Evan Day Breaks Down the Neuroscience Behind Fear-Based Marketing

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olensky. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest this week is Evan Day. Evan is the VP of digital marketing at Bright Capital Financial, where he's been mastering the art of science and making complex things simple for over 15 years.

0:38He's worked with giants like Comcast and global heavyweights like Publisus, bringing data-driven strategy to the forefront at every stop. But that's not all. Evan's also pursuing a PhD in psychology with a focus on neuroscience because apparently, Evan, a master's in data science wasn't enough. Overachiever. He's diving deep into the fascinating intersection of brain science and marketing, I love, figuring out what really makes people tick. And when he's not being a marketing wizard, Evan's a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu brown belt and a former college soccer player who I think sometimes forgets that his knees have aged a bit faster than his ambition.

1:18Evan, welcome to the show. Yeah, that's exactly right. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here, especially with a fellow Philadelphia guy. Absolutely. Yeah, for those who don't, Evan's a fellow Philly guy, and we promise not to talk Philly sports, maybe an Eagles, you know, I forget who won the Super Bowl. Never mind. Go birds. Exactly. Okay. So we got connected at the time of this recording, not that long ago. And you reached out and I'm so glad you did because you had just, or I don't know if you just completed, but you were working on some research around something that's really fascinating to me.

1:53And I think it's going to be really interesting to my listeners. And that's about fear and marketing. Now, specifically, it's about B2B marketing, but I'm going to make the leap that a lot of what we're going to talk about is applicable to B2B and B2C. That's exactly correct. And I think it's even more powerful if you think about B2C or going direct to consumer because, yeah, I mean, we'll get into it, but B2B is more rational. Yeah, and before we do the deep dive on our research, though, I know from us talking offline, you had some strong opinions around the traditional marketing research as a whole.

2:27Like, talk to me about that and my listeners. What are your thoughts on, as you phrase it, traditional marketing research. Yeah. So let me start by saying I am not against traditional market research. Okay. I realize it's a booming industry. It's been a booming industry since well before I was born, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do and the right way to go about it. People get stuck in their ways, you know, smoking cigarettes is still around in a booming industry. No effect to any smokers. It's not good for you. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, right? There's just, there's so many biases within self-reported data.

3:01People are mad at saying how they feel and explaining how they, you know, what they want, what they like. For one, they can't even tell you what they want because that happens below the level of consciousness. We don't know what we want. We just act on it, like impulses and urges. So if you ask somebody what they want, they don't know. There's research out there that shows people can't really describe how they feel in less than three words, which suggests that it's complicated. And it's more than, you know, if you think of a scale of zero to five, you know, how do you feel? You can't answer that, right?

3:36That's not going to give you accurate information. If you think about social desirability bias, that's probably the biggest thing. And for those of you who don't know, that's essentially you just trying to fit in, right? How does the person asking me the questions want me to answer? What are they going to think of me if I say I don't like this? What is the person who's coming in the room after me? How are they going to answer? What about the person before me? What they say? You know, what am I supposed to say here rather than how do I actually feel? So if you're asking somebody, how does this ad make you feel?

4:05You're thinking, well, how should I answer this? Not how does this ad make you feel? There's a bit of, I'm going to butcher this research because it was a while ago when I read it at a very high level. I think this proves my point perfectly. We got a room of people. It was about 10 or 12 people. All of them, except for one, were paid actors. And they asked them a simple math question. Now, again, I don't remember the exact question it was, but let's say it was, what is 5 plus 5? Everyone in the room, all the paid actors said it was 12 or 15, just gave a wrong answer. The only person who was not a paid actor, more often than not, would agree with the group.

4:42Even though it's very simple, you know 5 plus 5 is 10, they still said it was 12 or 15. So to me, I think that right there just kind of explains my beef, I guess you could say, I have with self-reported data. Again, it's good to have, but you need to use it in conjunction with more neuroscientific tools like eye tracking or EEGs or measuring pupil dilation and things like that. I realized that a lot of those tools until recently have been out of reach. Myself, I only started using them about two years ago. But with AI, AI is making everything much more accessible. You can do online tracking studies.

