Six people, two teams, a basketball being passed around, and a question on screen: how many passes did the players in white make? Somewhere in the middle of it a person in a gorilla suit walks straight through the group, and most viewers never see it. In this episode Alex Curtis and Stephanie watch the famous focussed attention experiment and use it to answer two objections advisers raise about their own websites.

Stephanie counted 14 of the 15 passes, clocked the gorilla for a split second and assumed it was meant to be there. Watch it back knowing what's coming and it's impossible to miss. That gap is the whole point: when someone has a task, everything irrelevant to that task disappears.

What we cover:

• The experiment itself, and why the gorilla is obvious on the second viewing and invisible on the first
• Objection one: "the enquiry form at the top of every page is too pushy, it's like proposing before a first date". It's a logical argument, and logic is not what drives behaviour. Someone reading for information simply scrolls past it, no offence taken. Someone who came to make contact finds it instantly
• Why the homepage is not a shop window: plenty of people arriving there are on their second visit and are ready to get in touch
• Objection two: "if I build niche pages I'll look like a one-trick pony, or like I'm not an expert". Someone searching for a specific scenario lands on that page, not the homepage, and never sees your other services. They are gorillas to that visitor
• The second page people actually do look at, and it isn't your other product pages, it's About Us and the team
• Why advisers overanalyse what else should be on a page. Real visitors don't audit your whole website, only compliance does
• Serve the thing the visitor came for, make it easy to find, and everything else is noise

If you want more enquiries from your website, stop optimising for the objection nobody raises and start making the one thing each visitor came for impossible to miss.

Brought to you by the team at The Lead Engine who specialise in generating mortgage leads.

The fastest way to ruin a good idea is to ask people what they think of it. In this episode Alex Curtis and Stephanie go through the businesses that would never have existed if they had listened to their own market research, and what that means for the way advisers test their marketing.

Red Bull: a smaller can, more expensive than Coke, and it tastes worse. No survey would ever have approved it, and it built a business that owns Formula One and football teams off one product.

Domino's: customers said the crust tasted like cardboard, so the answer should have been the recipe. The biggest sales jump came from the 30 minute guarantee and the pizza tracker, because the real blocker was not knowing when the food would arrive. Same reason Uber worked, you can see the car coming.

Apple, Dyson and Porsche get the same treatment: business people wanted a physical keyboard, nobody said they wanted to see their own dirt, and Porsche were told an SUV would ruin their heritage. The Cayenne became their best selling car.

What we cover:

• Why asking for an opinion pushes people into slow, analytical thinking, when almost every real buying decision is instinct
• The mental pairings that drive those instant decisions: if other people use it, it's safe; if it's expensive, it must be good
• The air fryer example, and why the cheapest option does not win
• Why you should never ask friends or family whether they like your social post, website, logo or email signature. If they say yes it probably won't work, and if they say it's a bit weird you probably won't post it
• From coupons to analytics: direct response marketing measured with mail order coupons, and how reach, watch time, on-page engagement and leads do the same job now with better data
• Why trial and error beats opinion, and why the most bonkers tests are often the ones that work

If you want to know whether an idea is any good, stop asking and start measuring.

Brought to you by the team at The Lead Engine who specialise in generating mortgage leads.

Why do people copy a room full of strangers doing something with no explanation at all?

In this episode Alex Curtis is joined by Stephanie to talk through a classic conformity experiment filmed in an opticians' waiting room. An unsuspecting visitor sits down with a group of actors. A beep sounds, everyone stands up and sits back down, nobody speaks. By the third beep she is standing up too, with no idea why. The actors leave, she keeps standing on her own, and every new person who walks in ends up doing the same.

From there we get into what this means for mortgage brokers, protection advisers and any financial services firm trying to turn website visitors into enquiries.

What we cover:

• The experiment, step by step, and the moment she stands up alone in an empty room
• Why the brain feels resistance to being the odd one out, and why going with the flow is easier than thinking it through
• Conformity vs social proof, and why social proof beats a logical argument almost every time
• The mistake to avoid: negative social proof. Don't highlight that most people skip protection, or that most people wait for rates to fall. You are showing the crowd doing the wrong thing and the crowd is what people follow
• Staying compliant while using it. Don't invent numbers or claims, use what is genuinely true
• Why Google reviews are the strongest, cleanest form of social proof, and why we show them three or four times on a single page
• Consistency beats volume: recent, steady reviews create a chain reaction, dribs and drabs don't
• You will never convert everyone. Use these principles and you convert more than average

If you want more leads from your website and your ads, this is the mindset shift: show people what the crowd is already doing, don't try to argue them into it.

Brought to you by the team at The Lead Engine who specialise in generating mortgage leads.