What can you learn about your brand from your customers? Richard chats with Kevin Hains, Head of Insight at giffgaff, the UK mobile service provider that is "Up to Good" about his experiences using time-response measures to learn more about how customers connect with the brand. Kevin talks about how an effective brand triggers a customer's emotional response to a product, and understanding that connection helps to quantify the trust that a customer has in that product - and how a community can emerge around a product!
What can you learn about your brand from your customers? Richard chats with Kevin Hains, Head of Insight at giffgaff, the UK mobile service provider that is "Up to Good" about his experiences using time-response measures to learn more about how customers connect with the brand. Kevin talks about how an effective brand triggers a customer's emotional response to a product, and understanding that connection helps to quantify the trust that a customer has in that product - and how a community can emerge around a product!
Brandon Wehn (00:07):
Welcome to the show. This is Brandon Wehn and you are listening to the Understanding Consumer Neuroscience Podcast, brought to you by the folks at CloudArmy. In this episode, Richard talks to Kevin Hains of giffgaff, about his experiences using time response measures to learn more about how customers connect with the company brand.
Richard Campbell (00:27):
Hi, this is Richard Campbell. Thanks for listening to Understanding Consumer Neuroscience. Today, my guest is Kevin Hains, who is the Head of Insight for giffgaff, which I believe is a telco in the UK. Welcome to the show.
Kevin Hains (00:49):
Thanks, Richard. It's great to be here. And yeah, it's great to be having the conversation.
Richard Campbell (00:53):
For those who don't know what giffgaff is, what's a giffgaff?
Kevin Hains (00:58):
What is a giffgaff? Giffgaff is a mobile company, a connectivity company, a telecoms company, if you will. We were founded about 14 years ago with the idea of really doing things differently in an industry that perhaps takes consumers for granted a little bit.
Richard Campbell (01:15):
Telcos, boy, oh, boy. Yeah. Between them and airlines, what are the companies that people are most annoyed by and yet need?
Kevin Hains (01:23):
Yeah, it's essential. We're a critical service and I think people need to be connected. It's important to be able to phone your loved ones. There are emergencies. There's just important news and exciting news to tell each other.
Richard Campbell (01:38):
There's Candy Crush.
Kevin Hains (01:41):
Exactly. There's Candy Crush. There are levels to be completed and [inaudible 00:01:48].
Richard Campbell (01:47):
There are levels to be completed.
Kevin Hains (01:48):
Yeah, prizes to be won. Yeah, so giffgaff was founded off this idea of doing things a bit differently and ultimately putting members we call our lovely consumers and customers, we call them members because they're part of something a bit more special.
Richard Campbell (02:07):
Well, and I noticed this point about 70% of your phones in 2023 were refurbs, which is really an interesting idea. Because we know perfectly well in the tech industry, these phones are fine. If you put a new LiPo battery into them, they'll keep going and they're inexpensive once they've got a few years on them as well. So you don't have to keep buying that thousand pound phone every two years.
Kevin Hains (02:32):
And that's really important to us thinking about how to be sustainable, how to enable our members to not only get great value to do that, but for the world. And so one of the things I think we're particularly proud of at giffgaff is that we're an accredited B Corp. So we've really committed, legally committed to doing right by people, planet and profit. So it's quite a big commitment for us to have made really as an organization.
Richard Campbell (03:07):
But it sounds like you're wearing the things of how do you do telco better? And it is being a B Corp really building an infrastructure that says, these things can be done sustainably. We can try and be a positive part of it. It must draw a particular clientele as well.
Kevin Hains (03:22):
It does, and I think that we have incredible love for the brand and for the business and people. It sort of goes back to why I said we talk about our members. They're part of something special. And when I talk to them or people in the business talk to our members, they are really big fans because we do offer something special. We listen and we really hear them and we hear their problems and we act on that. And that's one of the other benefits of being perhaps a little bit smaller than some of our big competitors, is there's that really ability to respond to concerns that our members have and the features or the products or the surprising things that they'd like to see and hear from us. So there's been many examples, if you look up giffgaff and see the many things we've done across the years, lots of examples of us just helping members and just listening to members, which is really important to us.
Richard Campbell (04:38):
I like the term we're up to good.
