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🪄 "The Magic of Brands" - Matt Johnson on how marketing rewires our brain and what it means for sustainability
68 Plays7 months ago
Matt Johnson is a speaker, writer, and researcher, specializing in the application of psychology and neuroscience to branding. His work has probed the science of brand storytelling, experiential marketing, and consumer decision-making. He is the author of the top-selling consumer psychology book, Blindsight: The (mostly) hidden ways marketing reshapes our brains.
He is a contributor to major news outlets including Psychology Today, Forbes, and BBC on a range of topics related to the human side of business. He also consults brands like Nike and is an instructor at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education.
When it comes to sustainability here are two articles he recently wrote:
- To Sell Sustainable Products, Go Beyond Sustainability Marketing
- Morality has a Branding Problem: The Tragedy of Vegan Meat Brands
Are you curious to make your company’s marketing ready for the future? Then I have the some simple and exciting options for you:
First, this is exactly what I do for my clients - I help them build their future strategies with workshops and coaching sessions.
I also have a very simple entry offer for founders and aspiring marketing experts: The Simple & Sustainable Marketing Academy, with a ridiculously cheap entry ticket price, because I love sharing what I have learned.
And if you enjoy reading: Check out my newsletter where I write about marketing, strategies and sustainability available every two weeks in the FutureStrategies newsletter.
About Florian Schleicher: I'm a marketing strategist - over the last 15 years I've led and helped shape marketing at McDonald's, Greenpeace and Too Good To Go. Now I help forward-thinking companies take their marketing to the next level.
With FutureS, the Impact Marketing Studio, I help brands achieve their goals and sustainable growth. All without the usual hustle.
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Transcript
Understanding Brand as a Concept
00:00:00
Speaker
So brand is a massive concept a massive topic and it's so massive that i don't think we can really understand it from one perspective alone really at the level of an individual consumer the brand is nowhere else but in.
00:00:15
Speaker
the temporal cortex. It really is a constellation of associations. And these associations don't just rest there, but they really shape how we perceive and interact with the entities for which this brand is associated with. That's the magic of brand name.
Introduction to Future Strategies Show
00:00:32
Speaker
Welcome to Future Strategies. I'm your host, Florian Schleicher.
00:00:37
Speaker
And this show is my gift to you. In honest conversations with inspiring marketing leaders, we explore how marketing and strategies can achieve sustainable growth. If you would like to apply this to your own projects, that's exactly what I do as a strategist, coach, and workshop facilitator. I'm here to help you build the marketing of your futures. So let's jump right into it.
Matt Johnson's Work in Branding
00:01:09
Speaker
Today I'm talking with Matt Johnson. He's a speaker, writer, and researcher specializing in the application of psychology and neuroscience to branding. His work has probed the science of brand storytelling, experiential marketing, and consumer decision-making.
00:01:27
Speaker
He's the author of two books like Blind Sight, the mostly hidden ways marketing reshapes our brains. He's also a contributor to major news outlets, including Psychology Today, Forbes, the BBC, on a range of topics related to the human side of business. He also consults brands like Nike and is an instructor at Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education. I'm very happy to have you with me here today, Matt.
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's fantastic to be here Florian. So I have obviously read your book
Impact of Marketing on Consumer Brain
00:02:00
Speaker
Blind Side last year and I really liked it because it was one of those books where I learned a lot and some of my thoughts on how marketing actually works was shaped.
00:02:12
Speaker
So today I want to first talk a little bit with you about some of the basics of psychology in marketing and branding, and then also a little bit about how this might be useful for green marketing and sustainability efforts. Sounds great. So let's start with the basics. Just how influenced are we by marketing and how rewired are our brains already?
00:02:36
Speaker
So we're very influenced by marketing and it's very difficult to imagine what the brain may be like in a environment in which we're not exposed to marketing. But of course what we've come to understand about neuroscience is that the brain is extremely malleable and it is shaped by influences in the environment. And given of course that we are
00:03:02
Speaker
Consumers living in a consumer world exposed to ads and content and brands every day, really how we see the world, not just what we want and what we buy, but really how we see the world and the associations that we make between concepts is really inextricably shaped by the consumer world that the brain is developing in.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yes, very influenced by marketing much more than I think we realize. And this fundamentally comes down to how the marketing world and the consumer world has really fundamentally shaped the architecture of the brain. Is there any instance that you can remember before or when you started your research where you thought, hmm, I'm really influenced myself.
Consumer Psychology and Brand Resonance
00:03:49
Speaker
And then I'm observing also how this brand actually reshapes my brain.
00:03:55
Speaker
I think that's one of the fun things about being a consumer psychologist is you get to dive into the mechanisms of why this ad works or why this brand resonates and you get to see how the sausage is made, so to speak.
00:04:12
Speaker
But just sort of knowing how the sauce is made doesn't make you want it any less so i love brands i love marketing i love good marketing and understanding the mechanisms i think helps you appreciate good marketing even more and we have a.
