See the show notes for this episode: S 01 | Ep 54 The Role of Social Proof and Defaults in Influencing Consumer Choices | Show notes.
0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to a very exciting episode of Experience-focused Leaders! I'm delighted to introduce you to Tim Ash, a highly rated keynote speaker, presenter, and author of two really fascinating books: “Unleash Your Primal Brain” and somewhat related and unrelated—we'll cover that more—“Landing Page Optimization” with over 50,000 copies sold effectively. The Bible of Conversion Optimization translated into six languages. Tim, welcome to the pod!
0:00:37 - Tim Ash
Thanks, Alex, great to be with you!
0:00:40 - Alex Shevelenko
Listen, I didn't do the full justice to your background because you're not just writing books. You actually ran an agency that was focused on optimization and a lot more for driving growth for marketing organizations. And you're advising CMOs in top companies now as their truth-teller. But tell us a little bit about the background of what drove you to write books that are, frankly, not related. As we discussed earlier, you wouldn't expect an evolutionary psychology book and a conversion optimization book to come from one person at the same time.
0:01:21 - Tim Ash
Well, you would if you knew my background. So I attended UC San Diego and double majored in computer engineering and cognitive science. I've always been interested in the brain and I almost finished my PhD. I quit seven years in when I was working on AI and neural networks—I guess what would be called data-driven modeling these days—and then I started a digital marketing agency. One of the OGs, you could say, in conversion rate optimization, called SiteTuners. I ran that for about 20 years and over the course of our work there we worked with the Expedia's, Nestle's, Google's of the world on down to much more nimble, high-energy companies. And we created 1.2 billion in value for those companies that we can document.
And the root of it, where most of the value came from, was from what I guess you'd describe as neuromarketing or evolutionary psychology applied to decision-making and consumer choices. That's such rich ground that I'd say anybody who wants to have a good marketing career should really understand evolutionary psychology and how we make decisions. So I guess you'd say I've come full circle, and the latest book, “Unleash Your Primal Brain: Demystifying How We Think and Why We Act” is basically the operating system for all human beings and what we picked up along the way in our evolution. Very readable, with no jargon in there, and it can definitely be applied to marketing. But I found it to be the biggest source of wins for our clients when I ran the agency.
0:03:03 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, let's dig into this intersection of the two. So I read a book called “Neural Marketing” at some point because I was really fascinated by both areas that we've described: marketing and, obviously, what drives us. I think in human behavior there are a lot of components. There's the cognitive but there's also social. Behavioral science driving that. I was always fascinated by combining those two. So guide us a little bit on, first of all, how you define your own marketing. When you advise your clients now, how do you integrate all of the components of the broader human species? It's not just the evolutionary biology that drives us but also the environment that we live in right now.
Obviously, they're all connected, but I'd love to hear your story, starting with your marketing and then translating it into something that's universally relevant.
0:04:07 - Tim Ash
Okay, that was a lot of different questions, but I'll try to unpack one at a time. My definition of neuromarketing is basically psychology applied to marketing, and psychology is rooted in our evolution. Evolutionary psychology in particular is an important branch. The way to think about it and the way I structured my book is we picked up a lot of things from very early life that all life on earth share. For example, dopamine. How to determine whether to expend energy in the pursuit of a goal. That's a pretty universal kind of thing. Fruit flies have it and humans.
And then there are things at the end of our evolutionary arc that are very bizarre and uniquely human and would allow us to take over the whole planet, basically.
And so you have to understand what part of the decision-making is making the decision. It could be a very primitive part or it could be a very human part. So the arc of evolution is important, but then when you're applying it to a complex environment, you have to basically think what is our kind of deep-seated survival level goal at the moment? Is it “I'm hungry”, “I want to mate”, or “I want to run away from danger”? That determines what we pay attention to and which environmental stimulus we have a strong reaction to. So those emotions are essentially prioritizing the right choice for us. This happening I guess you could say subconsciously, completely automatically, beyond our understanding, but it's working 24 hours a day to make decisions for us. The rational brain literally cannot make decisions. That part of the brain is only on a very small percentage of the time and gives us options. But our emotions, our embodied response to it, including our memories, our current state, and everything, are what actually do the deciding.
0:06:06 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it! So what I'm hearing is you're not dismissing the social and all these environments that we live in. But you're saying they are just the later stage maybe or some smaller portion of our decision-making process that starts at the core of your crocodile brain, and then it continues. That's the basic idea.
0:06:31 - Tim Ash
We're the most social animal on the planet, we formed the largest social groups and we literally can't survive by ourselves. So it's very important for us to be loyal to the tribe. A lot of things come out of that. For example, it's more important for us to be a good team player than to be right. So we'll actually override our own direct life experience in order to fit into a group and propagate the cultural package of that group. You see that in our politics today and in a lot of other venues. But the point is we need to be tribal and good team players to survive and a lot of times that's what's actually driving our decision-making.
And being cast out of a tribe and excommunicated is actually the worst thing that could happen to us from a survival standpoint, even though the stakes aren't the same anymore.
0:07:23 - Alex Shevelenko
So if we take a leap into conversion rate optimization, it's fun to go back and forth between these two concepts. This would be a call to action that says 84% of customers, just like you, have selected us for X, Y, and Z reasons. So you're kind of trying to connect. Some calls to action will signify social acceptance. Certainly, social proof is important.
0:07:52 - Tim Ash
Social proof is critical. I mean, you're standing in front of two restaurants. One has a line out the door, the other one's empty. Which one are you gonna go for? Actually, you'll wait in line, unless you're from the former Soviet Union like us, when you don't want to wait in lines anymore. But you'll stand in line because that's social proof. That's the only indicator you have of whether something has quality, is popular or acceptable. You won't go into the empty one, even though you could have a table right now.
