POV

The conscious persuasion model employed by marketers is based on three things: more, more, and more. Think about it: Retail and grocery stores offer more coupons. Politicians, more arguments about their positions. Health care and Big Pharma? More data via clinical trials. Lawyers provide more evidence. And most brand managers and ad agency leaders believe you have to spend more to make an impact.

This focus on “more” creates a world in which marketers are constantly yelling in their audience’s faces, pushing them to buy, prodding them to choose what they’re offering, in an attempt to convince them to do their bidding. But truth is, this either goes in one ear and out the other or turns people off altogether. Still, this model is employed by marketers and ad agencies across the world, tricking most of us into thinking it is the best way to convince someone to vote for a political candidate, contribute to a cause or charity, or sell a house.

The thought is if they only shout louder, spend more, and make better arguments, the customer will surely yield, give in, and comply. This is supposedly how to “persuade” the conscious mind. But the conscious mind is obstinate. In fact, it’s unpersuadable. This model may be more visible in social media digital marketing than anywhere else. Companies believe that in order to sell their wares today, they must maintain a 24/7 dialogue with consumers. If they don’t keep up the barrage of social media posts and digital ads, they worry they’ll be left out of these “ongoing conversations” and their competitors will prevail. But with such an active digital ecosphere, their message is more likely to get lost than heard.

The average American in 2022 saw between 4,000 and 10,000 ads per day, double what they were exposed to in 2007. In a never-ending search for more content, more interactions, more likes, a brand’s reputation can even take a hit as their message gets watered down or disappears in the chaos of thousands of ads.

Meanwhile, these companies spend millions, hoping the more money they throw out there, the more attention they’ll generate. It adds up: In 2022, US companies spent a total of $56 billion on social media advertising. Worldwide, brands spent over $173 billion on social media ads, an amount projected to reach nearly $385 billion by 2027. But this model of “more” is a relic from the past, part of the failed traditional marketing approach. Aimed at the rational, conscious mind, it’s the wrong technique because, in reality, that’s not the part of the brain that’s in control. Still, marketers and business leaders have spent the past 10 decades trying to persuade people to use their brands, products, and services through an array of techniques from an outdated playbook. They can’t help but follow the old rules. It’s not their fault.

They were trained on them; they moved up the corporate ladder with them. They have become ingrained in our collective understanding of how marketing works. The problem is, they were developed in a world that had a radically different understanding of how the brain works.

From Persuasion to Perception

At Harvard Business School, we were taught that competitive advantage comes from either being the low-cost provider, having product differentiation, or focusing on a particular niche. Seems reasonable, but it leaves out the most important driver of all: perceptions. Highly differentiated, even superior, brands don’t always get that credit in the marketplace; time and time again they are beat out by parity products with perceived superiority. That’s the ultimate competitive advantage because it exists in people’s minds.

Another well- established principle, life cycle theory, proposes that brands and products exhibit higher growth when they’re younger and slower growth as they age. But there are many exceptions to the rule. Brands that have been kicking around for 50 to 100 years — like Coca- Cola, Target, and McDonald’s — can still go through a growth spurt.

Similarly, many research tools that metrics leaders rely on, from brand health tracking studies to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) (a metric of customer advocacy based on how likely a consumer is to recommend a brand they have used before), are founded on questions people answer with their conscious mind. Despite what they say, consumers have no idea why they buy the brands they do, which means their answers to research polls, surveys, and focus group questions are largely unreliable. Recognizing the limitation of such conscious approaches, the field of neuromarketing has come up with a number of offerings, from brain scans, such as EEGs and fMRIs, to emotion tracing and facial-expression coding.

Unfortunately, these new tools have some gaps of their own. Though they go beyond the conscious persuasion model, they don’t tell us what’s really going on “behind the scenes.” Brain scans, for example, are great at showing how a stimulus affects a person’s brain — such as a certain portion lighting up when the person experiences empathy, sadness, or a sense of community — but they don’t explain why. Why does looking at a certain image cause us to feel joy? Unless we look at the underlying associations, we simply cannot know. These newer techniques are encouraging, as they begin to move the research community toward a greater emphasis on the unconscious mind. However, they don’t provide quite enough insight into the network of memories and associations that influence a person’s decisions.

The truth is, changing people’s perceptions and behaviour is not about emotion. It’s about memories. It’s not about coding people’s facial expressions in response to stimuli. That’s external. It’s not about attributes. It’s about understanding the associations that live on our neural pathways. Moreover, every technique traditional marketing uses to drive business — from inundating people with social media posts to promotional incentives — is aimed at changing the conscious mind. None of the traditional techniques focused on persuading the conscious mind, nor the new techniques that purport to have the inside track on the brain, have proven fruitful in consistently driving growth and market share.