Kevin Hains (04:42):
Yeah. And that's really what found it. The idea of becoming B Corp accredited and putting that energy into that B Corp accreditation, we were doing a lot of good anyway. And when you talk to anybody in the business, there's a lot of... The main thing people talk about is I just want to do good. I want to do the right thing. I want to do what's right for members. And so that culminated into this idea, this bigger idea of being up to good, which is just really fantastic to be part of, an exciting place to be.
Richard Campbell (05:15):
Because you've been in the insight business, and I'm looking at your LinkedIn here for probably more than a decade. The term insight has been in your title for a variety of different companies, insight management. When you say the word insight, what do you mean? What does it mean to you?
Kevin Hains (05:32):
Me, its insight is I think a mixture of inspiration and talking truth to power. So I think it's incumbent on people within insight and anybody who works within insight world. I think it's important that we have the bravery to speak the truth, to be objective and to tell the business as it is because sometimes we have to talk about quite difficult... We have to have difficult conversations about what members or customers think about the brand or think about the business, think about the products that we're selling. And it's important that we're that voice in the business.
Richard Campbell (06:23):
DC Insight is sort of the inbound side of marketing. That marketing is us trying to sell out a message about our brand and our product and our ideas. And then insight is how did the customer receive that.
Kevin Hains (06:36):
How the customer received that, how future customers might receive that, and how can we tap into future audiences, I think... And that's the other part of it is not only do we have to talk truth to the business, but we also have to inspire the business to change and we have to inspire the business to think differently, do things differently as well. So in some ways, we do have to sell our wares and sell our ideas into the business to be that catalyst for change.
Richard Campbell (07:07):
Inbound marketing, you are marketing to the company to more align with a prospective set of customers.
Kevin Hains (07:14):
Absolutely.
Richard Campbell (07:15):
And this sort of brings this idea of what a brand's really about then. How do you define brand? I mean, we always talk about it on the show, but I don't know that we really dig into it, so what is a brand?
Kevin Hains (07:27):
I would never ever imagine that I could give a good answer.
Richard Campbell (07:32):
That's fair.
Kevin Hains (07:33):
There are so many people who are so much smarter than me. But to me personally, I think it really does boil down to a set of feelings and a set of ideas that something stands for, that you want to adopt into your life that perhaps says more than just the functional use of that product, but perhaps send some messages both to yourself and to the people around you about what sort of person you are. And so I think that's... I guess that's what a brand is. It's very intangible.
Richard Campbell (08:15):
It isn't it.
Kevin Hains (08:16):
The more I work on brand strategy and building brands, the more I realize it's really just a feeling.
Richard Campbell (08:24):
But ultimately, our customers have some relationship with our product, some set of feelings around that product. And in some ways the brand is a artifice between the actual product and the customer to trigger those feelings.
Kevin Hains (08:38):
Yes, absolutely.
Richard Campbell (08:39):
I think about a logo and a name for that matter as all elements of the brand that trigger the relationship to the product.
Kevin Hains (08:47):
Absolutely. I think it's every part of the brand that you can touch, see, taste, feel, consume in some way. They all contribute to this bigger idea that is the brand. And what's exciting and really fascinating is getting under the skin of how all of those different touch points, if you call them that, what do those touch points mean to people? How do they recognize those touch points, I think is fascinating.
Richard Campbell (09:20):
So now I feel like there's two things I need to know. The first is how people actually feel about the product and then how the brand equates to the product. They're not necessarily the same thing. I might have a product people really like, but I haven't built good enough branding around it to associate that brand with the product.
Kevin Hains (09:41):
Yeah. And I think that's a really good example, a good challenge for or good conversation around, particularly for small brands. Because often in the start... If you're a startup or you're just sort of starting your business and creating this product and you're beginning to sell it, is really hard to convince people of all of the aspects of it and to give people a sense of... To build a brand around a product when people don't know about it or who you are, they're not even aware of you. It's incredibly challenging. And I think for small brands, you look to the big brands, the well-known, the brands that have been here for decades and decades, the big multinational brands, and you'd look at them with envy because you just think they just have to flash a color and everybody knows what that brand is.
