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Foreign. Welcome back to Bray. German brands. This is the second opener I've done because I haven't had my coffee this morning. I've only had tea. I'm trying to be healthier guys. Trying to make sure that like what I'm doing is actually helping my brain and my experience as a human on this planet and not hindering it there. For a while I was up to like two or three cups of coffee a day, which I don't know, maybe for some of you that's like a totally normal thing and it doesn't bother you but. But it, I get the jitters, man. If I drink too much coffee, it's not good. As I just told producer Scotty, I have not done a solo episode in quite a long time. So this is going to be Sarah talking to herself in her office. We're just going to see how this goes. It's either going to be really weird and I might delete it later or it's going to be great and everybody's going to be fine. Today I want to talk about something interesting that I just read. Sarah's a big time reader. Like all I do all day long is just like look at stuff and just consume, consume, consume. Not so much on the video side as I used to. I used to be on TikTok a lot consuming content. These days for some reason I've just been really into blogs in particular and books. I'm like a big time book reader. I really miss the days where we used to actually have paper books though because I liked the physical aspect of turning pages and I just really like the way books smell. Like anytime I go to a new city, the very first thing I have to do is go find the library because I just like obsessed with books. But excuse me, goodness, I'm dying. One of the books that I recently read was super crazy fascinating. It broke down kind of the four critical forces behind everyday purchases and really decisions in general. And it talked really deep into like how the brain actually filters out things that it doesn't really need to pay attention to. It also talked about invisible decision makers, things that are happening inside our environment that are actually influencing what we do a lot more than we think they are. It'll talk about what the actually what the brain actually does logically, like the checks and balances it puts in place to make sure that it's actually consuming things that it wants to consume. And then the final trigger, the one thing that makes the brain actually tick over from evaluating everything that it's seeing into. Yes, I want to actually go pursue that. And I actually put effort into it. So to start, this book is by a really, really cool neuroscientist, Thomas. How do you say his name? Thomas Zweiga, I think, is how you say it. Ramsey. Interesting guy. I actually talked to him on LinkedIn after I did this post. Fascinating. Dude, like, had some really cool things to say. I'm actually gonna bring it up because I really liked what he had to say about was interesting. When I posted this, this was just like a book that I had read over the weekend, and I just really liked the book. I was like, this is just interesting. And so I wanted to do kind of a summary of everything that I had seen in it. And when Thomas reached out to me, he. He said, like, I love this. This is a superb distillation of what I tried to put in the book. And one thing, apparently he has not pushed enough in promoting the book, is to the extent at which this was based off of his experience of working with Fortune 500 companies. So this specific book, and I'll tell you the title in just a second, is built on 15 years of work that he did with Fortune 500 companies. Kind of just sharing and collaborating and learning more and more about what makes people, specifically consumers, consume things. So he really kind of tried to provide kind of a framework based on all of that work. So the book that I read is called how to make people People Buy the Art and Science of Enabling, Engaging and empowering your Customers by Thomas Ramsey. Amazing freaking book. So we're going to dissect it and go through it here. First thing I want to call out, which was fascinating when I started reading it. It's something I align with 100. The human brain was not designed to read ads. It was not designed to read ads. It was designed to survive. That's the only thing the brain is meant to do, is make sure this specific human that I am, like, kept captive inside of doesn't die. Because if you die, then the brain can't do what it wants to do, which is just like, keep everything going and start to interact with the environment, gain resources, find mates, right? Like, care for your family. The brain is designed to keep you alive. It's not designed to read ads. Interesting stats that came out of this book. 80% of the ads that we see don't even register in the brain. And I had somebody else comment on this. Oh, my gosh, where was it? On this, like, giant thread talking about the fact that there was another company. Gosh, I wish I Could find the comment talking about the fact that Harvard Business Review or Harvard Business School, sorry, did a review of all of these different ads that they were seeing going out from their specific client base and it was even higher. They said 85 to 90% of ads don't even register in the brain, meaning all of the ads that we are creating in D2C, most of them, a large majority of them, up to 90% of them aren't even being seen. The brain doesn't even know that it's in its environment. That's freaking scary. A second stat that was terrifying on here. Less than 1% of these ads that are actually seen are being remembered. So if only. What do we say, like 20, 20%? Ish. 10 to 20% are being seen. 1% of that 20% are being remembered. That's such a small amount. Guys, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. This