The Brain Science Behind Successful Marketing

0:00I was like, this, I found it. I found that this is what I've been looking for. I can honestly say has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It's changed the results that I'm seeing. It's changed my engagement with clients. It's changed my engagement with the team. I couldn't be happier. Honestly, it's the best investment I ever made. What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the duct tape marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs, marketing agencies, and consultants. Just like them, you could use our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue.

0:38Visit dtm.world.scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It's time to transform your approach. Book your call today. dtm.world.scale

1:03Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is Michael Aaron Flicker. He's the founder and CEO of Xenosci Ventures and co-founder of the Consumer Behavior Lab, alongside renowned behavioral scientist Richard Schott. CBL's mission is to explore how behavioral science can be applied to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of media and marketing. So 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 Michael, welcome to the show.

1:43Thanks so much for having me, John. Excited to be here with you. 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? So many books about behavioral science, about the academics of marketing start with the studies or start with the 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.

2:32So we wanted to start with the brands rather than with the academic studies and make sure that we always ended it with, so what? So what do I do with this knowledge so that I can apply it to the brands and the businesses that you're running? So you mentioned something I was curious about. You 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? 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.

3:15But 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. And so our belief is that most of the campaigns, most of the brands we looked at, they understood that they had access to something special.

3:52We don't think they knew many of the academic studies behind it that proved why it was likely to work. Yeah. So in some ways you were validating something they'd already discovered, but didn't realize it was a secret. Yeah. 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? I don't think 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.

4:32And oh, 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 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?

5:23And 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. 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 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. I mean, you and Richard are both, I mean, you have consumer behavior labs.

6:02So there is a little bit of laboratory work involved in that, right? In the research. That's right. How do you take insights from, I don't know, academic behavioral science and turn them into like, real campaigns or product design? 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.

6:44In the UK, they have something called the IPA effectiveness database, which 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, well, what's the academics that can 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.

7:25And then we feel we have some material that's worthy of conversation. Do you want to give me a couple of concrete, sort of specific detailed examples about, I don't mean a whole campaign necessarily, but like, here's one human behavior that we discovered you could impact this by doing it. Give us an example. 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, and 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.

8:17And 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%.

9:08It's 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 fourfold 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.

9:57You know, over the years, you've heard me talk a lot about marketing systems. Today, I get to share something really special. My daughter, Sarah Nay, who also happens to be the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, just released her first book. It's called Unchained, breaking free from broken marketing models and how small business can finally take control of their marketing, lead with strategy, and scale with AI. I know, a mouthful, right? But it's everything we've learned taken to the next level. In fact, we're even calling it Duct Tape Marketing 3.0. As a dad, I couldn't be prouder. But I want you to check it out at dtm.world slash unchained and get ready to take your strategy to a whole new level.

10:40Great example. So 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? The answer is yes. The answer is yes. And there's a few things at play here, but the illusion of effort is something that Richard and I 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, we'd just roll right over it. There's some interesting science behind it, But that's why, yes, we're trying to show specificity.

11:23We're trying to show the effort that went into that. And we know that has caught more people's attention because of it. Yeah, 3 ,000 % increase as opposed to 3 ,217. Way more believable, right? 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 than if he had said 5 ,200 prototypes.

12:08Yeah, yeah, yeah. So since you did profile and you actually chose 17 brands, were there any that really surprised you? I mean, somebody doing something behaviorally significant or savvy that you didn't expect? 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. So the colonoscopy patients are going through an actual procedure and every 60 seconds, they register their pain level.

12:53At 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. And so Kahneman calls this the peak end rule. So that's kind of interesting. Like this is where academics stops. Right. But what does that mean for brands and marketers?

13:38there'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 five percent of all trip advisor 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 a 1950s motel dated 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 day or night and they will bring out on a silver platter as many popsicles as you'd like to eat.

14:26It'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 a all-star in the city, you don't have to redo everything. In fact, if you could just come up with something that everybody loves, a lot more people will be endeared to you. Well, and I suspect also one of the key ingredients is it's kind of unexpected. Like who does that? I think you're right. right yeah i mean i think 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 kind of it stands out 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?

15:29I mean, something that just really has somebody go, you got to see what these guys did. 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 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 these 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 a another example of how anybody all right let's go to the dark side shall we yes 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?

16:40So 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. You know, we have a quote from Kahneman in the beginning of the book, humans, thinking is to humans like swimming is to cats. They can do it. They just prefer not to. Humans naturally want shortcuts. We naturally want to make, we want to think as little as possible to get to the decisions we need. So first, understanding these is about understanding human humanity and human psychology. Second, we write books for everybody to read so everybody can be aware of them.

17:27So 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. this. Yeah. Years ago, I had Dr. Childani on the show. I wrote Influence. A seminal book in our field. Yeah. Yeah. And he told me during that interview that he actually wrote the book so people wouldn't be exploited.

18:03And of course, then unfortunately, people turned around and used a lot of what was in it in a way that wasn't intended necessarily. So if a marketer is listening to this and they want to hack their own campaigns 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 i mean where do they start 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 these in the in in the approach of behavioral science and how it could improve marketing.

18:47Lots of material online, lots available, of course, including our book. But in order to get started, I 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 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.

19:30So we're increasing the probability that you're going to have good outcomes in your marketing. The flip side of that mindset, though, is measurement, right? I mean, understanding, okay, if this is our hunch, if this is our hypothesis based on research, how do we prove that we were right? And has that become a stumbling block for a lot of folks? 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.

20:15If you're not, we would advocate for observational research. Do something and see what happens. And you can 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. Mike Iron, I appreciate you stopping by to talk about hacking the human mind. Is there someplace you'd invite people to connect with you? We have our website, the consumerbehaviorlab.com, where you can learn about the book, about the masterclass.

20:56And 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. Awesome. 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. Thank you, John.

21:22Hey, small business owners. Let me ask you a quick question. Is your marketing actually working for you or just working you over? If you're tired of chasing random tactics and want real clarity, it's time for a strategy-first approach. At Ductate Marketing, we help you build a marketing system you own, one that fits your business and finally puts you in control. No more chaos. No more guesswork. Just a roadmap you trust, powered by smart strategy and, let's face it, a little help from AI today. You ready to shift from overwhelm to confidence? head on over to dtm.world slash ownit. dtm.world slash ownit.