The Brain Science Behind Successful Marketing

Consumer Behavior Lab (00:00.365)

perfect.

John Jantsch (00:02.467)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Michael Aaron Flicker. He’s the founder and CEO of ZenoSci Ventures and co-founder of the Consumer Behavior Lab alongside renowned behavioral scientist Richard Schotton. The CBL’s mission is to explore how behavioral science can be applied to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of media and marketing. Michael Aaron and Richard’s book.

is what we’re going to talk about today, hacking the human mind, the behavioral science secrets behind 17 of the world’s best brands. So I go welcome the show.

Consumer Behavior Lab (00:42.191)

Thanks so much for having me, John. Excited to be here with you.

John Jantsch (00:44.909)

So let’s start, a lot of times I have to start with the title of a book. So what does it really mean to hack the human mind in the context of marketing and branding?

Consumer Behavior Lab (00:55.723)

So, so many books about behavioral science, about the academics of marketing start with the studies or start with the, with esoteric research. And we said, what if we turned it around? And what if we said some of the best brands in the world have insights into human psychology that they’re taking advantage of whether they know it or not. So let’s take those examples.

break them down, understand what they’re doing, and then explain some of the science behind it so that you can have confidence using it in your own business for your own brand. So we wanted to start with the brands rather than with the academic studies and make sure that we always ended it with, what? So what do I do with this knowledge so that I can apply it to the brands or the businesses that you’re running?

John Jantsch (01:48.579)

So you mentioned something I was curious about. said whether they know it or not. I mean, how often did you find that brands were like, what are you talking about? I mean, we just, it’s like, that’s why my mom said you should treat people. Is that not good?

Consumer Behavior Lab (02:00.014)

I think what we find is that great marketing strategists, great marketing creatives have an insight into human psychology in a way that many of us do not have. But we also found folks that are selling hot dogs on the street, those that are running florist shops on the corner market have those same insights because they’re this close to the consumer.

They’re next to the consumer, they’re selling every day. And so at both extremes in the vaulted agencies and brands of the world, and at the ground level, when you’re actually selling to people every day, you learn things about human psychology that get put into practice. so it was, so our, our, our belief is that most of the campaigns, most of the brands we looked at, they understood that they had access to something special.

We don’t think they knew many of the academic studies behind it that proved why it was likely to work.

John Jantsch (03:01.687)

Yeah. So in some ways you were validating something they had already discovered, but didn’t realize it was a secret. So were there any myths or best practices in quotes that you found that you could challenge head on or that you were even trying to challenge head on?

Consumer Behavior Lab (03:05.902)

It’s a nice way to say it.

Consumer Behavior Lab (03:20.375)

I don’t think we sought, we set out to challenge this, but one of the most common things we see marketers do is they have something they want to sell and then they start stacking the RTBs, the reasons to believe this thing goes faster and is quieter and by the way, it’ll clean your teeth while you do all those other things. And you know, we did not set out to debunk that, but we opened the book with a story about five guys.

which is, if you’re an American listener, one of America’s fastest growing, better burger chains. And that founder, Jerry Morrell, started with an insight that he was just walking along a Maryland boardwalk where he sees one company stall with a massive line when everybody else’s stalls were empty. And Thrasher’s fries on the Maryland boardwalk

John Jantsch (03:48.697)

Mm-hmm.

Consumer Behavior Lab (04:16.63)

had this massive line. And he got to thinking, is this stall that only sells one thing fries, doing something better than everybody else that sold burgers and milkshakes and sodas? And so anyway, that’s one of the founding beliefs of Five Guys. And even to today, $1.6 billion franchise, they don’t sell chicken, they don’t sell salads, they don’t sell ice cream, they only sell burgers and fries. And there’s some interesting academic

studies that back that up.

John Jantsch (04:47.213)

Yeah, yeah.