is why I love this book because I was like, oh my God. Brands are interesting though, because we keep running them. We keep running ads. And a lot of the brands that I see nowadays are running massive amounts of them, hundreds to thousands of different ads to try and get seen, seen. Now, I find this really interesting because Ramsey has been studying kind of how the brain processes ads for decades. And I think this, this particular book needs to be on your bookshelf 100. His book kind of reveals these four critical forces behind what happens when someone actually stops on this tiny little percentage of ads and how that actually plays into their purchasing decisions. So from the top, there's four different things, four different critical forces that are coming into play, according to this book, behind these purchases. The first one is obviously attention. This is kind of the gateway. We all kind of know of this in DTC as the hook, right? Or whatever is getting people to stop the scroll. Number two is going to be emotion, the spark. This has got to be the most important piece. I truly believe the spark is going to be the one thing that's going to get people to connect with your ad at such a deep level that they will want to move forward energetically. This is something that I just talked to real, really cool, like neuroscientist behavioral expert Dr. Thomas Troutman. On my last episode, we went kind of deep into this concept of like, your brain is real weird, right? When it makes decisions, the brain is trying to make a judgment call as to whether or not this decision is going to require large amounts of energy, effort. And I've talked about this at a few places on Twitter before purchasing Decisions and decisions in general come down to an energy transfer. The brain has to decide, is this going to be worth the amount of glucose I have to spend to be able to attain it, right. 100% of the time. Engagement, purchases, conversions, that's an energy thing. It's not necessarily like a desire issue, because I can want to work out and then I'll come home later after work tonight and eat pizza, right? Desire has nothing to do with behavior. Desire is just kind of like a motivational neurotransmitter. It's a dopamine issue. When it comes to purchases, though, the brain is really trying to make a decision as to how much glucose do I want to spend on this particular issue. If it decides that the glucose is not worth it, it doesn't move forward. It's bonkers. It's absolutely crazy. So number two, emotion creating that spark is incredibly important because that tells the brain that this particular decision is going to be worth the energy expenditure. Number three, cognition, which I found really interesting in his particular model, the logical check, right? So the brain is going to make an emotional connection, decide that, yes, this is worth the energy for me to go and pursue it, and then it will basically make a logical check system for itself to say, are all of these things that I logically want involved in this purchase? And it's doing that because it's trying to justify the energy expenditure, which is kind of important. So number three, cognition. Very, very important that we have some sort of logic involved on the back end of our ads so that the brain understands, here's all the reasons why this is going to be important for you. And then the Last 1, number 4, memory. Memory is the purchase trigger. Memory is the purchase trigger. I can't get enough of this. Okay, so here's how all these work. We're going to start from the top and move to the bottom. Number one, attention is the brain's first filter, right? So most ads are not even registering. And obviously, according to Ramsey, this is the reason why our brains are evolved to just ignore 99% of what we see in our environment out of pure survival. And I agree with this 100%. As somebody who studies psychology excessively and can't get enough of it, the brain is ignoring 99% of what we see out of pure survival. Because if we had to stop, stop and process every little thing within our environment every single day, we already would have died off as a species. Can you imagine trying to make a decision? Every decision that comes into play when you have to make coffee Right. First I have to decide, do I want the red cup or the blue cup? Once you decide that, do I want to set it on the counter or do I want to hold it in my hand? Do I want to put it underneath the flow? Do I want to push the button with my right hand or my left hand? Do I want. Like, you can see how many decisions come into play with just everyday activities. Can you imagine trying to do that now for every single ad? You see, if we had to actively process our environment, we would die from cognitive overload. We would just die. So to break through that kind of primitive filter, an ad has to trigger three different things on. Again, this is just to gain attention. There's three things involved with attention. First one is novelty. It's got to be something completely unexpected. Something that's just like, holy God, what the hell was that? One of the best ads I've ever seen was somebody trying to shave a balloon. You've seen this in, like, some of these ads. It's just fantastic. Like, that should pop that balloon. Why is it not popping? Bizarre things, right? Unexpected things, odd things. The brain really, really craves something that just doesn't look right because it's trained to look for things in the environment that are odd. So we can make sure it stays safe for one, but also so that it can make sure if this is something that's, like, you know, different or something that could possibly elevate my status in the tribe, or possibly something that could just be really fun for me to engage in in my environment, the brain will stop. So the very first thing that we have to have to be able to drive attention inside an ad is novelty. Second one is contrast. I'm talking, like, sharp differences. Color can be a big driver in this. So obviously, black and white, you know, thinking here, um, you can have a sea of blue and then one thing of red right in the middle. That's contrast. It's breaking it up, up, up. It's breaking up enough of the environment that you finally get down to one specific thing. It's causing your brain to pull in its attention towards one thing. So when we talk about contrast, too, this. This can be color based. Like I just said, it could be contrast based when it comes to textures. I've noticed if you have something real chunky in the middle and soft things around it, then that creates a lot of contrast. It can also be sound focused. So contrast can be somebody talking really, really loud, and then it goes really, really quiet. That's contrast, right? So you're you're making some sort of like a differentiation between two very drastically different things. So again, to break through this primitive filter that we're trying to break through from an attentional standpoint, you need novelty, you need contrast and then you need motion. Our eyes are real drawn to specific motions of things. Now I see a lot of brands trying to create motion. Basically like to fake it. Like folk faux motion. They try to fabricate it. Meaning they do a lot of clips. Right? We're doing, we're splitting everything up between two and three and four seconds. We got to make sure we keep moving. The brain needs constant movement. I disagree with this. I think motion can be one of the most powerful things when you don't break it up. One of the best use cases of this, there's a movie, what is it called? 1914, 1917. There we go. I just had to look it up because I couldn't remember the exact year. 1917 was a film that came out in 2019. You can look it up on Wikipedia or Google, whatever. Really interesting filming process where they didn't cut. They did not like very, very few cuts through this entire movie. I love these war movies. They're so interesting to me. I like get addicted to war movies. This one though was fan freaking tastic because through the entire thing they didn't stop cutting. They just kept going and going and going. Even if the actors like sort of messed up or did things in a weird way, those actors had to be very quick to come right back into their lines and into the scene. So I mean just the amount of effort that went into making this film is fantastic. And your brain just gets sucked in because there's no clips. They didn't cut it. I don't think that motion has to be cutting every two seconds, cutting every four seconds. Motion can also be driving you down a frickin hill or whatever it is. Driving down a road without stopping. The brain is just going to keep watching to see what comes around the corner next. So don't, don't take this like motion need for attention and think it means I have to clip things up super, super fast. It can also be very fluid motion as well. It this was something that was interesting. In the book. If you don't grab attention within 0.4 seconds, less than a second, you've already lost. This was like, oh, I love this stat in the book. I was like, oh, this is such a juicy one. You have less than a second, 0.4 seconds to try and gain attention. If you haven't gained attention Got attention within that, like less than a second split window, you've already lost because the brain just doesn't care. So again, number one is attention. You need novelty, contrast and motion to do this. If you nail all three of those, you have the best chance to get to the next piece of driving purchases, which is emotion. This is the invisible decision maker. Guys. I loved this framing that he has here. Invisible decision maker. Both marketers and consumers are acting as if like purchasing is a rational choice. It is not. Ramsey lays this out very, very clear in his book. Right. So this, there's a lot of deeper emotions, driving behavior than we think. And the best, best marketing taps into just three of these. So the first one, status, who we want to be. This is aspirational. Marketing is typically what I usually frame this as. Status, aspirational, who we wish we were as people. Right. This is real big when it comes to marketing and we do this pretty well in D2C. I see a lot of really good marketing around the idea of become who you want to be. The toughest part about status though, I feel is a lot of brands want to make it seem as if their brand is the only way you can get that status. I would rather wrap our products and our brand into status as a whole. Meaning we are one piece of your journey, not the entire journey. Right. Because that again, that, that drives back down into the real world experience of the consumers. We're trying to get to our ecosystem. So status is the first one if you're looking to create emotion. The second one is probably fear. According to Ramsey, at least fear is going to be the second one. Anything you want to avoid. This is very much like problem solution focused, I find. Always wraps into fear. Now I, I disagree slightly with this mostly because I think fear is often overused and I think that people don't, especially in marketing people don't. They're not very careful with how they use fear. I don't want this to be like a. Let's just push these people to what we want them to do by trying to elicit some sort of like a fear based response. I don't love that type of marketing because I don't find it to be. And again, I'd have to talk to Ramsey to see if that's what he meant by this. But I don't find it to be very