Richard Campbell (10:40):
And some of those products are only sugary water and they're still widely recognized and somehow beloved. It's very strange to think in terms of, I don't know how important that product actually is, but it's brand... It's people's association with that product and that brand are extraordinary.
Kevin Hains (10:58):
The complexity of how our minds perceive the real world is just fascinating. And I remember many decades ago, and on another continent, I remember changing the label for a really well-known soft drink brand. And consumers would tell us until... They would argue with us until they were black and blue that we had changed the product. And you sort of go, "No."
Richard Campbell (11:31):
Wow. Because all you'd done is changed the label.
Kevin Hains (11:33):
The label has just changed. We've just updated the label, made it look... I'm sure there was a better strategy, but effectively we just made it a bit cooler, a bit more relevant for younger audiences. And all of a sudden, there was this huge backlash. Because people were like, "You've changed the product, you've added... You've reduced the sugar content, you've added sweeteners that taste different."
Richard Campbell (11:57):
Or something. And you knew perfectly well exactly the same product in the container, but-
Kevin Hains (12:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Richard Campbell (12:03):
Yeah. I also fascinated by the idea of customers defending a product against its owner. Listen, you are betraying this product you own. The customer has his own relationship with the product.
Kevin Hains (12:17):
I'm sure lots of your listeners will know sort of new Coke, those examples. [inaudible 00:12:21]-
Richard Campbell (12:21):
Oh, it's very famous story.
Kevin Hains (12:22):
There are so many... Yeah, there's so many examples of products that have been tweaked or changed, label change, a formulation change that was well-intentioned. But when you eat and drink that product or use that product day in and day out, it's familiar and you don't want that trust betrayed.
Richard Campbell (12:46):
Yeah. Well, the idea that there is a trust... First, we have to perceive the fact that there is a trust in there that could be betrayed by tweaking the product. I think about insight, this idea of just communicating to the product owner, your customers trust this product to be a particular way, tread at your peril, understand the consequences of trying to alter that. And then in a recognition that maybe the alteration is necessary, how do you do this in the least painful way? Do you simply take the blows and people will get over it? Or is there a community strategy to come to? People want to try the new version. And the new Coke story is interesting because in some ways Coca-Cola was very open about the fact of we are changing the formula and so forth. And sure there was an outcry and both products sat side by side for some time. I don't know that we look back on that and say, "That was a brilliant strategy by Coke." It certainly got a lot of people talking and it's not like they sold less in the end.
Kevin Hains (13:46):
It's the saying, "There's no such thing as bad PR."
Richard Campbell (13:50):
Something like that.
Kevin Hains (13:52):
I'm sure I can hear my PR colleagues recoiling as I say that, but-
Richard Campbell (13:57):
Well, I'm also thinking that was the '80s. We are in a different era now where I think people are starting to really feel we are super saturated in PR, and so there is such a thing as bad PR now. Like, don't ask for people's attention if it's not for good purpose, because attention's gotten so valuable.
Kevin Hains (14:17):
It really has. That is probably the fragmentation. I guess we would talk about the fragmentation of media and all the communication messages that people are being bombarded with across so many different touch points and media types that it is definitely getting harder and harder to grab people's attention and hold people's attention. Which is a particular challenge for brand building because you're trying to tell people these... A lot of brands and a lot of products have complex stories to tell. And almost every product I've worked on has had a really, really fascinating production process history. And when you sit in the marketing department and you think, "What can we actually tell people?"
(15:10):
You sort of go, "Well, we've got to think about how much attention."
Richard Campbell (15:12):
Yeah, how much time do we got? The story can't be too complicated. Most people are busy.
Kevin Hains (15:17):
We can't make a two-hour documentary about our brand.
Richard Campbell (15:21):
Well, you can, but nobody's going to watch it.
Kevin Hains (15:25):
Well-
Richard Campbell (15:25):
And you're going to spend a lot of money.
Kevin Hains (15:30):
Exactly. So it's a unique challenge, but I go back to we were talking about trust and that building trust, and that's an interesting... Not breaking trust with consumers. And that's quite often I think what happens in the insight world is we sort of see those risks and those opportunities of the intangible feeling around a brand. And that is an interesting challenge because that's... Sometimes there are changes to be made to a product which are financially beneficial for the business or maybe to meet regulatory standards or there are loads and loads of reasons that these products change or just to update it and maintain relevance with new audiences. And one of the questions I will get quite often asked is, "Kevin, what's the risk of us making this change?"
