Better Brainstorming Includes Debate

I have always rebelled against the tyranny of the usual team meeting dynamics.  Yes, there ARE stupid questions!  And why capture an idea that we already know is impractical just because the official brainstorming rule is to avoid any criticism? Who made that the rule, anyway?

Turns out research supports this contrarian view:  debate and discussion actually do make us more creative.

An excellent article in this week’s The New Yorker, “Groupthink, The brainstorming myth“, by Jonah Lehrer, gives a solid overview of research and examples around the best ways to drive creativity in groups.  (Unfortunately you have to subscribe to The New Yorker to see the entire article on that link, so I’ll give a summary.)

Alex Osborn, partner at BBDO, presented brainstorming to the world in his book Your Creative Power, in 1948. His most important rule was the absence of criticism and negative feedback, saying, “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it in the bud.”  Brainstorming took off like a rocket, and remains deeply influential to the point of unquestioned dogma.

Yet the research to quantify or disprove brainstorming’s effectiveness date back to 1958, at Yale University. Forty-eight students were told to brainstorm a set of puzzles in groups of four, while forty-eight other students worked solo.  The independent students were twice as productive in number of solutions, and were judged to have created solutions that were more feasible and effective.

Subsequent research consistently reinforces that conclusion.

On the other hand, Osborn’s observations from client B.F. Goodrich’s research center  that science was best approached in creative teams, has been reinforced in multiple subsequent studies and case studies, most notably in MIT’s Building 20, where a hodge podge of science departments worked side by side and were unusually productive.

What these example all have in common are:

• multiple perspectives and diverse backgrounds working together
• an atmosphere of debate and open challenge to ideas

Charlan Nemeth, at the University of California at Berkeley, demonstrated this effectively in 2003, with 65 undergraduates divided into teams of five.  One set of teams followed standard brainstorming rules, one set were advised to debate and even criticize each other’s contributions, and one set was left to their own devices.

The results were telling.  The brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, but teams given the debate condition were the most creative by far.

Even after the teams disbanded, the individuals in the debate teams continued to come up with more ideas.

According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reasses our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feeling,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong.  Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive.”

Overall, the lesson seems clear:  creativity works best in mixed groups without the constraints of artificial rules of engagement.

Lehrer sums it up, “It is the human friction that makes the sparks.”

 

Belonging and Performance

So much of the social sciences applies to marketing and events–motivation, how people behave in groups, learning styles…

Here’s an interesting study I ran across in the Boston Globe, though the abstract below is from PsycNET. People are motivated by feeling like they are part of something larger.  Even for tasks that are not team-based, like solving math problems. They showed that the sense of belonging is easily created: by reading about a social group, by sharing a birthday, by being assigned to an arbitrary group, or by having something unrelated in common.

Even more important, the extra boost of motivation continued for several days after the initial exposure to the social cues.

Four experiments examined the effect on achievement motivation of mere belonging, a minimal social connection to another person or group in a performance domain. Mere belonging was expected to increase motivation by creating socially shared goals around a performance task. Participants were led to believe that an endeavor provided opportunities for positive social interactions (Experiment 1), that they shared a birthday with a student majoring in an academic field (Experiment 2), that they belonged to a minimal group arbitrarily identified with a performance domain (Experiment 3), or that they had task-irrelevant preferences similar to a peer who pursued a series of goals (Experiment 4). Relative to control conditions that held constant other sources of motivation, each social-link manipulation raised motivation, including persistence on domain-relevant tasks (Experiments 1–3) and the accessibility of relevant goals (Experiment 4). The results suggest that even minimal cues of social connectedness affect important aspects of self. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)

You could argue that an unconscious but compelling reason people come to events is to get this stimulating social “high”.  And, as event organizers, we can work these basic social interactions into the learning environment.

 

Mere belonging: The power of social connections.

Walton, Gregory M.; Cohen, Geoffrey L.; Cwir, David; Spencer, Steven J.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Oct 24, 2011, No Pagination Specified. doi: 10.1037/a0025731

 

Best Practices for Exhibitors

I doubt that most exhibitors are fully aware of how deeply show organizers want them to succeed.   Its logical, of course.  If exhibitors do not succeed at an event they eventually will stop exhibiting there.  But most show organizers I talk with are willing to go to some lengths to help exhibitors, with research, training, sponsorship opportunities, measurement, lead retrieval devices and lots of conversation and consulting.

As a Champion employee, I recently collaborated with our client, Pri-Med, to create a webinar for their exhibitors about best practices in exhibiting.  While it is specific to medical events (with their requirements to comply with industry and government regulations about appropriate marketing), it applies to any industry.  We frequently give these webinars, but I think this one is particularly useful, including some great recent exhibitor marketing research and a lot of examples.

So I thought I would share it with you.  You can find the recording of the full webinar at:  Exhibitor Success:  How to Maximize Your Time and Thrive in a Convention Environment.  And the pdf of the slides is also attached.  Pri-Med Champion Exhibitor webinar

Some of what I consider to be the key take-aways:

• The top three reasons attendees remember your booth:

1. Product Interest: So make your signage really clear about what you are offering
2. Well-Known Company: So make your look and feel and key messages consistent with the company marketing strategy
3. Product Demos: So use demos! Whether it is in a theater, on a plasma, on a counter.  The booths with crowds are ALWAYS the ones with demos.

