Stay steadfast in your goals, but flexible in your approach.
Health Problem:
People are boundedly rational, meaning they have rational tendencies, but are driven to act by invisible forces, not just information.
Situation: With the release of books like Thinking Fast and Slow, and Nudge, the world of behavioral science was starting to become a highly sought after specialization in the world of marketing and advertising. McCann Health, a $300mil company with over 1600 employees was looking to develop a core differentiator for their strategic process and landed on behavioral science as the discipline to do it.
Task: I was tasked with building out the program in its entirety. In partnership with the CSO, I developed the stretch goal and SMART objectives to drive success of the newly named “Social Sciences” Team.
Action: Concepts as complex and challenging to understand as the Social Sciences made it very difficult to “sell” this brand of strategy. To make it simpler, we developed a metaphor-rich sales story, a robust toolkit with 5 productized and pressure tested tools, as well as trainings for internal and external stakeholders. These tools were developed by galvanizing the expertise of people across the global network, including experts in social sciences from the US, Canada, Japan, China, France, Italy, the UK, and Germany.
Philosophy
The Social Sciences philosophy stems from the idea that all health problems are systemic - meaning that there is never only one cause of negative health outcomes. Individual psychology, stigma, social norms, policy, interpersonal relationships (and more) all contribute to whether someone is able to take their medicine regularly, or see their doctor for an annual checkup.
This philosophy also states that once you identify the “deeper why” behind someone’s behaviors, it is significantly easier to decide what to do. Even better - your actions are more likely to change someone’s behavior.
The Results:
1. Grew a team from 1 FTE to 16 people across 3 global offices.
2. >$10mil in revenue in a single year using behavioral science as a differentiator.
3. Achieved a 2:1 revenue to investment ratio.
4. Increased new business win percentage by 25%.