Gen3 Marketing: Your Brain is Against You
Reading Time: 〜6 minutesWe evolved to avoid change as much as possible.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair wrote this in his 1935 book I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked. In it, he discusses how people ignore or deny truths when accepting them would threaten their status, status quo, livelihood, or worldview. People dislike change so much they are willing to believe anything to avoid it.
Aristarchus of Samos in Ancient Greece, proposed the heliocentric solar system sometime around 250 BCE. But that pesky Ptolemy came in silver-tongued with his geocentric model (“Earth is the center of the universe!”), which then endured for 1500 years.
Until Copernicus.
Let’s do a thought experiment. You are a mid-16th Century farmer, having a typical day in your field, when Nicolaus Copernicus walks up to you and exclaims that the sun is not, in fact, flying across the sky, we are on a big sphere orbiting the sun. This violates all that your sensory perception is telling you. Clearly, obviously, the sun flies across our sky, it is plain as…well, day.
Copernicus’s assertion thrusts you into an uncomfortable, uneducated, mid-16th Century choice: I can trust my own eyes, or I can stretch my imagination to believe this raving lunatic in the funny hat. We can all confidently scoff at the preposterousness of the question, given our knowledge that Galileo, Newton, and Kepler all later stood on the shoulders of Copernicus, giving us modern astrophysics.
“Utter bosh! Poppycock!”
Feels good, right?
Ignaz Semmelweis faced a similar problem. In 1847 Austria, he, a physician himself, discovered that doctors who wash their hands prior to delivering babies experienced a drastic reduction in infant and mother mortality: 18% down to 2%. Why was this? Well, there must be some wee beasties that migrated from cadavers onto doctors’ hands. The problem was, no one could see them. Incensed at Semmelweis’s ridiculous assertion, the medical community locked him up, and he died in his cell. Of sepsis.
Louis Pasteur later pioneered germ theory, which Joseph Lister (for whom Listerine was named) used as a foundation for antiseptic surgery and wound sterilization.
“Ha! Everyone knows that.”
Do we? Really?
OUR INNATE RESISTANCE TO NEW CONCEPTS
You’re a biased human. Sinclair’s quote is a window into these biases, ones that developed through our evolution to ensure our survival on this harsh, hostile, pathogen-filled rock that is flying around our star.
Here are the prime suspects:
1. Motivated Reasoning
People rationalize beliefs that align with their self-interest and reject information that threatens it.
Example: Digital marketers trumpeting targeting and analytics over the factual (and obvious) evidence that it is the creative message that contacts the brain and converts customers, because their jobs depend on it.
2. Status Quo Bias
People prefer things to stay the same and resist changes that might threaten their stability.
Example: Ad creatives insisting that their intuition-based ideas are what lead to sales-generating ads, rather than the factual evidence of cognitively resonant messaging triggering the brain state that leads to decision and action.
3. The Ostrich Effect
The tendency to ignore negative information because acknowledging it would cause stress or require action.
Example: Marketers commenting that AI will never replace people, despite the increasing trend of layoffs and consolidation.
HELIOCENTRISM, GERM THEORY, AND GEN3 MARKETING
The response I have received from a sub-set of marketers has been exactly like the above. Gen3 marketing (the actual neuroscience of what creates customers) has been called “psychobabble,” I have been called a “frustrated, angry megalomaniac.” And for what reason? I dug into the peer-reviewed, published science, conducted research of my own, partnered with some of the most elite minds in global science, all to solve an important problem: eradicate as much as possible the guesswork, bullshit, fraud, lies, and egregious lack of efficacy in the ad industry that has been a bottomless pit of waste for incalculable amounts of advertising spend over the last century.
This puts you once again at the crossroads, but this time it’s not a thought experiment, it’s real. If you’re content with your marketing job, two-martini lunches, and life in general, stop reading now. Really. Click out, because you will not be able to unsee what you are about to see. You have wee beasties all over your hands, and the sun is not flying across our sky…
You have been warned.
THE ONE BRAIN RESPONSE THAT HAS CREATED EVERY CUSTOMER, EVER
Dr. Paul Zak is a colleague, mentor, and friend. DARPA, the CIA, and sundry other organizations of that ilk paid his lab tidy sums of money to discover what happens in the brain when people take action. Presumably, these spooky groups thought a carrot might be more efficacious than a stick in their attempts to extract information, recruit assets, and order it shaken, not stirred.
After tens of thousands of blood draws, Dr. Zak’s lab discovered that two neurochemicals are released prior to action: dopamine and oxytocin. Let’s call this the resonance response (Paul calls it “Immersion”).
Action is purchase, likes, follows, subscribes, shares, NPS, and every other objective you can conjure. But most important, it’s purchase. Getting people to buy our stuff is the raison d’être of advertising. In the marketing equation, to the right of the equals sign is only revenue. Everything else is to the left: influencers, SEM, paid social, 360, creative, targeting algos, AI, branding, MMM, activation, and literally all else.
If you’re one of the marketers whose biases are firing five alarms right now, then you are automatically thinking: “That’s not true! It’s the brand! Long and short term effects! 60-40! The brand creates the revenue!” If this Stockholm Syndrome is bouncing around your cranium, then the sidebar is for you.
SIDEBAR:
A company is very similar to a human body.
A body has blood.
A company has revenue.
A perfectly healthy company/body operates well when revenue/blood is coursing through it — all parts functioning as they should.
However, take away the blood, the healthy body dies.
Take away the revenue, the healthy company dies.
No more social programs, no more offsite Branding Brainstorms, no more PSL-powered powwows replete with pet theories via pop-psych in powerpoint.
Game over.
Revenue. Period.
Revenue is a function of purchase. Purchase is a function of action/decision. Action/decision is a function of the resonance response. Dopa/oxy is the one ring to rule them all, and henceforth, it is all any marketer should care about.
Big Takeaway: Gen3 marketing teams aim all of their efforts at triggering and measuring the resonance response. This is the one phenomenon that generates revenue and builds brands all at once.
The witch hunt I have been experiencing from the Gen2 crowd is because of their biases, as well as the fact that the resonance response is nonobvious. Gen2 ads are evaluated based on a single metric: liking.
Bad idea.
Discover why in Part II, here.