Deeper Understanding of Human Beings Has Become Mission Critical

Physics, chemistry, biology/neuroscience 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 open-minded about what consciousness might be.

It's 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 scale.

The 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 believe.

Marketing 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. That's because they have hardly changed at all in half a century, despite the heady gloss painted over the true situation, in which the pivotal client-media agency contracts are still built upon sex/age 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 marketing.

There are many layers of mind which influence our self-identity 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, product-specific motivations, sexual orientations, spiritual/cosmological assumptions and beliefs, neurolinguistic proclivities, attitudes about psychic powers, use of intoxicants, brain chemistry, habits, emotions, moods and more.

All of that can be sorted out. The longest-running data are MRI/Simmons product-specific and general attitudinal questions. Those data can easily be mined to provide a first step in better understanding each of your target segments.

There are also new sources of data. RMT (a company I co-founded) DriverTagsTM are science-based, having distilled 265 behavior-changing variables from machine learning starting with over 13,000 psychological variables covering everything in the "layers of mind" paragraph above. IBM Watson has expanded the five-variable OCEAN model into a more in-depth schema. Semasio is semantically analyzing everything in digital display on a real-time 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 outcomes.

Neuro and biometric measurement have made a great start but are still more focused on evaluating specific ads based on aggregate groups of people than on peeling the layers within individual minds.

In this context, a company called Sightly is questioning marketers about what their brand stands for, asking interesting questions such as:

• Does your brand support any philanthropic or charitable causes?
• Does your brand believe that certain celebrities, influencers and/or activists capture its mentality?
• Does your brand have any other aspirational brands?

There are also scenarios Sightly asks the brand to respond to, such as:

• Your competitor releases a new product
• A prominent celebrity dies due to illness

After 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, up-to-date, fragmented mass culture of 2021.

For example, Vita Coco used Sightly's Brand Mentality^TM platform to indicate their brand opinions and content preferences. Sightly's Anticipation Software™ then monitored real-time trends across the digital landscape and filtered them according to Vita Coco's custom profile. It identified the Nature's Cereal trend on TikTok, which was first introduced by @natures_food and popularized by Lizzo, that involves users creating a meal of blueberries, strawberries, pomegranate seeds and coconut water.

That platform identified the trend's relevance to Vita Coco, and recommended action. Within 24 hours of trend identification, the Sightly team was able to launch Coco's own Nature's Cereal-promoted post to TikTok, featuring its hero product, and include an "order now" call to action (CTA), which drove viewers to Vita Coco's Amazon product page. The result was a 0.64% clickthrough rate (CTR), +35% above the brand's norm.

Some of these best examples of psychology going deeper have, by dint of their scientific methods, produced proofs of efficacy. RMT has been third-party validated to produce double-digit 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 measures.

Adelaide 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 outcomes.

Semasio with Audi and PHD has proven that semantic lookalikes beat demographic lookalikes in reducing cost per conversion.

And 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 over-emphasis on speed, lowest cost and convenience.

The 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 not.

Look 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 ways.

Those who will rise are those who will lead science into ethical and humanistic psychological investigation and testing at scale, investigating the win-win opportunities to make life a little bit better in every way we can, and making sure it is all validated based on real outcomes.

Photo at top courtesy of Bill Harvey.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet.