the advertiser become convinced that this method of developing improvements is not only working but that none could be better. Research clearly shows that great persuasion has “legs” – it can run for a long, long time. In contrast, weak persuasion burns out when run over-and-over. So, if a campaign is weak, the agency gets to do the whole thing over every few months. At best, it’s throwing money away. But weak persuasion, at worst, can alienate your prospects. For example, a weak ad or emailing might persuade people to visit a site, but the persuasion doesn’t stick. That explains the high percent of those who browse and then don’t put things in shopping carts, and explains the equally high percent of shopping carts that are abandoned. Sometimes what appears to be an acceptable cost-per-order hides these errors until a more savvy competitor explodes onto the scene with great persuasion that multiplies the percent who click, who put things in carts, and who complete the sale – putting the competitor in a dominant position. Even without an upstart competitor, there is further hidden trouble when you settle for sub-optimum-yield persuasion. Here’s why. When an advertiser culls the best advertising venues to get a low-yield trickle of customers, it implies that the advertiser has left behind massive numbers of people who decided “no.” The advertiser is using up their marketplace fast. Revenues from those ads will be a tiny fraction of what could have been achieved if they’d had a better success rate at each step – from ad, to site, to shopping cart. *So What’s the Answer?* At ResultsLab, we start by creatively discovering the deepest, most psychologically fundamental persuasion elements for every product for every client. Then we apply those carefully researched elements and our creativity to the development of issues, themes, messages, arguments, visuals, placement, and graphic animation. Then we apply those psychologically designed elements to a rigorous testing procedure that looks for breakthrough results and strong buy-in from the prospects. No other marketing consultant or agency we’ve ever heard of has a technology for Persuasion Design. Over 90% of what we’ve developed over the years is unknown by even the most sophisticated marketers within companies and agencies. Our clients have discovered that by working with the best of those experts, they’d only have 10% of the power going for them. With us, it’s 100%. See What Clients Say.


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