I can think just in my own experience of some kind of local places that only do like fried chicken or something. And they’re just, they’re kind of legendary because they, I think there’s something about the experience of that too. It’s like, we know why we’re going there. So let’s get into the lab work. mean, you, you and Richard are both, I mean, you have consumer behavior labs. So there is a little bit of laboratory work involved in that, right. In the research. How do you take insights?

Consumer Behavior Lab (05:15.55)

That’s right.

John Jantsch (05:19.006)

I don’t know, academic behavioral science and turn them into like real campaigns or product design.

Consumer Behavior Lab (05:26.528)

I think what we’re always looking for is that there’s an incredible wealth of knowledge happening in the universities that stops short of, so what do we do about it? And so it’s this goldmine of insights and goldmine of observations that gets validated. But then the question is, so what do you do? And so what we’ve been looking for is saying, well, we have high performing campaigns in the UK. They have something called.

John Jantsch (05:38.497)

Yeah, yeah.

Consumer Behavior Lab (05:55.786)

the IPA effectiveness database, is campaigns that are proven to drive sales. And there’s a lot of data supporting that. So you look at famously effective campaigns, and then you look at, what’s the academics that could help understand that. And there’s not always a match, but when you can find a match, you can mine the academics and you can match it to the effective work. Now we have a starting spot.

But if that match is just kind of a fun uncover, we don’t think that matters. Then we have to make sure you can apply it to a business or a brand that you might be working on. And then we feel we have some material that’s worthy of conversation.

John Jantsch (06:39.641)

Do you want to give me a couple of concrete, specific, detailed examples about, I don’t mean a whole campaign necessarily, but here’s one human behavior that we discovered you could impact this by doing it. Give us an example.

Consumer Behavior Lab (06:53.515)

So often as marketers, we get this idea that we can just paint in the picture of the mind of somebody, how amazing our brand or our product is, that they’re just going to buy it. And what the data tells us is that may be true, but how you paint it really matters. And a brand that we dissected in the book was Apple, but not all of Apple, specifically when Steve Jobs

reveals the iPod and he stands up in stage and he holds the iPod up and what he says is it’ll be a thousand songs in your pocket. And up until that point, everybody else was saying five gigabytes of storage, 128 kilobytes of this. And so what we got thinking was, well, what’s the science behind why a thousand songs in your pocket really connects with people?

And the study that we went to was in 1972, Ian Begg, Western Ontario University, recruits 25 students and he reads them 22 word phrases. Some phrases are impossible amount, rusty engine, flaming forest, and others are apparent fact, common fate. And when he asked the group to remember as many terms as they could, they can recall

just about 23%, just about one out of five. But here’s the observation that matters. They can only remember 9 % of the abstract words, like impossible amount, but 36 % of the concrete terms, like white horse. That’s a four-fold increase if they can picture it in their minds. And so what it teaches us is that great taglines, great phrases,

Conjure an image in your mind red bull. It gives you wings Eminem it melts in your mouth Not in your hand skittles taste the rainbow Maxwell’s house good to the last drop you can picture what I’m saying as you say it and that really can make the same idea much more sticky and much more concrete in the mind of the buyer

John Jantsch (09:09.594)

Great example. I was curious when I read the subtitle, did you choose 17 different, was there some sort of like psychological trick being played or hack being played by the number 17?

Consumer Behavior Lab (09:21.606)

the answer is yes. The answer is yes. And, you know, there’s, there’s a few things at play here, but the illusion of effort is something that Richard and I are really, are really interested in. And the basic psychological principle here is that by getting to a very specific number, it shows a lot more intentionality and a lot more purpose. We think if we had said 20 of the world’s best brands, know, we just roll right over it.

There’s some interesting science behind it, but that’s why. Yes, we’re trying to show specificity. We’re trying to show the effort that went into that. And we know that that has caught more people’s attention because of it.

John Jantsch (10:03.354)

Yeah, 3000 % increase as opposed to 3217. Way more believable, right?

