Re-thinking The Human Factor with Bruce Hallas - What Security Awareness Professionals Can Learn From Marketers and Understanding the Customer Journey, with Kenda MacDonald

What Security Awareness Professionals Can Learn From Marketers and Understanding the Customer Journey, with Kenda MacDonald

02/18/20 • 70 min

Re-thinking The Human Factor with Bruce Hallas

What Security Awareness Professionals Can Learn From Marketers and Understanding the Customer Journey, with Kenda MacDonald.

Kenda MacDonald joins us in the hot seat for Series 3, Episode 2 of the Re-Thinking the Human Factor Podcast. We are absolutely thrilled to have Kenda MacDonald on the show today. As I’m sure you’ll agree, she has the knack for pulling things together in a way that is easy for you, the listener, to understand and digest. We could have talked all day but we managed to stop ourselves..... just.

Formerly a forensic psychology major, Kenda MacDonald is now an award winning business owner, and the award winning author of ‘Hack The Buyer Brain’. Kenda is the founder and CEO of Automation Ninjas, and she sees her mission as helping forward thinking businesses get better quality leads that convert better, for happier customers that come back and spend more. The key to this is combining buyer psychology and marketing automation.

In our show today, we're going to dive into what we in the security awareness profession can glean from insights provided by marketers such as Kenda and their understanding of human behaviour and decision-making.

"It is incredibly important to know your target market and make sure they keep on coming back for more, and with so much data available to businesses these days, there really has never been a better time to do so."

JOIN KENDA MACDONALD AND BRUCE HALLAS AS THEY DISCUSS:

The importance of making the time to tailor your customer journeys via understanding why and how your customers stay the long haul with you as a business provider — whilst remaining ethically tethered. And how this can be applied to marketing and implementing your security awareness.
How does knowing human behaviour and conscious consumerism aid your business?
- Prevent choice paralysis. Being able to cater directly to an individual and know whether to offer them ‘A’ or ‘B’ saves time and money for both you and your users.
- How giving people conscious choices they will want to make, for the benefit of all, can help get things done.
A happy, fulfilled customer is bringing you, the service provider, customer lifetime value via loyalty and advocacy. Building your ambassador network by learning from how it is done in marketing loyalty schemes.
Customer Lifetime Value: The benefits of a lifetime customer versus a one off purchaser, and what we can learn from this.
Time viewed as a lifetime value. Gaining value via full attention and usage of apps.
It’s far more cost effective to spend time getting to truly know your audience, rather then thrashing about in the dark.
Give people a positive experience with little friction and they will help to generate corporation and seed new awareness within the culture around them.
The importance of data gathering when trying to shape human behaviour.
Humans have developed to be social animals. They have group identities and labels whether they like to admit it or not. Like attracts like and stereotypes do exist.
The Customer’s Journey can be applied when implementing security awareness-
- The customer’s journey is everything a consumer has to do along a path to buy and utilise a product.
- Avoid making the mistake of forgetting about the fact that purchasing something is only one part of a long journey as a consumer.
- By utilising customers’ ‘moments of truth’ you gain more lifetime value from them.
Understanding mental biases -
- The brain creates a great deal of rule sets to help it make sense of the reality around it.
- A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that affects the decisions and judgments that people make. Some of these biases are related to memory.
- The individual can develop a bias towards a product or service due to recent repetition of exposure to it. The brain likes availability and ease of use.
Marketing security more effectively and driving behaviour using the Heroes Journey -
- Craft content to make your user feel like a hero in their own story,
- Validate with data to see if your users are looking for the content you are providing.
- How gathering data helps you understand the wants and desires of your customers to aid you in bringing them their happily ever after.

RESOURCES AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Hack The Buyer Brain
A Prescription For Cutting Costs
The Availability Bias
The Sunk Cost Fallacy

MORE ABOUT KENDA MACDONALD:

Plea...

What Security Awareness Professionals Can Learn From Marketers and Understanding the Customer Journey, with Kenda MacDonald.