conscious of different types of fear. Fear comes out very different ways. Anxiety can be a fear response. Disappointment can be a fear response. Apprehension is a fear response. Fear goes into all kinds of different things. So if you're going to use this in your marketing, try and pinpoint the actual type of fear that your customers are feeling. Whether it's anxieties, disappointment, apprehension, irritation, whatever it is, pinpoint how it's coming out and then talk directly to that. If they are afraid, but it's coming out as anger. I'd rather you talk to the anger part than the fear part because again, some of this is very sensitive for people. And I just. We got to be very, very careful how we use this in marketing so that we're not eliciting some sort of a trauma response without knowing that we're doing that right. So speak to how it's coming out, not so much to the actual fear underneath. If you're going to market towards fear. And the last one in here, if you're going to create emotion, one of the best ways to do this is to create desire, what we actually crave as humans. Cravings come out in the weirdest ways and I love it. I can't get enough of it anytime that we're craving something as humans. Dopamine is a huge part of this. Dopamine is a motivational neurotransmitter. It's not necessarily a success focused one. Right. So it's not about gaining something. It's actually about the act of trying to gain something. You've seen this a lot where people will doom scroll and we'll just scroll through TikTok over and over and you'll see these big spikes where people will come up and then they'll go down and they'll come up and they'll go down over and over and over and over. That's a desire focused mechanism. But you can also put this into all kinds of different places in your marketing that will help people desire the next step. We've talked a ton, ton about this. I have lots of different episodes. If you want to go listen to all the ones that are like the psychology tactic focused ones, those are desire focused things. So to wrap this up, emotion is very, very important, obviously, because you're trying to be memorable. You got to create an emotional response within a person. Because we can only create the next step and the next two steps by having an emotional response to things. So number three in this, right? So we've kind of talked about how the brain is making these purchases. Is there four critical things that are happening behind every purchase? We've talked about attention and how to get it, emotion, how to create it, and then cognition is the third one. I really liked this section of the book. Because it's the logical check. The brain is going to make sure that it's not making a decision that's dumb for the most part, which is really interesting because the brain often makes dumb decisions. But once emotion pulls you in as a customer, the brain is looking for reasons to say yes. It's. It's actually trying to make a good decision. It's going to go through and work off of its programming to make sure that the resource it's going after is of smart resource. So again, it's trying really hard not to waste energy. Right? So Ramsey shows something really interesting here because he talks about the fact that too much information in your ad could lead to decision fatigue, but too little information feels untrustworthy. I love this concept. Like, I think this is so fascinating mostly because he, he says there's kind of a sweet spot of creating this, this communication loop where we give enough information that people want to move forward, but we don't hold too much back so that it feels kind of like, I don't know if I could trust this brand. His sweet spot in particular has one clear problem. We're solving one problem at a time in our ads. We're not trying to solve 80, right? We're not saying you need these shoes because they look good and they're comfortable and they're black and they can go with everything. Like, that's a lot of problems that this would solve for this one person. So start with one clear problem. Go for one simple solution. This is the shoe you need if you want to be able to stand on your feet for 14 hours a day. Simple. Very, very simple. One clear problem, one clear solution, and then one reason they should buy now. Now, this doesn't have to be discount focused, right? Our job is to make the decision effortless. Obviously in marketing, however, it doesn't have to be. You should buy now because they're 40 off. Not everybody cares about discounts. I hate to break it to you, and I say this a lot, but I'm going to say it again. Not everybody cares about discounts. People price often doesn't matter in the least bit if the value is interpreted as something more valuable than the cash I have on hand. I will spend $40,000 on a car and I will spend $8 on coffee. Right? The value of what it's. What it means to me is what's actually being interpreted here. So this reason to buy something right now really does come down to what exactly are you focused on as a human right now in your life. If I'm selling shoes to maybe like nurses, right, These, these black shoes to nurses or whatever it is that solves this problem of being on their feet for 14 hours a day, it's going to be very important to understand what she's struggling with most in the beginning of the year. Right. She's a nurse. She's going to constantly be on her feet all day long. But is there something that she's currently focused on? Maybe she's got a performance review coming up, right. And she really needs to not be tired. And so this is something that she's actively looking for. Like I need new shoes because these ones are just old and I have a performance review coming up and I'm exhausted all the time. And like