The Human Element

So what Well perhaps this helps explain why the tenyear FOX BHC ROAS study finds that only one in five brands have grown their user base in the last ten years in the USWho has gotten those lost users Small DTC companies that started in social media and emphasized their human qualities Their trust levels are 68 as compared to big businesses at 14 Gallup reports the annual drop rate for confidence in big business is currently running at 23 per year see same prior linkWhen you touch people deep inside they are moved and are attracted to you and trust you more listen to you more Emotion attraction attention memory are all things that marketers know they want So they try to pull strings to get those things Sometimes using mechanical means Mechanical means to create human bonds between people and brands amp8211 it should be obvious that this is plain silly amp8211 but very smart people are making this mistake at scale every dayFor example trying to force human attention by using device calculations based on cursor movements and clicks positions on page etc with no notion of what the creative is who the target is etcTwo aspects of this new reality into which we are plunging and have plunged pretty deep already are amp8220performativeamp8221 and amp8220performanceamp8221 Performative means acting out respecting appearance amp8220the opticalsamp8221 more than honesty and truth Performance in the current marketing culture has come to mean the quarterly sales results in earnings reports which drive C suite compensation The latter is treated as part of a dichotomy between immediate sales and long term brand growth brand equity and brand loveIn the UK Les Binet and Peter Field continue to fight the good fight for balancing these pseudopolarities in a pseudodichotomy but in the US despite the folks in the trenches who reported their work at the recent ARFSequent Attribution Accelerator the tide has solidly shifted to short term sales as the only criterion for explaining and defending the actual marketplace behaviors of big marketersNot that this is news Big marketers have tried ardently to simulate the human element in their messaging But they do this based on a mix of intuition following the herd and numbers The human element gets lost in the numbers The herd is checking the boxes having all the right ethnicities and gender categories in their ads a similar strategy to trying to force attention based on mechanical numerologyThe average human being sees through this like clear glass Their BS meter needles are pinned to the max readingThe one word used the least in marketing today is the one word that can bring back the human element That word is MotivationsMotivations are the propulsion system for human beings Motivations are also the guidance system for human beings Motivations are the deeply embedded things that an individual really cares about the most The things that are most predictive of their actual behavior the choices they makeMotivations are what causes attention Our attention is drawn to the things that seem relevant to the underlying things we really care about If we focus on resonating with a personamp8217s motivations we will get their attention in a natural human wayMotivations are what causes emotion and feelings Emotions are the bodily reactions which go along with the subjective inner experiences amp8220qualiaamp8221 we have which we dub amp8220feelingsamp8221 When our motivations are thwarted we feel negative valence feelings and emotions When we sense the possibility that something has the agency which will bring us toward fulfilling our deepest motivations we experience positive valence feelings and emotionsMotivations are what causes attraction amp8211 and also repulsion amp8211 depending upon how we subconsciously assess the stimulus If it strikes us as having promise and opportunity for our motivations to be served we shall be attracted If we see it as a threat to what drives us we shall be repelled or prompted to attackMy friend and partner in altruistic projects Jerry Zaltman famous Harvard neuroscience professor and bestselling author has established that 95 of human decision making is driven from the subconscious mind This is why it is not possible to get a clear picture of a personamp8217s motivations by asking that person straightout what motivates them Verbal conscious mind answers only get you so farSummarizing the history of the marketing industryamp8217s inquiry into motivations Ernst Dichter brought up the subject about 70 years ago used focus groups and his own excellent intuition to report insights on this subject but did not last long as it was difficult to attribute any realworld marketing success to these methods Yankelovich used surveys and lasted much longer Stanford Universityamp8217s VALS project extended the survey method for these purposes Ultimately what lasted until today was a diminution of the concept of motivations to productspecific benefits Not the things that motivate us in life but the things of which we are consciously aware that are important to us in deciding among alternative products and brands For example when you buy a new car to what degree are you looking for styling safety resale value performance gas mileage etcOf course there are complex relationships between life motivations and productspecific motivations If in life we are motivated by hedonism itamp8217s likely that breath freshening and tooth whitening may be more important to us than decay prevention in a toothpaste But we have not been getting down to that deeper level of the causation layer in the subconscious motivationsUntil a littleknown experiment in the late 90s which uncovered a way of getting at subconscious motivationsA personamp8217s motivations are revealed by their behaviors which can be passively measured This can then be used to craft ads which speak to those motivations The ads created based on life motivations will tend to speak at the level of natural language and will tend to connect and resonate with people as human beingsEven existing ads which are not inherently humanistic can be showcased within media contexts to reach people with motivations that resonate with those ads and media contexts This is not as good as creating new ads based on the insights about life motivations but it still reliably results in double digit increases in short term sales and in long term branding success metrics Frankly this can also be characterized as a amp8220mechanicalamp8221 application until the ads themselves are based on the new method letamp8217s call that step 2 because it only affects the targeting and context selection letamp8217s call that step 1 But it works and is a step in the right directionWhat proof do we have that this method of targeting and context selection has these sales and branding resultsThe Advertising Research Foundation ARF Cognition Council using Kantar ad tracking and Circana IRI sales tracking finds that the method predicts 48 of sales resultsNielsen NCS indicates 36 average increase in sales lift605 reveals 37 average increase in purchase intent and 62 increase in first brand mention And that motivational resonance is more powerful than frequencySimmons across 3830 brands in all verticals measured finds that the method increases the predictivity of brand adoption 83 amp160Neustar in a random control trial reports 95 increase in incremental sales and 115 increase in new to brandIf you know me personally you know that if there were any contrary or inconclusive results I would report them So far the method has worked every time it has been testedThe method was my brainchild with a lot of input from my mentors over the years most notably Dr Timothy Joyce who helped me get it off the ground decades ago This has been one major aspect of my lifeamp8217s workItamp8217s based on collecting data on the content a person consumes and infers their motivations from thatIt rests upon the metadata The keywords used to characterize content amp8211 program and ad content The results are very different depending upon the metadata one uses For example the results are greatly weakened by only reporting the objects which appear in the video track or the words that appear in the audio track or by extracting keywords from reviews of a television series or by using subjectively selected categories such as amp8220funnyamp8221 vs amp8220seriousamp8221 or by surveys of what people say about specific content or adsThe metadata used are 265 psychological words derived empirically using machine learning starting from every word in the English language More information on methodology in this podcast or in this ARF paperWhat is happening as regards step 2 the application of this method to the development of new ads aimed at expressing the human element On April 25 2024 I had the honor of presenting to a global audience which packed the Grand Banking Hall of the hotel One King West in Toronto at Vividataamp8217s first annual Vivo Conference We presented the opening of a new age in that Vividata amp8220the MRI of Canadaamp8221 is now reporting Drivers amp8211 the motivational data generated by my method amp8211 for the purpose of guiding creative briefs advertising strategy creative executions as well as targeting and media context selectionLetamp8217s get marketing and advertising back on track letamp8217s add back the missing element of real humanismPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick 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 MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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Bill Harvey

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