00:04:30
Speaker
World-class brand like a Nike for example or a Lulu lemon and you just see the incredible fandom that that people have and the love that they have for these brands It's it's incredibly impressive and it's incredibly impressive I think especially given the very fragmented media landscape that we live in to really sculpt and
00:04:51
Speaker
these entities in the mind of the market because that's fundamentally what
The Intangible Influence of Brands
00:04:56
Speaker
a brand is. It's a constellation of associations existing in a physical space inside our own heads. And it's incredibly impressive at, I think, a brand level that these companies are able to craft these incredible entities that inspire such
00:05:17
Speaker
emotion and such drive. And again, sort of understanding the basic mechanisms of this doesn't make these emotions resonate any less. So I think that's kind of one of the fun things about being a consumer psychologist.
00:05:33
Speaker
So you mentioned Nike and Lululemon. I feel this way with Apple. I know how their marketing manipulates me. And to a certain degree, I like the way they do it. And I'm a total sucker for most of their products. I don't know how it is for you with Nike also working with them. So you are actually working on the things that then influence you on a consumer level also.
00:05:58
Speaker
Totally. Yeah. No, I feel the same way. I feel like there's no real good, quote unquote, rational reason why I should want to buy another pair of shoes. I'm a runner and I have a sufficient number of shoes to run in, but of course I want another pair and I want that pair specifically to be Nike. And if I'm trying to think dispassionately about this consumer choice,
00:06:22
Speaker
I know from a rational standpoint, there's really no reason that I should buy Nike versus another top running brand, but there's that special intangible about Nike. If I am blindfolded and you put on to my feet a pair of Adidas running shoes or a pair of Puma running shoes or pair of New Balance running shoes,
00:06:44
Speaker
I don't have the sensitivity to my feet to tell the difference. And if I run a quarter of a mile in a pair of shoes and I don't know what they are, I'm not going to be able to tell you what they are. And I can't tell based on the product alone, but effectively having the brand there makes it special. You feel different. You feel more confident. You feel that you can perform to your best. And it's really this intangible that
00:07:12
Speaker
really defies any sort of logic or rationality. You feel like you could run faster in these specific shoes, not because of the shoes, but because they have this magic sort of dust, which is the brand itself. There's this great line from
00:07:28
Speaker
Hunter S. Thompson that I love, which he's talking about music and he's like, I love music. I'm a serious consumer. I still feel like a car with the gas on empty can still drive another 50 miles with the right music on the radio.
00:07:45
Speaker
And that's how I feel about brands. That's how I feel about performance brands. I can run a little bit further if I've got the right shoes. Even if I'm on empty, I've got no stamina, I've got nothing left in the tank, the brand can get me another 50 yards or 500 yards. And I think that's the power of the brand. But again, from a rational standpoint, I know that there's no sort of fundamental physical objective reason why this should be the case.
00:08:12
Speaker
And yet, that's the magic of branding. It sort of takes you out of the physical realm, essentially. So that's super interesting. And I want to dive a little bit deeper on what a brand actually is because you mentioned the example of music, something that gets you going.
Brand Associations and Consumer Experience
00:08:28
Speaker
But what really, in your opinion, is a brand or what makes a good brand?
00:08:33
Speaker
So brand is a massive concept, a massive topic, and it's so massive that I don't think we can really understand it from one perspective alone. So I think, one, we have to understand what a brand is from the perspective of the market and the perspective of an individual consumer. So really at the level of an individual consumer, the brand is nowhere else but in
00:08:57
Speaker
the temporal cortex. It really is a constellation of associations. These associations don't just rest there, but they really shape how we perceive and interact with the entities for which this brand is associated with.
00:09:12
Speaker
The classic example is if you drink a brown fizzy liquid and you're told it's a generic brown fizzy liquid, it tastes fine. If you're told this brown fizzy liquid is Coca-Cola, that inspires this constellation of activity that effectively activates this network and that brings into our experience happiness
00:09:37
Speaker
Santa Claus, all of these incredible memories, all of the tens of billions of dollars that Coca-Cola has spent to instantiate this constellation of associations, and that fundamentally changes our experience. And so this has been done again and again and again. If you drink your brown fizzy liquid, you don't know what it is, tastes fine. If you do this when you are told it's Coca-Cola, it actually tastes better. So it actually
00:10:04
Speaker
fundamentally alters our momentary experience. And you can swap this out for performance products. So if you hit with a generic golf club, but you're told it's Nike, you'll actually hit the ball about 10% further. There's a lot of controlled experiments with that. If you take a violinist, professional violinist, and you give them a generic violin, they'll think it's fine, it's so-so, but
00:10:31
Speaker
If you slap on the logo of a esteemed violin brand, they will feel as if they are actually creating much more beautiful music and they feel more confident. So even within experts, even world-class violinists, still we have our experience shaped by the brand itself.
00:10:49
Speaker
So I think number one, the brand on a consumer level is this constellation of neural activity and associations, largely in the brain's temporal cortex, which then shapes our momentary experience.