JOIN KENDA MACDONALD AND BRUCE HALLAS AS THEY DISCUSS:

The importance of making the time to tailor your customer journeys via understanding why and how your customers stay the long haul with you as a business provider — whilst remaining ethically tethered. And how this can be applied to marketing and implementing your security awareness.
How does knowing human behaviour and conscious consumerism aid your business?
- Prevent choice paralysis. Being able to cater directly to an individual and know whether to offer them ‘A’ or ‘B’ saves time and money for both you and your users.
- How giving people conscious choices they will want to make, for the benefit of all, can help get things done.
A happy, fulfilled customer is bringing you, the service provider, customer lifetime value via loyalty and advocacy. Building your ambassador network by learning from how it is done in marketing loyalty schemes.
Customer Lifetime Value: The benefits of a lifetime customer versus a one off purchaser, and what we can learn from this.
Time viewed as a lifetime value. Gaining value via full attention and usage of apps.
It’s far more cost effective to spend time getting to truly know your audience, rather then thrashing about in the dark.
Give people a positive experience with little friction and they will help to generate corporation and seed new awareness within the culture around them.
The importance of data gathering when trying to shape human behaviour.
Humans have developed to be social animals. They have group identities and labels whether they like to admit it or not. Like attracts like and stereotypes do exist.
The Customer’s Journey can be applied when implementing security awareness-
- The customer’s journey is everything a consumer has to do along a path to buy and utilise a product.
- Avoid making the mistake of forgetting about the fact that purchasing something is only one part of a long journey as a consumer.
- By utilising customers’ ‘moments of truth’ you gain more lifetime value from them.
Understanding mental biases -
- The brain creates a great deal of rule sets to help it make sense of the reality around it.
- A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that affects the decisions and judgments that people make. Some of these biases are related to memory.
- The individual can develop a bias towards a product or service due to recent repetition of exposure to it. The brain likes availability and ease of use.
Marketing security more effectively and driving behaviour using the Heroes Journey -
- Craft content to make your user feel like a hero in their own story,
- Validate with data to see if your users are looking for the content you are providing.
- How gathering data helps you understand the wants and desires of your customers to aid you in bringing them their happily ever after.

RESOURCES AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Hack The Buyer Brain
A Prescription For Cutting Costs
The Availability Bias
The Sunk Cost Fallacy

MORE ABOUT KENDA MACDONALD:

Plea...

Previous Episode

Reducing Cyber Risk By Reducing Friction, with Jason Hoenich

Jason Hoenich joins us as we return for Series 3, Episode 1 of the Re-Thinking the Human Factor Podcast. We are glad to be back after our hiatus having made a few changes to the podcast that we hope will add value and increase our reach so we can continue making security and behaviour awareness an engaging topic for all.

Both a security vendor and a sponsor of this podcast, Jason is a leader in the security awareness arena and a well-known speaker and blogger on the subject of awareness. He is the creator of the popular Hashtag Awareness video series and he brings over a decade of experience developing world-class awareness programs for companies including The Walt Disney Company, Activision Blizzard, and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Currently the President of Habitu8.

‘We live in the age of ‘Peak TV’ — people expect and demand high quality, binge-worthy content. If your training can grab their attention in the first 10 seconds and keep them engaged, that’s your chance to influence them and make them actually want to learn.’ - Jason Hoenich.

JOIN JASON HOENICH AND BRUCE HALLAS AS THEY DISCUSS:

