Anybody watching recent research will know that this article will come as no surprise.  Why?

Because we all buy like this.  We all go online and make decisions on the products, we buy based on the content we find.

The psychology of the way we buy has changed.  Whereas, we may have liked being sold to, now we hate it.  And talking to young people they hate it even more.  It is young people that hate advertising (they are biggest users of ad-blockers), they hate unsolicited emails and they hate cold calls.

We are far to busy in our lives to take all these interruptions from people, interruptions from adverts, interruptions on email and interruptions from cold calls.

I do a lot of interviews with students to ask me to help them with their dissertation and they complain that the University courses no longer reflect society.  The courses are all about paid media and society is all about social.  Things have changed, but do we older people (I'm nearly 54) know it?

What do I mean?

We use Slack internally and it's great because, you don't have to write and read long emails.  We (as a generation) have grown up with text messages and whatsapp.  At my previous company, we used social internally and gained 25% efficiency increases.  In a company of 100,000 that was 25,000 employees for free!  You may not like it, but it's an intrinsic part of  life and you cannot go backwards.  The genie is out of the bottle!  Looking at my email inbox I have 3 emails in there.  This isn't a boast, it's because people have migrated from email and legacy communication methods to social.

We don't like making calls as more as they take such a long time.  It's just easier to send text or reply to somebody on a Slack or whatsapp.  As I say above, you might not like this but, that's the way it is now, you will never go back to the way it was.

So you have two choices, embrace the changes and understand the buyer and use psychology to embrace those people, or stay the same and slowly become less and less relevant.  The choice is yours!