Richard Campbell (16:27):
Yeah. There's a bunch of things we could change. And many of them we change, nobody would notice everything is fine. But there's a few landmines out there. How do you go about identifying the things that people really value about your product?
Kevin Hains (16:41):
Yeah. And so how do you quantify trust? How do you quantify familiarity? How do you quantify the right color and whether that changing that color is going to make a difference? I think one of the most common questions I've been asked through all my career is, "Kevin, how much has our design, our pack design change made?" How many sales-
Richard Campbell (17:11):
We know how much we spent redoing this label.
Kevin Hains (17:13):
We do.
Richard Campbell (17:14):
How does that translate into sales?
Kevin Hains (17:16):
How many more did we sell just because of that design? And so that is a uniquely challenging question to answer. These intangibles, these really difficult to measure their emotions, their feelings. How do you measure that? And-
Richard Campbell (17:32):
Is this where neuroscience comes into play?
Kevin Hains (17:33):
It does. It's got a big role to play.
Richard Campbell (17:36):
You've done this work, right? You've worked with CloudArmy in a variety of different entities, giffgaff I presume being one of them. What do you try to measure then when you're trying to quantify that trust?
Kevin Hains (17:50):
I think we try and as best as possible using neuroscience techniques and working with the fantastic consultants at CloudArmy, we try and measure these intangibles. We try and measure whether or not people do trust a product. And that is all down to how strongly they associate your product with that feeling, that color, that logo. There's so many. That sound. And I think that's a particularly interesting areas. There's sort of sonic branding.
Richard Campbell (18:26):
Sonic branding.
Kevin Hains (18:28):
But these are the intangibles that I think really only sort of neuroscience based research can really help us understand. Because I think asking somebody explicitly and saying-
Richard Campbell (18:44):
We've learned from serving that asking people why they like a brand is just not a good idea. You do not get usable results from that.
Kevin Hains (18:50):
No.
Richard Campbell (18:51):
So you have to measure it obliquely. You like the sort of time response type tests?
Kevin Hains (18:57):
Yeah.
Richard Campbell (18:57):
Do you get insight from that?
Kevin Hains (18:59):
Loads. And I think that's where particularly these more intangible aspects, because quite often if you do ask explicitly, most of the responses will gravitate around the same levels. So if we ask, "Does this famous brand... Do you recognize this color from this famous brand?" Most people will say yes. And there's no way to differentiate that.
Richard Campbell (19:24):
No.
Kevin Hains (19:25):
But the time response is really fascinating When you start to see, well, how quickly do people recognize that color with that brand? It becomes really fascinating to sort of see how that pulls apart. Because when people don't necessarily have... They don't have the time, they're considered time, like an explicit survey would allow them to. And I guess we're sneakily watching them in the background to see how quickly they answer.
Richard Campbell (19:55):
Well, we're getting those subconscious responses, like when the brand is really in their minds, those responses are almost instantaneous. It's shocking how fast it is.
Kevin Hains (20:03):
Yeah, absolutely.
Richard Campbell (20:05):
And when isn't, it's apparent. There's a clear delineation in the data.
Kevin Hains (20:09):
And I think another area that is... So obviously with brand building absolutely relevant, but I think where this is uniquely interesting is there are a lot of topics and a lot of questions that businesses ask about their customers and consumers that are difficult to ask explicitly. Only because people will quite often give you the response that they think they should give you.
Richard Campbell (20:39):
Right. The pleasing effect.
Kevin Hains (20:40):
Yeah. Classic, I sort of give the example of recycling and it's really that say, do gap that I'm talking a [inaudible 00:20:49]. And if you sent a survey out and said, "Do you recycle?"
Richard Campbell (20:53):
Everybody's going to say yes.
Kevin Hains (20:54):
Everybody says yes because they feel like I should be recycling. I must be recycling.
Richard Campbell (20:59):
I must have recycled something. Yeah.
Kevin Hains (21:00):
Yeah. So it's one of those where I think when you ask it explicitly, it's hard to get a genuine response. And time response and implicit responses are a fantastic way to give us greater insight into that subconscious and greater insight into what they're actually doing versus what they think they should be saying to us.
