How Friction Is Killing Your Marketing Success [Podcast]
Friction costs businesses trillions of dollars in e-commerce each year. It erodes healthy company culture, it drives potential customers away from your website and toward your competitor, and it’s all because of your site’s failure to deliver a smooth and intuitive customer experience.
No one understands the danger of friction better than Roger Dooley, who has spent years studying the intersection of behavioral science and marketing, and has just completed work on his latest book, FRICTION. His research has led to shocking discoveries about just how costly and pervasive this problem can be for all kinds of businesses—and how strangely reluctant businesses are to address it.
This week on the Conex Show, Roger Dooley joins us to discuss how friction is the enemy of any healthy and successful business.
In This Episode:
Why Friction Is the Enemy of Business Success
Dooley starts off by explaining how friction is your enemy. Friction is really any unnecessary effort that will reduce the number of people who do what you want them to do.
“If you look at why people abandon shopping carts, most of the top reasons are frictional in nature.” – @rogerdooley
The Surprising Reasons Why Businesses Sometimes Fight Change and Refuse to Innovate
Using the examples of Uber and Napster, Dooley explains how companies are more likely to want to fight and try to get rid of industry-disruptive businesses rather than try to improve themselves.
“Businesses confronted with an obviously better user experience generally don’t say, ‘Wow, we can do that and maybe even do better?’ Instead, they fight it.” – @rogerdooley
Tips for Calling out Organizational Friction on the Job
Friction in the organizational sense refers to things like procedures that end up wasting time, meetings that have too many people, and pointless email chains. Dooley shares the example of a woman he worked with in a past job who was in meetings 32 hours a week. Many of those meetings could be seen as friction because they were getting in the way of her doing her actual job.
“Once people start seeing friction, they cannot unsee it. They get really motivated to get rid of it, which is a good thing.”