Brand Differentiation and Value
00:11:03
Speaker
That's where we get this, these wonderful, they're called functional brand effects.
00:11:07
Speaker
But the brand sort of zooming out from a corporate perspective is something very different. So the brand is not the company. The brand is a tool of the company that allows it to do three things. So it differentiates it in the marketplace.
00:11:24
Speaker
It helps the company to identify its offerings, right? So you have a logo, you've got a motto, you've got a brand architecture. If you walk into a footlocker or any sort of shoe store, you don't have to look under the tags and say, oh, look, manufactured by Nike. You can just see the iconography and it provides a shortcut there.
00:11:44
Speaker
So the last element is what we were talking about before that the role of the brand is to provide this unique value above and beyond the physical constituents of the product itself. And again, this goes back to everything we were speaking about before.
00:11:59
Speaker
that again, if you feel that you love the Nike brand, it feels different wearing Nike shoes than it does Adidas or Puma or Under Armour and has nothing to do with the physical product, the physical shoes themselves, but everything to do with this intangible quality of how the brand itself adds value to the end consumer.
00:12:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's so fascinating. Last year, I was deciding on buying a new monitor because I have my laptop here, but it's a small display. So I was thinking, okay, I need a big monitor. And I had this decision, okay, which brand am I going to choose? And obviously the most expensive brand is Apple in this segment with the studio display. And then I found another great display, different brand.
00:12:45
Speaker
But it wasn't Apple. And so I was like, okay, who am I? And am I the kind of person who has the product of another brand? Or do I, am I the kind of person who has his whole workstation done by Apple? And so, yes, I chose the Apple Studio Display. And I'm super happy. And I'm like the work that I'm doing.
00:13:08
Speaker
on an objective level would not be any different. I would do the same things. It's like maybe a little bit the display is a little bit brighter or so, but it feels different. And I think that's a big thing that those brands have achieved. And as you said, it takes a lot of investment to get there.
00:13:27
Speaker
And while you were talking about the emotions that we associate with it, I think brands are also a little bit like a story because I once read about this study that in a restaurant, they divided people into two groups. They both got the same menu.
00:13:45
Speaker
One group got a small card where all the ingredients were written down. And the second group got a personal story from the chef of why he cooked that meal. And the second group, where the chef explained it to them and shared his or her story, they said the food tasted better.
00:14:07
Speaker
It was the same food. In a way, I think brands, they built this story that remains in our heads. I would be very curious because I work with a lot of established brands, but also startups.
Balancing Brand Investment and Marketing
00:14:20
Speaker
Both of them struggle sometimes with when to invest into brands because it's a long-term investment. You won't see the results straight away or when to do performance marketing.
00:14:33
Speaker
That's a, that's a fantastic question. And this is kind of the, uh, the age old debate. So, you know, number one, you know, at what stage do we invest in the brand? And then number two, like, what is this balance between, uh, where I want to delegate my, my finite resources? Do I do it towards brand building efforts or do I go performance marketing? And this is the big academic literature on it. You're probably familiar with Les Benet and has a bunch of, um,
00:15:03
Speaker
really impressive formulations for really how to dedicate to this. It's all probabilistic, of course, because marketing is messy, but gives young startups and younger companies sort of an idea of how to delegate depending on which industry. So I've done a bunch of startup work as well. I'm originally from the Bay Area, and that's the classic question that we have as well. And I think it's every founder's
00:15:24
Speaker
instinct to invest in brand early, especially because this is your baby and you want it to look good and you want to have the ideal colorway and you want to, you know, have snappy copy and dedicate, you know, find a cool logo, like what founder wouldn't want to just make their thing to putting out into the world as beautiful as possible.
00:15:43
Speaker
But what I find more and more is that this zeal for the brand is a little bit overdone. Just as a startup, you know, they're looking first and foremost for product market fit, you want to do I think that the same with the brand where it's the minimally viable brand to really position this product in the mind of the market and be able to communicate this value.
00:16:09
Speaker
But as you know, the first threshold that has to be met in a young startup is product market fit. The first thing you have to do as a young startup is you have to be the best product within your category. You don't have to be all things to all people. You shouldn't be all things to all people, but you have to be something specific to someone specific. So you're trying to fill this unmet need for this very specific target consumer.
00:16:34
Speaker
And you're trying to sufficiently communicate this value proposition to this target market. The brand may need to play an important role there in order to sort of showcase this value for the consumer, but they probably don't need all the bells and whistles. They don't need the perfect colorway. They don't need the perfect logo. They just need a position correctly.
00:16:57
Speaker
do your proper brand positioning such that you're highlighting the features you want the end consumer to focus on. I think there's always exceptions to this rule. So I think in tech-oriented products, the product is the product of the product.
Lifestyle Brands and Market Differentiation
00:17:13
Speaker
If it makes lives easier on the other end, it's going to succeed. If not, it's going to fail.
