The Human Element

So what? Well, perhaps this helps explain why the ten-year FOX BHC ROAS study finds that only one in five brands have grown their user base in the last ten years in the U.S.

Who 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 link).

When 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 – it should be obvious that this is plain silly – but very smart people are making this mistake at scale every day.

For 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, etc.

Two aspects of this new reality into which we are plunging and have plunged pretty deep already are “performative” and “performance”. Performative means acting out, respecting appearance (“the opticals”) 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 love.

In the UK Les Binet and Peter Field continue to fight the good fight for balancing these pseudo-polarities in a pseudo-dichotomy, but in the US, despite the folks in the trenches who reported their work at the recent ARF/Sequent 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 marketers.

Not 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 numerology.

The average human being sees through this like clear glass. Their BS meter needles are pinned to the max reading.

The one word used the least in marketing today is the one word that can bring back the human element. That word is Motivations.

Motivations 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 make.

Motivations 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 person’s motivations we will get their attention in a natural human way.

Motivations are what causes emotion and feelings. Emotions are the bodily reactions which go along with the subjective inner experiences (“qualia”) we have, which we dub “feelings”. 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 emotions.

Motivations are what causes attraction – and also repulsion – 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 attack.

My friend and partner in altruistic projects Jerry Zaltman, famous Harvard neuroscience professor and best-selling 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 person’s motivations by asking that person straight-out what motivates them. Verbal conscious mind answers only get you so far.

Summarizing the history of the marketing industry’s 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 real-world marketing success to these methods. Yankelovich used surveys and lasted much longer. Stanford University’s VALS project extended the survey method for these purposes. Ultimately what lasted until today was a diminution of the concept of motivations to product-specific 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, etc.

Of course, there are complex relationships between life motivations and product-specific motivations. If in life we are motivated by hedonism, it’s 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 motivations.

Until a little-known experiment in the late 90s which uncovered a way of getting at subconscious motivations.

A person’s 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 beings.

Even 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 “mechanical” application until the ads themselves are based on the new method (let’s call that step 2), because it only affects the targeting and context selection (let’s call that step 1). But it works and is a step in the right direction.

What proof do we have that this method of targeting and context selection has these sales and branding results?

The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Cognition Council using Kantar ad tracking and Circana IRI sales tracking finds that the method predicts 48% of sales results.

Nielsen NCS indicates +36% average increase in sales lift.

605 reveals +37% average increase in purchase intent and +62% increase in first brand mention. And that motivational resonance is more powerful than frequency.

Simmons across 3830 brands in all verticals measured finds that the method increases the predictivity of brand adoption +83%.  

Neustar in a random control trial reports +95% increase in incremental sales and +115% increase in new to brand.

If 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 tested.

The 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 life’s work.

It’s based on collecting data on the content a person consumes, and infers their motivations from that.

It rests upon the metadata. The keywords used to characterize content – 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 “funny” vs. “serious”, or by surveys of what people say about specific content or ads.

The 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 paper.

What 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 Vividata’s first annual Vivo Conference. We presented the opening of a new age, in that Vividata (“the MRI of Canada”) is now reporting Drivers – the motivational data generated by my method – for the purpose of guiding creative briefs, advertising strategy, creative executions as well as targeting and media context selection.

Let’s get marketing and advertising back on track, let’s add back the missing element of real humanism.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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