The fact is, we can't do much about it. So there's a famous study. In this retail environment, you could buy French wines or German wines. I know you spend a lot of time in France. In the background, they play either stereotypically German oompah music or French romantic ballads. And people would buy more French wine or German wine based on the background music. They'd get skewed in either direction. But if you ask them, “Why did you buy that Riesling?”, they wouldn't say it's because of the German music in the background.
So we are being manipulated all the time and we can't do anything about it. Casinos are notorious for this. They'll pump oxygen in. They will show you the slot machine wheel on almost two sevens and half a seven — “I almost got there!” That makes you chase the goal even more. So the reality is we're manipulated and we can't do much about it, because all of this happens in our subconscious brain. We can't think about every decision we make all day long. In fact, we make poorer decisions later in the day, when we've used up our reserves of what's called executive function, our conscious thought.
0:10:04 - Alex Shevelenko
We're talking about kids. How do you manage, for example, their informational diet?
There are probably some mediums that are a lot more seductive to making easy kinds of intuitive decisions and some that are suboptimal, right? Speaking of environments. You turn on Netflix. You then immediately go. Your brain goes, “Oh, okay, let's go get some food from the fridge.”
You've got the serve combo. Behaviors can not be “naughty behaviors”, and I wonder to what degree we educators can help nudge people in the direction that may be good for our business but also is good for them in the long run.
0:11:19 - Tim Ash
Yeah, and now we're getting into the realm of ethics a little bit, and it's an important one. We can do this for good or evil. You can divide people and make them hate each other and think of other groups as subhuman and commit genocide. That's one way to do it. Or you could say, hey, all healthy eaters in the school cafeteria, I mean, just put the fruit and the vegetables at the beginning of the line where I'm more likely to grab them when I'm hungry, not at the end of the line after I got my dessert and chocolate milk. So there are ways to nudge behavior primacy.
0:11:54 - Alex Shevelenko
So you get using psychological concepts like primacy and whatever to encourage people in the direction of what's going to be good for them.
0:12:07 - Tim Ash
Yes. Or, for example, there have been a lot of effective ways to get people to save for retirement. We tend to discount the future because it's not likely to work out the way we plan it anyway. But if you have an automatic, anytime you get a raise, let's put half of your increase in your pay into your retirement fund. It happens automatically. That's a great way to help people save. So you can influence positive decisions with marketing. There's nothing wrong with that.
0:12:39 - Alex Shevelenko
So back to the executive function concept. Let's assume we are reasonably ethical, but there's still some degree of education that people need or going on a journey, personalizing it's to commit to certain behaviors. Because one thing was your advice, we convert, but then there is a difference between converting and behavioral change, and one of the thought processes for us, as we work a lot, was employee benefits, for example, education and related to making the right investment decisions and so on. How do you help people really understand how to take advantage of what's good for them?
There's a lot of things that companies pay for that people don't use because they don't know it exists, they don't engage with it. How it could be relevant to them and their lifestyle? It's a one-time event, in November, choosing your benefits before the New Year. So this is a very real example how companies spend a lot of money and they're getting relatively minimal outcome from some of the investments.
How do you nudge people towards the right behavior and make sure they stay on the right track. And educating, internalizing it. There's a difference between short-term conversion, like clicking on a clickbaity something, and actually saying, oh, this is a step that I want to be making.
0:14:32 - Tim Ash
So I don't, you know, conversion has this bad reputation of you're just trying to sell me something and shove me down the sales funnel and I look at conversion events. It could be anything. It could be a click, like you say. It could be filling out a form, a phone call, it could be signing up for something or consuming content. Those are all conversion events, depending on the context. But they have to be lined up around this idea of a customer journey.
The sales funnel is the simplest form of it. You've probably heard of awareness, interest, desire and action. You have to take people where they are, so you can't say, buy now when they don't even know they have a problem. So a lot of content is neglected for the top of the funnel. And if you create content for that awareness and interest stage before making the decision, even before your company can financially benefit from it, that's where I really need the support. And once you lock me into you guys as a good source of information, then I'm much more likely to stay with you.
I think that most marketers compete for the bottom of the funnel, which gets real expensive and has to be just noise and interrupt-driven. And they make the mistake of actually not helping people throughout their whole life cycle of their problem. To answer your question about how to get people to adopt better behaviors, there's two specific strategies that I would lean into. One is the default. What is the default? The default should be whatever makes the most profit for your business and is of the most benefit to your clients. So a famous case of this is, for example, organ donation In California, where we spend some of our time. You have to opt in to being an organ donor on your driver's license.
Only a small percentage of people do that. I forget which European country. I believe it's Austria. Their default is an opt-out. You're automatically an organ donor unless you choose to opt out of it, and they have a much higher uptake rate and a lot more people benefit from organ donation as a result. So we consider, what is my default? What happens if they do nothing? Because most people will do nothing most of the time. Our brain is a lazy energy conserving machine.
So what happens if I literally do nothing? That should be the suggested or best case option.
0:17:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Architecture matters a lot. Smart defaults is sort of the answer.
0:17:06 - Tim Ash
And then the other part is social pressure. If you externalize an accountability, then people are much more likely to do it and commit to it and carry through. So if you have a workout buddy, I'll see you at the gym on Tuesday at 8 am. God, I feel horrible this morning. I don't want to go, but my friend's going and so it makes you accountable. So anytime you make people externalize their and other people can inspect the results of what they're doing, they're more likely to keep their commitments.
0:17:40 - Alex Shevelenko
So that's back to that. Using the social pressure, not losing the reputation.
0:17:47 - Tim Ash
Are you a person of integrity? Do you keep your word?
0:17:50 - Alex Shevelenko
You kind of reduce complexity to some degree. What's interesting to me is you didn't bring up educating people that much. You brought it up in the sense of telling about the problem, but there's a little bit of a tension between removing friction and then going deep into the problem and I'm curious, how do you recommend to solve it?
And I'll actually quote you from one of the interviews from the landing page optimizations book you said, you have to have a singular focus and discipline and be very clear about what desired conversion action is on your landing page, everything else should be de-emphasized or ruthlessly eliminated. So on the face of it, I'm totally in with you.
But at the same time, this educational component. I'm gonna have to read, I'm going to have to think, or there is a tension between eliminating content and actually having some substance that people believe in. And we work a lot with people around that. It's a challenging problem to me at least.
0:19:25 - Tim Ash
You quoted me out of context and I just want to reframe it a little bit. So, when I'm talking about calls to action on a landing page or on a website, if you have 17 things I might want to do on that page and you don't prioritize them for me, guess who the idiot is? Not me for not doing any of them, it's you for creating that choice architecture. So you should have a for every page on your site, whether it's your homepage or a specific landing page for a campaign. You should have priorities, of which conversion actions are most valuable to you. If you make more money if I call you, then make the toll free number more prominent rather than fill out this form. You should be very clear about visually and in terms of screen real estate and emphasis how to prioritize the conversion actions. And there it's choice overload that I was basically commenting about.
With regard to educating people and thinking about more them investing time in it, well, that seems a little pedantic to me. You're insisting that they pay attention and they'll only pay attention if they care. So one of the things you should do and I think your content platforms, for example, help solve this is have it in a lot of different media. So, okay, you can have a slide deck, you could have a PDF, you can have a recording of this as a video. You could have an interactive quiz or a guide. Whatever format they want to consume it make it easy for them, and also breaking it up into bite-sized chunks. So when I did my LinkedIn learning class on neuromarketing, each little section is three minutes. You have three minutes. If you say it's going to be a one-hour class, well, I don't have an hour, but I have three minutes and I can watch that next section. So breaking it up even if it's long form content into bite-sized chunks is critical because, as you said, people have the attention span of a lit match these days.
0:21:18 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, a little goldfish on cocaine, exactly. Probably something like that. What you're saying, fundamentally, is shrink the change and shrink the informational overload as much as possible. But give me an easy set of ways to continue.
0:21:42 - Tim Ash
Three more minutes. That feels like attention resets. If you're looking about video, anything like that's serial, for example, audio or video, we watch that linearly. Okay, you need to have an attention reset in under seven or eight minutes.
0:21:59 - Alex Shevelenko
You have to break it up into chunks, at most that long seven or eight minutes. Let's dive in, let's apply your book to the Netflix paradigm, right? People can spend hours, obviously, watching Netflix late into the night, when their decision making powers are its weakest. The series itself creates these moments that create tension and and breaks to watch, or how do we think about it?
0:22:33 - Tim Ash
They're just enjoying it. That's entertainment. That's something we're doing voluntarily for, whatever our motives are to decompress, to escape, we identify with the storytelling or love the story. Stories are very powerful, separate subject, happy to talk about that and their evolutionary purpose. But no, those are things that we even enjoy. Looking for stuff to watch on Netflix, I'll spend time looking for a show the same thing in terms of looking for books or something we enjoy doing that is inherently enjoyable. I don't think that's the same as a marketing decision. Most marketing decisions are based on “I have a problem”. I'm not sure exactly what it is. Spend a lot of time doing it. In fact, the right answer is spend as little time as possible solving my problem. This is not an enjoyable experience like watching Netflix, which I do voluntarily.
0:23:37 - Alex Shevelenko
So you're distinguishing maybe between business decisions, B2B or some sort of a complex. But what about like buying a car right, like, how would you consider the fact that some people just spent enormous amounts of hours researching that? Is that because they're enjoying it? Is it a risk of making their maximizers and they risk making you afraid of making a wrong decision? I mean, people go research on Amazon, things that cost $7 for hours, looking at various options, like there's that?
0:24:10 - Tim Ash
That may not be appropriate and so the way to think about it is what's the magnitude of the impact of the decision? Sometimes we can't even tell that in real time. So, in terms of consumer individual decisions, there's a clear hierarchy. The most important choice you'll ever make in your life is your spouse, or the person you choose to have kids with, if that's your objective, house, car. So they're big decisions. It makes sense to spend time researching, evaluating, managing the risks and so on, because the consequences are long lasting and severe. Let's put it that way. For smaller stuff, yeah, it doesn't make sense for me to optimize a lot of things. I'd rather go to the 7-Eleven, which is geographically close and that's their whole thing, and overpay for it. I'm not going to go to Target to buy a box of Tic Tac Mints, I'll just go to 7-Eleven.
0:25:04 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. So what you're saying is assuming people behave rationally and align.
0:25:10 - Tim Ash
Well, they don't. That's what I'm saying.
0:25:12 - Alex Shevelenko
They don't do that. Well, what's fascinating to me is that there are, I'm forgetting which book it's from, I think it's Jonathan Hayes wrote there's maximizers and satisfizers, and there's people who are maximizers. They actually do go in the cerebral mode, or they think they do, and they start tuning up and studying everything and they're really like, risk averse of making a suboptimal decision and they tend to be very stressed people. And then there's some that are satisfizers, like, hey, this is good enough, I'll go to 7-Eleven type of things. What I'm hearing you say is, well, look, depending on the decision you're making, you may become a little bit more maximizer or satisfizer. But I'm curious what your take, what your research talks about that.
0:26:10 - Tim Ash
Well, first of all, let me restate this this is chapter one in my book, which is The lie of rationality. We can't make logical decisions. All the rational brain can do is give us options. They're automatically prioritized by the strength of our emotional reaction. So it's like, “I need to do this or I need to avoid this.” The ranking is happening emotionally. There've been people that have had various brain issues, and if that part of the brain is separated from the rest or doesn't exist, they literally can't make decisions. So there is no such thing as Mr. Spock, logical decision ever.
How much energy do we devote to deciding on a goal or decision? Well, it depends on the context. So, for example, I say, okay, Alex, you're on a shoe buying site and find the best hiking shoes. Okay, here's a page with 20 different ones. You're hurrying out the door and you need them for your hiking trip next week. They need to arrive by Amazon. Okay, versus, hey, Alex, you need to find the running shoes or hiking shoes in size 10 and a half that are the cheapest ones on this site, or I will kill you.
Now you're going to approach that context very differently. You may spend hours looking at that website, so it's really your motivation. Which goal is salient? A lot of other factors that go into it, but it's not a personality trait. Yeah, some people may be a little more OCD in terms of doing things. But the right answer is satisficing and that's has been shown economically. Which is, once you've seen a large enough sample size, pick the next best one that comes along. That's shown to be pretty close to optimal decision making.
0:27:59 - Alex Shevelenko
Optimal decision but then you're still saying, to do that, you need a sample size.
0:28:03 - Tim Ash
That's large enough. You need a sample size so you get a good sense for things but your point, whether you're maximizing or you're or you're satisfying.
0:28:12 - Alex Shevelenko
Bottom line is you're still kind of. What you're doing is you're just projecting your emotions and you're framing them in a little bit of what you think is a rational decision.
0:28:24 - Tim Ash
That people make a decision and you can see that on brain scans and happening in their head. Then some fraction of a second later, the conscious language part of the brain kicks into rationalizing. And so Robert Heinlein, a science fiction author, once said, man or mankind, man is not a rational animal, man is a rationalizing animal. So whatever comes out of your mouth as an explanation for something, that's bullshit and that's not why you made the decision. That's just an alibi after the fact. It's fascinating.
0:28:57 - Alex Shevelenko
We do see xactly what you're describing in some of the content that we present. There's certain things where, if you add a background video that creates a certain sense of awe or an emotional connection that people just go immediately. They go, I love this. This is bringing me my ideas to life. This is making me look good. They immediately project themselves or they think of themselves, I'm a very time efficient person. And then they see dynamic navigation and they go, oh, this is me. But the way they justify it, like typically, we look at our clients the way they justify oftentimes is like, oh well, I could see the analytics and the ROI, but they're buying the initial reaction very much. Oh, this is in line with how I want to be in the world, so this fits into my vision
0:29:51 - Tim Ash
Exactly, and I would say that don't use focus groups necessarily to decide what to do, because people are there, they're getting the payoff for being evaluated, probably paid or paid attention to as part of your focus group. When we used to do usability testing on websites when I ran my agency, we would do two very important things. One was time constrain it. You have 30 seconds to do the following. Second watch what they do. Don't talk to them in the middle or have them talk in the middle of it. Just watch their actions and then, if you want to ask a follow-up focus group question or two, that's fine afterwards, but just know that you may get some insights from it, but that's not what really happens. So, time constrain it because most people, like we said, have very short attention spans and watch their actions. It's as simple as that.
0:30:55 - Alex Shevelenko
It's funny when you said time constrain it, I thought what you're going to go with is if you time constrain it, you don't have time to get your rationalizing, overthinking brain to start. Thinking about what you've asked and you're going with the natural instinct. Before you can explain why that is. And the reason that this makes a lot of sense is we capture what people do on screens through the software, like, do I get to this page? What do I do it? Or do I click on this button? Do I keep hovering around and exploring things like it's in an aisle in a bookstore or do I move somewhere else immediately?
And that's really very interesting insight, because if you do an interview of that person, some people would claim that they've done something that they haven't even accessed the digital experience and other people, they're rationalizing it after the fact so there's just like seeing what people do versus what they want to tell you. What they want to do, those are two very different things and it goes back to Ogilvy talking about those concepts. You really gotta see the behavior. Is it really the time constraint that gives you the clarity of the gut primal crocodile brain or so?
0:32:25 - Tim Ash
I feel like my judgment is that you keep coming back to this idea of more time. Let us be more rational and deliberate. First of all, that's not the case, so we're not doing it. For that reason, when I would put a time constraint on some kind of usability test, it would mainly be to simulate the fact that you don't give a crap, which is most of the time how we're interacting with websites. So it's to lessen the attention or the care that you put into it, not the rational part of the mind. The rational part doesn't exist, so the time has nothing to do with that, but it's to just simulate the lack of attention that most people do most tasks with online.
0:33:11 - Alex Shevelenko
So let's take a step back. Using what you've done. Before I make a convert in something that I don't know anything about, you need to educate me about the problem. I need to feel like it's a relevant problem to me. You need to keep my interest in it and then maybe at some point I convert. We build trust or whatnot. We believe a lot in the mindshare. If you create distractions, like a lot of content could create distractions. I'm looking at a PDF that's theoretically very interesting to me, I need to make an important decision, but then they were enough to provide a video. I click on that video and then we see we have data that people never come back to that experience because the videos in YouTube and then they get an ad and they get like distracted and move on to the next thing, and then they have to switch gears and come back to the original site that it is, which is a different environment.
Which B2B company is going to outperform YouTube algorithm that's optimized to distract you? I don't know they have to be very good. So that was very interesting driver for us to say, well, if I'm interested in the topic, if our clients are interested in learning something, we need to nurture that in a very precise way where we give them this video medium that they like, that gives them a break, maybe from reading, maybe humanizes something for a story but doesn't distract them. And then, when they're done with the video, they're able to move on further, get more mindshare and then eventually get to that conversion persuasion event. So that's our hypothesis and the data that we're seeing validates it.
What really triggered me a little bit is that, like, remove all the noise. I know you meant it towards the end of the of the funnel, when you're driving, when you're really about the driving event. But to me, there's some noise, some mindshare, some kind of progressive levels of education that I feel like we need to have in order to stand out because there's so much information.
0:35:46 - Tim Ash
So again, you're bringing up a lot. Let me see if I can unpack a little bit of it.
First of all, I don't see the conversion event as at the bottom of the funnel. I see a customer journey sideways and micro conversions to advance you along. And all of those are important. If any of them break, even if it's earlier in the traditional funnel, you lost them. So it's not about the get them buy or sign up. That's not the conversion action.
There are dozens potentially of conversion actions, including consuming content along the way. Okay, take them where they are, map the whole customer journey and have stuff, for God's sakes. Have stuff for people early in the process when you can't make money off of them. They still need the help and no one's offering that because they're all trying to make money off of them and just kind of squeeze that tit at the bottom of the sales funnel and try to make money come out. I call that greedy marketer syndrome. Don't do that. Address the whole customer journey and especially, like you say, the awareness, interest, educational stuff. That's really high or early in the customer journey. Do not neglect that. And the micro conversions consuming that content eventually lead to more marketing, qualified leads or something.
0:37:02 - Alex Shevelenko
I get it. So what you're saying and thank you for pushing me on this is that the you're treating that educational step as itself a micro conversion event towards building trusts absolutely building establishing some sort of bi-directional and momentum.
0:37:20 - Tim Ash
You're sliding them along that customer journey instead of trying to make them jump. Do standing broad jumps to get to the next step. That's important..
I still feel that there's this sense that you need to spoon feed them a lot of content and yes, you do, but it needs to be appropriate to the stage in the funnel and their role. So, for example, when you're talking about B2B as opposed to consumer purchase, the consumer purchase is the personal risk to me. Okay, I might lose money, it might not work for its intended purpose. I could have gotten it cheaper somewhere else. It's those kinds of decisions. When you overlay that on a B2B purchase of a significant amount, then you also have company risk. This could blow up the way that our company operates. I could lose my job. That's another layer of it.
So it's not like B2B buyers are different than consumers, but B2B buyers have other risks that they have to mitigate. So a lot of the content we developed for our B2B clients when I ran the agency was role specific. Here's for the CFO, the life cycle costs of doing this system. Here's for the end user, here's for the person maintaining the system. Okay, so each of them need to be addressed individually and have their own concerns and customer journey.
0:38:51 - Alex Shevelenko
So that's the difference, I would say, is it needs to be role-based and within each role there's that customer journey, there's your own journey, and so this is really fascinating, because one of the customers that we really admire, they created something that they called marketecher, in their words, but it's effectively you could pick the persona, like, pick the type of company you are and then, within that, you pick the persona that you are in that company.
So you're going to like a level deeper and then the next level, you're going down the business goals that you have as that particular persona, because they could have multiple business goals, and what was interesting to us is they, they weren't sure what you're gonna pick, like, people claim that they'll have some personalization technology that will immediately figure out who you are and what you want, but I think that maybe works in B2C much better than in B2B, because, you know, these things are messy and sometimes, when you're making a decision, you need to consider multiple personas, if you're the sponsor of the product, you need making a decision, you need to consider multiple personas, you're the sponsor of the product, you need to to present the information to the CFO and the CIO, so it's what they did.
Really interesting is they let you choose the areas that you will care about the most, and there are a couple of choices they made like, hey, I'm going to get to the golden carrot, the golden, whatever, the gold at the end was that I'm going to get to exact information that I need. But I also know that if I have a different role, I have different people on my team, that they have similar journeys and I could access them. What is your thought about something that's very narrow, not noisy and just specific to that persona? Or getting this initial architecture from which you can then choose who you are and what you care about as a way of presenting. It almost feels like there's two different philosophies.
0:41:08 - Tim Ash
Well, I mean, those are similar to what I talk about. And again in my landing page optimization book I talk about roles and tasks and decomposing things along those customer journey lines, but for each role. So there's nothing here that's contradictory. What you just said to me says, you have a person, they have a customer journey. You need to address their concerns at every stage of that customer journey. I mean, it seems completely in line to me, so, but you have to design it for those roles and tasks. I hate the word persona. That came out of the advertising world and it's sort of like if you're doing media buying, well, you know, Jane is a professional who works in finance and likes to hang out in bars in Soho on Friday nights. Well, maybe that helps you visualize a Jane-like segment, but it's completely useless because you're not addressing the real needs in the role. So I think role and task-based is a much more powerful way to think about it, as opposed to personas. They're just the kind of shorthand for communicating for within an ad agency.
0:42:15 - Alex Shevelenko
So what I'm hearing is you generally, as long as the atomic level is a role in the task it's okay, to combine those. You know there's three roles in this particular domain. Here's a master landing page, so to speak. And from that master or master presentation, and from there you go.