00:17:19
Speaker
You have other categories. If you're a lifestyle brand, for example, the primary value that you're communicating to the consumer isn't product functionality, isn't sort of utilitarian value. It really is this intangible element. And so if you are a younger company and you're a lifestyle brand, you're very brand sensitive,
00:17:42
Speaker
uh, industries such as automobiles, for example, like you're kind of fighting a, uh, you know, you're fighting on two fronts. You're, you're trying to create product market fit and be the best product, but you're also trying to build a brand as well. And this is what we're seeing in a lot of these new upstarts, uh, EV companies, right? So if you're a Rivian, for example, like the, especially the, the American auto consumer, they're very brand sensitive, right? Of course they want the product to work.
00:18:09
Speaker
But it's very self expressive. So what you think what you said about Apple is the same as people feel about their cars But times a hundred because you only buy a car every 15 years and it's probably the biggest Investment you make in sort of self expressive consumerism. So it really matters what the car says about so if you're a Rivian you're sort of fighting on two fronts you're trying to build this brand but you're also trying to perfect this product and
00:18:36
Speaker
and you're trying to invest in the performance marketing such that you're building awareness and getting people into your sales funnel, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot of the difficulties I think we're seeing in the EV market comes down to just the sheer complexity of being a startup in that industry.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah, super interesting. And I was also thinking about before you were talking a little bit of the different kinds of brands that there are, and I recently listened to podcasts, I think it was from Melina Palmer on the two kinds of brands. There is either a brand is either value oriented or I think the second was premium.
Memorable Brand Experiences
00:19:11
Speaker
Could you walk us a little bit through on what those two
00:19:16
Speaker
brands evoke or how they should be structured from a psychological point of view? Right. So this is a idea that comes from Melina, actually. So she's written this fantastic book called The Psychology of Pricing. And she's a good friend. And so I've interviewed her for my blog. And we dove into a few topics that I found super fascinating in her book. And one distinction that she makes as she's trying to advise brands on how they should
00:19:43
Speaker
price themselves, how they should position themselves in the market is something we really spoke about earlier, which is, you know, where are you going to out compete from a, you know, a marketing standpoint, you're trying to navigate this exchange of value, you know, you want to be somebody's favorite, you need to out compete. That can either mean that you are, you know, you're competing on
00:20:05
Speaker
Sort of affordability you're competing on convenience you're competing on being premium and being trusted so you're like the apple of your industry you're competing on. Being more self expressive you have all this social signaling value you have to find somewhere where you are.
00:20:23
Speaker
being able to compete and the biggest distinction that malina makes and i would i would agree with this is that need to figure out if you are a value business in which case you are competing on praise you're competing on reliability and and sort of the utility driving for the consumer or you are.
00:20:40
Speaker
what Molina calls a quality brand, which means you're trying to go up market. You're trying to be a bit more premium. You want your very sort of brand heavy. And that brand prestige is, of course, supported by product excellence. And that's going to be able to bolster more pricing power. So I think there's a number of ways to look at it. There's ways to sort of visualize brand positioning on different dimensions. But I think, yeah, the sort of
00:21:09
Speaker
The dimensions that Melina takes a look at is really this idea of being a value brand versus say a quality brand. Yeah, got it. What you said, I think a brand is also made up of all the experiences, how we connect with it. In your book, you call them boosters, I think. Yeah. Could you walk us a little bit through those? I think it was four boosters.
00:21:36
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. So one thing that we can really apply well in marketing is the science of memory. And really all marketers, whether they realize it or not, are in the memory business. So this is true of content. This is true of retail design. And this is especially true in brand building. So if you as a company are investing in your brand building efforts and you create the most
00:22:05
Speaker
gorgeous, long-form storytelling, founder story, fantastic brand building piece of content. If it's forgotten the moment that the consumer stops seeing this on YouTube or wherever you've posted it, it really ceases to have any impact on the perception that the consumer has of your brand. And it doesn't really move the needle in terms of sculpting this brand image in the mind of the market.
00:22:35
Speaker
This is where really the neuroscience of memory comes in because we've come to understand quite a bit about how the brain converts experiences into memory, right? Because not all experiences are equally worthy.
00:22:52
Speaker
of being remembered. And that's really the first fundamental thing we have to understand about the neuroscience of memory is paradoxically, it's not about accuracy. It's not actually about the memory. We're trying to define what memory is. It's really the brain's attempt at connecting us with the past such that it can guide future behavior.
00:23:12
Speaker
So human beings, we are future-oriented creatures. Our survival or not takes place in the future. Anything that happened in the past needs to support this future goal. So the brain, from an evolutionary standpoint, shouldn't ruminate, shouldn't go back and replay memories. It only does so if that can help support the future.
00:23:33
Speaker
Once we have this kind of orientation about memory, where it's not about accuracy, it's not about recalling facts and figures, it's about guiding future behavior, then we can see what the brain really values in the types of experiences that it's going to lay down into long-term memory. So one quick example is emotion.