Consumer Behavior Lab (10:09.916)

In our book, we dissect a brand Dyson. And I don’t know if everybody knows this is a famous vacuum cleaner. James Dyson is the inventor. And when he invents it, his first ad that he puts into the market was 5,127 prototypes to get to the world’s first bagless vacuum. He loves it so much in his autobiography. It’s the first line of his autobiography. Look at the effort to get that bagless vacuum. It’s just more believable.

John Jantsch (10:35.508)

the

Consumer Behavior Lab (10:39.721)

than if he had said 5200 prototypes.

John Jantsch (10:44.056)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. you, since you did profile and you, actually chose 17 brands, were there any like that really surprised you? mean, somebody doing something behaviorally significant or savvy that, that you didn’t expect.

Consumer Behavior Lab (11:00.714)

You know, I think there was one that had a big impact that I wouldn’t have originally thought. And it’s this concept that comes from Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner economics. 1993 Kahneman and his colleague, Donald Radelmeier come up with a study on colonoscopy patients. And here’s how the study goes. The colonoscopy patients are going through an actual procedure and every 60 seconds,

they register their pain level. At the end of the experience, they get two chances to give a retrospective rating. One right after the experience is over, and then another one a month later. And what you find is that those retrospective ratings do not correspond with the total pain level at all. In fact, the retrospective ratings, whether it was the hour after or a month later, coincide with two

critical moments, the peak intensity that happened during the experience and the final moment of the procedure. so Kahneman calls this the peak and rule. So that’s kind of interesting. Like this is where academic stops. But what does that mean for brands and marketers? There’s a LA hotel called the Magic Castle Hotel. It was featured in Chip and Dan Heath’s book, The Power of Moments. And the Magic Castle Hotel

has top 5 % of all TripAdvisor hotels in LA. 94 % of their reviews are very good or excellent, better than the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. But what’s surprising about this hotel is it’s a 1950s motel. Gated decor, mediocre rooms, small swimming pool in the courtyard. But what have they done so well? And what does almost every review talk about? They have a popsicle hotline in the pool. And you pick up the phone.

John Jantsch (12:44.74)

Mm.

Consumer Behavior Lab (12:59.165)

day or night, and they will bring out on a silver platter as many popsicles as you’d like to eat. It’s a peak moment in a average hotel, and that makes everybody love going there, and everybody loves to dial the phone. So thinking about how you can use what would otherwise be a very hard to advertise LA motel and make it into an all-star in the city, you don’t have to redo everything.

John Jantsch (13:05.242)

Yeah,

Consumer Behavior Lab (13:26.736)

In fact, if you could just come up something that everybody loves, a lot more people will be endeared to you.

John Jantsch (13:32.858)

Well, and I suspect also one of the key ingredients is it’s kind of unexpected. Like, who does that? Right.

Consumer Behavior Lab (13:37.98)

I think you’re right. Yeah, I mean, I think that the point of the peak is that it stands apart from everything else. If they had just the softest pillows, somehow you think it might not make as much of a difference, but something fun and social in a courtyard surrounded by all these relatively uninspired rooms, it stands out.

John Jantsch (14:02.298)

Yeah. And I think the beauty of that message, I mean, obviously it’s a hotel, they’ve got a different application, but almost any business could do something like that, couldn’t they? mean, something that just really has somebody go, you got to see what these guys did.

Consumer Behavior Lab (14:16.416)

I think it can be a customer experience like that. It could also be, we had a guest on our podcast a few weeks ago and they were talking about, go every month they go to this shore town and when they get there, they always go to their favorite restaurant. And the favorite restaurant has flowers on some of the tables.

But whenever they come in, he brings over the flowers and places it on the table they sat at. And they say, now the table’s ready for you. It’s a small act. It’s intentional. He’s just using this little vase with three flowers sticking out of it. But it makes the person feel special. That’s a peak moment that requires no extra money, requires no grand strategy, but it does require intentionality and consistency. And that’s another example of how anybody can use it.