0:42:43 - Tim Ash
Wait, sorry, I can see where you're going with this. It's not a master presentation. The landing page is raise your hand. Who are you? I'm the CFO. I'm the end user of this system. I'm the administrator or maintainer of this system. That's it. There's no information on that page, and then you take them to subsites that address their specific role in customer journey. There's no general combined information. The first question you ask is who the hell are you?
0:43:08 - Alex Shevelenko
So we know how to relate to you, so you set the never jump them up to that.
0:43:12 - Tim Ash
Yeah, you never jump them up to a more general scope after that. You keep them within the scope that's specific to their role and never let them escape which, by the way, like you're talking about the YouTube videos, all of your videos should be embedded in your site. You never take them off your site.
0:43:26 - Alex Shevelenko
That would be crazy. What you're implying is that you never let them off. What if there are different stakeholders? I could be a stakeholder, but then my customer in the value that I deliver to them is sometimes even more important, frankly legit.
0:43:56 - Tim Ash
And so, for example, I used to run an international conference series on conversion rate optimization, called Conversion Conference, in the US and Europe for about 14 years, and one of the things we had was, hey, a guide for getting your boss to approve you coming to this conference. It wasn't for the end user. They want to come to the conference. They had to justify it to their boss. I'm going to learn a bunch of stuff. I'll be upgraded. I'll be more valuable. I can share my learnings with the rest of the team.
We were giving them a guidebook for how to deal with another role, so how to sell this inside your company. If it's a big B2B sale with a high ticket attached to it, there's probably three or four decisions. Gord Hotchkiss had a great little book I don't know if it's still available called The Buyer's Fear Project, and he was saying things get really complicated when you have more than three or four decision makers and likelihood of sale goes down. It's largely because you in one role are not effective at communicating to someone about their role and what they care about and their risk factors. So it's really important that you have other ways to sell inside your company and pre-prepared materials to hand to people in other roles.
0:45:07 - Alex Shevelenko
We call it champion enablement. Some champions don't know what they don't know, so you want to give them as much of the easy playbook to be successful.
0:45:23 - Tim Ash
Michelle is the CFO. Here's a whole packet or whatever I can send to her. Great, I don't need to know that, but I have to trust that the material is quality enough and targeted at the CFO position in this context.
0:45:40 - Alex Shevelenko
So I think, inadvertently, you brought up one of the biggest challenges in the B2B world today that there are a number of decision makers increasing and so that's why we're going back to how do you architect this kind of who am I and what are my roles and responsibilities? Or, like it feels, even for relatively tactical kind of point solutions, right now they need to be approved by historically it. It was like in technology sales. It's like HR or sorry, it needs to approve something, and then the CFO and the buyer, and now there's like 15 other tools that we're using and the owners of those tools and the end users are the champions. So we need to do the end user buy-in, the sponsors, and it feels complex. Do you see that that has become more complex over time?
0:46:43 - Tim Ash
There's a tension and I forget Scott used to keep this marketing technology dashboard.
0:46:52 - Alex Shevelenko
I think they're like 8 000 or 12, we had Scott on and he talked about it like there's a lot but there's consolidation. Exactly, that's the tension I wanted to talk about.
0:47:04 - Tim Ash
You can either have the all-in-one suites that do nothing particularly well, or you can have the cutting edge point solutions. But then you have to crazy glue them to work together and put a bunch of custom stuff in to make the workflows work. So there's no right answer here. It's a question of how customized do you truly need for your application would be one high level thing I'd be thinking about, and the other is are there restrictions of an all-in-one suite too onerous for us and don't support our business model? That's kind of how I think about it.
0:47:42 - Alex Shevelenko
But that's a buyer process. But let's say you're a seller and let's just assume that 10 years ago we had three roles that were involved in the purchase of our product and the decision, and now there is seven. Well, I'm not saying the number.
0:48:03 - Tim Ash
You can do anything about that number of buyer complexity. What I am saying is that, for example, even like, let's say, a CFO role of deciding on some change we would want to, even considering switching costs this is our solution is a lot cheaper to maintain and pay for the administrator of a system. They don't want to pull something out and do something else. You want to have a migration guide? Okay, so to make sure that it's not just easy, ours system is better, but we're not putting extra work on your plate in order to do the migration. It's largely automated push one button and you're on the new system and we've sucked in all the stuff from your old system. So they have very specific needs. However, many roles that are important in your buying scenario, you need to really think about what they care about. And again, for the administrator of something, it's how much work, how much extra work is it for me? And you have to address that basic, primal thing for them.
0:49:08 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, I understand. So what you're basically saying is it's still humans with specific concerns and it doesn't matter if there's five or seven people in the decision. You need to address each role—and not persona role—and their problems and what they need to do in a way that makes the ability to go there without friction.
0:49:36 - Tim Ash
Yeah, it de-risks it for them. It gets rid of the fear for them and they feel comfortable and safe. The ultimate goal in a B2B sale is safety. I'm not going to get the old saying, you don't get fired for buying IBM because that was like the safe choice back in the day for computer systems. It's the same thing. It's like I don't necessarily want to make the right choice or the best choice. Those are not how people make decisions. I don't want to get fired. I want a bigger bonus next time. I want the company not to shine a spotlight on me as the person that broke things.
0:50:14 - Alex Shevelenko
So that is, I would say, average. Not early adopters but average buyer.
You mentioned you worked with large companies and with smaller companies. So my sense is the smaller companies or even the large company introducing a new offering that's new to the market needs to find the early adapter kind of profile of a buyer that is willing to do more than just say, hey, I don't want to get fired. They love their job.