00:23:55
Speaker
So emotion is sort of this sort of red flag that the brain's waving around saying, this is going to be important. This is going to be important. And this totally makes evolutionary sense, right? So if you are eating some oatmeal on a Tuesday morning and your heart rate is normal and you're fully calm and you're just in perfect emotional homeostasis,
00:24:17
Speaker
That's a perfectly fine morning, not worth remembering because things that are worth remembering are things that cause very sharp emotional experiences. So whether good or bad,
00:24:30
Speaker
really intense human emotions are very important to remember. So if you have a really, really, really good emotion, your heart rate is pumped up and you're excited and it's amazing and it's transformative, that's an important experience to remember because you're going to want to repeat it again in the future. It's about future behavior. You have a very intense emotion, but let's say it's very negative. It's full of fear and anger.
00:24:53
Speaker
shame and really negative emotion, if it's high on a dimension of intensity, that's going to be important to remember because, of course, we want to avoid whatever context or situation produce that negative emotion. So whether good or bad, emotional intensity is sort of this gauge that the brain takes in when it decides whether I should really lay this into long-term memory or not.
00:25:19
Speaker
One example that I really loved was from the New Yorker magazine when they were celebrating their anniversary because it was also an experience that they created.
Experiential Marketing in the Digital Age
00:25:29
Speaker
Could you walk us through that a little bit on what they did and why you think from a psychological point of view it was so well executed?
00:25:38
Speaker
So I think this is one of the really key trends that I think we're seeing more and more as the consumer world is increasingly digitized and digital content does what it does, which is it proliferates. Digital content wants to be free. That's sort of the fundamental nature of the internet. And so if you create a song, people are going to be able to find it.
00:26:02
Speaker
If it's not streamable, it's going to exist and it's going to be shared. If you're a media company and you've got your articles behind a paywall, people are going to find a way to get these articles. They want to be free. That's sort of where the business models incentivize content proliferation as well.
00:26:19
Speaker
And so given this fact, one thing that we're seeing more and more is that digital companies and media companies are investing in first-person experiences. Because one thing that we really can't digitize, at least not yet,
00:26:35
Speaker
is conscious objective experience itself. So you can go on Spotify and you can stream Adele or Taylor Swift or monkey safari thrown in an Austrian group there as much as possible, right? You can you can do that endlessly. But one thing you can't have from a digital standpoint is the experience of being in the front row of
00:27:00
Speaker
the concept of your favorite artist. And so what we're seeing in the music industry is artists really investing just incredible amounts in the first person experience itself because everything that they're going to do in terms of their content, that's going to be basically free on the internet for everybody.
00:27:18
Speaker
And so we're seeing this with other media brands as well. So you mentioned the New Yorker, where it's a heritage media brand, Conde Nast, and they're one of the pioneers of this movement where they have the New Yorker festival every year. So if you're a subscriber to the New Yorker, you get all their content. If you're not a subscriber to the New Yorker, you can probably still find their content. But one thing that you can't have from a brand standpoint and a personal experience standpoint
00:27:44
Speaker
is the experience of meeting your favorite journalist, you know, being in the sort of New Yorker ethos and hearing book talks and getting to sort of mingle with these podcast hosts on the Conde Nast network. So you're being invited into the brand effectively.
00:28:02
Speaker
It is this experiential activation. And it's, number one, I think, a way to sort of create a differentiated product. So there is sort of a revenue conversation to be had about these types of festivals and these types of events, especially in music, because increasingly that's more and more where the artists is getting the revenue from is the experiential campaigns themselves.
00:28:26
Speaker
But then secondly, from a brand building standpoint, experiential marketing is incredibly stellar because it's really the ability to shape these perceptions and the minds of individual consumers in a way that they couldn't otherwise do with an Instagram ad or social media spend or even a Super Bowl commercial, which is the biggest brand awareness move you can make.
00:28:50
Speaker
That doesn't take the place of being at a festival and sort of getting to meet your favorite journalists and being in the brand ethos. So it has an incredible sort of brand building potential there as well. Yeah. And I also think like experience is those things firsthand.
00:29:10
Speaker
has a different level of authenticity because now online, like even on TikTok now, all the content is so stylized, everything looks perfect. And if it doesn't look perfect, it's probably meant to be this way.
00:29:26
Speaker
But if there is a life experience, if I can talk to my favorite journalist or my favorite author or my favorite music star, then I feel, okay, I am partly in the room with them. And those people are also not perfect. And maybe they drop some amps in there. And I think this is so important to provide this additional layer of authentic content because that's where we, again, coming back to emotions.
00:29:56
Speaker
where we feel something more and where our emotional arousal is deeper than with all this perfectly designed content.
00:30:07
Speaker
Totally, totally. That's a really, really good point. And I think it's underappreciated just how much content that we see in the digital world is really catered to the medium. So if you look at something like TikTok, which is often touted as the most creative space for brands or Instagram,
00:30:29
Speaker
Yeah, of course, there's some degree of creativity there for sure. But like all brands have to do, they have to cater to the algorithm, they have to look at what is, you know, mimetically valuable, they have to sort of play into trends. Even the most bold market driving brands, if they're on social media, they have to acquiesce to that platform's priorities.
