5 TED Talks that are guaranteed to upgrade your marketing game

Jul 5

Big ideas don’t have to take a lot of time - sometimes 15 minutes is all you need to change someone’s viewpoints. TED Talks, famed for doing just that, are a treasure trove of information that will level up your marketing practice. Still, it is very easy to get lost in this rabbit hole of information, so we made a list of our top 5 marketing TED Talks that will make you reconsider and improve your own marketing efforts.

1. Malcolm Gladwell: Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce

It is impossible to talk about masterful behavioural storytelling and not think of Malcolm Gladwell. The man behind Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers considers what sets trends and intellectual epidemics in motion, what are the traits of high achievers and what it means to be a leader with a surgical precision that explores ideas to their core.

This talk is no exception: in short, he describes how the pursuit of the perfect product is, in reality, a futile mission. Tasked with finding the perfect ratio for Aspartame in Pepsi, Moskowitz concluded that there is no such thing as the perfect Pepsi - instead, he said, there are the perfect Pepsis. The difference is that instead of trying to find the one universal best version of something, it is crucial to create the choice and offering that allows for other preferences - the trick, he says, is designing for smaller subgroups instead of one, uniform large one.

If you take away one thing:

Challenging the Platonic dish, which is a dogmatic approach to a product - in this case, the spaghetti sauce. The traditional Italian recipe might be the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, but that doesn’t mean that this will be the sauce that every single person will like. In order to move towards innovation, we need to change from ‘universals’, the rules that guide the way we all behave, to the understanding of variability. And in order to do that, we need to challenge the Platonic dish.

2. Dan Cobley: What Physics taught me about Marketing

It is safe to say Dan Cobley knows his stuff: having spent over 8 years at Google, he was promoted to the UK MD role after five years in Google marketing, first as Marketing Director, UK, Ireland and Benelux and then as VP Marketing, EMEA. He now leads the FinTech portfolio for Blenheim Chalcot and sits on the boards of Liberis, Modulr and Onfido. The man knows his stuff.

This talk becomes a thought mash-up, fusing the laws of physics with the principles of marketing. For example, Newton's Law that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction is used to explain how the bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it. Then, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states the impossibility of exactly measuring the state and the momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it. He then applies it to responder bias and suggests to measure what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they'll do or anticipate they'll do.

Finally, he talks about the nature of the scientific method: one cannot prove a hypothesis through observation, they can only disprove it. He then goes on to apply this to marketing by explaining how in reality, a brand can spend decades building their reputation, however it might take just a day to create a serious crack in the consumer’s trust.

If you take away one thing:

Dan talks about the second law of thermodynamics that explains how entropy (a measure of the disorder of a system) will always increase. This is extremely pertinent when it comes to your brand: you might put your campaign out, but with online comments, Twitter, TikTok and other distribution tools, it's impossible to control where it goes. At this point, you can't fight it, so embrace it and find a way to work with it.

3. Amy Lockwood: Selling condoms in the Congo

From the moment that Amy Lockwood identifies herself as a ‘reformed marketer’, I knew that the bite-sized talk would pack a punch, and sure enough, it did.

Tasked to find looks at new solutions to big problems, Amy is the deputy director of Stanford's Center for Innovation in Global Health. One of these big problems was the shockingly low percentage of condom use in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country where HIV prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults - this translates to roughly 930,000. Still, only 3% of the nation’s residents use condoms.

One of the major roadblocks? The marketing of condoms, following a very utilitarian approach to what is by definition meant to be sexy. Applying the 3 Fs (Fear, Financing and Fidelity) in marketing condoms is not congruent with what users are thinking, so it ends up taking the fun out of sex. Amy traces it back to the fact that the donor agencies have multiple audiences, and try to find a way to talk to all, ending up talking to no one. This is an extremely important marketing lesson for any industry, even ones that are not as sexy.

If you take away one thing:

Amy breaks down the importance (in this case, with life and death consequences) of understanding who the audience truly is. In this case, for the donor agencies, even though at first glance it is the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in reality it is the people that support their work, people like politicians, philanthropists, charities, funders and other development institutions. The fear-based marketing message they are pushing is to appease them, not to appeal to the everyday user. However if what they are really trying to do is stop the spread of HIV, they need to think about the customer (the people whose behaviours needs to change) and adapt the message for them.

4. Sheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier

When it comes to the art of choosing, Sheena S. Iyengar is considered the leading voice, and seeing her in action makes it clear why. The S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Department at Columbia Business School has an extremely impressive catalogue of research on decision making, examining the aspects that affect choices, the desire for choice, as well as the factors that lead to better decisions. In this talk, Sheena explores ‘Information Overload’ and explains how the way choice is presented, categorised, quantified and perceived makes all the difference.

Interestingly, she breaks the negative consequences to offering people too many choices in three areas: Poor engagement: they're more likely to delay choosing and will procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest. Then, their Decision Quality: they're more likely to make worse choices. Finally, Satisfaction: they're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better.

She goes on to say that the best way to deal with ‘Choice Overload’ is by these four actions: Firstly, cutting the choice offer. Secondly, lead with concretization: in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and the consequences need to be felt in a vivid, concrete way. Thirdly, categorization: we can handle more categories than we can handle choices. 400 magazines divided into 20 categories are deemed as more choice and a better choosing experience than 600 magazines divided into 10 categories. The reason is that the categories tell people how to tell them apart. Finally, Condition for complexity: when it comes to a sequence of several choices, we have to gradually increase the complexity. Measured by engagement in a path of 56 decision, people were more engaged when going from low choice to high choice. If one starts with easy options, it prepare them for how to choose and gets them excited about the bigger product, so they are more willing to be motivated to be engaged.

If you take away one thing:

Sheena presents an experiment with jam tasting: following the pattern of an AB test, table A has 6 jams while table B has 24. Unsurprisingly, more people stopped when there were more jams: 40% for table A in comparison to 60% for table B. However, when they measured the purchase rate of the two tables, they found the opposite effect: of the people who stopped at table B (24 jams), only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam. Of the people who stopped at table A(6 jams), 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. This means that people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24 choices. This is crucial because it goes back into making sure you measure what matters and not the vanity metrics.

5. Sarah Willersdorf: What brands can learn from online dating

Can you have a relationship with a brand? Sarah Willersdorf, Managing Director and Partner in the New York office of BCG makes a compelling argument for it. A topic expert on Fashion and Luxury, she poses questions that are genuinely thought provoking when it comes to the analogy of online dating apps and brands: would you date your brand? Would you hook up with it for a hot night of passion with your product? And if so, how is your online romance taking place?

Sarah brings out three rules. She starts with advising us to be clear, not coy: real life dating might be flirtatious, but in online dating, one has to be direct. She brings the examples of two of her friends that are looking for different things: one wants something quick and easy and adapts her profile that way. The other curates his profile by intentionally selecting relationship-inspiring pictures: a shot with the puppy that shows his playful side; the picture with a surfboard to show he is sporty. and so on.

This raises a great point: one’s branding on social is different depending on what they are looking for. There are countless memes about how people present themselves differently on different dating apps, with romantic shots on Tinder and Bumble and sexier ones on hookup apps like Grindr.

Sarah’s second advice is to give them what they want: it is more about math and less about mystery. She talks about the fact that sometimes, before the matching even starts from the parameters like compatibility based on the questionnaires, the algorithm is examining how engaged people are with your profile by how long they spend on it - this then infers your level of attractiveness and matches you with similar cohorts. Users are aware of that and optimise accordingly, something that brands should be doing as well.

The final advice is to get naked with your message: brevity is key, as exemplified with the simplicity of the Tinder interface which is just one action (a swipe). Users on average spend 2-5 seconds before making their decision. This is because we are pre-wired to make rapid decisions based on very limited information, especially as we are overwhelmed by messages and choices.

If you take away one thing:

Online dating participants are optimising their profiles with the right pictures, copy and messaging so why are brands not doing the same? The newer generations are aware of the algorithms, expectations and hacks, actively trying to optimise their profiles for it. In the same way, they expect brands to optimise for them and woo them, make their brands more appealing in a clear, easy and concise way. If they can communicate their entire brand in 2-5 seconds, so should we.