What challenges does one come across when applying security awareness across a behemoth such as Disney?
The importance of flexibility when addressing different types of professionals coming from different mind sets.
- Left brain versus right brain professionals need different methods of communication.
- How flexibility enabled a safe space to explore new ideas and growth within user engagement.
The challenges of influencing behaviour within specific environments.
- Looking for friction within different departments and accepting the reality that one cap does not fit all.
- Understanding each department within an environment personally by spending time to observe the way they prefer communications to be presented.
The issue of time when taking a more nuanced approach to security across departments:
- Dealing with company preconceptions about how security and behaviour awareness looks.
- There is a need to market security correctly to get people to change their behaviour. Making decisions easy for user engagement.
- Setting expectations that are realistic is vital to the success of the mission to update security protocols across a company.
Identifying stake holders and how it aids success:
- The foundational action is to engage key stake holders early on for optimum results.
- Corporate communications need to be brought into alignment quickly and painlessly.
- Selling the broader strategy and strengthening the internal ambassador network.
The importance of change and how to tackle bias.
- Looking for ways to make communications more engaging.
- Crafting media to suit the audience and appeal to their attention span.
- How does staying fresh and relevant effect engagement?
The famous ‘jam experiment’ and what can be gleaned from it.
- Choice architecture and applying it to security and human behaviour.
- A small amount of high quality choice equals a greater reaction.
- Understanding whether or not the process makes sense to the users to remove any friction.
Role of regulators -
- Just because the law says it must be done, does this mean it gets done?
- Are regulations aiding the job of security awareness and education managers and is there any room for creativity?
- We cannot treat humans the same way we treat computers and the digital realm. Human behaviour needs to be accounted for.
- Reducing the risk of noncompliance via applied understanding of human behaviour.

RESOURCES AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

MORE ABOUT JASON HOENICH

Please subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, and if you enjoyed this interview, please share with your friends and colleagues and leave a 5 star rating and review.

Thanks for listening and sharing.

Bruce & The Re-thinking the Human Factor Podcast Team

Next Episode

Applying Marginal Gains One Small Step At A Time, with Chris Fleming

Applying Marginal Gains One Small Step At A Time, with Chris Fleming.

Chris Fleming steps in to join us for Series 3, Episode 3 of the Re-Thinking the Human Factor Podcast.

If you have been with us here for sometime you will know we strive to bring you the highest caliber guests for your listening delight. After hearing Chris do an incredible presentation at the SANS conference on marginal gains (you all know how much we here at the podcast love those marginal gains) we knew he would be the perfect guest to bring on the show.

Chris studied accounting and finance, but made a career change and is currently acting as Senior Manager of Global Security Culture & Awareness at an international insurance company. His approach to internal security is firmly rooted in understanding human behaviour to bolster security from within with both compassion and empathy. To put it in Chris’s own words he is: ‘responsible for strengthening the human firewall...one nudge at a time.’

“Big gains can become apparent when small, incremental improvements are made across the board.

In today’s interview we’ll be discussing how the various parts of the whole can be upgraded one small step at a time.”

JOIN CHRIS FLEMING AND BRUCE HALLAS AS THEY DISCUSS:

Factoring human behaviour in to security procedure can allow a more empathetic reaction to security issues.
Malicious insider risk, the human angle. Is a thief always just a bad egg?
- Human behaviour can be affected by changes in external influences. Understanding these can create a better security culture.
- Creating a stronger network within internal security via education and the building of awareness, can open up the possibility of preventing internal risk.
- Internal support systems can be set up to help employees deal with difficulties. Small changes in the way issues are dealt with can have a huge impact.
The importance of being well read to expand your knowledge.
How the aggregation of marginal gains can help you achieve your larger goal -
- When the British Cycling Team hired Dave Brailsford as its new performance director he changed tiny details within the teams cycling regime to change performance.
- Marginal gains is the concept of breaking down every single part of a whole to work on improving them individually, by as little as 1%.
- How simply changing a pillow had a knock on affect.
The main hurdles we face when trying to apply change across a large company -
- When you as a team are tasked to change the security culture across an organisation it is a huge job and usually comes with little budget.
- A lack of manpower can be overcome by using the concept of aggregated marginal gains.
- Takeru Kobayashi, a professional speed eater, made incremental changes to improve his performance, breaking world records against all odds.
Finding opportunities to apply material gains within security and awareness.
- Communications need little manpower or budget to be tackled. Simply changing the way an email is sent can reap measurable gains.
- Choosing your words wisely, language impacts response.
- Randomised controlled trials, otherwise known as AB testing, and how these help you fine tune your process.
- Low risk and low investment — maximum rewards. A great compliment to larger initiatives.

RESOURCES AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

MORE ABOUT CHRIS FLEMING:

Chris Fleming

Please subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, and if you enjoyed this interview, please share with your friends and colleagues and leave a 5 star rating and review.

Thanks for listening and sharing.

Bruce & The Re-thinking the Human Factor Podcast Team