Dr. Neale Martin is the kind of marketer that tries to understand why you buy the same brand of toothpaste, peanut butter, and batteries year after year, without so much as blinking at the other competitors on the shelf. He studies why consumers shop at the same stores, buy the same products, and get into the same type of “comfortable” relationships with brands, that we often slip into with other humans.
Neale is a habit marketer and consultant who has worked with emerging technology companies, B2B corporations, and consumer facing brands since the early 90’s. A Ph.D. graduate from Georgia Tech who left the academic world of papers and publishing, Neale got his wings in the emerging telecom business. His top clients include such established brands as Sprint, Samsung, Cisco, and Texas Instruments.
Neale is the author of “Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore“, and an accomplished speaker, making the rounds at TED events and book publishing workshops.
Today marks Part I of our in-depth conversation with Dr. Martin. Learn how customers form purchasing habits, what the one “golden window” of opportunity is that you can seize to change those habits, and what risk, reward, and loyalty look like in the minds of buyers. We’ll also tell you more about how you can customize your own sales funnel, by segmenting buyer habits and implementing marketing strategies based on behavior, attitude, and intent.
Tune in, subscribe on iTunes, and be sure to share this episode. As always, you can let us know what you think on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBranding, or Facebook.
Episode Transcript
Amanda: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of On Branding by Phase 3. I’m your host Amanda Serfozo.
Amanda: Dr. Neale Martin is the kind of marketer that tries to understand why you buy the same brand of toothpaste, peanut butter, and batteries year after year without so much as blinking at the other competitors on the shelf. He studies why consumers shop at the same stores, buy the same products, and get into the same type of comfortable relationships with brands that we often slip into with other humans. Neale is a habit marketer and consultant who has worked with emerging technology companies, B2B corporations, and consumer facing brands since the early 90’s. A Ph.D. graduate from Georgia Tech who left the academic world of papers and publishing, Neale got his wings in the emerging telecom business. His top clients include such established brands as Sprint, Samsung, Cisco, and Texas Instruments, among others. Neale is the author of Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore, and an accomplished speaker, making the rounds at TED events and book publishing workshops. Today marks part one of our in-depth conversation with Dr. Martin. Learn how customers form purchasing habits, what the one golden window of opportunity is that you can seize today to change those habits, and what risk, reward, and loyalty look like in the minds of buyers.
Amanda: Are you listening? Chime into the conversation as you listen by tweeting us at @BrandFever using the hashtag #OnBranding.
Amanda: So Neale I would love to start off by talking a little bit about the consulting work that you’ve done with brands and companies over the years, your areas of expertise, and how they match what brands need and want in the marketplace right now.
Neale: My background is a bit eclectic. When I finished up my Ph.D. in marketing from Georgia Tech, instead of going into academia I went into working for a small consulting company that was teaching marketing to regulated utilities that were deregulating. My primary clients were in the telephone business so back in the mid–90’s I started working with Sprint and Bell South and several companies like that. The timing was amazing. It was just before the telecommunications deregulation in 1996. But it was really at the forefront of all the new technologies. Wireless, broadband, and broadband wireless. As all these companies were really transitioning I was helping them understand the world from the customer perspective. “What’s the market implications of the new technologies?” We were very heavily involved with the wireless marketplace and I helped design the first Samsung response to the iPhone which came out in 2008.
Amanda: Here’s something you might not know about Neale at first glance: he calls himself a ‘futurist’. Not in the sci-fi sense, but as someone who endorses a way of thinking focuses on connecting the dots, forming relationships, and helping others understand that new waves of technology matter.
Amanda: That’s amazing! That was a hot time. You were in Atlanta for that correct? You were here in Atlanta for the birth of the telecom movement down here. I can imagine it was an exciting time.
Neale: It was absolutely amazing. It was just incredible good fortune. It wasn’t planning. But I kind of got billed as the telecom futurist. Having a marketing degree from Georgia Tech they just assume that you’ve got all the tech stuff down. I discovered that my background in reading lots of science fiction was incredibly useful at that point because a lot of the vision of what was gonna happen, which I saw so clearly, was because I had been reading very smart guys writing books from like the 1950’s and the 1960’s.
Amanda: It’s interesting to me that you do have that academic background. Do you feel that you are able to bring a fresh perspective on a lot of what some people would say is very dense and heavy reading material. Were you able to twist that into a refreshing new perspective for these brands? Particularly with all the new technology coming out?
