It’s Time for a Marketing Revolution

Eye tracking studies are a powerful tool that show us what our users perceive, but this information is limited without a clear understanding of how they recall this information. To give a more three-dimensional perspective on how our users are processing information and storing it in their memory, we can look to experimentation, surveys, and user testing.

It’s helpful to set goals before we test, so we have a clear idea of what answers we’d like to hear from our users. For instance, if our users recognize an aspect of our product, but can’t retrieve the specific memory, then our marketing wasn’t fully effective.?

If they can recall specific product details (memory), then we know that we were able to reach out to them and help them understand and acquire that information quickly.

A suggestion to do this on our website or our product is to set goals before our test and ask post questions to follow up. There’s plenty of software and tools out there to help our performance.

(ex. sticky.ai, hotjar, usertesting, userzoom)

Mentioned Readings and Studies:

Adapted from the Encyclopedia of Psychology

https://www.apa.org/topics/learning/index.aspx

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When Gallup surveyed people and asked them what they thought of the honesty and ethics of different professions, nurses came out on top at 85% rated high or very high. Engineers, my chosen profession, did pretty well on 70%. Marketers, not so good at a mere 11%. And probably the only bright spot for marketers is that sales people did even worse. Now, when it came to trust, another survey asked people what professions they trusted. Doctors in that survey came out on top with 49%. Just about the same for firefighters. Marketers, once again, not very good, just 3% were trusted but as with the previous example, there was one bright spot.Politicians did even worse at 1%.

And, it's not just regular people who distrust marketers,when CEO's were asked about their C level executives and whether these executives were competent to do their job,90% had pretty much full faith in their chief financial officers, as far as their competence, their ability,and about the same number for their chief information officers, again 90%. But when it came to their chief marketing officers, in this particular survey, it was only 20%. That means that only 1 in 5 CEO's trusted their chief marketing person to be fully competent to do their job.That's a pretty scary statistic. Especially if our 1 of the 4 out of 5 that's kind of on the bubble.

So, we might ask why that is?And there're probably a lot of reasons but to us, the biggest one is that most marketing and sales money is wasted,and this isn't necessarily something that's being recognized only today. A hundred years ago, a department store owner named Wanamaker famously said,or is supposed to have said that half of his advertising was wasted, except he didn't know which half. And actually, that was a pretty optimistic estimate.These days, 95% of new products fail. 98% of direct mail gets no response. 98% of sales emails don't convert.Those are bad statistics but there's more. App revenue this year is predicted to be 269 billion dollars.Big, big market.But according to the Gartner Group, 99.99% of the consumer facing apps will not make any money.That's a pretty high lack of success. And e-commerce revenue last year clocked in at1.9 trillion dollars. Really big number, but relatively small compared to the 4.6 trillion dollars that was abandoned in e-commerce shopping carts.

Just think of all the money that went into driving that traffic,the pay per click ads, the SEO, the content marketing,the web design.Everything to get the customer right to the point of concluding the purchase but failing to close the deal.It's not really any wonder,that from CEO's to regular people,marketers are distrusted.And it's clear that what we really need is a revolution. And fortunately, we have one.

For millennia, people thought the earth was the center of the universe,and then ultimately,Galileo and Copernicus came along and showed that, in fact, the earth wasn't even the center o four own little solar system. Similarly, for thousands of years,people assumed that the conscious mind was the center of human behavior. And as John Bargh of Yale so eloquently puts it, that just as Galileo removed the earth from the center of the universe,now, today's scientific breakthroughs are removing the conscious mind from the center of human behavior.

So, you might ask, how much of our behavior is conscious verses non conscious?And there're all kinds of estimates for this.We like to use the one from Gerald Zultman of Harvard,who says that about 5% of our decision making processes are conscious and 95% are non-conscious.And so, as marketers,the real question we have to ask ourselves is ,how much of our customers brains are we marketing to?Are we marketing to that little 5%,or are we addressing the much bigger 95%??

So, you know, this concept of human behavior being driven by not altogether conscious reasons, is not necessarily new. Aristotle, a couple of thousand years ago, said that reason was only one of seven drivers of human behavior.

Walt Disney, away back in the 1940'screated a propaganda film called Reason and Emotion and it was meant to be a commentary on war and politics but I thought it was a fascinating example of how it affects our human behavior, and it shows this little accounting looking fellow, being Reason,who's driving the car, and then a caveman guy, who is Emotion, in the backseat,and we're not going to view the entire video here but what Disney, the point that Disney made with this was that emotion could pretty much hijack control of the car just as emotions and non-conscious factors hijack control of our brains.

Now, this is a theme that they've continued at Disney.Their most recent Pixar movie, Inside Out,was all about what was going on in this little girl's mind,and there were these five little characters who were always arguing and battling it out. Now, obviously, that's totally fictional but there was actually some pretty sound science behind it.

These five characters were based on the emotional groups identified by Paul Ekman,a famous scientist who, about 40 years ago,invented the science of facial coding.

And, they condensed his six emotions to five for dramatic reasons, but he consulted on this film. And, Several neuroscientists who have seen it who found it actually, not necessarily instructive but saw a lot of truth in these rather fanciful depictions of what was going on inside peoples brains. And one other Disney related note,for years in my home town of Austin, they operated a top secret neuroscience laboratory where they studied the effects of content in advertising on the brains of subjects.It's no longer top secret now,this firm is taking on other clients andI toured the site a couple of years ago,but I think that Disney, more than most companies,has exemplified an understanding that yes, people sometimes make rational decisionsbut there's a lot more involved.

Reason? ------ THINK

Emotion ------ FEEL

Fear + Empathy + Pride + Hate