Tom Shapiro "Using Neuroscience to Optimize the Customer Acquisition Process"

Tom Shapiro's Inbound talk explains how neuroscience principles—especially emotional marketing, surprise/deviation, visual marketing, cognitive fluency, social proof, pricing psychology, choice reduction, and memory/associations—can be applied across the customer acquisition funnel to attract attention and improve conversion. He illustrates each principle with marketing case studies (Candy Sushi/VAT19, Apple, Nike, Blendtec, Dove, Domino’s, Basecamp, Instapage) and practical recommendations (use visuals and color, evoke emotions, simplify choices, be specific in CTAs).
Chapters
That's great. Thank you. It's great to see you and I hope you're having a fantastic time here at Inbound. So we're gonna talk about using neuroscience to optimize the customer acquisition process. So we're gonna be looking at how can you get more customers, right? How can you get them more efficiently? How can you get them more effectively? The more that we understand about your customers minds and their brains and how their brains operate, the greater you'll be able to connect with them more directly and engage with them more deeply. So we're going to look at many different facets of neuroscience today. We're going to look at some neuroscientific principles which are at the top of the funnel, grabbing people's attention in a very cluttered marketplace. And we're also going to look at the bottom of the funnel, converting them into customers. And some of the principles are going to apply throughout the funnel, which would be very helpful. Now, the other day I actually ran into a marketing campaign which completely grabbed me and sucked me in and made me fall in love with the brand. And I thought that it would be perfect to show you here, just an exemplary example of a marketing campaign that uses a lot of neuroscience. And it's none other than candy Sushi. Candy sushi. And this is real product, by the way. So the company is VAT 19 and they don't even make the candy sushi, they just. They sell it. And the way that they market it is through video. And their videos are hilarious. They put a huge amount of effort into their videos. And so, for example, with the candy sushi video, you have someone who's at a fine dining Japanese restaurant and very posh, and she's sitting at the table and she's eating her candy sushi, and the waiter comes over and hands her a glass of wine and then puts a kitty straw in it and then brings over the dessert menu on an Etch A Sketch and lights the candle on the table and it's a sparkler. And so they go to all lengths. They go all in in making their videos a ton of fun. And as we walk through the session today, you're going to see how this is actually incorporating many different aspects of neuroscience into their marketing. So we'll take a step back just so you know who I am. So I'm Tom Shapiro. I'm the founder and CEO of stratabeat, which is a branding, design and marketing agency in the Boston area. Actually started a neuromarketing group here in Boston a year ago. And so in just a year, we have over 230 members. And so I would like to just shout out to everyone if anyone is from Boston, if anyone is from New England, we'd love to have you join the neuromarketing group. It's completely free, it's totally educational. We have guest speakers all the time, whether it's from Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience or whether it's a professor from Boston University who's written several neuromarketing books. We've had several neuromarketing technology companies such as Affectiva and Imotion come in and demo their technology. So if you're in New England, we'd love to have you come. All the pizza you can eat, all the beer you can drink, and again, it's always free. So in my career I've worked with a lot of startups, I've worked with a lot of middle market companies and as mentioned, I've worked with over a dozen Fortune 500 companies such as AT&T and Hewlett Packard, Kraft Foods and Procter and Gamble. And so I'm taking that experience and I'll translate as much as I can of that here today for you. So why don't we start with the brain itself? Let's just understand what's going on inside our brains. And what you see is that our brains have over 100 billion neurons. But that in and of itself actually doesn't really do anything for us. It's actually the connections among the neurons which enables us to process information and to make decisions and to think and to store memories. And so it's these, what are called synapses. And there are trillions and trillions of these synapses going on inside your brain. And that's what makes us uniquely human. If we look at the power of this, compare it against the world's most powerful supercomputer, and the human brain is actually 30 times more powerful than, than the world's most powerful supercomputer. So very, very powerful, our brain packs a very powerful punch. And so then the next logical question is, okay, so how can we tap into all that power? And you might think that you're in full control of what you're doing. You go to a website, you're deciding what to click on, you're deciding what to buy, you're deciding to register for that event on a very conscious level, but actually that's just not the case. The vast majority of what's going on inside our brains operates on the subconscious level. 