Deeper Understanding of Human Beings Has Become Mission Critical

Physics chemistry biologyneuroscience and technology are all vastly more advanced now than they were half a century ago Psychology not so much Consciousness has been skirted as a subject by most physicists and those who pursue it assume that consciousness is an effect produced solely by the physical brain while starting any scientific expedition based on any unproven assumption is not usually very productive The great physicists such as Albert Einstein and John Wheeler were more openminded about what consciousness might beIt39s not just marketers who need to go deeper and more scientifically into human psychology Civilization needs it You all have surely noticed that everything has gone from bad to worse lately The nub of it all is the human mind and the counterproductive tricks it can play at mass scaleThe only way to pull out of the nosedive is by better understanding what makes us all behave as we do and why we are often so careless and rigid about what we choose to believeMarketing can be far more cost effective than it is today Media buying practices as Leslie Wood of Nielsen NCS points out are in need of major improvement That39s because they have hardly changed at all in half a century despite the heady gloss painted over the true situation in which the pivotal clientmedia agency contracts are still built upon sexage target reach and GRP guarantees where the dominant driver is simply low CPM The lowly CPM is still king In addition black boxes and lookalikes abound ROI attribution is still rarely based on scientific experimentation when it could be These are among the opportunity areas for the greatest and fastest improvements in marketingThere are many layers of mind which influence our selfidentity and the behavior it requires of us heritage culture subculture geography parents teachers peer groups character personality values perceptions motivations need states scripts mindsets situations productspecific motivations sexual orientations spiritualcosmological assumptions and beliefs neurolinguistic proclivities attitudes about psychic powers use of intoxicants brain chemistry habits emotions moods and moreAll of that can be sorted out The longestrunning data are MRISimmons productspecific and general attitudinal questions Those data can easily be mined to provide a first step in better understanding each of your target segmentsThere are also new sources of data RMT a company I cofounded DriverTagsTM are sciencebased having distilled 265 behaviorchanging variables from machine learning starting with over 13000 psychological variables covering everything in the quotlayers of mindquot paragraph above IBM Watson has expanded the fivevariable OCEAN model into a more indepth schema Semasio is semantically analyzing everything in digital display on a realtime basis at scale Adelaide a company I advise has detected and validated attention signals across digital media placements that are predictive of attention and subsequent outcomesNeuro and biometric measurement have made a great start but are still more focused on evaluating specific ads based on aggregate groups of peopleamp160than on peeling the layers within individual mindsIn this context a company called Sightly is questioning marketers about what their brand stands for asking interesting questions such asDoes your brand support any philanthropic or charitable causesDoes your brand believe that certain celebrities influencers andor activists capture its mentalityDoes your brand have any other aspirational brandsThere are also scenarios Sightly asks the brand to respond to such asYour competitor releases a new productA prominent celebrity dies due to illnessAfter extensive questioning Sightly automatically finds video and display contexts supportive of that brand persona including influencer sites videos going viral weaving together the brand purpose with the complex uptodate fragmented mass culture of 2021For example Vita Coco used Sightly39s Brand MentalityTM platform to indicate their brand opinions and content preferences Sightly39s Anticipation Softwareamp8482 then monitored realtime trends across the digital landscape and filtered them according to Vita Coco39s custom profile It identified the Nature39s Cereal trend on TikTok which was first introduced by naturesfood and popularized by Lizzo that involves users creating a meal of blueberries strawberries pomegranate seeds and coconut waterThat platform identified the trend39s relevance to Vita Coco and recommended action Within 24 hours of trend identification the Sightly team was able to launch Coco39s own Nature39s Cerealpromoted post to TikTok featuring its hero product and include an quotorder nowquot call to action CTA which drove viewers to Vita Coco39s Amazon product page The result was a 064 clickthrough rate CTR 35 above the brand39s normSome of these best examples of psychology going deeper have by dint of their scientific methods produced proofs of efficacy RMT has been thirdparty validated to produce doubledigit lifts in sales effect by Nielsen NCS and separately by Simmons to nearly double the predictivity of brand adoption based on demographics available at scale and thirdly by 605 to generate double digit lifts in full funnel measuresAdelaide and others in the Attention Council have together amassed over 50 case studies proving that attention metrics can be used to predict the impact of media on business outcomesSemasio with Audi and PHD hasamp160proven that semantic lookalikes beat demographic lookalikes in reducing cost per conversionAnd still we are moving too slowly into this deeper psychological realm in our actual activations The typical campaign is still leaving ROI and brand equity on the table by falling back on the convenient methods we have been using for years The percent of campaigns activated with full focus on marketing science is pitifully low due to overemphasis on speed lowest costamp160and convenienceThe data are now available to go deeper The direct marketers and DTCs and tech companies are using science ahead of the rest of the industry as is their wont There is no barrier to using the best science available and rigorously measuring all campaigns via random control trials simple random holdout groups will do Thousands of people are already doing it Tens of thousands are notLook at all the huge companies that have gone down in recent decades Like the giant reptiles they did not adapt quickly enough to rapidly changing conditions That description fits too many marketers today slowly investigating new things eventually allowing a few of them to be tested in convenient but not necessarily definitive waysThose who will rise are those who will lead science into ethical and humanistic psychological investigation and testing at scale investigating the winwin opportunities to make life a little bit better in every way we can and making sure it is all validated based on real outcomesPhoto at top courtesy of Bill HarveyClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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Deeper Understanding of Human Beings Has Become Mission Critical

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Bill Harvey

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