They kind of want to be the best, or they maybe they want to get promoted versus they're worried about getting fired. Yeah, there could be another motive, set of motivations. What's your using the combination of CR? You know conversion rate optimization and the kind of our primal motivations. How do you spot the early adapters and how do you talk to them differently than the rest?
0:51:16 - Tim Ash
Well, I don't need to address this because Jeffrey Moore did a fantastic job of addressing it. His book Crossing The Chasm talks exactly about this. How do you cross the chasm from the super early adopters to the mainstream, and he talks about head pins, like in a bowling scenario. You have to have certain small niche verticals that you slightly customize for, and then they broaden out and knock down other bowling pins and then you get to the mainstream market. So that's really well addressed in that book. I don't think I have anything.
0:51:49 - Alex Shevelenko
I don't think, with all respect to Jeffrey, in his book, I don't think he is a neuroscientist. He maybe describes, hey, there's a bigger pain in this industry, but I think he doesn't go and describe the profile of what that early adapt, like the psychological, motivational makeup of that early adapter. How do you spot them?
0:52:14 - Tim Ash
I don't think they're early adapters. I think younger companies have fewer anchors. They're not dragging them around, they don't have a lot of momentum in certain directions, so they can be more nimble just because they don't have a dog in the fight. They're just not anchored to anything.
So that's their advantage. Primarily, they don't have cultural and bureaucratic momentum to overcome. They don't have ecosystems of entrenched other companies around their current offering. That's why big companies often lose and can't see innovation coming. It's not that they don't see it, it's because it's just too much to give up milking the cow, if I'll use another analogy and the profits they're making off of their current setup. So I think of it more like that, not as individuals within the companies, being progressive.
0:53:03 - Alex Shevelenko
So you don't think there's a cycle. So this is interesting because we're curious and if you find it, let me know. But we started, when we started, we were working with enterprises and we did notice that there's some personality traits that seemed, at least to us, without the lens of neuroscience, exactly. But there were some commonalities. So people maybe are in the large enterprise, but they were in a startup before, or maybe they are already advising somehow startups or participating in the innovation ecosystem in addition to their role. So it felt like there were some common threads and there was maybe the fear of losing a job. Didn't feel like that was the biggest motivator for no, I was using that as an example.
0:54:00 - Tim Ash
Group norming and fitting in with the corporate culture is important. There's some with “move fast and break things”, Zuckerberg's original idea. There's plenty of cultures that don't rock the boat and do everything by consensus. There are even, you know, whole countries that do things that way. In Asia, for example. That's the default. Group Think is the default. You don't make individual decisions. Being a maverick is not a good thing, or doing things on your own. So it really depends on the larger corporate culture that things are embedded in and the risk tolerance of the company. Do you get promoted for trying new things or do you get slapped down for trying new things? And so I would look at the corporate culture first and foremost because you say it's a self-selecting group and people that want to be employed in that corporate culture and bend to it to some degree, or usually completely.
0:54:59 - Alex Shevelenko
I see. So that's very interesting. So the dominant trait is the culture of the company, not the individual's predisposition.
0:55:06 - Tim Ash
Exactly, the behavioral norms within the company.
0:55:09 - Alex Shevelenko
And if there is different within some companies, there are different subcultures, then that's probably something that you could pick up on. Exactly, the salespeople are different than the manufacturing people.
0:55:20 - Tim Ash
The salespeople might be mavericks within the company, but the overall culture is still kind of top down as being enforced on the different functions as well.
0:55:36 - Alex Shevelenko
Where were you when I was trying to figure this out, Tim. We should have done this much earlier. I can't thank you enough. So many topics I know we jumped around from two books that you've written and I I think they connect for you. But I think fundamentally they also connect for all of us, because when you're basically the shortcut in my mental little brain is for conversion rate optimization is it's a very, extremely easily measurable way to drive behavior change in a very maybe digital sphere, but it's driving whether it's from micro conversions to education, to making a decision and commitment. And you've brought up, your core book is about behaviors and how they change or not.
And so this has been really fascinating to bridge those gaps. What kind of three tips from both of your books that you would want to offer for our audience, that they would take away and apply immediately in the marketing role, what are the three things you're using in your lessons?
0:56:55 - Tim Ash
Well, I'll give you a couple of specifics and one more general. The specific is a lot of marketers avoid controversy or pain. But negative motivation has been shown to be about two, two and a half times, three times more effective than positive in most contexts. So I don't I sell tooth whitening by telling you that you have yellow ugly teeth. You keep your mouth closed, you have resting bastard face, you're going to die alone. And then you want to do teeth whitening. Not if you'll have a bright smile. You know that's not the way to sell teeth whitening, so lean into the pain.
0:57:31 - Alex Shevelenko
So basically, start with the pain. It's much more effective.
0:57:35 - Tim Ash
And that's crucial.
0:57:37 - Alex Shevelenko
Hold on, hold on. Let me brush my teeth right now. No, no, it's all right.
0:57:41 - Tim Ash
It wasn't you in particular, it was just an example I use in my book. Pain is much more activating because the goal of a marketer is to move us off our comfortable spot. When we're on our comfortable spot, the default is doing nothing. So you can move us off the comfortable spot by upside, surprise, or downside, and downside is more effective and you can combine them. You say first, oh my god, this is hell. Imagine what heaven would be like. And that Delta, that shock absorber bounce over a pothole, that perturbation is what makes us care. That's how much we're willing to pay to solve the problem.
0:58:26 - Alex Shevelenko
What is the end of the world scenario and what it could be like?
