PPPPeering Inside Your Head (Four P's #187)
Inside the Brains of Marketers, Consumers, Kids, and The Opposition
I like challenging you to think beyond your assumptions.
I love messing with the status quo.
Isaac Newton said that the status quo is the most difficult force to overcome. It was his first law of motion. Yet for all his genius, Newton had no scientific knowledge of the human brain.
In our professional and personal lives, understanding how the brain works is important. If I want to convince my kids to listen to me, I need to understand what they want, and perhaps more importantly, what their friends tell them to want. If I want to convince marketers that "NFT 2.0" is the next generation of community-building and branded experiences, I need to know how they think. Similarly, I also need to understand how their consumers think. Time to take a trip to inner space...
Something Personal: Inside the Brain of A Marketer
Every so often, a piece of creative advertising beats the odds and finds its way into our brains whether we like it or not. Sometimes whether we even KNOW it or not.
Over the past few months, my daughter and I became increasingly enamored with a commercial jingle that permeated (infected?) our sub-conscience. We'd be sitting at the dinner table... or walking to the tennis courts... or riding bikes... then spontaneously bust out into song. But what was the ad? We didn't know. Neither of us remembered the specific ad, but we found ourselves singing the tune in pitch-perfect harmony with increasing vigor and dramatic effect.
What we DID know was that the jingle was performed with such emphatic, exaggerated vocals that Sydney and I would burst out laughing every time we would try to re-create it. But then weeks went by, and we couldn't remember why we found the ad so funny in the first place. Were the lyrics we were singing even right? And what was the product they were even pitching, anyway? Then it became an obsession. We would scan the radio stations for commercial breaks, switching away to another channel when the music would come back on. I spent months searching on YouTube and Google all without success.
Once I narrowed down the potential creator/originator brands from whom it made the most sense, I pinged them all on Twitter. All to no avail. Can you imagine how frustrating this is as a marketer to not be able to track this down?
And then it happened. And when we least expected it. Our seemingly interminable joke-turned-nightmare finally paid off when we heard the ad again months later while in the car. It WAS from Cascade, and even though I still cannot find a link to it anywhere online to share with you, you apparently should be "Saving Waaaaaaater (WATER!) with your dishwasher."
First-ballot radio jingle Hall-of-Fame, but terrible creative operational management.
Something Professional: Inside the Brain of A Consumer
Our months-long quest to find that radio spot shows why it’s so important to keep a balance between an ad’s emotional content and its branding message. Branding is about the brain. And while so much money goes into data and research, so few marketers understand what's going on inside their consumers’ brains?
It was great to be back at the Adweek CMO Summit in New York last week, connecting with so many leading marketers who were eager to share their strategies, challenges, opportunities, and perspectives. There were more than a few recurring themes, but one stood out: Branding is hard. In fact, after more than 20 years in the industry, I would say that branding is THE hardest thing to do well in all of marketing. It is part art, part science, part instinct, part luck. There was plenty of commiseration and empathy as they discussed how it has become increasingly rare for an advertisement or creative message to cut through the clutter and resonate with its intended audience (let alone the masses).
And herein lies the advertiser's conundrum. One of the first lessons that marketers learn is that people are more likely to remember something if it triggers their emotions. But emotions can also distract us. Sometimes the creativity is so so good that while people remember the ad, no one remembers the brand. When people have an emotionally charged experience, like watching or listening to a funny or sad commercial, they’re more likely to remember the central element of the experience. But they are also more likely to forget any peripheral information surrounding that experience.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman says that our brains use two distinct processes to make purchasing decisions. "System 1" thinking uses all of our past experiences, biases, and associations to reach quick decisions. It happens subconsciously, and in everyday life, with everything going on around us, we use this kind of thinking 90 percent of the time. So – as a marketer – it’d be in your best interests to ensure that your branding triggers a lot of subconscious positive associations. "System 2" thinking operates at a conscious level and involves logical reasoning to come to a decision. We use System 2 when we’re confronted with something that we perceive to be unconventional or risky, and what could be riskier than buying something we can’t afford.