Neale: I think that’s been critical. Actually I went back to school when I was in my early-mid 30’s. So I had a lot of practical business experience before but my original background was actually as a journalist. I found that that was the biggest advantage, being able to translate a lot of the dense academic research, especially in the neuroscience and cognitive psychology fields, to be able to translate those insights into more practical applications for businesses.
Amanda: You have this on your website that you call yourself a futurist a lot. Tell me what a futurist is to you.
Neale: It’s a term that I use with some great humility. To call yourself a futurist is somewhat ostentatious. But the flip side is you’re looking at the implications of things. I developed a program called ‘Market Implications of New Technologies’. So start looking at the Internet for example. Cisco would hire me to go around, and this seems so strange but it wasn’t that long ago, but I was actually going around to large companies and explaining to them why the Internet mattered and why they needed to pay attention to this new thing called the Internet. My shtick with the bankers is that I would pull out a dollar and say, “What is this?”. Or ten dollars or twenty dollars, whatever I happened to have in my wallet. And they would go, “It’s a twenty dollar bill” and I would go, “No, it’s information.” The value changes minute to minute. Exchange rates, currency fluctuations – it’s just information, it’s really just zeroes and ones on computers. And when you recognize that that’s all it is, why do I need a physical bank? And when you look at the implications of that you go from having all of your branches be assets to, all of the sudden, those become massive cost liabilities that the entire banking industry can flip on a dime. Those kinds of things were so much fun because it was a great intellectual exercise. It was also really fun to shake people up because I would have people come up to me after these presentations and go, “Well I’ve been thinking about retiring and I guess now is a good time because I might have to deal with that.” I was talking to the telecommunications industry in 1996, just as the Telecom Act was gonna get passed. I did the presentation of this very large group on competition. My first question was, “Is copper an asset or a liability?” When you start thinking about the future that way and you really begin to understand that the foundation that you think your business is built on is often made of sand, and that one technological, or in some cases even a regulatory, change can just completely change everything in your industry. And to get the implications of things is really a lot of fun for me. You’re constantly challenging your own assumptions about the marketplace. But also you need to take a lot of time to understand the science, to understand the technology and where it’s going. It’s like Moore’s Law when that was originally postulated. You start thinking about the price performance of these chips are going to double every 18 months. You start thinking that five years from now a laptop computer is going to cost this. If you do the same thing with storage or these other kind of things, you begin to start thinking about what an iPhone would look like. I was writing about the iPhone about three years before it came out just because I could see the trajectory of what was happening. I worked with a company that was really trying to create that. This was a company that is no longer around but it was owned by one of the richest men in the world. This was probably three years before the iPhone came out and he had told these people that what he wanted was essentially this computer that could slide in your pocket and would do all these amazing things. And what they had come up with was that they had just shrank a laptop computer to about the size of a label maker. And they thought this was great because it had a full QWERTY keyboard and it would run Windows. And they just completely misunderstood what this person’s vision was, which was essentially the iPhone. When the iPhone came out I’m sure he went, “No that’s what wanted! That’s what I wanted you guys to build!”
Amanda: It reminds me of a guest we had on. Her show is coming out next week. She claims that she invented the pet rock. She and her brother could not have a pet in the house but she went out to the backyard and she got a rock and put it in a box and called it her pet. And then a year later, I think it popped up in California, there was a pet rock. And she was like, “Ah! Such an opportunity missed! If I had only had, at seven years old, the insight to go out and patent it I would be making some royalties on it.” So I’m sure it’s got to be humbling to see it come out and say, “Darn!”
Neale: It is funny though. Back in the mid–90’s I was teaching marketing to telecommunication companies. Telecom had been basically anti-marketing. They were a regulated monopoly. So if they made a lot of money they had to give it back. But they were getting deregulated. They were going to compete against cable. Wireless was somewhat competitive back then. Nowhere near as competitive as it is now but back then there were two providers in each market. To try to create a new product for them to bring to the market, something that wasn’t out there, and this is the one where my wife punches me, I created the ebook. It was just as a marketing exercise, an electronic book. For these guys it was like all this stuff will go across your networks, it makes sense and is perfect for what you do. But again to start talking about the market implications of new technology. If I can send these books, the information, to your device then I don’t need bookstores. It is something which I think all of us should do, to continuously stay up with the technology. I’m a huge fan of Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” which I recommend. It amazes me that I encounter people all the time that have never heard of it, much less read it, who are in strategic positions within businesses. There is a lot of great stuff in there, but the thing that I think is so powerful is the idea that disruption happens to your business model. The disruption isn’t the technology itself, it’s the implications to how you make money. But back to creating the ebook, my wife is like, “You should have done XYZ,” and I’m like “Hun that’s great, but how many people came out with ebooks that went out of business?” It took a business model. It took Amazon’s business model to make the ebook successful.