Richard Campbell (21:23):
You talk about the color of a label, and those sorts of things. We've had conversation on the show before about changing packaging, impacting the ability for the customer to find it on the shelf. Which makes a lot of sense. We generally live in an overwhelming range of choice in our average grocery, at least in the west. So product identification is important, but you seem to be pressing more on the emotional response that when I change that packaging, I don't elicit the same response. Have I effectively broken the brand at that moment if I do that?
Kevin Hains (21:55):
Potentially. There's always an interesting debate about there are things you can do to make your brand shout louder, be noisier, stand out more. But there's a balance to be struck with. You're trying to build something, you're trying to build an idea and a set of emotions and a set of feelings around your brand as well, because that's what creates long-term sustainability. If we just all we were trying to do is shout, shout, shout, you just run... Promotions are a great way to do that.
Richard Campbell (22:26):
Yeah. But people move away from the barker eventually, right? You can only take so much noise
Kevin Hains (22:30):
Yeah. And everyone, you've got to create a sustainable brand. And creating that feeling is really the root to building that relationship with your consumers that is just so much more valuable than that one-off sale. It's about creating a long-term relationship with those consumers so that they learn and trust... They trust you, they learn more about you, they get more involved in your brand and more engaged. And equally, you can learn more about them as they stay with the brand. And that sort of ties back to... And I think why I really love giffgaff because there's this real idea of mutuality and that's really what giffgaff means. It's sort of an old Scottish word, and it's about this idea of mutuality that as much as you give us as customers, we give back to you, be that through value for money or better products and services. But I think it's really, really true. The more you build this long term sustainable relationship with your customers and your consumers, it just helps to build a really, really powerful brand, which is really fascinating.
Richard Campbell (23:43):
You're also striking on an idea that this relationship evolves, that people don't fully understand your product when they buy it the first time. That it's going to take time for you to communicate a longer message. It's a telco. There's not a box on the shelf per se. I think that's really an interesting problem to go over to... Most people when they take out their phone, don't think about their carrier. That's not the thing that they're looking at. So when do they even think about you? The monthly bill? Is that it?
Kevin Hains (24:16):
So it is the sort of classic category entry points, that sort of phrase of what are the moments that people are going to be thinking about their mobile carrier? And it's not always when you pick up your phone, but it's when the call doesn't go through, when the message doesn't quite... You don't get the blue ticks. When that communication fails, they will think about their mobile provider at that point. So there are... For us, it's about managing that relationship because it can be a very high-risk relationship. Because we are such a critical service really for people. More and more people don't even have landlines phones in their homes anymore.
Richard Campbell (25:07):
This is their connection.
Kevin Hains (25:09):
They just use their phones, their mobile phones. So there are those moments, but there are the other moments which are, they want to buy a new device, they want to buy a new handset, a new phone.
Richard Campbell (25:21):
That's the logical time to think about is it time to also change the carrier?
Kevin Hains (25:24):
Yeah. There are these other moments where they will think about us, but that is the risk for us is that we can be sat... Like many utilities, we can be, the moment that bill arrives, we can be the moment the service fails. So managing that. I guess that's why we are so passionate about building that relationship with consumers and really understanding them and giving them a sense that they've got a voice into our business.
Richard Campbell (25:50):
I don't know how you collect insight on those moments. That seems like a really challenging thing to do. I mean, again, I keep falling back to classical survey. When you consider replacing your phone, what do you think about. I mean, I don't know how you turn that into a timed response measurement to sort of get the workflow of how someone chooses to change a carrier.
Kevin Hains (26:13):
It's very challenging, and I think this is where we will use a mixture of methods to understand our consumers. I think quite often where timed response and where implicit work becomes really powerful in particular is actually an understanding how to respond to those moments. The communications we can send, the reassurances we can send, the solutions we can provide at those critical moments. So I think often we can quite easily understand a lot of these moments and where the risks are, but it's more about how we respond and that's where time response and sort of going really into the subconscious. Because what we want to make sure is that we respond in a reassuring way, in a way that consumers and our members would expect us to respond.