00:30:55
Speaker
But if you look at something like you're saying with an experiential activation, you're hosting a festival or you have a pop-up shop, it is a blank canvas. There's no algorithm that's going to determine the enjoyment that people are going to have in this moment-to-moment experience. Especially brands that don't put a performance angle on an experiential campaign, it really is that brand's opportunity to showcase who they are.
00:31:24
Speaker
And there's no strings attached. You're literally inviting consumers into your brand. You're showing them love. You're showing them enjoyment. You're showing them sort of who you are and your brand personality really embodied in a physical in-person
00:31:39
Speaker
activation and that can create a lifetime's worth of influence and then of course there's gotta be of course the marketing angle to it so you want to scale this and you get. You know secondary and tertiary content can go on social media of course that's that's the Achilles heel of experiential marketing as you do want to be able to scale it.
00:31:58
Speaker
But in terms of the actual experience that you're creating for consumers, you're absolutely right. It is this ability to showcase the brand in a way that's totally unfettered by these other platforms.
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah. And I think we're going probably to see more of that also in the coming years and months. I could go on like sharing this passion for brands with you is just amazing. And there's so much more I want to talk with you about, but I would like to shift to the second topic, which is sustainability.
00:32:29
Speaker
So we face a big challenge at the moment with our climate heating up and it will change our lives. You didn't write this about this in your book, but I would be curious, why do we have such a big problem convincing people to change behavior into a more sustainable way? Or what does the climate movement get wrong about psychology at the moment?
Challenges in Sustainable Consumer Behavior
00:32:55
Speaker
Ah, good questions, good questions. Yeah, so we didn't dive into this too much into blindsight, but it's definitely a topic that took up in the second book, Brannon that means business. And I think we can sort of look at it from a couple of different perspectives. So, number one is, you know, you can look at it from sort of a behavior change standpoint, right? You can say, all right, these actions, these behaviors, these consumer habits,
00:33:22
Speaker
We know enough to know that there's such a thing as sustainable consumer behavior and non-sustainable consumer behavior. At least there's a spectrum there. There may be, even from what we call sustainable consumer behavior, there may be negative externalities somewhere in the supply chains. Even if we're consuming a very sustainable good, it may not be completely carbon neutral. But I think for all intents and purposes, there's certainly a spectrum there. Absolutely.
00:33:51
Speaker
And then sort of the challenge then from sort of a branding standpoint, a company standpoint is sort of how do we shift consumer behavior or even from a public policy standpoint to shift consumer behavior. And so there's a rich science of behavior change and that's sort of a project that we can look at.
00:34:12
Speaker
I think one thing that policy and marketers get wrong is that sustainability itself is not a very motivating behavior. So people in their most reflective, their most introspective, their most moralistic, of course would say, yes, I want to protect the planet.
00:34:32
Speaker
I want to act in a way where my grandkids are going to have an incredible environment to live in, where it's sustainable. Of course I want that. You'd have to be a psychopath not to want that. But then you throw that same consumer out into the consumer world, and guess what? The consumer world is messy.
00:34:54
Speaker
when I've got my two-year-old screaming in the shopping cart and I'm going down the shopping aisles and, you know, maybe there's a sustainably-minded brand here and there's a non-sustainably-minded brand there, but they're a dollar cheaper and I know them and it's a pattern of behavior that is, you know, rehearsed and habitual. Of course, I'm going to default towards what I've always done.
00:35:18
Speaker
So behavior change is very difficult because you're changing existing habits and these existing habits exist in the real world and life is very messy. So this is why in the sustainable marketing industry, you get this very classic intention action gap where survey after survey after survey.
00:35:37
Speaker
Your people will say like, yes, of course that would pay more for a sustainable product. And of course I would shop sustainably if I knew this brand was, was, you know, sustainable in their supply chain and in their production and in their product. I would go with them instead of a consumer or instead of a competitor rather, but you put that same consumer in the real world and they don't act in line with
00:35:59
Speaker
these sort of high-minded values. And so one of the big challenges that sustainably-minded marketers have is trying to narrow this intention-action gap to the smallest degree possible. And that is a very, very difficult challenge.
00:36:16
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely is. And I experienced this in some of the projects that I do with clients on this. How do we actually get people to make this conscious and emotional decision again and again? Because we are in an economic hardship in a lot of countries at the moment. And of course, if there is an alternative that's cheaper,
00:36:41
Speaker
You will have a hard time getting people to do the right thing, so to say, speaking for sustainability. I think the framing of sustainability will need to change because if we are just communicating, okay, this is better for the planet, for the environment.
00:36:59
Speaker
Like you said, nine out of 10 people will say, of course, that's great. But I think there are other benefits that might feel more personal and might emotionalize people better. Like it's healthier for you and say to that, or if it's better quality. Like in my youth, I was buying two sweaters a month or even a week just because it was cheap and I wasn't aware of the problem also. And now buying one or two sweaters a year.