5:17You can measure people. You can measure attention spans just through the webcam. So really now there's no excuse to not be doing some type of neuroscientific research in conjunction with your self-reported data. I think you were spot on that the proliferation of AI obviously has affected the entire world. But when it comes to research, I get the impression that, you know, when I talk to CMOs and marketers all the time, and they want and they acknowledge they don't know how to start. Where do I do other than go into chat, CBT and say, right, 10 survey questions, right? So I think for those listening, if you want to learn more, and I'll plug this right now, get ahold of me and I'll connect you with Evan, right?

5:58Or Evan will put you in touch with the right... Because I think the bottom line, Evan, is what you're saying is there's a lot of meat left on the bone kind of thing when it comes to research and then acting on those results. Is that fair? Yeah. I mean, AI is just amplifying it. It's making it much more accessible. And yeah, I mean, I'm happy to... I love talking about this stuff. I'm in AI every single day. I'm not actually kind of lean off of it because I'm becoming too dependent on it now. But you got to either get with it or get left behind. I cannot agree more. All right. So I want to get into now the research.

6:33And I want to start with... You wrote an article. I don't think it's been published yet, but I want to share the title because I love it. And the title is How to Use Fear Responsibly to Capture Attention and Drive Action in B2B Marketing. Again, B2B, but it's going to be, I think, agnostic. but to me the most operative word in that title is responsibly and we're going to get into the topic of fear eventually but i want to just set that set this whole entire thing up is i love the fact that you use the word responsibly because then i just had this discussion not long ago with another guest about the responsibility that brands and marketers have in general but especially when they when they wield or hold that power if you will and fear is a very very powerful emotion.

7:18So I wanted to just couch this as we get into this with that. And we'll get into fear in a little while, but I want to start right off with attention, right? And I know studies confirm and I confirm this confirm that fear increases attention, memory recall and visual engagement, right? And I know you wanted to start when we're talking offline. I want to start with attention, Steve, and get into why attention and the role of fear. Yeah, yeah, I think attention is the perfect place to start because if you're trying to persuade anybody, no matter who you are, I mean, I always try to make everything applicable to marketing because that's the world I'm in.

7:54But if you're marketing, you're in sales, you're a CEO presenting to a board, if you're interviewing for an entry-level job, you're hosting or participating on a podcast, you need to know how attention functions so you can capture the attention and give your message the best chance to persuade the person. So attention is broken down into two different sections. They call it top-down and bottom-down. Top-down attention is a conscious process. We're aware of what's going on. And this is very key, the word conscious process, because this is going to keep coming up throughout the rest of the conversation.

8:30I'm actively focusing on this podcast right now. All my attention is here. That is a top-down attention. Conversely, you have bottom-down attention, which is, I hear my daughter drop a toy, I'm going to look up because there's going to be a big bang. If the light flickers, I'm going to look directly to where that light flickered. If there's a siren, I'm going to look to the noise of that siren. So that is bottom-down attention. And that is the key to persuasion, is bottom-down attention. How do you hijack? Maybe hijack is the wrong word because we're being ethical and everything. But how do we grab attention of the consumer or whoever we're trying to persuade?

9:11Because we get about, I think it's something somewhere around 11, 10 to 11 million bits of sensory input per second. Wow. And we can only process a fraction of that. So how does your email compete with 11 million other sensory inputs or stimuli? How does your subject line, how does your ad, how does what you're saying, how does that compete? How do you get to the top of the queue? You get that through activating bottom-down attention. And how do you do that? The best way to do that is through emotion. So that's, okay, good segue into emotion. And the best way to capture attention, I know you believe, are emotions.

9:48But we also know there's, you know, how many different emotions in the world? Yeah. So emotion is a super, super debated topic. When I was doing this research, which, by the way, I'm going to pat myself on the back here. I got news last night that it was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Research. Massive congratulations. This is breaking news, folks. So you're getting it. Breaking news. That's right. And if anyone wants to sponsor me to go to Croatia, let me know so I can present. James plug. I love it. I'm just joking. No, no, no. Yeah. So anyway, emotions are super, super debated.

10:24You know, there's hundreds, maybe even thousands of different emotions that people feel when we talk about love, we talk about anger, joy. But it's kind of agreed upon that there's five basic emotions with the understanding that there's so much complexity that these that joy can roll into all these other different emotions. But there's essentially five different emotions, which is happy, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. Sorry, there's six basic emotions. And all these emotions can be measured through facial decoding, which is the really cool thing about it. And it's agnostic to race or culture.

11:05All these measurements are accurate, which is kind of why they settled on the five basic emotions. and if you take a step back i want to just define the difference between emotions and feelings because this is something that is really really it confuses a lot of people if they're not the same thing emotions and feelings are different and it's similar to top down and bottom down attention so emotions happen below the level of consciousness they happen within the limbic system which is often referred to as the primal brain yeah so we have no control like i said earlier with no control over emotions.

11:41It just happens. You think about fight or flight, emotions are such a large part of why we're here today. If I get scared, I run away from the lion or I've run away from the dinosaur that's chasing me. Emotions are very key. Feelings are the conscious processing of those emotions. You're actively thinking, okay, I'm angry. Why am I angry? What made me angry? So Thomas Ranzo, who's a leader in the world of neuromarketing, I read one of his books. He describes it perfectly. It's a great analogy. If you think about a thermometer, emotions are at the bottom. And your marketing or your persuasive message, your sales pitch, whatever it is, needs to raise that thermometer until it eventually turns those emotions into a feeling.

12:29So then they can consciously focus on what you're saying. So through emotion, you're making them pay attention to your message before they're even aware of it. Then once you get enough emotional input or a high level of emotional valiance, then that emotion turns into feeling. And now the person can consciously focus on what you're saying. So we're going from bottom attention, unconscious awareness through emotion, to top-down attention to now I'm focused on you have my attention. I'm focused on what you're saying. Yeah. That's why emotion is critical to any type of, any type of messaging. I mean, decisions are made emotionally, whether we like it or not.

13:11Yep. We just justify them later. I think, you know, I spent some time at a research company called System One Group. Yep. And the founder was on my show recently. His name is Sean Kieran. And one of the things, one of his tenants in life and the companies is as people, we think a lot less than we think we think. Yep. And I love that. Yep. And I think it dovetails perfectly to what you just said. Yeah. I mean, emotions, especially me, my wife and probably my friends will tell you I'm the most emotionless person. But even I admit decisions, I make decisions emotionally. Like we all do. It just is what it is.

13:47Of course, people, there's different levels. People are more emotional, make more emotional decisions than others. But it just is what it is. You tap into emotions. I mean, think about the word. You can't spell emotions without motion. Emotions make people move and act. And it's just the science. I like that. I may steal that. I like that. Go ahead. I stole it from a professor. So yeah, what goes around? I'll give you credit. That's okay. So brands, as you know, one of the things they look at when it comes to their marketing and advertising is not only demographics, but culture, right? And I'm curious to hear what you think or how do you...

14:24How do cultural and demographic factors can influence emotional and the effectiveness? Yeah. So that's, as I mentioned earlier, there's these basic tenets of emotion, right? Happy, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and sadness. These are agnostic to culture. There's research out there that proves everybody, no matter where you're from, if you're from North Dakota or North Africa, everyone experiences happiness. Everyone is surprised. Everyone can be fearful. They can experience anger, disgust and sadness. Not only that, but you can measure that there's facial decoding that can measure, you know, based on the reactions of the nose or the eye or the mouth, this person is feeling some level of happiness or some level of fear.

