On Friction and Agility

I’ve been catching up on my reading and ran across Dan Ariely’s July 2011 article in Wired magazine entitled, How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More. We have been long-time advocates of incorporating more behavioral economics into the design of marketing programs, and Mr. Ariely is perhaps the most famous behavioral economist today. His article is as entertaining (and occasionally annoying) as his other popular writings.

One sentence that caught my eye was “eliminating small frictions can radically alter one’s decisions,” the opening of a section about Amazon.com. This notion of “eliminating friction” is an area we are putting a tremendous amount of effort into in all of our client engagements. Each time we design a program, we actively identify obstacles that slow down the buying process and seek to eliminate them in the marketing communications, web sites, and ecommerce applications that we develop. Nathan Baldwin’s recent article on reducing friction by combining QR codes and PURLs is just one example.

Last week, I started a series on improving marketing agility. The “small frictions” that customers experience often result from policies, processes, and technologies that need to be updated or abandoned. For example, as I pointed out, data that can drive more relevant or efficient interactions is often not available to customer touchpoints. Making customer data more “agile” can have a direct effect on making marketing more relevant or the buying process more efficient.

Such outdated processes also slow down the ability of marketers to respond to new opportunities and to implement new marketing programs. Focusing on making the process easier for the end customer should also result in a more responsive –a more agile – marketing capability.

I’ll continue the series on agility in the next post, but in the meantime, feel free to leave any reactions about the Wired article or suggestions on how to eliminate “small frictions” below.