Amanda: Neale, who works to understand the habits of not only consumers but established brands, says that brands must periodically step back from day-to-day business and understand their core business product, even if that means disrupting the age old adage, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Amanda: That’s a great distinction for disruption because I feel like that’s a buzzword, a trendy word on everyone’s tongue right now, “we have to have a disruption,” especially with startups. I feel like brands are starting to pay attention to that and they also want to disrupt their business models. Have you witnessed any established brands that have really disrupted their own business model midstream with a new technology or a new service or a new offering or even a new way of delivering the product?
Neale: I think any really successful company periodically has to do that. It really is understanding what your business is. You could even get into some consumer products companies. I think it was Kimberly-Clark where they finally got rid of their lumber mills. They are saying, “That’s not our business. That’s how we got started but that’s not what our business is today.” It’s like when Texas Instruments got rid of memory chips, a technology that they invented. But the South Koreans were just killing them on price and they went, “We just can’t play in this space anymore.” So I want to use this as an opportunity to segue with what I do because what I think the vast majority of companies don’t understand is they think they are competing against their competitors’ products. But what they are really competing against, especially when they bring out a new product, is their customers’ existing habits. We are so inundated with brands. I have done this over the past few of years: it is a very powerful exercise to simply count the how many branded items you touch in a day. Or even just how many you touch before you leave your house in the morning when you’re going to work. And it’s not unusual for people to have 50, 60, 70 different brands that they touch just getting out the door.
Amanda: We asked people on LinkedIn last week, “What is the first thing you touch when you wake up in the morning?” And I think the vast majority of people said Apple. Their phone is their alarm clock or we had a Keurig Machine or Smartwater or Starbucks. If you observe throughout the day it’s hundreds of brands that you’re touching. It makes you think, without them what would we be? How would we even exist? So we talked about new technology and disrupting the industry. On the flip side of that you have habit. Behaviorally you get used to performing a certain function or buying a certain brand. Particularly, how is a purchasing habit formed? Take us through a journey in the mind of how someone continually buys a product time and time again.
Neale: Sure and that’s a great question. I think that it really is about the idea of how the brain works in terms of the conscious component of the brain and the unconscious component of the brain. The thing that most people don’t understand, and marketers are as guilty as most of us in terms of misunderstanding the conscious mind, is we think that as a product manager or as a brand person if we can convince someone that our product is better they’ll buy it. The reality is that your conscious brain is just dealing with novel problems, high risk problems. If you were to walk down the street in a crowded lunchtime environment and text message, you can do all of those at the same time because your unconscious mind can really multitask. It can do lots of different things at the same time. Now there is a cognitive cost for that, don’t get me wrong, but you can drive and talk on the phone. But your conscious mind can only think about one thing at a time and it gets overwhelmed quite quickly. There is a process that goes on inside your brain where you’re trying to take whatever you can that’s routine, that you’ve done before successfully, and take that from requiring a conscious decision to putting that in the area of an unconscious habit. It makes us much more cognitively efficient. And the process by which that happened typically, not always but typically, is that you have a novel problem. My daughter is moving out, she just bought a house and so she is going to be encountering tons of new experiences that she hasn’t had to deal with before. Each of those things she is going to consciously think about at the front end. She may research it, she may go online, she may reach out on Facebook, she may reach out on whatever, Pinterest, to get other people’s opinions. Or to get a review. But then she’s going to make that purchase. And if that works out then she will probably think about it the second time she buys it. “What was the brand I bought last time?” Or, “How did I do that?” The third time she’s doing that, there are neural circuits inside the unconscious part of her brain, inside the basal ganglia, that are beginning to form that once formed completely will no longer require any conscious input whatsoever to execute that behavior. This is what we need to understand, that the vast majority of what we buy day in and day out we buy habitually. If you go to the grocery store and you look in people’s baskets, if you were to follow their shopping every week – the grocery store has 45,000 separate products in it. The average person buys about 100 to 110 products total in a year.
Amanda: In marketing, there is what they call a golden window of time. Getting engaged, planning a wedding, having a baby, buying a house, retiring. These are all big life changes that disrupt the monotony of unconscious autopilot habits. And it’s the golden ticket for marketers looking to break into the consciousness of customers.
Amanda: We hear about this window of time. It seems like there’s a golden moment or golden opportunity, a window of time, when someone has a life change like that. They’re having a baby, they’re buying a house. What is that golden window of opportunity? I think I was reading somewhere if you’re an expecting mom, the first three months if you’re looking for diapers and you go with Luvs Diapers, you’re gonna buy that brand for life. What is the window of time for those life changing moments for marketers to really appeal to these new consumers and really capture that attention for the rest of their purchasing lives?
Neale: Let’s go back to this idea that we mentioned earlier, the idea of disruption. Again, I want people who are really involved with brands to really think about that from the customer’s perspective. They’re routinized to be efficient. Some people are more so than others. Some people are very much experiential. They’re out there really consciously involved in things. I have a good friend who’s always experimenting and never makes the same meal twice. But he has no children. If he had kids, if he was time compressed, if he had a lot of these different things he would not have time to do that. He would want to routinize things as much as possible. Like our breakfast is incredibly routinized. But when you start looking at this idea of somebody trying something new, I mean we’re inundated with ads. Thousands of ads a day. There are thousands of new products a year that are created just for a grocery store. Tens of thousands across all the different categories of things that we buy. The real issue is I don’t want any of it. There’s very few things that if I sat around for a day and said, “You know what I really want? I want somebody to do this.” Right? I’m overwhelmed with things that can solve my problems. We have to recognize that when somebody is going through a life change their habitual behavior is disrupted. They are in a different place. If you look at the structure of a habit it has several very knowable components to it. What is the context? That is the location, the time of day, people, what your original goals were. And then over time that becomes incredibly habitual. I don’t have to think about anything in the morning. When you look at why what you do in the morning is so routinized, it’s because you’ve got to get out the door to go to work. Let me just finish this real quick, I know you have a lot of questions here. But the idea of habit is that there’s a context. And then there’s a cue that triggers the behavior inside that context. And then there’s a reinforcement mechanism. If those things are all coming together, if you do a behavior it becomes very connected to a cue and it’s reliably reinforced, it makes it habitual. It makes it so you don’t have to think about it anymore. This is what we’re really fighting against. The reason I can sell you something new when there’s a life disruption is because all of those cues and all of those contexts are disrupted. And we need to understand that’s not the only time, that’s just the easiest time. If I’m going to get you to buy something new, I’ve got to disrupt your existing habitual behavior and knock you out of the automatic unconscious into conscious evaluation. If I don’t get you to that point I can’t get you to really look at my brand.
Amanda: It seems like it would be an uphill battle for, say, a toothpaste brand to disrupt someone’s habit. If you are a Crest person you just pick up Crest every time you go to the store. You know where it is on the shelf, you know how much it costs. It seems like the best time to really market and make the push is when someone is having those disruptive life changes. Does that make sense to you? Does that seems like that’s the best time for these companies to market and not really spend that money trying to do a campaign for people who are already stuck in their habits? Should marketers really focus on those change of life situations and market around those instead of trying to disrupt someone’s comfort zone?
Neale: Yeah there’s a lot of wisdom in that. There’s a lot of wisdom to say, “Let’s not fight real hard.” If you’ve been drinking Bud all your life the likelihood that I’m going to get you to switch to Miller is pretty low. But let’s think about this. There’s not a real cut and dry kind of answer. Let’s say there is a very big opportunity. A lot of times people who are habitual customers are not loyal customers. In other words, they’re not buying you out of some loyalty to your brand. They are actually brand indifferent. But they have just so habituated that behavior that they don’t think about it anymore. That may be a great person that if I could flip and get them to be habituated on me, that might be great because in my world view habitual customers are your profitable customers. You don’t have to resell them all the time. You don’t have to coupon them. You don’t have to advertise to them. They are on autopilot. They are re-buying automatically. That’s gold. The idea is to look at the cost benefits of that. How much would it cost me to disrupt that habitual behavior? Do I have something that I could do that the other guy can’t do? When you start looking at market shifts, a lot of times it comes down to, “This is just more convenient.” The other thing you can do is to create a new context. Like, “Oh I have my soap at home, I’ve been buying it forever, but if I go to the gym I don’t want to take a bar of soap.” If I’m trying to get you to do a body wash, rather than trying to get you to switch that out of the house, I may say, “Hey you know it would be much better for you to have a body wash when you go to the gym because then you don’t have to deal with a wet bar of soap.”
Amanda: That makes total sense.
Neale: And then once I’ve got you there then I try to expand that context out. “Oh well then when you travel you should take this.” At that point, once you’ve got a habit in your head for that, it’s much easier to replace the bar of soap in your bathtub than it would be to try and do that at the front end.
Amanda: Gotcha. So creating new contexts and new need states for these products.
Neale: Exactly. You’re trying not to fight against existing habits because that’s very hard to disrupt. We know how hard it is to change habits we want to change. So imagine how hard it is for another person to make you change a habit you don’t want to change.
Amanda: When you have information on purchasing habits, how can you, the marketer, make sense of it? Neale says we need to approach it from a behavioral perspective, not just demographics on a page.
Amanda: Segmentation is a big part of this, figuring out who’s an expecting mom and who’s moving and who’s retiring and who’s going to the gym? Segmentation is a huge part of this. How do you start to build that into a campaign and then get someone to buy it? Send coupons, do direct mail. How does a sales funnel integrate with all of this information about habit?
Neale: That’s another really good question and there’s a lot of threads to this. One thing is you really want to start thinking about segmentation from a behavioral perspective. When you talk about the life change stuff, there has been some great segmentation based on life stages and there’s a lot of things we know about what stuff to sell at what different life stages. I’m not trying to denigrate any of that. But I’m trying to say that that’s really tied into behavior. I’m always focused on behavior segmentation. I don’t care if you’re black or white or atheist or southern baptist. I want to know what your behavior is. And we all have this notion that I can group people together in these groups that seem to make sense. If I’m buying a cell phone for a 15 year old daughter I’m buying it for security. I’m buying it so I can know where she is and she can call me if she needs me. I want her to have a phone. For her of course it’s, “Oh my gosh I have a phone! Yay!” But the flip side is that that may be the same reason that I would buy a phone for my elderly parents. So if I am designing a cell phone plan, I need to know what the behaviors are that I’m trying to design that phone around. We did some really neat work after we developed the first response to the iPhone. It was amazing because I was saying, “We have all this data. I want you to cut the data completely differently and we’re really going to focus on behavior.” And out of that we were startled to discover there were six behavior segments. And what was amazing was every one of those segments had its own phone. In other words every one of those segments had a phone that accounted for more than 80 percent of the sales into that behavioral category. So it allowed us to completely redo our supply chain. It allowed us to completely redo how we were developing new phones. Because we knew that this segment needs a physical keyboard.
Amanda: It seems like there’s two sides of this story here. It seems like marketers really love data, they love demographics, they love targeting. And then there’s also another side of it where you really need to study how people behave with a product, what those need states are, the individual stories of each person that’s going to come into contact with it. How do brands go about recording this kind of data? How do they observe people in their natural habitat when they need this product or service? And then how do they make sense of all that data to create a real strategy around it?
Neale: That’s another really great question. When we created Sublime Behavior Marketing it wasn’t because we wanted to create a company. That was not on our list. My background was somewhat eclectic. I’d been an alcohol and drug counselor after my journalism days and I ran drug and alcohol programs. I actually was a psychiatric hospital administrator before I went back to school. I got this real understanding from that experience about the idea that you have a conscious brain and an unconscious brain. The conscious brain is going, “Oh boy I know I can’t use anymore because I’m gonna lose my job or I’m gonna go to jail. All these horrible things are gonna happen.” And you know they know this. You know they know that everything that they’re saying is true. Yet 10 days later they’re using again. It’s that power of the unconscious mind that is so evident in that space. When you start talking about why I wrote this book, why did we take this approach, it is this understanding of the power of the unconscious mind. And that means that I’ve got to do observational data. If I come up and ask somebody why they did something, they don’t know why they did it. But they assume that they must have had a reason and so they’ll make one up on the spot. So there’s so much bad data in our marketing research. It was funny, I was doing some work with Procter & Gamble and with Campbell Soup, and they were yelling at me because they said that I had broken the old models of consumer behaviors, so I had to create a new one. And as silly as that sounds it was like, “Okay fine.” So we took a step back and we actually created this model of consumer behavior that really deals with how much of the behavior is conscious versus unconscious. How novel is the situation versus how routine is the situation? That’s our starting point. You have to understand that from the beginning. To do that we ended