1548 – Why Science is Important for Consumer Behavior and Branding Applied Brand Science’s Ethan Decker

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0:58with us right now it's Ethan Decker Ethan you are a brand strategist marketing scientist and consultant you are found on the web at appliedbrandscience.com Ethan thank you so much for joining us it is a pleasure to be here Josh I'm sure there were many other things I could throw into in terms of your accolades, you know, speaking, et cetera, you know, to our friend, again, is listening to our conversation. You can follow along. You just go to appliedbrandscience.com and you can see all about the great work that Ethan, that you have done over the years. But I'll have you kind of share the work that you do today.

1:38Sure. I am a marketer by trade, but I'm actually a scientist by training. I grew up in the labs of New Mexico. I'm just kidding. But I did you with that gamma radiation created. Yes, yes. Bruce Banner is my other cousin. I did a PhD in ecology and I studied complex systems. And if you remember Jeff Goldblum and the chaos theory and the butterfly wings, I actually studied that kind of stuff when it came to ecosystems, but fell backwards into marketing after that. And I've spent 20 years in the creative industry, the creative side of marketing, doing brand strategy and advertising. And since then, I've launched my own thing called, as you said, Applied Brand Science, where I help companies understand the science that actually exists behind how shoppers shop, how advertising works, and how brands grow.

2:37Wow. Okay.

2:41I'm all time where I'd say, Ethan, let's just buckle up and give us your little mini TED talk here on kind of why science is important to understanding consumer behavior and the intersection with branding? Well, what's really interesting these days, Josh, is that lately we hear so much about data-driven marketing. And of course, we're a little past the time of big data, but there is still this sense of I want data-driven marketing. What's the data say? Data is going to be the future. And there is a difference though, between data and science. For instance, you can go out and do all kinds of studies on why people like chocolate, but it's not going to give you lots of insight.

3:25And it's not going to change the fact that we kind of know why people like chocolate because it tastes delicious. Similarly, if you look at physics, physicists don't have to retest for gravity all the time. But it's like marketers are constantly retesting for the fundamentals because they don't believe them, don't know them, don't trust them. So there actually is a science in the same way that there's the laws of physics for how planes fly for brands. But a lot of people don't even know it because it's kind of buried in academia. And how often do you hear, but Ethan, we're different. All the time.

4:02I like to say COVID changed everything. It changed all the laws of physics. COVID changed all the ways that our biology works and the way our brains work after hundreds of thousands of years. COVID has changed it all, obviously. And yes, your brand is different. Your brand is unlike any other brand that's ever existed in the history of brands. Well, what are the fundamentals in how consumers' brains work today and how maybe the advice that was given five to eight. While the principles are the same, maybe execution looks a little bit differently. Sure. Yes. Consumers' brains are surprisingly similar to the way they were a hundred years ago, if not a thousand years ago.

4:44And that is we don't spend a lot of time thinking about things that are unimportant. And the term for that is we are cognitive misers. So Josh, your brain, I hate to say, is only about 3 % of your body mass. Fortunately, that's pretty normal. so don't worry but it consumes 30 of your body's energy it actually consumes 30 of the calories and the energy that your body takes in and that's because the brain is the most significant and important part of the body for adaptation and for survival and and fitness so we do everything we can to not use our brains and the example i love to give is toilet paper math i'm sure you've stood at the grocery aisle and tried to figure out how many jumbo rolls are in a mega roll, how many plies are in a square meter, and whether that's 12 cents per count or 12 cents per ply.

5:40And nobody's got time for that. Nobody wants to do the toilet paper math. And so we do a shorthand. We say, well, what does my mom buy? Or what does my spouse get? Or what's the one that's on special or on sale? which one seems like a good deal or which one seems like it's eco-friendly. And so we replace hard questions like what is the best value in toilet paper with easy questions like what's the one my mom likes, even if those questions are bad. And we think we only do it for simple purchases like toilet paper. We do it when we buy our cars. We do it when we pick an airline to trust our life in and fly across the country.

6:22We do it when our kids pick high schools and colleges. There are 4 ,000 colleges in the United States, colleges and universities. And how thoroughly do we really assess those? We don't because it's really hard. It's really hard to know whether St. John's is different than Johns Hopkins and which one's better. So for millions of years, we've replaced hard questions like which college is the best one with easy questions like which one is familiar or which one do I know the coach at? And that's not changed. How that's changed, though, in the common in the current marketplace is that we have to filter even faster because there are 10 times more brands and more decisions to make every single day.