• Pre-show promotion: email, direct mail, website, social media.  And have something specific to announce or invite prospects to.  Why should they visit your booth?
• On-site promotion: use the appropriate sponsorship opportunities for your goals (awareness, leads, etc.). Use presentation theaters. Speak in the conference.
• Draw attendees by creating engagement in your booth.  Meet customers’ needs by providing education, interaction, or participation.
• Make giveaways relevant. Consider using better/more expensive ones, but making attendees earn them. Result: greater interaction, more qualified leads.
• TRAIN THE BOOTH STAFF. In the company messaging, in the promotions/products being offered, and in boothmanship.
• Boothmanship is so critical.  Set company standards for:

1. Being proactive in greeting
2. Key qualifying/engagement questions
3. Conducting a successful conversation
4. Capturing key data for follow-up
5. Etiquette:   give staff sufficient breaks so they aren’t tempted to eat, drink, use their cell phone or sit down in the booth

• Get out beyond the booth: encourage staff to interact throughout the event: meals/breaks, in sessions, at parties, taking clients out to dinner
• And, most importantly, follow up on the leads.  70% of leads still do not receive any follow-up post-show.

It doesn’t require a larger budget to be more successful as an exhibitor.  Just a little more advance planning and coordination of strategy.

Why don’t more exhibitors ace their trade show strategy?  Is the person responsible for planning the trade show strategy fully empowered?  Is running the trade show activities considered logistics instead of marketing? Are the different departments involved within the company fully coordinated?  Does Marketing assume Sales follow up on leads, but Sales thinks the leads aren’t useful?

These are bigger issues than our webinar could handle, but worth thinking about.

Research footnoted throughout, by Champion Exposition Services, Pri-Med, and International Center for Exhibition and Event Marketing.  With permission by Pri-Med.

 

QR Codes Gaining Acceptance

I just came across a piece of research from MGH about QR code usage: MGH’s QR Code Usage and Interest Survey.

[I don’t love the sample size, but we’ll work with what we have.  Online survey to 415 smartphone users in February 2011.]

• 65% had seen a QR code
• Of those, 49% had used one at least once

I seem to recall that about 70% of business people had a smart phone.  So, doing the math, that’s about 22% of a typical show audience who have used QR codes.

While I wouldn’t replace my current systems with QR codes for 22%, that’s definitely not fringe anymore.

QR codes have gone from “what?” to the funny papers in about a year.  About 10% of the shows I’ve attended this past 12 months have started experimenting with them, generally on agenda boards, or as a way to download the smart phone app.  The occasional exhibitor is using them in their booths.

What if the trade show industry started using them to download pdf collateral materials?  To share contact information?  For interactivity and involvement devices, like passport programs and games?

At the just-finished SuiteWorld 2011, all attendees were invited to participate in a contest for an iPad.  Each exhibitor gave out a card with a QR code.  Attendees who downloaded the QR reader app scanned the card themselves.  But if they didn’t have a smart phone or didn’t want to download the reader, they could take the card to a reader kiosk.  Some cards then said “You won an iPad!.”  Most directed the attendee to another booth or event activity, to pick up the next card.  All in all, it was fun and very well received.

A few other tid bits from the survey:

• Evenly split between men and women
• 52% 35 to 54 years old
• Highly educated

Sound like your attendees?

 

Integrated marketing: a story

I have done the split tests and have the statistics to prove the extent to which multiple media work and direct mail and email specifically work together to drive response.  And I could share it with you.  But I’d rather tell this story.  Which is funny, but absolutely true.

I once worked on my one and only consumer event, Computermania, held in Anaheim one weekend over a decade ago.  [It was cool, but ultimately a failed concept:  vendors don’t like channel confusion, and therefore can’t sell PCs and apps directly to consumers at a trade show.]

I was VP of Marketing, and responsible for attendee marketing.  We pushed the event hard, in print ads in the local newspaper, radio commercials on all the right channels, direct mail to homes, and probably email, though it was still early as a consumer medium.

As usual, the general manager of the event was frantic to increase attendee registration in the final couple of weeks.  I’ve heard a lot of crazy ideas when GMs get nervous in the last couple of weeks, but this was the craziest idea yet:  he wanted to rent an airplane pulling a banner to fly around Anaheim during the event.

No.  Direct response marketers don’t do things like that. Uh uh.  But he did it anyway.

So the event happened.  And we did a focus group.  One of the questions was why people came.  How did you hear about the event and what made you decide to attend?  And I’ll never forget the woman who said:

Well, that’s actually an interesting question.  First I saw an ad for it in the newspaper, and thought it might be interesting, but I forgot about it until I heard an ad on the radio and put it on the family calendar.  Then I got a piece of mail about it, and laid it out on the table to remind us to go.

But, really, you know why we’re here?  We were at the mall this morning and saw this airplane pulling a banner…

Don’t underestimate the role each promotion piece has in influencing the decision!  Even if you track keycodes, they don’t tell the whole story.  In this case, the airplane would have been credited with the sale…but it wouldn’t have worked without some combination of the other efforts…and maybe needed ALL of them.

And, yes, Mike.  The airplane was a good idea.