00:37:29
Speaker
It's a different kind of quality that I get and I value those items much more. So I think we need to shift this from, okay, do something good for the planet and also like, do not communicate that much about what you have to lose.
00:37:47
Speaker
to do something good for the planet, but what you can actually gain. And I think shifting communications and marketing to that will have a huge effect because marketing was or is still left out of addressing this problem. Marketing also caused the problem. Our job is to get people to buy stuff that oftentimes they haven't thought about buying yet or that they don't need. But this superpower, this influencing people and
00:38:14
Speaker
with your book and your research knowing how, on a psychological level, people work.
Reframing Sustainability in Marketing
00:38:22
Speaker
I think it can also be used to get people to actually make this smarter decision.
00:38:27
Speaker
Totally. No, I couldn't agree more. And in fact, I just written a couple pieces about these ideas where the title of the piece is to do sustainability marketing, don't do sustainability marketing. So you should be a sustainably minded company and if that's
00:38:47
Speaker
you know within the value system of the founders in the company like that's what they should do but don't put that on the front foot of marketing because these high-minded moral attitudes don't inspire behavior and we see good evidence of this in the vegan meat industry for example so there's
00:39:04
Speaker
plenty of evidence now suggesting that if you are gonna decide what meal you're gonna eat next and you wanna be sustainable, don't eat cows. That's the worst possible thing you can do. And there's a lot of good evidence for this coming from methane and factory farming. And we saw in the later half of the 2010s, 2018, 2019, these two massive vegan meat brands that are really coming up. So this was Impossible Burger and Beyond Meats.
00:39:33
Speaker
and they were coming up, especially in the pandemic, and they seem to really have come back down to earth. And I would say that their failure is not from a product standpoint, and there's not a lack of demand for vegan meats, but it's really that the brand did a terrible job positioning this product in the marketplace. Because the primary argument that both of these companies are making is
00:40:14
Speaker
And we don't really see that resonating, right? So Peter Singer, probably the most famous living philosopher today, wrote Animal Welfare in the 1970s. And what have people done since he wrote this book? The amount of meat that people consume has doubled since then.
00:40:19
Speaker
This is the moral choice.
00:40:32
Speaker
So, we don't really respond to moral claims by driving moral action and moral behavior. And really the contrast to Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods is this incredible brand that's coming out of the American South right now called Slutty Vegan.
00:40:50
Speaker
And it's this incredible brand where it's a vegan company, but they don't put veganism front and center as this kind of moralistic choice to make. They're not saying, do this, it's the right thing to do. They're saying, come into our restaurants, eat this delicious burger because it's fun and it's about
00:41:10
Speaker
uh you know promiscuity and fun and hip-hop and all of these cool things they've created a badass brand and that's bringing people in and so they've really flipped veganism on its head which is really about restraint and moralism and you're contrasting that with promiscuity and fun
00:41:28
Speaker
and something you want to do, but you're not supposed to do. And they've created this incredible brand around it. And Slutty Vegan is coming up in the world. And I would argue that Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are really going down. And they sell fundamentally the same product. Slutty Vegan actually uses Impossible Foods in their product line, but it's how you relate to the consumer. So I think we know enough now about human behavior to suggest that
00:41:56
Speaker
These moral claims, yes, they're great in a philosophy department, but when it comes to the real world, when it comes to consumer behavior, they really don't change people's behavior. They don't stop the wallets from opening. But we have this incredible machinery of modern marketing, which can get people to think very differently about an entire category, right? You have these market driving forces.
00:42:20
Speaker
Everybody back in the late 1990s to drive an electric car, you were a huge nerd. You were a huge nerd to even want a hybrid car, right? And what was Elon Musk's vision for the electric cars? Way back in the 1990s, explicitly, I want to make electric cars sexy.
00:42:39
Speaker
Now it's sexy to drive an electric car. And for everything that I would critique about Elon Musk, he's done an incredible job pioneering electric vehicles, the entire category, the entire industry, what used to be a super nerdy
00:42:54
Speaker
ultra progressive, elitist category of the market is now cool and sexy. And the best and most impressive thing about Tesla is it brings people into a sustainable category of the automotive market who
00:43:10
Speaker
don't care about sustainability. So it's one thing to get people who already care about sustainability to crank the dial a little bit further and to get them to actually execute on these sustainable values. It's another thing, and it's really the thing we need to focus on most to bring people into sustainable practices that maybe haven't thought twice about sustainability or maybe don't value sustainability. And instead of trying to convince them from the bottom up with these moralistic arguments,
00:43:38
Speaker
We've got marketing. We've got sexiness. We've got slutty vegan. We've got Tesla. We've got all sorts of examples of brands that are using these exciting attributes to bring consumers in, which don't have anything to do with sustainability. So long story long, definitely an imperative for companies to invest in sustainability. That's great to do on the backend in terms of supply chain, in terms of product development. But when it comes to their consumer facing efforts,
00:44:07
Speaker
Don't talk about sustainability. That's where you've got to get creative and bring consumers in for other reasons. Yeah. Sustainability has to be part of the business strategy first before you can talk about it. And I also love Oatly. They are doing, I think, an amazing job because same as Nike, totally different brands, but they have identified the problem that they are solving for people. Like Nike is not a fashion brand. It's a brand for personal progression.
