Neuromarketing: The Future of Marketing | Prince Ghuman & Dr. Matt Johnson
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with entrepreneur and marketer Prince Guman and neuroscientist Dr. Matt Johnson. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at google.

You've definitely heard of marketing, but what about neuromarketing? Neuromarketing is the use of neuroscience to address marketing. More specifically, to address the limitations of common tools like A/B testing and market research. According to Prince-Guman and Dr. Matt Johnson, neuromarketing is the future of marketing. They joined Google to discuss their book, "Blindsight: The Mostly Hidden Ways Marketing Reshapes Our Brains."

The book gives you the ability to see the unseeable when it comes to marketing so that you can consume on your own terms. Originally published in May 2021, here are Prince Guman and Dr. Matt Johnson, Neuromarketing. Hello, welcome. How are you? Good. Good to be here. Good to have you. Doing well. Doing well. Thanks so much for having us. Absolutely. So, Blindsight, tell me, how did you two come to write a book together?

Great question, Anya. I'll start here by just giving the audience a little bit more information about our background and sort of where we come from. So as you said at the intro, neuroscientist, marketer, I'm the neuroscientist in this equation. Neuroscience is my academic background. So I did my PhD in cognitive neuroscience. I am really endlessly fascinated by people. We are these very strange, conflicted, paradoxical people.

entities which try and navigate the world and try to attain what we think we want to attain. And we're just very strange, quirky things. And through the tools of neuroscience, we're able to probe some of these reasons, some of the mechanisms which allow for this complexity to express itself.

So typically in a psychology curriculum, you'll have developmental psychology, you'll have cognitive psychology, you have perceptual psychology, you have social psychology, et cetera. You typically don't have consumer psychology. And so I think really by looking at how we operate

in the consumer world, why we buy what we buy, what we'd like to sort of show off in terms of conspicuous consumption. I think what we buy and how we buy actually reveals deep truths about the human condition.

So this is really my perspective on marketing, really my perspective on consumerism. Most of my mid-20s, these were spent in labs and libraries. So I was really kind of dedicated to trying to dive into all the minutiae, all the literature about

really why we do the things we do from a purely neuroscientific standpoint. And that was really my orientation. So I'm purely driven by sort of a curiosity about really why we do what we do. And then as it pertains to the consumer world, I think the consumer world is such a fascinating window into the human condition because it's one that isn't often explored.

And for me, it was quite the opposite. For me, labs and libraries were not how I spent my 10 years. It was rather reading reading abstracts.

over the weekend, quite a lot of neuroscience and psychology abstracts. And like I'm sure some of the audience here, I worked at startups for quite a bit before I graduated onto a public traded company. And my secret to being a marketer was using these psych abstracts and applying them and testing them immediately. Right? So I did that for over a decade and

When Matt and I met, when we both were teaching at a business school in San Francisco, it was like peanut butter meeting jelly, right? He'd spent his life researching. I'd spent my life reading research of people like his and then applying and testing it. And that sort of grew into the idea of, man, we should probably write a book about this. And that's how Blindside came to be.

I love it and love the merging. I think being on a, you know, a marketing background, especially with the name, you know, of the book Blindsight, it's intriguing and really thinking about the alternative of kind of the neuro background. Why did you guys choose that name of Blindsight? How did that kind of spark your interest?

Yeah, so it's actually inspired from a very real neuropsychological condition. This is real, despite the fact that it's been noticed in a relatively small amount of individuals. And it's the rarity that kind of presents as a situation

sort of an interesting psychological oddity. So these are individuals who, in terms of their own internal subjective experience, it's a world of darkness. They think they're blind. If you ask them at any given moment, what are you looking at right now? It's almost insulting to them. They're like, I'm a blind person. Blind people don't see anything. It's just, you know, it's just darkness inside. And yet with blindside individuals, if you are to toss a ball in their general direction, they'll just snag it out of midair.

And you ask them, well, how did you do that? And they're as behooved as the researchers are. They'll sort of confabulate a little bit. I had a sort of a general intuition about it. I kind of felt it was there. You look like the kind of researcher who would throw a ball at me. And so I just, I knew it was coming. Those sort of have reasons that sort of confabulated a little bit, but they really don't know why. And so when you look at blindsight from the perspective of

of the brain, we're able to sort of see what's going on here. So it turns out there's many different pathways in the brain, which composes our visual system. We have a conscious visual pathway, and this is what allows us to see and operate in the world and gives rise to our visual worlds internally. But we also have unconscious visual pathways as well. And so blindsight is a condition where there is a bifurcation and there is a

a divide between conscious and unconscious pathway, whereby the conscious pathway is damaged through some sort of brain damage, only preserving this unconscious pathway. And it's a really fascinating condition. It is one that neuroscientists, philosophers debate still endlessly. And one which I think we saw as really the perfect metaphor for how we operate in the consumer world.

Prince, you want to say a few more words about that? Yeah, I love that you said many different pathways to vision because blindsight as a condition also illustrates our lives as consumers, right? Just like there are many different pathways to vision, there are many different pathways to engage or to connect. And consumers are largely blind to them. Right.

And marketers, believe it or not, there is certainly a 95th percentile of marketers that have a bunch of neuroscientists and social psychologists on their squad. Outside of them, they are largely blind to it as well. And if you would allow me to make one little analogy, I think this also sends the message home. It's the analogy of an airplane.

Full confession, I'm learning to fly an airplane and it's not easy. But think of the airplane as a brain, right? It's a machinery, it's physical, and it has all of its rules.

And when you're flying in the air, the air is the consumer world. You're flying through all of these branding messages, ads, everything. And at the end of the day, both consumers and marketers have to ask themselves, are you a pilot or a passenger? Right. A passenger is autonomous. She's sitting down and rolling around on the airplane wherever it takes her.

Whereas a pilot, she has the ability to control it. And the pilot in this analogy definitely is a consumer, but also marketer. Right. Absolutely. And, you know, while reading the book, one thing that becomes clear and I think we aren't necessarily taught in school is we don't really know why we do what we do. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by that and kind of how you guys discuss it in the book?

Yes. This is a very old idea in psychology, actually dating back to Freud. And we can talk about Freud from the standpoint of psychology and neuroscience. A lot of his ideas are completely crazy, completely out of this world. It's, it's, you know, we should treat Freud with, with caution for sure. Uh,

But we owe Freud a great debt in recognizing the impact of the unconscious, that really as we operate in the world and as we go about making, quote unquote, decisions that appear to us to be rational and engage in behaviors which appear to be well-informed,

These decisions are actually the culmination of many factors outside of our control. And we'd never really fully understand this full cascade of influences that are going on completely outside of our awareness.

And I think one of my favorite examples of this comes from an experiment which was done back at University of Colorado. What they did is they had people come into the lab, come into the experiment. And from the perspective of the participants, they're just there to rate faces. So they're told, you know, come to the lab. We're just interested in experiments.

you know, what your perspective is on attractive faces. So they go into the lab, they make these judgments on faces, you know, this one's attractive, this one's not attractive, this one, not so much, this one's a little bit fugly, you know, they kind of go back and forth on attractiveness. It's not, you know, completely out of the ordinary when it comes to looking at, you know, psychological research, a lot of times, you know, you're interested in these sorts of things from the standpoint of research.

So then the final question comes and it's not about attractiveness. It's about why did you rate the faces as you did? And all the participants are going, what do you mean? I just, you know, this one's attractive. This one's not attractive. And then they're like, well, how did the person in the hallway influence you? And they're like, what? What person in the hallway? So it turns out that the experiment had started 10 minutes prior.

So as the participants are coming in, there's actually a confederate of the experiment, someone who's working with the researchers who intentionally bumps into the participant as they're walking to the lab. And the confederate spills a bunch of papers and the participant picks them up and they give them a cup of coffee. It's either a hot cup of coffee or it is a cold cup of coffee.

And then they pick up the papers. This little interaction is over with. And they come to rate the faces. And it turns out that there was two groups of participants, one that got the cold cup of coffee, one that got the hot cup of coffee.

The group that got the cold cup of coffee, they actually rated the faces to be less attractive. The group that got the hot cup of coffee, they actually rated the faces as being much more attractive. So there's an interesting conversation to be had about the influence of temperature as a metaphor in terms of attractiveness, et cetera. But I think the more interesting finding here from our perspective is nobody had any idea that

That this temperature of the coffee that they interacted with 10 minutes prior had any influence at all. And this is how we navigate the world. There's all sorts of factors and influences that can be, in some cases, deterministic of our response, but we have no idea what these are.

Thanks, Matt. I think everyone's going to show up to their Tinder date when COVID ends with a hot cup of coffee now because of you. It is really random. I think, you know, thinking after the fact, oh, warm cup. They were also rated for being friendlier, more successful. There were quite a few ratings, but...

I think what's fascinating about this is when we talk about neuromarketing, one of the first questions we get is, oh, you mean like subliminal? It's like this weird voodoo thing. And I think to understand the implication of this coffee study where something completely random can have this weird impact on your behavior that you're unaware of. Let's understand a little bit about subliminal. And then what I really want to talk about is subliminal. So subliminal is not mind control.

what the old school story is of this guy named James Vickery.

He had a movie theater and the rumor was that just before intermission back in those days, they had intermissions. He flashed by Coca-Cola, right? For really quickly. And of course, intermission happened and Coca-Cola sales went through the roof. Turned out he was more of a hype beast than he was actually a neuromarketer. It's not true. And he confessed to it. And it was, if anything, he sold more soda from people coming in after hearing that story. But

Subliminal doesn't really work in nudging behavior. And what research is showing is what Matt and I call midliminal does. And truly neuroscientifically subliminal messaging is too fast for you to be conscious of. So in the visual domain, it's 30 milliseconds, right? Anything faster than 30 milliseconds, you're not conscious of it. And they've done tests to see how much influence that actually has, right? What midliminal is, like what midliminal is, is

hiding in plain sight, right? What midliminal is, is when you're following Beyonce on Instagram and she's with Jay-Z in Cuba and there's a small little Corona bottle at the bottom right that you maybe didn't notice. But for some reason you're craving a Corona later on in the week, right? When Matt and I wrote the book, we wanted to include a red pen with the book to nudge people to a midliminal prime,

to go have a preference for red products. We couldn't do that. But research after research has shown that this stuff that hides in plain sight actually has a more potent impact on behavior than subliminal voodoo crime. Absolutely. And so with that, you know, you're saying our brain takes notes of elements in our environment that we aren't conscious of. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that works?

Yeah. So this goes back really to this idea that we're constantly taking in information about the world that we don't necessarily realize from the standpoint of the conscious entity.

So we're only aware of a very small fragment of the amount of information we're taking in, both from the auditory domain, visual domain, et cetera. This is coming into our very, very complex brains and it's changing the weights in our synaptic connections in ways we don't fully understand.

And this is really how we operate in the world generally. And then we're looking at this from the standpoint of the consumer world. We're constantly being bombarded by stimuli, which is not only not fully broaching our conscious awareness, but also has hooks in it as well. That's trying to sort of nudge our behavior in a certain direction. So it's not just, you know, where you're staring at a scene of trees, you don't see every single tree and all of its glorious detail.

But the tree doesn't have necessarily a motivation there. The tree is just being a tree. When you're looking at billboards or banner ads or whatever the case may be, we're only processing a very small amount of these. We're sort of scrolling through these things. Maybe we're not sort of fully paying attention. We're sort of glazing over them. But the stimuli from the consumer world is unique in that it has a specific goal behind.

in mind. And not only are we not aware of the full range of stimuli that are impacting our brain and may impact behavior later on, but we're also not aware of how this is impacting our future behavior in line with the goals of some of these advertising tactics as well. I think

I think perception on top of the mental modeling is really one of the things that I wish more marketers and consumers knew about, right? We take perception from reality. And I guess...

in a weird poetic way it is because that's what we have, but we're not really experiencing reality as much as we're experiencing our brain's mental model of it. And one of the examples Matt and I use when we're coaching this stuff is we're in fact all blind in a very specific part of our visual field, right? 15 center to the left of each eye, we are blind. And we never see that blind spot because our brain

is actively practicing mental modeling and filling that in. And we go into our lives not knowing that. And actually, I know if it's cool with you, we'll include a link in there so people can actually do this exercise where you see where you're actually completely blind with a card that you can print out. And Matt and I love that because

Brands, what are they if not mental models? Right. Your brain is a pattern seeking modeling machine and brands are personified things that it's constantly picking up on. Right. So really for marketers, brands are really that the play in between that area between objectivity and subjectivity.

And it's only getting more and more important. And I'm sure you can look around the last four years where brands are actually now struggling on how to create a more honest, real persona with social issues, political issues, insert name here. But that's because that is part of what the consumers now want. And mental modeling brands are people. It fills into that. And that's the data point that consumers are now asking for.

Yeah, I think that's a really important point worth underlining, that from the standpoint of the human experience, we don't experience reality objectively. Perhaps we can't experience reality objectively. So what we ultimately experience isn't reality. We experience our brain's mental model reality.

So every time you take a bite of chocolate cake, for example, you're not actually eating the cake per se. You're experiencing your brain's mental model of that cake. And what we elucidate in more detail in the book is that these mental models are extremely fungible. They're extremely flexible. They're extremely malleable. Right.

they're not these sort of hard and fast faithful relays of reality. They can be tweaked and they can be amended in all sorts of ways. So if you look at the example of the food, so we look at that chocolate cake, that chocolate cake is modeled by the visual input that's coming into it. So it's a really, really, really delicious chocolate cakes that is have shown that, you know, the more delicious a food looks like, the more delicious it takes life, even if you fully control for all the, the ingredients.

We talk about a case in the book where people couldn't tell the difference between duck pate and straight up blended dog food when you control for the visual element of it. So it's the same exact

actual reality, quote unquote, which is meeting your tongue, the same exact, uh, gustatory response, the same exact nutrients that are, uh, you know, inciting your, your gustatory system. And yet we experience it extremely differently because this mental modeling process is complex and it's influenced by things that, uh, we're not always fully realized. And, and Prince just said it best, uh,

there is this gap between objectivity and subjectivity. And this gap is the marketer's playground. All of these tools to tweak mental models are well within the purview of marketing. So of course, you know, restaurant practitioners know this to a T, they know this intuitively, they have changed the lighting, you change the way that the waiters interact with you, or the visual aesthetics of the plate, or even the story they tell you about the food, all of

these things impinge on our mental models in ways that really create amazing experiences. So really, I think that the take home message here is that we again, we don't experience the world objective, we experience our brains mental model, and marketers have the ability to create our mental models. And by saying that, marketers really have the ability to create our reality. And that's, that's a huge power. And that's a huge responsibility as well.

Absolutely. I love the duck pate example. I thought that was crazy in the book. Matt gives me a lot of crap because I studied to be a psalm and so much research. Neuroscientists

I love wine or researching wine. And there was one piece of research that said, so to everyone in the audience, taste is our dullest sense. And if there's any Somalis in the audience, I've already offended you. It's all good. And there's multiple pieces of research where you have the exact same white wine and you put red food coloring, that's tasteless and odorless.

And you have people taste both and write down their tasting notes, right? Oh, toasted oak, cigar box, whatever, versus melons and what have you. And at the end of the day, it's the exact same wine. And it isn't just tricking their reality. They've been able to do this under fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging machines. We have to look at the level of the brain.

and completely different parts of the brain are without. So it isn't a trick as much as your brain is experiencing it better or differently. And I think that brings us to actually a really interesting part of the book around memory, right? So thinking about what we perceive and what we actually perceive, right, especially when it comes to memory and our recall, would love for you to kind of just explain a little bit more about, you know, what's so special about memory and how does this influence it?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is the one mental faculty in the book that we spent two chapters on because memory is a trip. Memory is really, really complicated. And memory, really, when it comes to the human experience, probably couldn't be any more important. So there are these very strange...

incidents of people who not only lose their memory, but along with that, lose their identities. This is this very rare case of disassociative fuge. The first noted case, his name was Ansel Bourne, actually the original inspiration for the Jason Bourne movie series. People are likely familiar with that. And it really goes to show just how inextricably linked

memory and identity is. We wake up every single morning as a slightly different entity. The cells in our body, the physical constituents of what makes us who we are, are constantly changing, constantly evolving. Technically, we are a different person in terms of our physical constituents every single morning when we wake up, and yet we don't feel like a different person. We feel like we're an enduring entity that is consistent through time, and it's really memory which is the glue that holds us together.

And so despite this incredible importance of memory, memory is something that is extremely fallible. And it's also something that we, when we reflect on memory intuitively, we get extremely wrong.

So we think that when we have an experience, we have the record, but not. So we're just taking in information, we're just recording this. And then when it comes to conjuring up a memory, we're just pressing the replay button. But it turns out that neither of those things are true. So we're having an experience as we talked about with perception, we're not taking in sort of the full complexity of the scene, our conscious attention could not possibly take in everything around us, we're constantly

being bombarded by aspects of our sensory experience that doesn't fully broach consciousness, but nonetheless can be further laid down in memory. And all of the experiences we had are not weighted equally in memory either. And then when it comes to replaying a memory, it's not a sort of a faithful replaying objectively of how the experience was just like perception. Memory is also a mental model, right?

And it's here also where we see a lot of the interesting ways in which marketing can really come in and utilize these interesting, some would say fallibilities of memory in order to give rise to really interesting consumer experiences and real opportunities for brands.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things, I mean, we dedicated two chapters to memory. We also dedicated two days to me bugging Matt to define memory for lay people who are not neuroscientists. I'm like, Matt, define memory. It is not a single thing. I'm like, nice. What is it? And ultimately, we're very happy with what we came up with, which was memory is our brain's attempt at connecting us to the past.

That is what memory is. It is valuable. It is like Matt said, you don't hit record and hit play again. In fact, next time you're able to go to a concert, recording it via your smartphone actually reduces the memory encoding and recall then versus watching it yourself, ironically.

So, but this is one thing that I, you know, I'm proud of the marketing community because I think a lot of the marketers have intuited how to create a memory. And we actually spoke to the event manager for Oprah, who literally was behind the, you get a car, you get a car, you get a car, everybody gets a car. And we spoke to so many brilliant people who have created a

intuitive how to create memories, right? And I think it's worth pausing for a second and sort of giving a formula for all the marketers in the room and for all the consumers in the room as well is firstly, attention. To plant a memory, to encode a memory, as Matt would say, you need attention.

And we think we know attention. That's a whole other sidebar. And I know if you want to go there, we can. But in order to get attention, you need to violate an expectation. That is how attention is earned. Attention earned equals violated expectation. And if you want to implant a memory, you have to have attention. So violate an expectation. And once it's violated, add friction. And if there's any UX people in the room, they're already jumping up and down. Friction is not always bad.

When it comes to memory, friction is good, but a little bit of friction goes a long way. There was a bit of research about a particular font where they had two different groups, read two different exact same story in two different fonts. And one of those fonts was purposefully made tougher to read. And then in memory tests after the fact that people who read the hard to read font

high friction, um, recalled significantly better and did much better in the memory tests. Right? So, um, I'll give a, I'll give a super basic example here is, is instead of having a billboard and you're Yamaha and you're selling pianos, uh, instead of having a billboard that says we make pianos, you maybe paint the keys of a subway, the keys, the color of the piano, or if you want to go one step further, make them musical. When actually people go up and down the stairs, it makes a sound right. That,

mental model of Yamaha broke an expectation of what a billboard should be like and planted a memory that is easier to recall later. Matt, if you want to talk about retrieval, we can get into that too. Yeah. I mean, if we had like three days, we could fully unpack memory, not only from a neuroscience standpoint, but also from the standpoint of, you know, how it manifests in the consumer world. But yeah, suffice to say that there are different ways which

marketers or any sort of experienced designers can optimize the experience in a way where it's more likely to give rise to a memory. So not all experiencers are weighted as equally in memory as any others. And Prince is highlighting a few examples here where you add a little bit of friction, which really forces the person to think. It forces them to pay attention. And the more we're paying attention to something, the more we're actually giving those memories, those experiences, the opportunity to be laid down into memory.

memory. You can also look at other types of sort of memory boosters. We talked in the book about the use of analogy, for example, which is a great way to make

elements in our experience stick. So if I were to ask the audience, how would you describe the movie Speed in a single sentence? They might come up with a range of things, but this is actually how Speed was described when it was originally pitched back in the 90s. It was diehard, but on a bus.

And that is just like the perfect distillation of the movie Speed. And it's leveraging analogy. You know the movie Die Hard. You know, it's sort of the, you know, this is Bruce Willis. This is, you know, action-packed. This is the movie, the action movie of the 90s, maybe of all time, some would argue. And it's Die Hard, but on a bus.

Yeah, there's, you know, some nuances, Keanu Reeves and Cinder Bullock, et cetera, but it's basically Die Hard and a Bus. I mean, that basically captures the whole movie. And that's really the power of analogy. Not only does it really crystallize what you're trying to describe in a nice, crisp way, but it also leverages this fact of our brain's memory system, which is that it's fundamentally about connections.

You can't learn something which doesn't connect with something you already have. So another memory booster, which again, we sort of dive into a bit more detail in the book is using analogy to hammer home these connections.

I think one thing I do want to make sure we cover here, and especially Prince, right, with your marketing background in the book, one concept most readers and myself included, and definitely a lot of marketers weren't familiar with was essentialism. Can you guys unpack this for us a little bit, especially to those who maybe haven't heard of it before?

Absolutely. So essentialism is sort of this unspoken layer that is in all of the objects that we interact with without us fully recognizing it. So it sounds strange to say, but ordinary objects have souls.

We see them as being greater than their simple sort of physical nature. So just like we sometimes think that, you know, people have souls or some sort of essence to a person that, you know, transcends the physical. When the person dies, the soul lives on. We sort of think the same way when it comes to objects.

