Ten: The Design of Persuasive Systems
In order to follow a system, communication must be systematic - which is to say, each communication cannot be handled as a thing unto itself, but all communications must be managed to ensure that they agree with one another.
Specifically, there are many touch points in which a consumer encounters a brand - some are initiated and scripted by the brand (advertising), others are initiated by the customer (a call to customer support), and still others are entirely accidental for both (a person sees someone else consuming your product).
It is not possible for a firm to have absolute control over every touch point at which the customer encounters their brand, but it is advisable to consider as many as possible and manage, insofar as possible, they should be orchestrated rather than random.
Push versus Pull
The authors use the supply-chain notion of push/pull to classify communications as well - in which "push" identifies communications the firm wishes to inflict on an audience and "pull" represents at attempt by consumers to get information from a company about their brand.
Brands regularly bungle push communications because they fail to consider the needs and interests of the audience - pushing a message they assume will be relevant and well received, but not really knowing until afterward.
They are no better, and a great deal worse, at pull communications because the firm is unprepared when a customer calls to provide the information they might need, even when they are interested in providing service.
The decision of whether push or pull approaches are more productive generally depends on the level of demand for the product. When a brand is familiar, customers will seek it out, and pull information from it. When it is unfamiliar, the brand must go out and let people know it exists.
The System Challenge
The author dwells a bit on the negative implications of system - a set of procedures written by someone who doesn't understand a task to prevent those who do understanding it from applying their own judgment and common sense. Granted, this often occurs, but "good" systems are based on practice rather than theory and provide flexibility to handle contingencies that may arise.
Human behavior creates a system informally, even in the absence of documented procedure: people who do the same task repeatedly tend to fall into patterns that are based on the most efficient and effective way to accomplish a goal. That is, each iteration, they try to do what worked well and avoid what did not.
In this sense, salespeople who adopt a behavioral approach often fall into a few different patterns of behavior that seem to work with most customers - they are not as flexible or dynamic as they claim to be, but go through the same sequences. To the degree that they are able to follow the right steps with a given customer, they will succeed in selling; to the degree they don't, they will fail and the customer will tune them out. In that sense to proceed "without a system" is to proceed with an undocumented and poorly understood system.
However, marketers are even further from the action: because they are preparing messages for the masses, they do not receive immediate feedback and cannot customize their pitch in the same way that a salesman can read the posture and expression of a customer to sense he's not getting through and try a different approach. As such, it's more difficult to tune their communication systems.