up getting pulled into a lot of market research projects. A lot of market researchers over the last few years have been adding ethnographies to their repertoire. But they’re typically bringing in an anthropologist who knows nothing about business and doesn’t really understand the market, but is trained in the observational techniques. Instead what we’re doing is we’re doing the observational work now and deep interviews and what we call confirmatory qualitative analysis. We have this model of consumer behavior that we’re trying to fill in through our observation. How habitual is the person’s behavior? What are the pivot points? We’ve created a behavior path analysis. And our goal is to then take that understanding of the behavioral aspects and then marry that to big data so that we begin to get this idea of what in the marketplace might make you conscious. I was doing a presentation and one of my copresenters made a really interesting point. There is an inverse correlation between gasoline prices and Starbucks sales. So is that a conscious thing or do you just go, “Oh man I just put 60 bucks in my gas tank, I’m not gonna spend four bucks on a cup of coffee.” Or is it unconscious? Is there just this emotional thing that is inside of you that goes, “Boy I just spent a lot of money on gas.” So that’s where I think the future of marketing is going. To be able to understand not just what’s going on between me and my competitors, not just what’s going on in terms of even just the consumer interacting with a certain brand, but what’s going on at this larger level? What are the impacts that we can see? I wrote a piece for Chief Marketing a few years ago in 2008. I was really trying to get the CMOs to understand that the value proposition of their brands was gone. That the value proposition that existed pre–2008, when the markets were pretty good, everything ties into that so that brand is worth that price. They needed to re-establish that brand value. Because they failed to do that you see private label and store brands are now accounting for 30 percent of sales in a lot of brand categories.
Amanda: With so many new marketing technologies on the horizon to capture this type of behavioral information, we asked Neale to give us some insight into what’s new and next. His thoughts? Be on the lookout for more wearable computing, microexpression software, and facial recognition.
Amanda: I’m interested in what you think, when you talked about the future of marketing, what new technology people are going to be using and brands are going to be using, people like yourself are going to be using, to collect this kind of data? What kind of technology do you think people are going to be using? What software is going to be out there for people to collect and make sense of these stories? They are really stories, not only data, but stories around how people receive and interact with brands.
Neale: Another interesting question. I was up at the Neuromarketing World Forum in New York a couple weeks age and I’m writing for the Neuromarketing Theory & Practice. I’m on their editorial board and I’m writing a column for them. But a large part of my perspective on neuromarketing is skepticism. There’s EEGs, there’s FMRIs, there’s a lot of biometrics. And I like the technology. I think we’re nascent. I think we’re very much at the front end of it. I think there’s been a lot of overhype, a lot of overselling of what the technology can do. But I do think if you start looking at what could be possible in the not too distant future, I think a lot of things are going to be empowering what I call anticipatory marketing. Google does it unbelievably. Amazon is doing it very well. They’re really tying-in this understanding of my behavior from all of these different things I do. My wife’s 13 year old nephew has moved in with us and so he watches a lot of things on my Netflix account. So now I’m getting a lot of 13 year old recommendations from Netflix. But the idea where it’s going is going to be very interesting around a few specific places. Wearable computing I think is going to be very big. I think there is going to be this persistence in computer applications. Obviously I think Google is going to be huge in this space. I know a lot of the phone manufacturers are fighting for this. I know Apple is to some degree. I do a lot of work with HTC, I know they are very interested in this space. Samsung is very interested in this space. The other parts of it though, which I think become quite fascinating, are things like facial recognition. I think also Paul Ekman’s work with microexpressions. You can imagine that with people that have cameras on their phones and cameras on their computers that you could very quickly show an ad to a thousand people and develop a computer algorithm, and companies are doing this, that would interpret through their facial expressions what their response to the ad was. I think that the technology is going to enable us to do a lot of very customized targeted marketing.
Amanda: On part two of our next episode we’ll talk to Neale about the ethics of direct marketing, breaking and mending brand trust through psychology, why reward does not equal reenforcement, and the fraction of a second that determines whether your brand brings home a profit. All that and more next week.
Amanda: Thank you loyal listeners for tuning in. While you’re listening we’d love if you would give On Branding a rating or review on iTunes. And don’t forget to visit us on the Phase 3 show page at phase3mc.com/onbranding. No matter where you go your brand is always on, so take On Branding with you.