15:11So I think that's why it's important that people focus on these core emotions because they're agnostic to culture. Yeah. So, okay, let's segue now into the big topic, which is fear. and the power of fear in marketing. And that's really the operative word. And power with great power comes great responsibility. You know, the whole lot. And we'll get into the ethics and morals of the responsibility side of fear in a second. But I read something, and I'm just going to read it verbatim. And it was about the amygdala, and which is the part of the brain that's responsible for rapid emotional responses, activates within 30 to 50 milliseconds when it confronted with fear.

15:49It's exactly right. It bypasses the logical brain and then in turn ensures immediate focus. That's heavy. Exactly. That's the whole theory. That's the whole thesis. Fear is rooted in survival. The brain is wired to detect threats first. Again, I go back to the lion example. If I see a lion, maybe my wife would go up and try to pet it because she's a little crazy with pets. But you should run away, right? And if we didn't, if we didn't have fear, we probably wouldn't be here. It'd be lions or whoever, whatever else ruling the world. And the amygdala is at the root. It controls almost all the emotion, but it's the headquarters for fear.

16:32And a study that I included in the research that I thought was so powerful was exactly what you just said, that when these participants were presented a fearful ad. So again, I realize this and I'm aware of this when I read these types of studies. What is a fearful ad? What's fearful to me may not be fearful to the next person. So we can get past that. It's some type, some level of fear was displayed in this ad. The amygdala responded within 30 milliseconds, which is well before we're consciously aware of it. That proves that we're thinking before we even know what's going on, before we can process it consciously.

17:11There was another study that compared joy, so joyful ads to fearful ads. Again, what is a joyful ad that may be different to the next person? But they compared these two ads against each other. And not only did the amygdala react faster, but there was stronger, it was lighting up more. There was stronger engagement in the amygdala than the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for joy. So the prefrontal cortex is the more rational brain, which is we operate consciously, right? So it makes perfect sense that fear happens subconsciously before we're aware of it. Joy happens consciously when we are aware of it.

17:53Of course, the fearful ad is going to make us react faster, get our attention, and it's going to be well more engaged because fear is rooted in survival. So it's quite fascinating to me, quite incredible. Not only is it faster, but it's more engaged and grabbing more attention. So it's totally powerful. Without question. Before we go on, tell us about the research itself. Who was involved over what timeframe? Those kinds of things. Yeah, yeah. This research. So I took an advanced neuromarketing class with Dr. Christoph Morin. Hopefully, if you listen to this, hi, you have changed my life. I think, Steve, I mentioned this to you before when we first talked.

18:35I've been in marketing for close to 15 years now. And I think until three or four years ago, I've been doing marketing completely wrong. I was looking at self-reported data. I was doing A-B tests on digital ads that were just completely... The variance was so high. It was completely by chance the winner that I was taking. Dr. Moore completely opened up my eyes to this world of neural marketing. He's got a great book, The Persuasion Code, which is rooted in tapping into the primal brain and using fear to tap in, using that stimuli to get people to pay attention to your messaging. So my research was a final paper that I worked on throughout four or five months for his class, Advanced Neuromarketing.

19:16It's more of a literature review than a traditional research. I didn't run any experiments. That's going to be the next step. So for my dissertation, for my PhD, I'm going to expand on this topic. And I want to do, I'm going to do, obviously I'm going to do some eye tracking because that's very accessible, but I'm trying to track down an EEG so I can actually measure how intense the fear is. Because we didn't get to this yet, but the level of fear matters tremendously. Yeah. So you can't, we're not just trying to scare the crap out of people, right? If you do that, you get the avoidance behavior.

19:52Yep. fight or flight, they run away. Which is why all these ads about drinking and driving or smoking cigarettes, they don't work because there are these disgusting lungs or these horrific car crashes. And they just make people run away. It's fight or flight. They just avoid your message. They don't care. They don't consume it. So fortunately, people are still smoking cigarettes. People are still drinking and driving. The message just isn't hitting home because the level of fear is too high. So you need to have the level of fear that encourages people to approach. So one of the studies that I read, which I included in my paper, they categorized three different levels of fear.