Richard Campbell (27:11):
Or your prospective members, somebody's on another carrier, they're ready to replace their phone, or they're frustrated once again, or they got the wrong bill. This seems like an SEO problem. I want the right search terms at that moment when they're frustrated that my product appears saying, "I have a better way for you."
Kevin Hains (27:27):
And we spend a lot of time thinking about help and support and how we can ensure that it's easy and simple and people get the solution they want quickly and easily. And it's a unique challenge for giffgaff because we only provide digital support. We don't really have a call center. You have to interact with us through digital channels to get support. And we find incredible success because we take the savings from not having a call center and we give that savings back to our members through good value tariffs. But it creates a unique challenge for us because we don't necessarily have a reassuring voice at the end of a phone line for people to talk to.
Richard Campbell (28:14):
I think you're also the product of the time too, because there's a non-trivial number of customers today who really don't want to talk to anyone. If you can answer all their questions online and they can interact with the device successfully, they're probably happier too.
Kevin Hains (28:28):
Yeah. And we see incredible success. We use obviously sort of the very typical traditional digital channels that you would expect, great website support and lots of help articles. But what's unique about giffgaff is there's this community that people can tap into. It's almost like a little mini Reddit where you can go in and you can have conversations and our-
Richard Campbell (28:52):
So is this customers helping customers?
Kevin Hains (28:54):
It is.
Richard Campbell (28:54):
That's pretty cool.
Kevin Hains (28:54):
So our members will help you and they'll respond pretty quickly. So you'll get a response almost immediately from our other members who are there to help. And this kind of goes back to what I said earlier, this is real fan base around the brand. It's a really loved brand, and we've built something incredibly unique around that, which is quite exciting.
Richard Campbell (29:23):
Did the powers that be discover this community per se, or did they make it? Was this intentional or did you realize when we do the right things, this community emerges? I don't know how someone listening to this goes, "Oh, I need to make one of those."
Kevin Hains (29:38):
It's really fascinating because I think it was partially intentional, but I don't think anybody really imagined it would get as big and as powerful as it is today.
Richard Campbell (29:51):
You can't say on the surface, "Hey, I want my tech support to come from the customers helping other customers." That seems absurd. And yet it sounds like that's what has emerged at giffgaff.
Kevin Hains (30:01):
Pretty much did it. But it was based on this idea of we will take the savings. We're not going to develop a great big call center that's going to cost us us a lot of money to invest in, and we're going to start small and we're going to let customers help customers, or as I should say, members help members.
Richard Campbell (30:24):
Giving a place for that to occur. That's as much as you can really do.
Kevin Hains (30:28):
Yeah. But we built a community and that's what's key is that it was never... And I'm sure there may be lots of inside professionals listening to this, it wasn't a research community. It was in some ways used for research and to understand members, but it was bigger than that. It was this idea of creating a community. And these people who would help you would also have conversations with the business and people in the business about how they wanted to shape the product. And so it was this idea of not just that, oh, we can save loads of money by not employing a call center. That was almost a side effect. The idea was to create... We wanted to create a product that was centered around members and put them at the heart, and they were driving the development.
Richard Campbell (31:29):
So give them a place to communicate, which... I mean, imagine you initially thinking will help with all these communications. And then that community emerged from that. So you expose yourself, you give a place for the customers to talk to you, and in that, a community emerged.
Kevin Hains (31:48):
That's hard to replicate. That's hard to copy.
Richard Campbell (31:49):
It seems to be something you could wreck easily. How can [inaudible 00:31:53] to destroy?
Kevin Hains (31:55):
It is. But also what I think where it's powerful is that because those members have had that hand in building giffgaff, I guess we've given a fair amount of leeway to get it wrong because we've always been open and transparent and we have admitted when we've got it wrong.
Richard Campbell (32:14):
Well, what more powerful force in there than showing your customers you're affected by their experience or by their reaction? When you can point to and say, "You have said, and so we have done."
Kevin Hains (32:24):
And so we have built trust because we've allowed ourselves to be vulnerable with our members. I think people understand. And this has pervaded a lot of the research done over all the years and the brands that I've worked on, is it's often more surprising how forgiving customers can actually be if you tell them the truth, if you're transparent.