00:44:36
Speaker
And it's this, I can do it, just do it. And same with Oatly, they are a lifestyle brand, not an oat milk brand.
Experiential Marketing's Future
00:44:44
Speaker
So I think there's a lot we can learn from those really successful brands, how they position themselves and how they focus, as you said, more on the brand than the product to get people to also change their behaviors.
00:44:59
Speaker
So Matt, as we're almost at the end of the recording, and of course there's a lot more we could talk about, I want to shift to the final three questions that I ask everybody here. So I would be really curious on what is good marketing for you in just three words.
00:45:19
Speaker
I would say invest in brand. Personally, I'm a brand guy. Products, I think, are mostly commodified, unless there's something incredibly proprietary about tech products, products of products of products, but really it's brands that inspire emotion and create meaning in the world. So yeah, I would say invest in brand. I like that. What is the future of marketing?
00:45:48
Speaker
I would like to say that the future of marketing is experiential. So for all the reasons that we spoke about with the world becoming increasingly digitized, with digital content wanting to be free,
00:46:03
Speaker
I think that the biggest growth area is inviting people into the brand, developing ways of actually physically interacting with consumers through the lens of the brand personality.
00:46:19
Speaker
I know it's a trend in Europe as well as the US. We're experiencing this incredible epidemic of loneliness and there's a much bigger conversation to be had. There's a much bigger public policy question to be asked there. But I do feel like brands can play a role. One thing that brands are stellar at is creating communities, is finding like-minded individuals that like the same
00:46:45
Speaker
activities and have similar personalities and interact maybe around the product, but also most importantly interacting with one another. And I think brands more and more that can inspire these actual in-person interactions, number one, it's fulfilling a huge unmet need in terms of human connection.
00:47:09
Speaker
But two, I think can really help move the needle in terms of brand building and this sort of new frontier of experiential marketing. Yeah. I like that outlook that a brand can be an enabler to make people feel less lonely. And we see that on Reddit, for example, with all the communities popping up there. That's just an incredible opportunity for everyone who maybe had a hard time before that finding a community in their neighborhood. And now you can find it.
00:47:38
Speaker
in the global village.
Recommended Reading on Branding
00:47:39
Speaker
So I think that's a very nice and optimistic outlook. Totally. Final question. What book have you recently read that is not your own that you would like to recommend here? Oh, good question. Good question. Oh, I'm reading a great book right now by, I'll probably butcher the pronunciation because it's a Danish author. His name is Christian Madsberg. And I've almost guaranteed that I've mispronounced that, but the book is called Look.
00:48:05
Speaker
And it's a book really applying phenomenology to marketing and branding, really how as marketers and consumer psychology specialists, we can
00:48:19
Speaker
really observe experiences that are divorced from the abstract suppositions that we feel as though we're supposed to feel about these things and really just observe the experiences that we're having in a much more direct way.
00:48:40
Speaker
The human brain has this incredible capacity for building these abstract generalized knowledge, right? That's what the brain does. It's an abstraction machine, but there was a time in our lives where we saw a dog for the first time and it was just dog.
00:48:57
Speaker
So getting back to that experience where we just have a single exemplar and it's not this bigger category. It doesn't provide a set of expectations for how this entity is going to behave, but we just approach it with total and complete openness. So I think it's an important skill in just everyday life for human beings.
00:49:22
Speaker
And I think is an especially important skill for marketers and consumer psychology experts as well.
00:49:28
Speaker
That sounds like a super interesting read. It will go straight to my reading list. Thanks so much for sharing that. Awesome. Awesome. So Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really had a great time talking with you, talking about your book, the ideas that you shared, and I really look forward to also reading your second book. Thank you so much for taking your time to coming here and speaking with me.
00:49:54
Speaker
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Florian. It's been a pleasure. See you soon. See you soon.
00:50:00
Speaker
That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. If you have enjoyed this episode, please give me a rating and a review. This means the world to me, as I really pour my heart into the production and the interviews with those brilliant minds. If you are looking for an easy way to learn strategic marketing, check out the Simple and Sustainable Marketing Academy, where I share the basics of strategic and sustainable marketing in an online life setting.
00:50:30
Speaker
You can also sign up to my inspiring newsletter, where I deliver valuable thoughts to your inbox on how to achieve sustainable growth. I promise you will like it. And if you want to get in touch and find out more about me and my projects, just have a look at the links in the show notes or find me on Instagram and LinkedIn at Florian Schleicher. Thank you so much for listening and I look forward to sharing more with you in the next episode.