Marketers need a mix of emotion, storytelling, empathy, and connection with their target audience. Yet many traditional advertisers still use outdated methods to promote their brands instead of applying data and scientific insights into how our brains respond to advertising. Take brand laddering, which starts with determining the rational benefits that consumers get from their product, then goes into how the product makes the consumer feel. Finally, they take these two different types of benefits – the rational and the emotional – and combine them to make snappy little taglines. ("Saaaaving water... WATER!")
What the brain is good at remembering though, are stories. Sometimes a brand doesn’t even need to tell consumers about its benefits. We’re better off weaving these benefits in and out of a compelling story. Sometimes it's just enough for a brand to show its consumers that it cares. And sometimes it's about catering to consumers’ unconscious preferences. Data shows that consumers like things that we perceive to be similar to us, so we’re more likely to choose a breed that has a hint of our physical characteristics. Research also shows that we hate losing so much that the pain of losing $100 is even more intense than the pleasure of gaining $100. When we perceive a brand as honest, we like it more and are more likely to buy it... but our brains also instinctively understand that it’s kind of hard to tell whether a product is “honest” or not.
Marketing and brand-building with tokens is still so new that most consumers have no previous experience with them. When a product or service triggers so few previous associations, you can’t count on System 1 thinking at all. At that point, people’s brains might go right to System 2, or logical reasoning. When this happens, the branding strategy has to point their thoughts in the right direction. What made NFTs so hot a year ago was that the speculative profiteering made it a no-brainer for some brands to test and learn with their consumers. As we move past "NFT 1.0," marketers have to define and create a value proposition so compelling that consumers easily understand the exchange and can calculate that it makes total sense. When marketing an unfamiliar, game-changing product, then try your best to make it a no-brainer for consumers.
Something Practical: Inside the Brain of a 5th-Grader
It has arrived. After eagerly awaiting this moment for months, our son's first iPhone arrived over the weekend. And as he opened the box for the first time, I couldn't help but wonder whether he was also opening Pandora's box (though one of his first downloads from the App Store was Spotify, not Pandora).
For graduating 5th-graders, the gift of a cell phone represents a symbolic, if not significant, moment in their lives. At least in our town. Independence, virtual and physical expansion. Freedom! Of course, this is a kid who had an iPad at age 3 and knows more about certain digital technologies than I do. These are kids who have year-long group text chats with their classmates... kids who have emphatically told me that they will not download Facebook, Snapchat, or TikTok because those are "apps for grandparents." Of course, even before giving it to him, I installed the Bark app on the device to put some degrees of security, safety, and parental protections in place. While their text messages are mostly harmless enough, the occasional alerts I've gotten via Bark reflect a surprising range of maturity and immaturity across the board with these kids that says more about their parents than it does them.
Parenting. Just when you think you have taken a few steps forward in parenting "wins," a new set of circumstances and scenarios arise. I've been vulnerable enough for years to admit that I struggle with anxiety, and parenting hasn't exactly helped. All parents feel profound fear at one point or another – fears about illnesses or accidents, or simply fears for the future. It’s a natural part of being a parent, we tell ourselves. But are these fears legitimate? And are they helping us protect our children, or are they hurting them?
A generational shift has led to modern parents’ constant preoccupation with fears and anxieties that our parents would have given less thought to. Parenting is now largely about choice, and stakes have become higher and more amplified. There is a special pressure to be a good parent, and that has translated into childhoods that are less free and more characterized by parental supervision and intervention. Parents in America spend more time with their children than ever before, even though more than ever are also working. We are more hands-on and more anxious about whether we are making the right parenting decisions based on desires rather than needs.