90% of our purchase decisions are based on the Subconscious. So inside our brains, what's happening is we process 11 million bits of sensory information on a subconscious level. And every second, compare that to the conscious mind. Under 100. 11 million, under 100. And so you can see, you have to ask yourself, is your marketing marketing to the conscious mind or is it marketing to the subconscious? And it can make a world of difference for your results. So we know that the brain is very powerful, right? And we know that we need to connect on a subconscious level. How do we do it? How do we connect with people on a subconscious level? Let's start by looking at emotions. So the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio ran some really interesting neuroscientific studies of people who had damage to the part of the brain that triggers emotions. In other words, these people couldn't feel emotions. They didn't feel anything. If you met them in the street, met them in the supermarket, you wouldn't know. But these people could not feel emotions. And what he found was very, very interesting and very important for your marketing is that they had an extremely difficult time making any decisions. They couldn't decide what to purchase, what to buy, what to do. And so flip that around. If your website, if your marketing right, if your social media, if your trade show booth, if your brochure is not evoking an emotional response out of your audience, guess what you're doing. You're making it physically and mentally difficult for your target audience to hire you, to purchase from you, to do business with you. It could be your own marketing that's doing this. That's how important emotional marketing is. And this has been proven in study after study. For example, if you look at emotional marketing versus non emotional marketing, if you look at tv, emotional marketing is three times as powerful. If we're looking at print, it's twice as effective. When we're measuring it by purchase intent, that's pretty significant. And if you look at the most badass marketers in our country who have been doing this for years and years and years, they all do this. They all evoke an emotional response in their marketing. Look at Apple. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple and What, it was 60, 90 days away from bankruptcy, what did he do? He launched the Think different campaign, right? Does this even tell you what they're selling? You have no idea what they're selling. It doesn't say anything about Apple itself. It doesn't tell you about their products, it doesn't tell you about their CPU speed. It you doesn't tell. It doesn't tell you about their hard disk space. It doesn't tell you how many employees they have, how many offices they have. All the things that you see so much in marketing focused on explaining in a very technically accurate way, what's the product, what's the service. Many marketers are very concerned with that. Steve Jobs was not. All he focused on was evoking an emotional response. Think different. It's 100% focused on evoking an emotional response. Think now you go back in time and when Apple launched the Apple store, it was very controversial. People thought that it was going to fail. I thought it was going to fail. They only had what, four products at the time. And people thought, oh, retail, they can't do it. But they focused on building relationships. They focused on an emotional bond with their customers. They wanted people to come into the store and bond with them. Right. At the time, the 800 pound gorilla was compusa. Massive buildings, right? Multi floored businesses. They were massive. And how did they market to their consumers? 10% off, 20% off, 30% off. Or they might talk about CPU speed and hard disk space. Right. And Apple went on to become the fastest growing retail chain in history. How about compusa? Right? Out of business, bankrupt. That's the power of emotional marketing. So always launch the like a girl campaign. Very, very powerful. I have a teenage daughter, I love this campaign and it's speaking to the fact that in this country, like a girl is a derogatory phrase. Like throw like a girl, punch like a girl, fight like a girl, run like a girl. And so they were out to change our language and to make like a girl a very powerful and empowering, empowering part of our language. So that during the most vulnerable years where girls are developing their self confidence and they're most likely to lose their self confidence during the teenage years, they're speaking to them and changing the language about what it means to be like a girl. Over 100 million video views on this campaign. Very successful. How about Nike, one of the most iconic marketing campaigns ever in this country. Just do it. Right? What does that tell you about their product? Nothing. Nothing. You don't even know what they're selling because again, they're 100% focused on evoking an emotional response. That's all this is intended to do. And, and that's why it's so powerful. Nike, I don't know if you know, it started with imported shoes. They didn't even make their own shoes. They imported shoes from Japan and they sold it out of the trunk of a Car. That's how Nike started. They're