In Brazil to participate in the Trakto Show and launch his third book, the specialist spoke about the importance of understanding the impact of the unconscious on decision-making
Specialist in evolutionary psychology and digital marketing, Tim Ash has been studying the human brain to seek to understand how we establish connections, act and react to different stimuli and the impact of the unconscious and emotion on decision making.
In times of continuous transformations and celebration of new technologies, it preaches a deep immersion. “We need to understand how to persuade people and what all brains have in common. If you want to have a good career in marketing, you need evolutionary psychology, not cutting-edge technology,” she says.
The professional participated in the Trakto Show, an event held in Macei, Alagoas, where he spoke with Propmark. At the meeting, he launched his third book, “A Mentira da Racionalidade”, in which he proposes to demystify concepts about the way of thinking of human beings based on a historical journey.
Marketers have constantly talked about changing and transforming consumers. From your perspective, is this a true meaning or is there a difficulty in understanding the human brain?
I think technology changes and when you have a large group of people using it, new behaviors emerge, but the important thing is that marketing is about how to persuade people. That doesn’t change anything, our universal motivation, which is why I wrote my book on evolutionary psychology because that’s the basis of all persuasion marketing.
How can brands genuinely connect with their audience?
The best way is to have a very restricted audience. If you try to say ‘my brand is perfect for everyone and everyone needs to buy my service or product’ then you don’t have a message. You have to find a small niche audience, small groups and understand what they value, the culture and then design products and services for them. It’s really about first choosing your audience, understanding it, and then creating messages and campaigns just for them. Don’t try to have a brand with such a broad approach.
Today, brands like to talk about investments in technologies and new solutions acquired to create connections with customers. And you say: not about technology. How important is technology and how should it be used?
What you’re trying to persuade is the brain, and on an evolutionary level, it’s not changing, that’s the brain we have. So technologies are just different ways to impact the brain. On social media, when we’re expecting a message, we have dopamine triggered in our brain and ‘what will the message say?’ Different technologies are like different channels that reach the brain, but the brain is still the same. So we need to understand how to persuade people and what all brains have in common. If you want to have a good career in marketing, you need evolutionary psychology, not cutting-edge technology.
In your presentation, you explained about how our brain is lazy and likes things to be simple. And today we have a trend towards simplification of the however, with shorter and faster materials, like on TikTok and Instagram. Can this tendency be associated with these characteristics?
I think the reason Tik Tok and Instagram are popular is because they benefit from our vision system. Words are what we are used to in books, websites, but images as we experience the world. In fact, we see the world as a three-dimensional stereo film. That’s why online games and movies are so popular, as we experience the world. TikTok and Instagram are images and videos and this is how our brain captures information.
What do you think about the future of content?
I think it’s going to move more towards video because, again, it’s the natural way we experience the world. Written information will be less and video will be much more. I was talking to Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspost, who my friend and he told me that in the last couple of years they used to do 90% of their marketing with text and only 10% video and now the opposite, 90% video and 10% of written content.
How can brands take advantage of this new reality?
Video is a good medium, it holds attention, but people have a very short attention span. The focus should be on short-form video, which doesn’t need to be produced much or done in a studio. In fact, the most important thing for video is the sound quality. As long as you have good audio and good lighting, you don’t need to script it, make it more natural. When I say short video, I mean content from 30 seconds to 1 minute and 30 seconds.
On stage, you said that companies should not sell the positive outcome of their products and services first, but use a negative message informing the consequence of the consumer not purchasing the products. How to do this?
The brain tries to conserve energy, so its default response is to do nothing. For me to react, you need to get me out of my comfort zone. The easiest way to do this is with fear, loss, and negative things. What you have to do tell me the story: what will happen if I continue on the same path. For example, if I’m on a plane that flies smoothly, I don’t need to do anything; If it’s falling at 100 km per hour, I have to act quickly. Brands have to give the consumer, as long as they can, all the bad consequences that will eventually happen to them, choose to stay in the same place.
You say the brain is a forgetting machine. What do brands need to do to maintain relevance to their customers?
Most things are handled automatically by the brain and ignored. You have a lot of things coming into your body, feeling, pressure, texture and so on coming through your eyes and ears. So the brain says most of it doesn’t affect my survival and only pays attention when something exciting or different is happening. If there are no threats around, I will look at my emotion and understand how I feel about it. If something isn’t a threat, but I don’t know what it is, I’ve never seen it before, if it’s new, then I’ll have to pay extra attention to decide what it means and how it will affect my survival. In other words, brands have to focus on things that create strong emotions and new things because everything is routine, that we already know what to do, we deal with automatically and won’t remember or interact with it.
You are launching your third book in Brazil, “A Mentira da Racionalidade”. What did you try to portray in this project?
The book is basically about the operating system of 8 billion people around the world. Retrace the arc of evolution and I explain in non-scientific language what we’ve captured along the way. It covers brain chemistry, memory, social relationships, storytelling, gender differences and how we evolve. Thus, readers can understand how people act and how we make our decisions.