7:08And so we filter even more and our shortlist for which brands we buy gets filtered even faster and subconsciously because no one has time to do the toilet paper math consciously. i do sometimes you know there's my previous persona i i would have right uh you know but again the square is not a square you know some squares like oh come on that's that's hardly a square one square of charman is not the same one square of walmart store brand toilet paper you're gonna have to triple up on that one to match the same so it's right it's well and i think, you know, when we think about different examples, like, you know, I remember listening to, you know, how mattress sales are done and how intentionally confusing marketers make it for consumers.

8:03So they kind of suffer this fatigue, I guess. You know, so I'm kind of thinking about that. But let me ask you about that, too, you know, you know, about, you know, kind of like, What is a consumer to do today? How can we be better consumers? Are there kind of fundamental questions we can ask ourselves? Some things don't matter as much, obviously, but then there are larger purchases that we make. And I know sometimes a lot of those decisions are irrational, what we factor into it. And marketers probably know about consumers' irrationality. To some extent. You'd be amazed, though, how many people I talk to that believe that the job of advertising is to persuade a buyer that your product is superior in some functional way.

8:57Like they think it's a job of rational, logical persuasion. And this goes back decades, if not centuries, of one model of advertising, which is that it's sales on paper. It's selling on paper, and your job is to persuade. So I'm in lots of big meetings with lots of large Fortune 100 companies who say we need to educate the consumer and we need to persuade them to buy us and demonstrate our superiority in some way. Well, one classic counterexample is the kind of creator of McDonald's, Ray Kroc, said people don't want the best burger. They want the burger that tastes just like the one they had last time.

9:39And it's true. McDonald's is not the best burger per se, but it's an exceedingly consistent experience. And it's exceedingly easy to find and buy and recognize. And you know that when you go into a small town somewhere in America that you've never been, do you go to Josie's White Picket Fence and get the burger there? And you don't know if it's going to be crap or delicious or if they've passed the health regulation test. or you're going to go to McDonald's and you know what you're going to get there. And it's not the best, but you know it's consistent. So a lot of marketers do think that the job is to persuade.

10:18You're right, though. There are other marketers who do realize a lot of the way we buy is subconscious or it's irrational or it's really social instead of functional. So for instance, one of my favorite new examples is that car companies, most of them know that you don't check the shocks and the struts and the electrical system when you buy a car. And if you do test drive, because not everybody does anymore, you sit in the car and you listen to how the door sounds when it closes. You know, you've done it. Is there that satisfying or does it sound tink, you know, chintzy? And the sound the door makes when it closes has a huge impact on whether you think the car is high quality or not.

11:06Oh, yeah. It took a hard question like the shocks and struts and electrical system, and you replaced it with an easy question, even if it's a bad question. And savvy marketers know that. And so they key in on the things that impact you irrationally. And BMW, among others, has a sound designer, not just to design the sound that the blinker makes when you use your turn signal, but the sound the door makes when it closes. the sound the engine makes when it idles right the sound that the the chair makes when you move it electrically forward and backward that has to sound right whatever the hell right means so there is this this mix of understanding that sometimes we try to be rational we try and actually do the toilet paper math as you do but a lot of the times we don't and so we just go with what feels right.

11:57And some marketers know that. Yeah. To our friends that are service-based in their offerings. So let's talk about maybe coaches, consultants, agencies that are providing services. How can we make our doors sound better when they shut? Yes, there are the same principles that apply to services. So if you're going to, if you're going to sign up for an email program, question is, have you even heard of any? And maybe you've heard of one or two because you listen to podcasts and one of them is MailChimp and one of them is Hootsuite, or maybe it's HubSpot, or maybe it's HubSuite. I don't know. It's an H.

12:42And so we start there and then we go to the next level is do we know anything about these at all and mailchimp actually um i think it's ben chestnut who founded mailchimp he has a great uh interview where he talks about how they came up with a name and it was because every time the team would put a chimpanzee or a monkey on any of their marketing it would work well it would slay and they didn't know why and it was cheesy but it stuck and they're like why don't we just call it mailchimp and so it's a little cute It's a little friendly. Curious George was a chimpanzee, I think. I think he was a chimpanzee.

13:20And so we go with those easy to remember things that feel right, even in services, even in SaaS, which is why one of the great case studies of savvy brand building in B2B is actually Salesforce, who has a whole menagerie of mascots built around Astro, which is their key mascot. And you'd think, you know, B2B SaaS companies have no business doing mascots. You know, that's for Kellogg's cereal. But actually, it works, and the numbers don't lie. And there is science. Again, there are principles behind this about how the human brain works and how memories get stored and retrieved that would lead you to realize, oh yeah, we need an easy device.