now over $32 billion in annual revenue. That's the power of emotional marketing. And companies are taking notice. Businesses are taking notice. The emotion recognition and detection market is expected to grow to over $22 billion by the year 2020. Apple bought an emotion detection company. Think about that. When is emotion detection, automatic emotion detection, coming to the iPhone, coming to the iPad? I would guess it's not too far away. Okay, so we understand the power of emotional marketing. What else? How else can we leverage neuroscience in order to connect more directly with our customers and engage with them more deeply? So I want to talk to you about deviation and surprise in the market today. We are inundated with marketing messaging, right? I mean, we're all aware of that. We're faced with, depending on the statistic that you read, between 3,000 and 5,000 marketing messages every single day. And that doesn't even include social media. It's just too much. So you consider that plus the fact that our minds are wandering all the time, right? We're not always focused on what's being presented to us. You might be pitching a prospective client. Do you really think they're listening to every word you're saying? That they're paying attention to every slide you're showing them? There's no way, on average, the human mind wanders 30% of the time. And that's conservative. It can be up to 70%. If you look at my daughter studying her homework, I would estimate it's 97.5%. So you have to shake things up. The brain is a prediction engine. That's what it is. It's trying to predict what's going to happen next. It feels most comfortable if it knows what's happening next. And that's because of the old brain. The old brain is all based on fight or flight, right? And it's a very primal part of the brain. And so the more that we can interrupt patterns, shake things up, get people noticed, that's how you can fight through the 3,000 to 5,000 messages that people are being bombarded with every day. Gregory Burns is a neuroscientist at Emory University. He ran some very interesting studies with a team where they found that the human brain is hardwired to love surprise. In fact, we love surprise more than stuff that we like. So think about that. Our brain enjoys surprise more than it enjoys stuff that you like. And so think about it. When you're talking with a friend and you start bursting out laughing, what is it? It's because there's an element of surprise, right? Your brain was trying to be a prediction engine. It failed, right? And so your friend deviated. Your friend surprised you with something and you burst out laughing. Think about the novels that you love, think about the movies that you love, think about the entertainment industry. It's all built on dis. Deviation and surprise. You see this in successful marketing all the time. So how many of you are aware of Blendtec? Okay, so maybe 20% of you. So Blendtec makes blenders. And it can be a difficult market to get into. Typically, if you're a blender company or you make blenders and you're trying to market blenders, what you would do is you would show some recipes that you're making in your blender and you would show what it can produce, right? It might be a smoothie, it might be grinding some vegetables, it might be grinding some meat. And that's typically what you would see in a blender commercial. And George Wright was hired to be the vice president of Blendtec back in the day. Had practically zero marketing budget, no money whatsoever. And he's walking through the building wondering, what in the world is he going to do? It's a blender. How's he going to market a blender and without a budget? And he's walking through the building and he notices all this debris all over the workshop floor. He says, what the heck's that? And he notices that the CEO of the company is blending a two by four. And he notices that there are marbles, there are diamonds, there are golf balls, there are iPhones. He's blending everything in sight. And so he decides, this is it. This is it. This is what we're going to show people. This is what we're going to show them, to deviate and shock and awe them and to surprise them. And so they have Will It Blend? Is one of their video series. Hugely successful. Help them become very profitable and grow very rapidly. Has over 50, 50 million video views. For a blender. For a blender. But every episode they're throwing something else into the blender that you would never, ever expect to blend. Like a crowbar, like the handle of a rake, like a Justin Bieber cd. It's different every time. Dove Real Beauty. So at the time that the Real Beauty campaign came out, advertising was saturated with extremely, extremely thin models. They were everywhere. If you wanted to advertise and you wanted women in your advertising and you wanted to express beauty, that's what you did. Except Dove didn't. And Dove proved that everyone's beautiful. All shapes and sizes are beautiful. Again, deviation from what absolutely everyone else was doing. Hugely successful for Dove. So Dominoes is a really interesting case. So they've been around for decades. And for decades, their marketing relied on the fact that they could deliver your pizza in 30 minutes or less. And we all loved that, right? We all loved it. And we would time it, and we would hope that they would come at 31 minutes just so we could get our pizza free. And so they did this for a very long time until online delivery became the norm. Everyone's doing delivery now. It's not exceptional. It's not a deviation from the norm anymore. So what did they do? Well, they realized that because they were so focused on delivery, some people felt that they didn't really care about their food. It was all about the delivery. And so they held focus groups. And what do you think? Some of the comments were coming out of the focus groups. One person said, your pizza tastes like cardboard. Another person said, your sauce is like ketchup. People were saying it was an embarrassment to pizza. It was horrible. So what did Domino's do? They told the world. They opened up, and they told the world everything. They told them about the cardboard comment. They told them about the ketchup comment. They told them everything. So I was fortunate enough to be on the phone with Russell Weiner, the former CMO and the president, the current president of Domino's, a few weeks ago, and he told me a really interesting story about this campaign. He said, look, if you're going to be authentic, right, you have to be all in. You can't be half in. You can't be 99% of the way in. You have to be 100% of the way in. And he said. So we fixed our pizza. We spent weeks and weeks with dozens of our top chefs revamping our ingredients, testing dozens and dozens of different cheeses to get the perfect mix and to improve the product itself, but said, it's more than just the product. It's the delivery. Right? That's part of the experience when you get your pizza, it has to be a fantastic experience. And so one time they had someone who called them up, called up Domino's and complained and. And said the cheese and the topping slid off the crust. And they said, hold on. Don't do anything. And they rushed a TV crew out to her house, and they filmed it, and they even named which franchisee it was. Do you think that any franchisee after that ever, ever had a bad delivery like that? So that's the level of authenticity, which is it plays right into deviation and just shocking us into no way did they really do that. They really said that. They're really this open. Do you think your company would be that open with negative feedback? Now here's the kicker. Here's where we're going to get the biggest bang for the buck. So we talked about the power of feelings, about the power of emotional marketing. Surprise amplifies your feelings. It's great if you're focused on emotional marketing to connect with your audience and you're doing it in a way that surprises them, that deviates from the standard way that everyone else is doing it. If you shock and awe them in an emotional way, you're golden. So I'm just going to beg you, please, in your marketing moving forward, really ask yourself, is this boring? And if it is, just ditch it. Ditch it completely and focus on evoking an emotional response and surprising the heck out of them. So in our marketing, there are really two things that it has to achieve. Anyone looking to purchase something, they're either looking to eliminate a pain and that could be a frustration. It could be something that, a challenge that they're working on. So they either want to eliminate a pain or, or in their minds, they're looking to achieve something, achieve a goal. They have an objective in mind and they need to achieve it. And so you have to ask your marketing, is your marketing clear? Are you removing pain or are you helping them achieve a goal? Because again, it's a direct connection to the way that they think now throughout the entire funnel. Visual marketing is extremely powerful and you're going to see why. So the human brain processes visual 60,000 times faster than text. I didn't say six times faster. I didn't say 6,000 times faster. I said 60,000 times faster. Think about that. Where else in your marketing can you get this kind of a return simply by moving from a more text based form of marketing to a visual form of marketing? And you might say, okay, well, so what, Tom, okay, our brains can process visuals more than text. That doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to buy from us more. Well, really interesting neuroscience study. This was documented in John Medina's book Brain Rules, which I would highly recommend if you haven't read it. And so there was a neuroscience team that traveled to the epicenter of wine country, Bordeaux in France. And at the University of Bordeaux, they brought together 54 of the world's best wine tasters. And they gave each of them a glass of red wine. Or so they Thought it wasn't red wine. It was white wine with odorless red dye in it. So the only difference, the only difference was the color. And in the wine world, you describe a white wine with a very particular vocabulary. You describe a red wine with a very different vocabulary. And so if you ask someone, what do you think of this wine and they described it to you, you would know immediately if they were talking about red wine or white wine. All right, so show of hands. Okay. Out of 54 of the world's best wine taster tasters, they think it's red wine. How many of them saw through the trick and accurately described it as white wine? Show of hands. If you think all of them guessed correctly. Anyone? Okay, Good. How about 50%? Right, 50%. Got it. Got it. Right. Show of hands. Okay, a few hands. Few hands. How about 25%? Okay, a few more hands. How about 5% more hands? Try zero. A big fat donut. None of them. Got it. That is the power of vision. That's how strong it is. That's why you need to look at your marketing today and make sure it's sufficiently visual. If you're overly reliant on text, you're getting killed. And you're killing yourself because you're not leveraging the way that your customer's brain operates. Everyone's brain operates this way. I don't care what industry you're in. I keep hearing from prospective clients, oh, well, we're in a technical industry, so therefore our brains are different. No, you have the same human brain. In neuroscience, there's something called pictorial superiority effect. So pse. And what this is, is the more visual the input that's coming into your brain, the better you're going to recognize it and the better you're going to recall it. So, for example, if you read text three days later, you'll remember about 10% of it. If it's visual, you'll remember 65% of it. So where in your marketing can you get a six, ten times better return? Another example, and again, this comes from John Medina's book, Brain Rules. People were shown 2,500 pictures, and a few days later, they were asked to recall them. Now, here's the thing. For every picture, they were shown the picture for less than 10 seconds. So 2,500 pictures, and they were shown each one for less than 10 seconds, and there was a 90% recall rate. That's how much our brains are attuned to vision. We are naturally attuned to remembering what we see. We see with our Brain, not with our eyes. 50% of the brain's processing power is dedicated to our vision system. 50%. So they looked at people's recall a year later. So, okay, after a few days, it's 90%, right? A year later, 63%. Still pretty amazing for 2,500 pictures where they only saw it for less than 10 seconds each. That's the power of visual. So along the same lines, let's go a little deeper. Color. How does color play into your marketing? Color increases brand recognition by 80%. Pretty massive. You see this all the time. Think about Starbucks. Think about Dunkin Donuts. They sell the same damn thing. Coffee, same thing. Okay, it might taste a little different, but they're selling the same damn thing. And if you saw this, even if I took out the logo and I just showed you green in a fraction of a second, you would know that I was talking about Starbucks. If I showed you orange and pink and brown in a fraction of a second, you wouldn't even have to see the words Dunkin Donuts. You wouldn't have to see their logo. You would know that I was talking about Dunkin Donuts. That's the power of color. And some brands really get it. So for example, Virgin Airlines, they have their stewardesses wear the brand color as their lipstick. They have their own branded lipstick. A company that does a fantastic job at using color is T Mobile. If you're in the mall and you're just walking down, down the hall, you will notice out of the corner of your eye something that's pink over there, right? Magenta. And you will know it's T Mobile. You won't even have to turn around and look in all of their marketing. They are 100% consistent. You might say, yeah, so is Starbucks. Yeah, but look at their CEO. Every single day he's wearing the brand colors. So you have to ask, is your CEO wearing the brand colors? Cognitive fluency. So this is very important. And again, this is very applicable throughout the entire customer acquisition process. So Google ran a study in 2012 where they wanted to see how quickly the human brain could recognize what's going on in a website and decide what it thought of that website. Was it a beautiful design? Was it not? Was it a professional looking website? Was it a credible company? Was it a trustworthy company? And this is before seeing testimonials, case studies, anything like that. It's just you come to the website and you see the homepage. So how long do you think it takes before the human brain recognizes all of these signals and Starts making decisions about your brand. Do you think it's, I don't know, 10 seconds. Show of hands, 10 seconds. Okay, how about five seconds? 100 seconds? Oh, 10 hundred. So it's 50 milliseconds. 50 milliseconds. It's crazy, right? It's crazy. Absolutely. So 50 milliseconds. And people are making judgments on the credibility of your company, the quality of your website, and they haven't read all of that beautiful copy that you've spent weeks and months crafting. Right. The power of vision, the power of color, the power of what we're going to be talking about here. Cognitive fluency. So what's happening is the retina is intaking visual input. Right. It's intaking information. And then it sends it back to the brain. And. And then the brain is trying to figure out what it's looking at. And it's a process. Think of it as an assembly line. It's an assembly line. Well, the faster that that assembly line moves and the faster that your brain recognizes what it's looking at, the more that it enjoys the experience. Think about that. You could have the same exact marketing message as a competitor. Yet if you're a little too complicated in the way that you're presenting your information and they're making it simple and easy, the consumer's going to have a better brand experience on your competitor's site. In that case, we like simple. The brain enjoys it. It turns into a good user experience or a bad user experience simply because of how complicated it is for the brain to decipher what you're trying to tell it. So just remember, kiss applies with all of your marketing. Keep it simple, stupid. Right? Just keep it simple. Okay. Trust. So with trust, I want to point to Robert Cialdini, who is the author of Influence, another great book that you should read if you haven't. And what he was looking at is the main elements that drive influence. And one of the things that he asks is, okay, so we all have watched tv, and we've all watched sitcoms and show of Hands. How many of you love the canned laughter in a sitcom? Okay, one person. Who's lying? Oh, you do? Okay, one person. So TV executives don't like it. They know that the vast majority of us don't like it. Sorry. So why would TV executives insist on canned laughter with practically every sitcom that we have to watch? If they know we hate it, it's because they know that we're going to laugh longer and we're gonna laugh louder. What is that? Why Is that it's social proof. We feel more comfortable if someone else is doing something, and then our brain gives us the green light and says, okay, you can do it too. If the brain doesn't detect that others are doing it, there's a little trepidation there. There's a little protection going on there. We don't want to get hurt. Right? So Basecamp is a project management software company. They do a great job on this page using social proof to gain trust. So last year alone, Basecamp helped over 285,000 companies finish more than 2 million projects. So what's even better than this social proof? I'm sorry, the first. The first. What was better? Why? Right, it's not a round number. Right? As round as the other number. And that's exactly this point here they go into even more detail on a paid search landing page. So Just last week, 8,050 companies got started with Basecamp. So defining the time period, defining the exact number of companies, and sometimes this is not a zero at the end, it might be 8,053. And the specificity helps to gain even more trust because that looks like a real number. If you look at how we react to the social proof, if someone is telling us something. So 88% of people actually trust an online review or word of mouth online as much as a recommendation from someone they know, family, friend, whoever it might be, 88%. It's very powerful. This whole concept of social proof is extremely powerful at helping us gain trust with people. It's just the way that our brains naturally operate in B2B. So if we look at B2B specifically, I believe the figure was 91 or 92% of purchases rely on some form of word of mouth. So again, social proof from others. Okay, so we're getting further and further down the customer acquisition process. Right. And we've tried to message them with social proof, and now we really want to convert them. And so let's talk about price. So how can we win them with price? So there have been studies done where the display of the same exact price influences whether you're going to buy the product or not, whether you think it's expensive versus whether you think it's cheap. And it's the same exact price. So the longer the number, if you include for 1000, if you include the comma, if you include the decimal, if you include the two zeros to the right of the decimal, guess what? It's going to look more expensive if you instead had 1k. And I would even argue if you had 1k and it was a lowercase K, people are going to feel like it's cheaper even though it's the same exact price. So when I started my career, I actually worked in Tokyo for four years at Panasonic. And one thing which I'll never forget was the pricing strategy that we had there. So anytime that we've released a new product, we would always release another one too. So one product would be priced at X, the next one would be more expensive. We didn't even care if anyone bought the more expensive one. The only reason for having the more expensive one was to anchor people's thoughts and their perception of the price into thinking, oh, this is cheap. Right. It was very powerful. And so I don't remember the exact figures, but it had to have been maybe 95% of sales or something like that were for the cheaper product. And so it's very powerful if you present another price next to a price, that's going to dictate how people perceive that price. That's just how the brain works. It's looking for anchors because without that there's no context. It can't figure out whether it's cheap, whether it's expensive, whether it's priced just right. It's very difficult to figure out. Very interesting study that was done by a professor at Columbia University and Stanford University. They went into a supermarket and they wanted to see what the effect on purchases would be if they offered more options to people. Right. So more options are good. Right. We go into the store and we see 30 different kinds of toothpaste. We see 50 different kinds of spaghetti sauce. Right. Is that good? Does that help us buy more? I see you shaking your head. You're right. It doesn't. It doesn't. It kills conversions. Kills conversions. So in this study, they were looking at jam. They were in the supermarket and for part of the time they offered six jars of jam. And they would offer free taste test. Right? You could go and you could taste whatever you want. You could eat. Eat whatever you want. So six jars here. At other times they offered 24 jars, so four times as much. So sales when they only had six jars, sales increased by six times. Six times over. The number of orders themselves increased by 10 times. And so if you're worried about offering your clients enough options, just be careful. The way the human brain operates, and this goes back to cognitive fluency as well. Keep it simple, right? Don't over complicate things and don't drive them towards analysis. Paralysis memory. So the way that we remember information is, we hard code it into our brain, but we encode it into our brain. And the human memory is very different than computer memory. Right? Right. With computer memory, you can put in a search and the computer will go find that one thing, and it could have been from five years ago, it could have been from 10 years ago. It doesn't matter. It will go into the database and it will find it. With the human brain, we're a lot more complex because of brand associations or just associations in general. So when we have a memory, it's not just remembering, say, the number three or not just remembering, say at a wedding, what the groom was wearing or the flowers. We remember all of it. We remember everything. And so if you pick out one element, the brain automatically starts utilizing the synapses that we were talking about before. Right. And bringing in lots and lots of data. It's not like a computer. So what does this have to do with your marketing? Well, think about it. If you're isolating your marketing messaging, right? If you're isolating what you're trying to tell people and the way that you're trying to communicate it, that could be very limiting. You want to try and have very concrete brand associations. And think of it this way, build an ecosystem of associations. An ecosystem. You have to have multiple associations because that's how the human brain works. We're not like a computer. The Baader Meinhof phenomenon, and I'm probably butchering the pronunciation of that, but this is where, for instance, you're interested in buying a car. So you go to the car dealership and you decide that you want that really hot red sports car. And then on your way back home, you see that red sports car everywhere. And then the next day you see it, and the next day you see it everywhere. Why hadn't you noticed it ever before? And so this leads into the mere exposure effect. What you want to do is you want your brand to be available as much of the time as possible. Because just because you're available doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to take notice the first time or the second time or the third time. But if you use emotional marketing, if you use shock and awe, if you use visual marketing, if you use color effectively, if you're using all of these to capture them, then guess what? The more that you're building this ecosystem of associations, they're going to notice more and more calls to action. So with calls to action, again, we're at the bottom of the funnel now. We want to convert now Very powerful thing. So this is instapage. They are a landing page builder and their call to action is Build my page now. Is it Learn more? No. Is it get started? No. Very, very specific. The most powerful landing page platform, Build My page Now. Specificity works with calls to action. When you're ready to convert, be specific also, especially online, make sure visually that you're providing some kind of contrast or at least test it. Oftentimes, with design, what looks best is what blends in really well. Sometimes you need to contrast the colors. And remember, in this country, 9% of males are colorblind. And so you can't count on absolutely everyone being able to recognize things where they blend in. Nine, nine. So we've looked at many different facets of neuroscience and how it can really help your marketing in connecting more directly with your target audience and connecting and engaging more deeply. And if you find that your current marketing is just not pulling its weight, if you're frustrated that you're not pulling in enough customers and you just feel like you're stuck. One of the things I do want to offer you today is I'm writing a book. It's called Rethink youk Marketing. And just for you, here at Inbound, it's exclusively for you. I'm offering the first three chapters for free. You can download it at rethinkyourmarketing.com inbound16. So nice and simple. And then the book will come out later this year. But it's filled with a lot of stories from really intelligent marketers. I mentioned that I was talking with the president of Domino's Pizza. His stories are incorporated. The CMO at Tough Mudder, his stories are incorporated. And so a lot of both big brands as well as smaller brands, local brands, national brands, a lot of insights as to how you can get more customers through your customer acquisition process. Thank you very much.
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