0:58:31 - Tim Ash
Yeah, exactly, and the difference between those and moving me off my comfortable spot is really important. The other thing is we're all human, tell stories. Everything should be wrapped up in stories. A lot of B2B companies make the mistake of relying too much on data, ROI, financial stuff or technical specs. Big mistake. We're designed to consume experiences in stories. Like hey, Alex, if you go down that road and you go take a left, at the fork, there's a pond with fresh water. If you go to the right there's a mama bear protecting its cubs. That's kind of important. Me telling you that story, wrapping it up, it's not just information.
0:59:12 - Alex Shevelenko
We consume things in terms of stories, so stories and the stories go back to our, they're easier to remember and so they facilitate survival.
0:59:21 - Tim Ash
And they translate from generation to generation.
Yeah, and stories are also very powerful, but you have to know your audience. So if I told you a story about bullfighting and I said, the bullfighter stepped into the arena, bullcharged past them, he shoved the sword through its shoulder blades and killed it instantly. Well, to someone from Spain, for example, that might be a powerful story about tradition and courage and all of these positive things, and for people from for the ethical treatment of animals. It's like this is barbarism and murder of helpless animals and needs to be stopped today. So you have to know your audience. So the final thing I want to leave you with. This is all a marketing summed up in one framework. Know your audience first, then you can design campaigns, business models and messaging for them. Everybody does this backwards. We have a product and we're a product-led company. Bullshit. I call bullshit on all product-led companies. If you don't know your audience, how they live and breathe and what they care about, you cannot design business models, products or messaging for them.
1:00:32 - Alex Shevelenko
This is a thrown out, a challenge to PLG, Product-Led Growth and all the companies and proponents.
1:00:41 - Tim Ash
It's all bullshit, all bullshit, by the way.
1:00:43 - Alex Shevelenko
Wes Bush, who wrote a book on Product-Led Growth, was an interviewee. I think this is good controversy.
1:00:49 - Tim Ash
We're gonna have to have a debate, but you're saying product is only relevant if you start with the audience first and then you understand them and you understand their pain and you can solve their problems. It's their problem that matters, not your product. You know the old joke of like I go to home depot and buy a drill because I need a hole, I don't want the drill, I need a hole.
1:01:16 - Alex Shevelenko
This is back to that discussion that we had, where you need to find who you are. You self-select who is the person, the role and what's the problems that they have, and then you educate them on the problem or do you emphasize more of their problem, and then you bring in the product or whatever.
1:01:40 - Tim Ash
Again you're putting your education piece. Yeah, I'd say, your audience understands what they care. Define a very narrow audience.
1:01:53 - Alex Shevelenko
Understand what they care about, then design products and messaging for that. Don't even try to fit the product in, just wait, like really understand your audience.
1:02:08 - Tim Ash
If you don't understand their pain or what they value, you are building a minimum viable product that nobody cares about. It's an interesting debate.
1:02:16 - Alex Shevelenko
We see challenges around, I think there's an evolution towards horizontal products and I think that we kind of went down the journey and we could come back to this, but what I think is interesting is the best horizontal products actually do speak uniquely to an audience and the product journey. You do identify who you are, what do you want to accomplish, and only then the product adapts to that. So, so I think the the worlds do meet. I think the best, uh, companies that a product philosophy. They still have this nuance of who do they start with?
1:02:59 - Tim Ash
And then they customize the product well. I think that that may be true of platform type products that need to be customized to an audience, but in general, I wouldn't agree with that.
1:03:10 - Alex Shevelenko
If you're a point solution, you better be able to have an origin myth and attract your tribe.
1:03:18 - Tim Ash
Have a clear editorial voice that goes through all of your content and marketing. And if you don't have that basic of like, “I'm flying the flag, follow me, you're in my tribe”, you will not be successful based on that product feature level ever.
1:03:36 - Alex Shevelenko
So again, to summarize, let's not confuse the platforms, be it like Notion or Microsoft Office or Canva, or us trying to build a platform and relate to the actual historical. Where the success has been is, you know, very narrow audience, you well understood them, they connect to you emotionally and then you have their trust and then you're like, hey, yeah, I hear, you're not Sony, you're not Coca-Cola, you don't have hundreds of millions or decades to build an international brand.
1:04:13 - Tim Ash
Those kinds of general things are the exception, not the rule.
1:04:18 - Alex Shevelenko
Amazing. Well, I love the challenges that you've thrown out into the ecosystem. I like that you're speaking truth to marketers, Tim. I would love to continue this, but I want to respect your time.
1:04:31 - Tim Ash
We can do a part two if you ever want to.
1:04:33 - Alex Shevelenko
Part two is in the making right now, because I'm thinking through our go-to-market optimization, so to speak, that we should be doing, but this has been amazing. So what I would love for our audience to do is to kind of find ways to read your books, connect with you, learn about the services you provide for top CMOs. Tell us about that.
1:04:55 - Tim Ash
Yeah, happy to do it! The best way to find out about the book—there's different editions Chinese, Russian, Brazilian, Portuguese—go to primalbrain.com. And if you're interested in my executive advisory for digital growth that's basically me unlimited on-call tied to a senior executive at your company, you can find that on timash.com.
1:05:18 - Alex Shevelenko
Amazing, Tim! Well, you guys have seen that you've shaken me up in this conversation. So if you want to be shaken up and see where real growth comes from, I think, Tim, thank you for showing it versus talking about it. This has been fascinating. So great to have you as a guest on the pod!
1:05:41 - Tim Ash
Oh, it was a lot of fun. Thanks, Alex!