Focus on Consumer Goals

The National Institutes of Health consider goaldriven behaviors to be the core of human psychology as shown by the purple box I imposed on their schematic belowMotivationsGoals are at the core of all human behaviorNeuroeconomics Second Edition39s main thrust centers around VS VS stands for Value Signals These are specific phenomena that can be measured in the brain which are related to the computations of the inference engine as it regards to a decision to be made Such as whether to consider buying a specific brandDr Karl Friston the leading neuroscientist in understanding the brainamp8217s inference engine understands that the entire system is driven by specific goals of the individualThe following words are all talking about the same set of phenomena goals values desires motivations drivers and need statesIn marketing there is widespread use of productspecific motivations in segmenting and targeting audiences with messages specially crafted for themThe blind spot is the more universal motivations which cause the productspecific motivationsFor example toothpaste brands understand that there is a segment that sees toothpaste for decay prevention another that sees it as a breath freshener yet another that sees it as a tooth whitener This superficial notion of the consumer is used in creative briefs to give inspiration to the copywriterInvisibly beneath the analysis horizon the most likely consumers to try your new toothpaste brand for the first time might be those whose motivations are eg to live for today If you knew that you could of course write the most effective ad But instead not going ahead and discovering that deep layer of motivation you satisfy yourself by focusing on a specific product benefit the awareness of which has long since been saturatedHow can the industry get down into the deep universal motivations in order to create more compelling creativeIn Canada Vividata is providing deep universal motivation data calling it their DriversThis enables subscribers to the special study to gain deep insights into different strata of interest which creative people find usefulFull disclosure Iamp8217m one of the founders of RMT whose VS metatags have been validated seven times including ARF Cognition Council NCS Neustar Simmons and Wharton Neuroscience Although my interest in developing valuesbased metatags precedes current neuroscience My lifetime of introspection into the way my own mind works led me to conclude that values are the prime mover of advertising effectiveness and of decisionmaking in general decades before neuroscience got thereNeuroeconomics Second Edition says that there are hundreds of different value signals VS that have been identified in the brain RMT hypothesizes that its 265 DriverTags each corresponds to one of the identified brain VS signalsWe know that RMTamp8217s VS proxies have predicted and explained salesbranding increases 7 out of 7 times 2 of the 7 times were predicting the most advanced neuroscience correlates of sales increases longterm memory encoding approach and synchronyAt the ARF ATTENTION 2024 Conference FOX Chief Research and Analytics Officer Mainak Mazumdar Wharton Neuroscience Initiative Director Michael Platt and I discussed the use of these value signals as proxies for EEG using EEG as a calibration panel for the value signal proxies so as to be able to cover every ad and content impressionThe advertising industry through the World Federation of Advertisers WFA the Association of National Advertisers ANA and many other industry associations has prioritized measuring the relative efficacy of different mediatype environments It is one of their top 5 priorities source CIMM International Conference July 9 2024Ironically this was one of my highest priorities for most of my career since my first series of agency assignments all involved the pioneering of media optimizers and I had concluded in my first days in the business that without relative media impact weights media optimizers would simply select vehicles based on the lowest CPM with some variation based on reach considerationsIn the past few years driven largely by the universal realization that a TV impression and an impression made by an ad in a digital scrolling platform are probably not equal amp8211 and by the Media Rating Councilamp8217s MRCamp8217s creation of the Viewability Standards amp8211 the industry has rallied around attention measurements as the way to get media impact scoresHowever attention cannot take you all the way there because it is not a driving factor of success it is a gating factor which can ensure failure An absence of attention can say no to advertising success but a propensity of attention cannot guarantee advertising effectiveness because the mechanism underlying the salescausing effect of advertising is persuasion Motivations can take you all the way there because motivations are the basis for persuasion An ad can change your predisposition to buy a brand by changing the way you perceive the brand in such a way as to persuade the mind often below the level of conscious awareness that the brand may have the instrumentality to help you achieve your motivationsIn the near future we may find out that the combination of motivation and attention yields even greater incremental sales than either attention or motivation alone However at the present moment motivation has seven independent scientific validations that it increases sales caused by advertising while the ARF Attention Study so far has shown almost no correlation between attention and sales effect This was based on the creative pretesting use case the upcoming third wave of the study will focus on the media use case which is likely to show some positive correlation with sales effect because the attentional differences between immersive engrossing television and streaming media contexts and the other main media contexts amp8211 scrolling feeds and usergenerated videos amp8211 is rather extreme as first pointed out by Karen NelsonField some years agoThe way that RMT VS are applied is to calculate a Resonance score between the ad and the person andor between the ad and the context The higher the Resonance the more likely the sales effect the relationship being a sigmoid curve as RMT deduced from the NCS study sponsored by Turner under the command of its head of research at the time Howard ShimmelBecause Wharton Neuroscience has now shown that there is a high correlation between RMT Resonance and the three key brain measures most predictive and presumed causative of incremental sales effects longterm memory encoding approach and synchrony RMT is officially changing the name amp8220DriverTagsamp8221 to amp8220RMT VSamp8221 ie RMT Value Signals This reflects the hypothesis that neuroscience will ultimately determine that there is a onetoone relationship between the hundreds of unique VS measured in the brain and the RMT VS Logically there must be a subjective experience amp8220qualiaamp8221 is the term used by neuroscience corresponding to each VS a feeling such as competency or pride or confidence etc all of which are semantically related to specific motivationsvalues The RMT taxonomy which was derived by AI and ML Machine Learning from program choices people make as measured by set top box data has three levels 265 VS which cluster into 86 Need States which cluster into 15 Motivations When we completed this work a few years ago it was eerie to see that the 15 Motivations we empirically derived from decades of work bear a startling resemblance to the 5 levels of Maslowamp8217s Hierarchy of NeedsPosted 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

Click to Make Your 2025 Contribution to Support the MediaVillage Education Foundation

Focus on Consumer Goals

Author

Publish date

Channel

Archived in

Bill Harvey

Jon Miller | Cofounder Marketo, Engagio | The Gumball Machine is Broken - Rethinking B2B Marketing - By Mike Linton

More Videos:

Click to Make Your 2025 Contribution to Support the MediaVillage Education Foundation

Focus on Consumer Goals

Enjoying This Commentary? There's More to Love

Bill Harvey

Jon Miller | Cofounder Marketo, Engagio | The Gumball Machine is Broken - Rethinking B2B Marketing - By Mike Linton

The payment was successful

Cookies