Richard Campbell (32:54):
If you show you can listen to them and act on them.
Kevin Hains (32:57):
Absolutely. Because they understand that you're a business, they understand that you're there trying to... You've got salaries and wages to pay. They understand you've got suppliers to pay. Customers understand how business works, they understand what you're there for. And they understand maintenance needs to happen, but it's all around the communication. But if you try and pull the wool over their eyes, that's when they get angry.
Richard Campbell (33:25):
Sure.
Kevin Hains (33:25):
And I think Giffgaff was really, really good at, and today we still are good. We are vulnerable. We admit when we make mistakes, we talk to our members. We're just really, really member centric.
Richard Campbell (33:37):
But then we still need these other measurement tools that are not direct communication, like the timed response stuff. I think this... I always fear that these neuroscience pieces feel like trickery, like I'm fooling a customer or I'm pulling something they don't own. And I know it's not true that really what this is is sometimes these things are very hard to communicate, and timed responses are a better way to communicate them.
Kevin Hains (34:01):
Absolutely. And even there, we will co-create research programs with our members.
Richard Campbell (34:11):
Interesting.
Kevin Hains (34:11):
We'll tell them what we're doing. We explain it to them because again, that's part of not just thinking about them, putting them first. And we don't ever want to be manipulating people. But timed response is... And we will talk to members about it, it's incredibly powerful way for us to get a genuine response, to help us get over people post rationalizing thoughts and feelings. And it's to get that instantaneous feeling, the reaction to something. So I think that there are different ways that you can manage that, but I don't think I've ever found it to be manipulative or problematic.
Richard Campbell (34:59):
No, I think when you use a term like neuroscience for certain folks, that just seems threatening. But I also think you can explain it to people in a way that says, look, we want to measure those visceral responses. And in some ways it's like it's easier for you to take this test than to come up with complicated answers to things you may have not thought through in the first place.
Kevin Hains (35:17):
Exactly. And it's fun. I think when I look at the traditional surveys that we sometimes do, there are a lot of effort to work through.
Richard Campbell (35:26):
There's almost a gamification to it, right?
Kevin Hains (35:28):
It is, yeah. It's gamified. Yeah.
Richard Campbell (35:31):
But in a way that plugs into people's more visceral responses. So easier to do and actually better results, which is interesting. We can get those two together when it's done properly.
Kevin Hains (35:41):
Yes. And it's crucial to give us that insight into those questions that we just would struggle to get a genuine response if we asked explicitly. So it's very, very powerful.
Richard Campbell (35:55):
I think that's powerful insight, Kevin. I really appreciate that. Because it helps set that stage for, we can be totally open with our customers, so how we're trying to help them even using these more complicated tools.
Kevin Hains (36:06):
And with people within the business as well. Because as you say, neuroscience can... I think quite often the word neuroscience just conjures up this idea of electrodes and caps and-
Richard Campbell (36:17):
Which is a part of neuroscience, just not the whole thing.
Kevin Hains (36:21):
Not all of it. But it doesn't have... And I think it's sort of just that labs and white coats kind of... Which just feels very invasive. But actually it can be fun. It can be quite engaging, and ultimately it helps us to create better products and really understand what are-
Richard Campbell (36:44):
Things that people value.
Kevin Hains (36:44):
I think-
Richard Campbell (36:44):
And help to communicate more easily.
Kevin Hains (36:46):
Yeah. But it's critical... I think critical for product innovation, for helping us create better products, new products. It's very, very exciting.
Richard Campbell (36:58):
Absolutely. Kevin Hains, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate these insights. It's a great way to think about why we do the things we do and how we can interact with communities at a deeper level. I think what you built at giffgaff seems extraordinary.
Kevin Hains (37:11):
Thanks, Richard. It's been lovely to chat to you. And yeah, we hope we can continue to make giffgaff be growing better and spread the love with more and more members.
Richard Campbell (37:21):
A telco that people like, I think it's ought to be the craziest thing I've ever heard.
Kevin Hains (37:25):
We'll get there.
Richard Campbell (37:26):
Thanks again for coming on the show.
Kevin Hains (37:27):
Thank you.
Richard Campbell (37:27):
And we'll talk to you next time on Understanding Consumer Neuroscience.