As he enters middle school, the common parental fears of bodily injury or kidnapping are being replaced by fear of bullying, peer pressure, academic stress, and overall mental health. Looking back on the first 11 years of my life as a parent, those early parental fears were clearly out of sync with rational appraisals of risk. According to the FBI, it would take around 750,000 years for a child left alone in a public space to be kidnapped by a stranger. Yet minimal threats like kidnapping are powerful in our imagination.
Availability heuristics are our irrational tendencies to judge the likelihood of something happening by how easy it is to recall an example of the same thing happening. In the age of mass media, it is less helpful. Meanwhile, 500 children are injured and three children die in a car accident per day, on average. But sure, let's put more cell phones out into the world... At the recent orientation for middle school parents, the principal was quick to point out the pros and cons of cell phones for incoming 6th-graders. In a town like mine, with a VERY wide income gap among families, disadvantaged families are more likely to be at risk of societal judgments about parenting decisions. I can only imagine how these gaps will perpetuate social stereotypes for these kids in middle school. The United States does not provide subsidized child care, mandatory parental leave, universal early years education, or parental rights for flexibility in the workplace. And yet it has made it a social crime for parents to NOT give their kids a cell phone on elementary school graduation day.
I do hope that the false confidence that parents will now have in giving their kids new phones will open up some degree of freedom that they need to have fun and learn how to be adults. If it’s a tough time to be a parent in America, it’s an even harder time to be a kid.
Something Political: Inside the Brain of The Opposition
While it would be quite powerful and valuable to get inside the brains of political opponents, this has become a place I am increasingly fearful to explore. It would be like sampling different poisons just to see which one tastes most like death. No thank you.
But a poisoned brain is exactly what has happened to a large percentage of the population. You can blame Trump, but the threat is bigger and more dangerous than one man. The Republican Party is about lies, promoting racial divides, making the press the enemy, using propaganda, and winning at all costs. Trumpism all but ended the split in the Republican Party of a decade ago, which was previously divided between more mainstream conservatives and the extremists. By turning the focus on science, on race, marginalization of the rights of immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and even women, the extremists won, and their hearts are now just as poisoned as their brains.
To understand today's Republican Party means understanding that their rules are just different. As are their objectives. For Democrats, political power is something to be used to make the country better. But for Republicans, the aim is power, itself. Help people despite political risks (see: ObamaCare) or win at all costs (see: Brett Kavanaugh). Democrats’ inclination to take the moral high road every time and prioritize principles gives unscrupulous Republicans like Mitch McConnell a huge advantage. In the grand scheme of future-looking history, McConnell may have done more to poison America than even Trump via the courts: creating a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and placing Federalist Society members to open federal bench seats.
While Democrats continue to focus on social justice and rights, local and state GOP leaders have obliterated election fairness and equality of access. Republicans are trying to suppress the vote everywhere. Democrats need to do the opposite – aggressively. Not just because unregistered voters are more likely to become Democrats – also because getting more people to vote is morally right and better for democracy. Democrats have been reluctant to push this issue, afraid to look too partisan. But we need to get that kind of thinking out of our brains.
Yet even with a Democrat in the White House and slim majorities in Congress, we're at a stalemate. The Senate is broken. The filibuster is wholly undemocratic, as is the two-senators-per-state system. More people are moving to big cities in blue states, yet election representation hasn't caught up. Now also seems like as good a time as any to scrap the electoral college, but that won't happen either. Democrats could add two more seats to the Supreme Court. It’s also worth considering limits on these justices’ terms. And yes, now is also the time for Democrats to also limit the power of the presidency: Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution needs to be repealed, as does the National Emergencies Act.
It’s great that Democrats are concerned with getting policy right and acting respectfully. But the recent actions of the Republican party – not just Trump, but McConnell, Desantis, Abbott, and the rest of the ROMCOMs (Racist, Oppressive, Mean, Conservative, Old Men)– make it clear that this is not the time to play it safe. The Republicans have used dirty tactics to delegitimize elections, the Senate, the courts, and so much else. They need to be stopped, and the system needs to change so they can never do this again. Now is not the time to play it safe.