John Jantsch (14:50.68)

Yes.

John Jantsch (15:10.522)

All right, let’s go to the dark side, shall we? Understanding these things, what risk do we run in exploiting, manipulating, using them to not necessarily do what’s in the best interest perhaps of the customer?

Consumer Behavior Lab (15:13.286)

Yes.

Consumer Behavior Lab (15:30.951)

So we would say, first of all, that these insights into human behavior and human psychology are facts. And understanding them is first about understanding why we are naturally prone. We have a quote from Kahneman in the beginning of the book, thinking is to humans like swimming is to cats. They can do it, they just prefer not to.

Humans naturally want shortcuts. naturally want to think as little as possible to get to the decisions we need. first, understanding these is about understanding humanity and human psychology. Second, we write books for everybody to read so everybody can be aware of them. So we’re educating marketers about how they can use them for positive ends. And we want consumers to understand that these are

our natural leanings and inclinations that we got to be aware of. But yeah, for sure there’s ethics in behavioral science, like there’s ethics in marketing, like there’s ethics in AI. And we have to be aware that we’ve got to use these for ethical and moral purposes.

John Jantsch (16:43.07)

Years ago, had Dr. Childani on the show wrote influence, know, probably the earliest. Yeah, yeah. And, and he told me during that interview that he actually wrote the book, so people wouldn’t be exploited. And of course, you know, then, unfortunately, you know, people turned around and used a lot of what was in it, you know, in a way that wasn’t intended necessarily. So if a marketer is listening to this, and they want to hack their own campaign,

Consumer Behavior Lab (16:47.59)

a seminal book in our field. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:12.154)

or customer journeys or whatever it is they’re working on. Are there certain habits or mindsets that they’re going to need to adopt? mean, where do they start?

Consumer Behavior Lab (17:20.678)

Yeah. So we would say that this is a field, behavioral science is a field that’s really blown out in Europe and in the United Kingdom. Here in America, it’s a much more nascent budding place. So if you’re interested in the approach of behavioral science and how it could prove marketing, lots of material online, lots available, of course, including our book.

But in order to get started, think you have to have an interest in the academics and the science that powers why we do what we do. If you’re a marketer that believes everything’s done on hunches or on gut instinct, it’s going to be hard to embrace this type of marketing because this is based on a belief that you can decode human behavior through science and through observation.

It’s not that you can guarantee what’s going to happen, but you can make your campaigns more likely to be successful if you use this science-backed thinking. So we’re increasing the probability that you’re going to have good outcomes in your marketing.

John Jantsch (18:33.754)

The flip side of that mindset though is measurement, mean, understanding, okay, this is our hunch, if this is our hypothesis based on research, how do we prove that we were right? And is that become a stumbling block for a lot of folks?

Consumer Behavior Lab (18:38.757)

you

Consumer Behavior Lab (18:52.269)

We would say that there’s a massive industry around consumer insights that has its place for some marketers, but for every marketer doing tests and seeing the outcomes, everybody can do. So if you are an e-commerce based or a web based, A-B tests are very easy to do. If you’re not, we would advocate for observational research.

John Jantsch (18:59.876)

Mm-hmm.

Consumer Behavior Lab (19:19.043)

do something and see what happens. And you could do that on a small scale and you can watch the outcomes and then you can continue to innovate or go down this path. So what we would say is, if you’re a small business owner, if you’re a solopreneur, use these tactics and then find ways to test them small and learn from those tests.

John Jantsch (19:42.01)

Mike Irwin, I appreciate you stopping by to talk about Hacking the Human Mind. Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you?

Consumer Behavior Lab (19:48.866)

We have our website, the consumerbehaviorlab.com, where you can learn about the book, about the masterclass. And then we also have a podcast that’s been much shorter than John’s called Behavioral Science for Brands that we invite everybody to take a listen to.

John Jantsch (20:06.383)

Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Consumer Behavior Lab (20:11.791)

Thank you, John.

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