this is just going to help me kind of stave off a little bit, a little bit of the uncomfortableness of my job. Focus in on what she's really, really craving in life. That reason why will go much, much farther than just putting in price and discount. Okay, I digress. Last on here, because we're already 22 minutes is memory. Memory. This one I loved actually, just because it's, it's often not talked about. Something I should probably do more. More content on. Memory is the final trigger when it comes to purchasing decisions. Most brands are focused on the now. Almost every brand that I work with is focused on the now. But what happens if you have a customer that's just not ready and they just want to buy later? Right? So memory is the battleground that all brands play on. We're not playing so much on attention because we know how to get attention. And once we get attention, some of us are pretty good at eliciting some sort of emotion. A lot of us are very good at getting that cognitive list in place. Very few of us are very good about memory, like being memorable. Right. So Ramsey goes on to explain how these great brands are staying on top of mind. There's three different things which I absolutely love and agree with 100%. This is straight out of a lot of the studies that I'm reading as well, so very validating for psychology based marketers. First one, if you want to be memorable, you've got to stay repetitive. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Whatever your core message is, whatever message you want to put out into the world, whatever that value based system is, repeat it and repeat it again, and repeat it again and repeat it again. Say it in as many different ways as you need to, but don't let the core message dilute. Right? Very important to keep that repetition in place, just like I've done with my marketing. All of my marketing says Psychology based marketing. Psychology Based Creative, like everything about it is understand your customers so that you can have some sort of psychology focus, so that you can do X, Y, Z. All of my marketing for my business is based in psychology because that's the core message of my business. And I say it in such a repetitive way, people probably get sick of it. But repetition works because it teaches the brain what's valuable. Number two in here, distinctive assets. I love this. Colors. Sounds are distinctive assets. If you've ever heard like the but up. That's distinctive, man. As soon as I do that little Diddy, everybody knows which brand that is. And now I'm going to do a test, comment on, on my, my, like my Twitter, whatever it is, comment on that tweet and tell me which brand that is. And if you don't know, I'm gonna be so sad. Okay. Sounds can be distinctive assets or taglines. I am so sad that we are out of the Mad Men days of taglines. I wish to God we could go back to it because. Because it helps brands so, so much understand what the hell they're actually selling. Taglines, everybody, you need to create a tagline. My tagline is Psychology Based Creative. That's the tagline I've had for many, many years. And I refuse to go off of it because it works so incredibly well. It's very distinctive. People know Psychology Based Creative is Sarah, right? Create a tagline, please. Go do it. Okay, Number three, mental shortcuts. We are the only X that does. Yes. Sarah is the only brand, the only agency, the only, like consumer insights company that uses psychology to bring people in through ads. That's the only one. Right? Now, I don't have any competitors that can say that because if they come in and try and say that other people in the industry, my competitors or, you know, obviously my. My customers will say, well, that doesn't make any sense because Sarah's that you can't be that because Sarah's already that. So these mental shortcuts, we are the only X that does Y. Again, this goes back to the tagline thing helps immensely because the brain will start to understand how do I need to see this particular entity and why is it important? Right? They don't remember you. They're not going to buy from you. Creating memories, right? Emotional memories in particular is such a great way to show people that you're good enough to be remembered. Right? So if you're going to run ads or write, copy or build brands or do whatever you do. I think this, this book by Thomas Ramsey, how to Make People Buy, was one of the best I've read. Distills it down to some very tactical things so that we can help the brain that was only built to survive understand why what we have is incredibly important. If you would like to learn more about your customers, understand what they want, emotionally, psychologically, understand what they're trying to create in their lives and how your products fit into that so that you can keep your costs low and you can boost those sales. Come check out what we're doing at Tether Insights. I've created this company 100 just to study consumers. That's all we do over there specifically because it's one of the things I think that's lacking most in D2C brands is understanding the. The core of the humans that they're actually selling to, because that's what's driving all of these purchasing decisions. So if you want to go check out what we're doing at tetherinsights IO is the website tetherinsights IO. Follow me everywhere that you can consume content at. Sarah Levenger. Yes. And then go read this book because, oh, it was so, so good. Like, I couldn't get enough of it. I read it in two days. Anyways, we'll see you next week. Have a lovely day. You're great. Brain Driven Brands is part of the Learn and Laugh series on the Quickfire Podcast network and is presented by Tether Insights. For more information, go to tetherinsights IO.