14:07We need a fluent device like a mascot to help people remember us, much less tell us apart from the other six brands that offer email services. Yeah. Ethan, I would recommend like anyone who's listening to our conversation, follow you on LinkedIn. You also share some really good stuff on Twitter. You just share a lot of cool charts and graphs and I love it. You know, for - My sweet spot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for, you know, if you're if you're truly like, you know, if you want to evoke your inner marketing nerd, follow Ethan. I do. I do my best to make those charts and graphs easy. Oh, no, they're fun.

14:49Yeah, they're good stuff. Yeah. And how do you work with clients today or audiences or how do you engage? The number one thing I do is work with CMOs of midsize companies, sometimes pretty large companies, actually, and sometimes startups. But I work with CMOs or the heads of marketing to understand the laws and principles of brand science and then get their teams all rowing in the same direction as far as how buyers buy, how brands grow, and how advertising works. And if you can agree on the scientific evidence-based principles of how those things happen, then first of all, you're all rowing in the same direction.

15:36And second of all, you're not rowing upstream. You're not trying to push water uphill. You're rowing with the current. And suddenly marketing and advertising become easier because you understand the scientific principles behind it. And again, these are principles that are based on science. and some of them are completely invariant to what brand you are, what category you're in, whether you're B2B, B2C, whether you're luxury or discount, whether you're a retailer or a product. And that's what makes them a universal law in the same way that gravity. Yes, the level of gravity is different here than it is on the moon.

16:17But the law of gravity is the same. So you make some adjustments based on what planet you're on, or you make some adjustments based on whether there's air resistance and wind resistance when it comes to gravity. But you need to know the laws of gravity. Similarly, I work with CMOs and their marketing teams so that they understand those principles. And then when it comes to building the brand and doing the advertising, things become a lot clearer and make a lot more sense because they're principle-based, they're evidence-based, and they're timeless. and then if people want me to stick around and actually work on their brand i've done a whole lot of that so i help build the brand tweak the brand fix the brand grow the brand i can do that too yeah is there a way you just spoke at south by southwest uh and the laws and levers of brand science is there a way to watch this right now we are editing the video so that will be up soon If you want to get a sneak peek, you can just listen to the audio.

17:20South by Southwest, I believe, has posted audio for almost every single session out of all 659 sessions or something like that they had. So you can listen to it now if you go to the South by Southwest website and search for the laws and levers of brand science. You can find it there. And then in a week or so, I should have the video up so you can watch the presentation as well. Yeah. So good news for a friend that's listening to this, because we recorded this episode probably a few weeks ago. So it should be in the show notes. So you just kind of click around in your app, you'll find it. And we've got a direct link so you can watch that.

17:56But Ethan, at your website, appliedbrandscience.com, what else, aside from watching your South by Southwest presentation, if someone's like, I need more Ethan in my life, what would you recommend they do now? Sure. I like to say that I offer things in four sizes, extra small, small, medium, and large. And the extra small is you can sign up for a newsletter. It's a very irregular newsletter, irregular in when it comes out and also in what's in it. Maybe a couple times a month, I'll hit you with my latest post about the new or old science of marketing and science of brand growth. That's the extra small free version.

18:41The small one is you can bring me in for a talk or presentation. I get people excited about the notion of evidence-based marketing and give them a taste of what it's like to kind of see the light of brand science and how that clarifies things. The medium size is I can come in for trainings and train your team on the brand science and how to do evidence-based brand building. And then the large size is I can stay on and actually work on your brand with you and help you understand your buyer, help you understand how your brand should be structured. And when I say brand, I don't just mean your logo, of course.

19:19I mean, basically your entire promise, the four P's, which are timeless, despite what a lot of people on Twitter say, product, price, place, promotion. They're still the fundamentals of marketing. But I can stick around and help you fix or grow or adjust your brand if you want. So those are kind of the four sizes. Kellogg's, Gillette, Fruit of the Loom, Hotels.com, Domino's, Quicksilver, Intel, Discovery Channel, Duracell, Hershey. These are all brands that you've worked with. And again, to our friend that's listening to us, go to AppliedBrandScience.com. And that is the next step. Your blog is pretty good.

19:59You've got some great, I like the headlines. For example, does 80 % of your revenue really come from 20 % of your customers? You'll find that out in the blog. Ethan Decker, this has been a great conversation. Again, brand strategist, marketing scientist, consultant, trainer, speaker. Your website, one more time, is appliedbrandscience.com. Ethan, it's been a joy. Thank you so much for joining us. Josh, my pleasure. Have a great day.

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