20:30So slight fear, moderate fear, high fear. Again, what is slight fear, moderate? It's going to be different for everybody. But they bin these levels of fear and they found that the moderate fear had the best attention, the best memory recall, and the fastest engagement as well. So in all three categories, it skyrocketed and results boosted when they positioned a solution to the fear. I was just going to say that I think I either read it in your article or somewhere else about when you use fear, okay, and you got to, there's rights and wrongs, of course, but then at the end, almost in the CTA, provide a solution.

21:10That's exactly right. And that's not just fear. I think it's more prevalent in fear, but any emotion. So if you go back to emotions, like our brains are wired for homeostasis, keeping things level, keeping things, you know, staying steady, keeping a nice ebb and flow. Emotions throw that off. If you're sad, if you're angry, if you're fearful, throws off that homeostasis. So our brain is automatically thinking, how do I get back to my baseline? What do I do? And when you think about fear, our brain is thinking, how do I eliminate the threat? Do I run away? That's the avoidance behavior that we don't want.

21:43Yep. Or did the persuader strategically place a solution to eliminate the fear within that message? So at the top, the fear surfaced, the pain point surfaced. I'm feeling this uncomfort. My homeostasis is off. I'm thinking, how do I eliminate this fear? And then boom, I see our product, so-and-so, you know, will eliminate your fear. What are some examples? I know one of the ones we talked about was email subject lines, right? Where people can, marketers can use fear. Elaborate on that and any other examples you want to share about how marketers use fear. Yeah. I mean, you can use fear in literally anything.

22:17Subject lines, digital ads, email copy. It could be, again, not just marketing, but it could be in decks. I put it into decks and presenting to your board of directors. I need you to invest$50 ,000 or we're all going to lose our money, right? Right. That's going to invoke fear. But to give you some more practical examples, Apple, they had a tagline, if it's not an iPhone, it's not private. That is so simplistic. Yep. And it evokes that fear. And their solution is a clear product, right? I get Apple. I'm not going to get hacked. I have secure. I feel a sense of security. They're surfacing that fear.

22:54They're eliminating that fear. And the simplicity is especially important because you don't want to have cognitive overload. That could be like a whole other conversation. Yes. But if you have too much going on, again, going back to what I said about the 10 to 11 million bits of sensory inputs, you can't overload your message. If something is so simple, if it's not an iPhone, it's not private, that's all you need. Yeah. Call the action button, go buy. The sensory overload is they're going to check out. Exactly. No matter what your intentions are, they're going to check out. Yep. So give us, for CMOs, marketers, and advertisers, brands, I'm going to put you in front of a room with these folks.

23:33Give me three to five tips, ideas, how, hey, I'm listening to this. And I think fear mark, a fear base could work for me and my brand. Give me some advice. Yeah, I need you to strategize. So I really, really liked the research that I read where they bend the groups of fear. So we have a light fear, moderate fear, heavy fear. See what works for your audience. And this is with anything that you do. What I do isn't going to work for you do. And what you do isn't going to work for the next person. you need to figure out what works with your audience. So figure out what level of fear feels right. There's tools that you could use.

24:10There's eye tracking tools at$99 a month. It's called Fengui. It gives you eye tracking, predictive eye tracking, predicting attention spans. So I would implement some type of ABC testing on your fear. Two, I would invest in In neuromarketing research, it's a heavy investment. But with AI, AI is eliminating that. And I just feel like every day, things are getting more accessible. So this time, by the time you figure out what you want to do and how you're going to tackle it, that tool is going to be so much more accessible. And three is just gather as much data as possible and really look at the data.

24:48Of course, I have a data science background, so I want all types of data. But don't just rely on self-reported data. You cannot just rely on self-reported data. Yes, get it. Do not simply rely on self-reported data. That's the biggest mistake. I mean, I was looking this morning, Publicis spends$100 billion in ads a year, $100 billion out of a single company. Of course, they have multiple brands under Publicis. They spend$100 billion in ads a year. Think of that, how much they're wasting by not knowing what level of fear their ads are invoking or if they're even using fear at all. Are they positioning pure joyful ads?