So if you were to find yourself in possession of, I don't know, a George Clooney sweater or Travis Scott sweater or insert celebrity thing here, that would cease to be more. It would cease to simply be a sweater. It would be more than that. Even if you washed it, it would still be George Clooney's sweater. It would still be Travis Scott's sweater. It would still be something. There's still an essence to it.

that again transcends the physical. And there has been a bit of interesting science on this. This is Paul Bloom and Bruce Hood's work, which has looked at why exactly things have essences and how can we give an object an essence. And it really sort of comes down to the story about the object. So it was an experiment which was done

I'm blicking on the exact year, but it was sometime in the early 2000s called the Ordinary Objects Experiment. What they did is they took...

these objects could not be any more ordinary. They took all these sort of like rubber duckies and paperclips and water bottles. They bought these from eBay for their listing price of like $2, $3. And then what they did is they recruited a team of storytellers. They recruited a team of fiction writers and authors to write stories about these objects. So this little rubber ducky, for example, this was something that a two-year-old clutched

you know, every night as he went to sleep and his mom gave it to him. And it was, you know, originally got it from his uncle who fought in some war, you know, some background story to the object. And then what they did is they relisted them on eBay. And now with these stories attached,

these went for $200, $300, $500 sometimes. So a massive increase just by putting a story there. So we do see this sort of hidden essence in the objects we interact with. It's something that, again, we don't tend to sort of think about unless, you know, we find ourselves in possession of a George Clooney sweater, and then we sort of understand the essence of it. But it's something that is also well within the wheelhouse of what

marketers are capable in terms of how they're able to inject that into their into their products. Yeah. I mean, think about Etsy in an e-commerce world where Amazon has eaten everyone's lunch and dunked all over them. Etsy has grown. And it's because you're buying the essence of the artist. You're buying the essence of their product and their story. And I love that Paul Bloom did that seminal research on this. There's a bunch of other research as well, but it just

really speaks to the soul of something, the brand, the product. I love the example. This happened while we were writing the book where I'm sure some of the audience members would know about it. Maybe you do too, Anya. It's the Banksy story where it was at an auction, big graffiti, not big, normal size graffiti piece at an auction. Banksy had actually hit a shredder in there and as they're bidding on it and it's sold, it just boom, tricks on and it sheds it. But in that moment, the essence of that piece changed.

And Matt and I would argue, there's a story there now. And that story adds to the soul of that piece. And you can see the objective valuation of that piece went up immediately after it was shredded, which is super ironic.

But you see this a lot with brands. You see this with I love Under Armour because they went from making underwear for high school football kids to being sponsoring Steph Curry. Right. But they didn't jump straight to Steph Curry. They went and got Misty Copeland because they couldn't afford big name underwear.

athletes, but also Misty Copeland fit the essence of an underdog. Misty Copeland was rejected by the American Ballet Academy for not having the right body type and should rather go to, and they suggested this is a 13 year old girl they're speaking to,

you're better suited for dancing in Vegas, right? This was the rejection letter that's actually public. And she said, to hell with that. And she replied and she actually got in and she was the first mixed race ballet, American ballet, except T, which Under Armour found out about and doubled down on it. And that in effect added to Under Armour's essence as a brand for the underdog.

And, and, you know, we've seen this happening quite often, you see this happening with Red Wing, one of the oldest still made in America shoe companies, and they have an entire heritage line. And it's all branded, Iron Ranger and Iron Ranger. And there's a story about the Iron Ranger that used to work in blah, blah, blah mines and did this, this and this, and this shoe represents that person, right? And then they have a lager shoe, and it's all the way they used to make it, but they have this entire essence that's baked in. And

It might sound so subjective until you look at the research that shows what happens when people buy into the essence or the soul and use these products. Right. So you might think, oh, someone who really loves Red Wings might feel more confident wearing them. Right. But they've actually done research where you give people three golf clubs, no name, a generic brand, a Nike and people. It's exact same golf club, but people hit red.

further with the Nike Golf Club. And that, to me, is the soul of a brand. This subjective, soft, untouchable thing is actually having objective

impact on behavior. And I think essentialism and storytelling is a big part of that. This was this is a true story. I was at a vineyard and there was a bottle served to me. It was called Shannon. And I was like, well, what's the story here? And it was the best story ever. It's like, oh, the winemaker's youngest daughter, Shannon, did not like cabs at all. And his goal was to make her the cab that she would fall in love with.

And on her wedding, he presented her with a case of Shannon because he was that convinced that this is going to be the cab you're going to like. Right. Oh, my God, it tastes better already. And it's not even on my table yet. That's the power of essentialism and storytelling when it comes to the soul of a product or a brand.

Yeah, and it really kind of takes this full circle, right? So we talked in the beginning about mental modeling, right? So we don't experience the world objectively. We experience our brain's mental model. And so if we're trying to alter the visual aesthetics of something, that influences our mental model, even if we're operating in the guisatory domain. But one way which very clever marketers can deeply sculpt our mental model is through storytelling.

that that really fills in this mental model, the essence of an object, what we come to believe about the story, the hidden essence, the origin story of the products we interact with, the brands we interact with, that influences our mental model. And as Prince's example really exemplifies, this does have very objective consequences. So if you believe that you're hitting with a Nike golf club, you'll actually hit farther. And that's

Pure brand. That is the power of the brand. Similar findings are found with Ray-Ban sunglasses. So if you're led to believe you are putting on Ray-Ban sunglasses instead of a generic sunglass, even if it's the same exact sunglasses, you'll actually report that it blocks the sun better.

So it is pretty wild how this can go. We can look at this as we don't experience the world objectively. There's a subjectivity to everything. But this gap, which is the market is playground, this does have very, very objective consequences in the real world.

Yeah, I love the Banksy example. And that was, I think, a plot twist for sure, as well as some of the ones you provided, Prince. And for the audience, we do have a couple more questions. But in a couple minutes, we'll actually be moving to audience questions. So please add your questions in the YouTube live and Matt and Prince will answer.

Prince, do you want to ask you before we get to those audience questions, right? I think, you know, we bring up, this is a marketer's playground, right? And the ways that we go approach this with everything that you've learned and everything within the book, where does this put you as a marketer and how do you kind of, you know, marketers use essentialism, storytelling to collectively get this right? Ooh, that's a good question. Where does this put me as a marketer? Well, right now in the hot seat is where it puts me. I think that...

Well, it's a life of dissonance, honestly, Anya. On one hand, I love being a marketer. I love creating brand experiences, events, products that charm the pants off people, right? I love creating that product. And as a consumer, if I'm being honest,

I love being charmed by brands and companies. I like arguing about, you know, Nikon versus Sony or Xbox versus PlayStation, right? And that's part of the life that our society has created, right? So, but occasionally there is this level of distrust. And I think, you know, there's a couple of things I wish. One thing I wish is,

Us as marketers and consumers, I wish we could agree on the definition of marketing. That was actually fair. That tracks back to the old days when before there were logos and tracks to today when we have way more complex way of traveling each other. And I think the best that I've come up with is trading value. I wish marketers and consumers really looked at

consumerism and marketing as trading value because ultimately that's what we're doing, right? And back in the old days, you had a shop that had goods to sell and you had a buyer, money, product.

Done. And then evolved to a couple of years later, you have the shop that has a bigger selection, a higher form of providing value. At the end of the day, a buyer comes in and pays and gets a product. Fast forward to today, it's a complex world. We have more product options than we have needs to fulfill. And and.

And consumers can provide value with user generated content, with reviews. Consumers have other ways besides money or Bitcoin to pay for stuff now. Right. And I think understanding that responsibility and that balance is key. And I think the second thing, and this is more speaking to marketers in the room, we think we are.

scientific, right? Because frankly, for a while we did. We adopted research in the 50s and 60s, and we adopted user experience, we adopted A-B testing, and that's sort of a stalemate. And it's not often we get to go beyond that. And there are fMRI and EEG research we can do, but most of us don't get the opportunity to do that. I bring that up because

We think that is understanding the consumer, but it's not, right? We think that I can test for early adopters for a new product I'm launching, right? And that was forever, that was over a decade ago, but Christensen said that he crossed in the chasm and Gladwell made it popular in his book. But ultimately, why is it that early adopters adopt products early, right? And is there science behind it? Well, of course, there is this

psychological impact of newness and safety, right? We call it new and safe. And that is understanding how that hits at the level of the brain helps marketers and product managers have a much deeper understanding than just let's test for early adopters, right? So I guess my first thing is

understand neuroscience because it's going to make you a better marketer. It's going to make you find more genuine, new, engaging ways to connect with the consumer. And for the consumers, you don't want to be that passenger on the plane, right? It doesn't feel good to be taken for a ride. And if anything, if consumers know a little bit more about their own psychology when it meets marketer's

marketing, they might appreciate all the stuff that we, all the effort that we put into marketing. So that's a big thing for me. Thank you for asking that question despite it being on the hot seat.

Absolutely. And final question here, right? So with PopNero, with your book, what is the impact you both kind of, and I feel like I have a guest, but would love you to speak to it. What is the impact you guys want to have in the world? And what do you want people to kind of take away from, you know, not only today, but also kind of from the book and your research? Yeah, so I think...

we both have maybe a slightly different answer for this. So for me, it is to really appreciate marketing. So as Prince said, marketers are flirting more with consumers now than ever in history. So I think as consumers, we sort of take marketing for granted. So brands come into our lives, brands come out of our lives, products come into our life, brands come out of our lives, and we don't really think twice about it. But there's a design behind all of this. There is a

thought and human ingenuity that goes into all of our consumer experiences that we don't fully appreciate. So there's a lot of conversation that's worth having about the ethics of marketing. And we do talk about that in the book, but at the end of the day, we're all consumers.

So if we're sitting here complaining about marketing, that's like the fish complaining about water. It's definitionally within our environment. And so I think we should grow to understand it as people and grow to sort of see the power we have as consumers to shape the consumer world because it is in reaction to us. If everybody suddenly snaps their fingers and goes vegan,

That changes the consumer world that puts, you know, meat companies out of business. And now, you know, who can sell the best vegan burger becomes, you know, the richest person in the world. So that's a massive impact that is actually in control of consumers. And so there is a back and forth there that I think needs to be realized as well.

For me, it really is about going beyond A/B testing. It really is about the next evolution of the marketer. We have a ton of data and that's great, but I think there is still a blind spot for marketers with neuroscience and I think understanding that.

Our big audacious goal, if I'm allowed to dream out loud in a public sense, is I hope neuroscience today is what user experience was 10, 15 years ago. Right. You go get your cog side degree and you go get your design degree and you put the two together. Right. And now there's at least one user experience person in almost every company.

Why is it that we don't have one person who knows the behavior science game or the neuromarketing game, right? We don't have that. So I think that is going to be great for marketing, but I think it's going to be great for consumers too, because ultimately consumers are getting smarter. And ultimately we both want to create amazing products as marketers and we both want to fall in love with amazing products. And neuroscience is only going to help bridge that gap. Right?

And that would be my big giant audacious goal. It's more EEG stuff, more neuroscientific rigor in marketing campaigns. I love the moonshot and the best of both worlds. Great. With that, I think we're ready for our first audience question. So from David, how is the understanding of memory affected by people with edict, edict memory, or by the use of memory palaces? Yeah, it's a, it's a really great question. So, uh,

this is some interesting research. Ed Cook has done some really interesting pioneering work on it about really tapping in, everybody's sort of tapping into their potential when it comes to memory. So there's this sort of technique in memory where if you're able to imagine, if you're losing your keys, you don't know where your keys are and you put it down somewhere, one of the best things you can do from a tactical standpoint to remember them is imagine your keys and then just imagine it like exploding, right?

And that's a really highly salient visual image which will be weighted very heavily in memory. So this is a way of another tactic that can be used to really try and give experiences the best opportunity of being laying down in memory. So one thing is there are certain tactics that all of us can do to sort of tap into our potential in terms of our memory abilities.

But there are also all sort of genuine individual differences in terms of memory abilities as well. So there are sort of grandmaster memory people that what you or I, you know, here would do in, you know, taking a day to memorize is,

you know, these people can do in, you know, 20 minutes or 30 minutes. There's also really interesting examples of what's called HSMA, which is highly superior autobiographical memory, where individuals remember things

this morning, they remember rather events that happened three years ago, like you or I remember this morning. So they remember, you know, February 9th, 1986. They remember, you know, they have this vast compendium of memory they never, ever, ever forget. So there are genuine individual differences when it comes to memory as well. So it's one of those mental faculties where there is, you know, a general sense

science to it. And there's things that all of us in the general population can do to, you know, further augment our memory abilities. But there are, you know, people at the at the ends of these extremes as well. Great. Thanks, Matt. And our next question from Mason, can you offer any tips for recognizing the impacts of marketing on our brains in real time? I try to live mindfully, but marketing seems to work at a different level than our awareness for mindfulness.

Oh, man, it's such a good question, Mason. And I try to implore a similar philosophy as well. I like to sort of think of this from the standpoint of mindfulness, because I think that is a really good perspective. So there is this perspective for mindfulness when it comes to food consumption, for example, where

You really, out of a love for yourself and out of an appreciation for food and the appreciation for your circumstances, you should appreciate and enjoy each bite of food and understand as much as possible how that food impacts your physiology and your health. And you should really be mindful of that process as much as possible. And I think that that's a great analogy for how we should look at us as consumers in the digital space specifically.

Just as when we're consuming food, food science is what it is right now. We can't be fully sure how these nutrients are being assimilated into our body. It's this incredibly complex system which involves our genetic endowment as well as our lifestyle, et cetera. So it's very, very complex. But we have some general understanding, the more mindful we are of how this is impacting our

physiology and how we feel. And I think the same type of perspective can be applied to digital consumption. So when you go on, you know, Twitter, for example, and you're, you're scrolling down, you might not know exactly how this is impacting yourself and your, your sort of state of mind and your, your, you know, self into the future. Uh, but you know that it may have a, uh,

you may have an impact. You may fully never understand the complexity of it, but the more mindful we are about consumption, the same way we can be when it comes to food, I think gives us the opportunity to see these interactions sort of unfold. So long story long, I don't think there's a way for us to fully grasp with the complexity of how consumption influences us, especially in the digital domain. But I think the more mindful we can be about consumption, the more we can sort of notice these things in this interaction.

And I think if I could add to that, it's a great question. I think the mindfulness piece works, and this is going to sound odd, if you know what to be mindful about. Right. And what I mean by that is understanding the different ways marketing interacts with you is one way.

You sort of have to do that homework ahead of time. And I hate to use the term homework because then when you sit down and you really go, well, why am I buying more Tesla stock? It's extremely overpriced. Well, then you think about, you know, the north sense of empathy and human connection and what you learned about that. And you can and then when you're

practicing mindfulness during these marketing times, you're able to see, well, we're programmed to empathize more with a single person than we are multiple people. And Elon Musk is Tesla, right? And little things like that, right? Once you understand what psychological elements are at play behind marketing, the mindfulness piece is going to be more effective or effective in general. So hope that helped answer your question a little bit.

If you're curious about what those neuroscientific principles are, there's a book called Blindsight. You should check it out. Quick plug. Can't turn off the marketer. There's no off button on them. Awesome. Thank you, Matt Prince. Next question from Mark. How do you deal with the lack of replicability for many of the social psych studies you mentioned that's led to a big reckoning for the field of psych?

Yeah, it's a great question. There certainly has been concerns about replicability for sure. We were fairly careful in the book to try and not cherry pick the science and not cherry pick these sort of highly salient examples, which

You know, they show a cool effect once, but then they never get replicated. And we really can't, if we're being rigorous, have confidence in them. The temperature water study, I believe, has been replicated, that one in particular. Our main insight from that is not that temperature can impact attractiveness. That may not have been replicated, but it's really the...

this idea that we're never really fully aware of why we do what we do. And that was the main insight we took from that paper. And to that effect, there's massive, massive literature. I think that is a finding we can be very, very confident in for sure. So if we're moving away from the water study, we can look at stocking studies. You place water with stockings, get a very, very similar

And this has been noted in the literature since the 1970s and 80s. So, yeah, it's a great question. This is a massive issue that the field is reckoning with. Absolutely. We did our diligence to really try and extract the signal, which is coming out of all of the research, not to cherry pick it, but to define the most consistent findings and have that inform sort of our understanding of consumer neuroscience for the book.

- Thank you, Matt. And our next question from David, what ethical obligation do marketers have given all these easily manipulated parts of human psychology? More uncomfortably, what can be done if people choose not to proceed ethically? - Ooh, that's a good question. Do you wanna start that one, Matt? - You go for it. You're the marker on the hot seat.

I think, thank you for asking that, David. And that's something that, you know, we have done research in ethics and it is ongoing. We are trying to put together some sort of a framework for this because that is often how it happens, right? Innovation consumers eventually catch up in public policies where the hell down here. And that happens over and over. I think the, the,

One place to start is trading value as a philosophy for marketers, right? And it's really about being fair in that trade of value. What do I mean by that? When we are restricting cognitive ability in the consumers. Let me give you an example, right? You wouldn't advertise to a six-year-old, right? Because they don't have the cognitive ability to make that decision. You...

and some countries allow this, right? But you wouldn't advertise to an alcoholic. There are certain things you don't do because you are acting upon a infringed autonomy, cognitive autonomy. So that's the second pillar, right? Be mindful of the cognitive autonomy. But I think it comes back to having a fair trade of value and hiding certain tolerances

behind terms and conditions that are written in something that requires me to get a JD to understand, I would argue that that is a form of limiting that cognitive ability. And I think ultimately it's us as marketers owning this, right? Consumers will have to own the

the cost of free with free products. Right. But us as marketers, we have to own this as well. Right. We have to own that. We have, like Matt said, if we're on the branding team, the ability to create reality. Right. We can alter perception. So with that comes responsibility and and the fact that we don't think about ethics in general and having a conversation about ethics and starting with the fair trade of value and not infringing upon cognitive autonomy. That's one of the steps.

Right. And the rest, Matt and I are doing active research on this exactly to see if we can unearth some other pillars to this framework. Yeah, it's a great question. It really does cut to a lot of the research we're doing right now. I think looking at marketing as a trade of value is a great perspective. So the respect for autonomy is certainly recognized at the level of industry. So this is

why antitrust laws and anti-competitive laws exist. You can't have a monopoly because that reduces consumer autonomy. They don't have a choice when there's one player. But this is not yet recognized so much at the level of marketing tactics. So autonomy, we recognize to be an important

value the level of industry, but not at tactics, at least not so far. And that's a lot of the research that Prince and I are doing right now. The one thing I would add above and beyond any specific ethical precepts is just the orientation to what we're doing as marketers. So as marketers, we say we're marketing to consumers.

But really, what's a consumer? A consumer is a human. And there is something a little bit dehumanizing about calling them a consumer because it reduces their complexity. So you can, of course, aggregate humans together. And once you put them into a large group and sort them by demographic features, psychographic features, etc.,

you know, data profiles, et cetera, they do seem to, you know, go in this direction or that direction. But at the end of the day, people are still people and we have to recognize human complexity and markets with that in mind, if we're truly going to be ethical, I don't think we can fully say what we're doing is ethical as marketers. If we don't understand the full psychological reality, not just behavior of the types of tactical, uh,

advertisements or whatever we're doing as marketers has on the consumer. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Prince. Very interesting question and look forward to see kind of the research that you guys continue to do. Next question. And our final one for today will be from Lauren, Matt and Prince. Thank you for coming today. How do you see marketing, neuromarketing evolving in the next 20 years, taking into account emerging technologies? Lauren, I love that question. I think, I think marketing is going to get,

I think the testing methodologies for marketing will change. I think that we have personally, I'm sure maybe some of you have in your professional lives seen the limitations of current market research. And I think when just as marketers, as a profession, when you're able to find and test using EEG and not just surveys and focus groups to see if people like something, that is the proverbial game changer.

when it comes to marketing, right? So I do see that changing. I do think

I firmly believe that behavior science is going to be more common in an average marketing team, right? Not just Google or Facebook or Apple. I'm talking a 50 person shop that sells auto parts and they made 100 million a year. There's going to be a behavior science person there. I think this is the next sort of evolution or frontier and very similar to what user experience was a few years ago. Matt, anything you want to add to that?

Yeah, I think really behavioral economics, you know, opened up everything. So this is, you know, pioneered by and popularized by Kahneman Tversky. Think your vastness low is probably the best distillation of this that's accessible and popularized. And this is really this realization, of course, that we're not rational entities. We're not rational when we think we are. We think we're rational beings. We think our decisions are well-informed.

but they're clearly not. And there's a really robust science to that. I think this was a great conversation starter, but we can go a lot deeper. We can look at not only the fact that we're not rational, but we don't really understand even how the, uh, the, the sensory information that we're receiving actually impacts us on a perceptual level and on a memory level. We're not working with a full, uh, realization of human fallibility when it comes to decision-making. We're also not layering in, uh,

a conversation about sensation and perception and how we can create amazing experiences that may not result in a direct behavior, but may nonetheless change attitudes and emotional orientations towards a brand or towards a product.

It hasn't layered in yet conversations about human sociality, how tribalism plays a role in decision making and in marketing. So I think behavioral economics was a fantastic conversation starter and really busted this open. But now that it's open, there's so much more to this conversation, which fully takes into account human complexity. And so that's, I think, where the field is going next.

And I think we accidentally glossed over the second half of Lauren's question, which was about emerging technologies. I love that question, right? I think that having a foundational understanding of the human condition, right, is only going to help as we maybe live our lives via VR or augmented reality or whatever else is going to come in the next 15 years, like you said. But right now we're at a point where our understanding of the

Neuroscientific experience is anemic already. So although there are people coding for Oculus and creating apps, not having any idea of the psychological impact of it, right? These are just garage coders who are making money trying to create apps for VR. That's a perfect example. And that's going to continue happening. But if you actually want to have a leg up in this world, this emerging tech world,

uh, aspect of the changing world we live in, the foundational understanding of neuroscience is only going to help you as a consumer and a marketer be better prepared for what comes next. Great. Thank you, Prince and Matt. I think that's a very interesting point to end on. And a lot of questions still remain, I think for all of us, um, this will be the end of our session. So thank you audience for joining us and big, thank you, Matt and Prince for kind of joining us today and sharing more with us. Thank you guys for having us.

Thanks for listening. You can watch this episode and tons of other great content at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.