#173 - Coen Olde Olthof, CEO of Alpha One - On using neuroscience to predict market response

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help creative people know upfront whether their Creative will work – and with that produce work that has an exponentially bigger impact. My guest is Coen Olde Olthof, CEO of Alpha.One

Coen started his career at KPMG in information risk management. He then moved to Getronics, where he became responsible for digital identify management and later on IT Services Sales. When Getronics got acquired by KPN, the largest Telco in the Netherlands, he was asked to lead the process to turn KPN into an online organization. Shortly after that, he added Marketing to his portfolio as well.

Today, he’s ranked as one of the top 10 Marketeers in the Netherlands and the CEO of Alpha.One. Alpha.One is a fast-growing consumer neuroscience company that’s on a mission to ‘Helping good companies make better decisions.’ Coen has a fascination for decision architecture. What drives people in their day-to-day choices? And how can we use neuroscience to decode this? Together with a team of scientists, he analyzes the brain’s reaction to content to predict market-level outcomes.

And that inspired me, and hence I invited Coen to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the creative media & marketing landscape. We discuss why the traditional approaches don’t work, and why it’s not technology but an open mindset that prevents the route to success. Coen shares fascinating wisdom about what drives the behavioral change that lead to adoption and more sales. He also explains how exponential thinking helped them create the remarkable solution they have today.

Here are some of his quotes:

“I was brought up with an understanding that if your NPS scores are higher, people are more likely to buy from you or more likely to stay. If you look at the research, that's not the case. People that give you high NPS still are not likely to buy more. The only thing that you can really measure from that measurement is that if you have a very low NPS, that's a solid basis for people going away.

Byron Sharp, an Australian Professor of Marketing, who looked at 10s and 10s of years of data, concluded that if you have a product that is physically available, and mentally available, you will do very well. Those are very data-driven, solid insights that most of the marketers should know, but not all of them do.”

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How driving momentum is highly dependent on your ability to hit the right nerve, i.e., creating positive tension and desire with the right people
2. Why making things memorable is essential to influence behavioral change
3. How exponential thinking puts you in the right mindset to create transformational change in a market.
4. That if your customer doesn’t say ‘Exactly’, you won’t have a deal. And that’s all about finding the unfair thing that hurts your customer most.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Coen Olde Olthof
• Company Website Alpha.One
• Platform website: Expoze.io
• Coen’s Ted Talk