Welcome to the Stacking Growth Podcast. I'm Tori Kinlick, VP of Demand Generation at Refined Labs, and your host for today's episode. On this episode, I sat down with Braden Masson-Jones, a performance marketing manager here at Refined Labs, and we covered cognitive biases and the implications for marketers. A super interesting topic, maybe not one that you might expect to hear about from the Refined Labs team and all of our demand gen experts over here, but there are definite implications for marketers, especially demand gen marketers.
Really love the episode and the topic and had a good time recording it. Hope you all have a good time listening. Hey, everybody. This is your host, Tori Kinlick.
Welcome to the show today. My colleague, Braden Masson-Jones, who is a performance marketing manager here at Refined Labs. Braden, would you mind just getting a quick intro? For sure.
What's up, everyone? My name is Braden. I'm Tori Sed with the fine team for Smoke, three months now, it's an awesome experience, and yeah, I'm stoked to be here and dive into this topic. Awesome.
I'm really excited for this topic, too. I know I say that probably on each episode, but I am legitimately excited for this topic. This one feels a little bit maybe out of the ordinary for some of the topics that you're typically hearing from the Refined Labs team. It's definitely got my wheels turning.
Today, we're going to be talking about the implications of unconscious decision drivers for marketing, also known as cognitive bias. For those of you unfamiliar, we each have a very unique viewpoint on the world, on our surroundings based on our preconceptions, on our past experiences, the environments that we spend our time in, the people that we surround ourselves with are upbringing, what part of the world we're from. However, these thoughts, these feelings, these preconceived notions are not always 100% reflective of reality. I think simply, these cognitive biases are a bit of a distortion of reality through which we each view the world, our own individual lens.
When Braden reached out and mentioned that he wanted to hit on this topic, it reminded me of a book I read a couple years ago called Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger. For those of you that haven't read that one, I highly recommend it. Really great book on this topic. Certainly has a little bit of a marketing spin on it, but more than anything, it dives into the aspect of how other people have an impact on our own decision-making.
I think it's human nature to learn from those around you. We as humans are social creatures. I'm reminded of the ads that are running on TV right now by progressive insurance, I believe, about turning into your parents. They're absolutely hilarious and really well done, maybe my favorite campaign on TV right now.
So many of us, especially those that are around my age right now and my mid-30s here, but so many of us are often caught saying, man, this is something my parents would do. I'm turning in my father. I'm turning in my mother. That's natural.
It happens to everybody because these are people that we have spent so much time around, that we have spent so much time watching, mimicking, learning from as we grew up. And so it is just kind of a very natural occurrence that we are influenced by the people around us and especially that example. And I think another couple examples that come to mind right now, much more marketing specific, is the rise of communities in marketing. That is a huge buzz right now.
Everyone's out there trying to figure out how to create communities, how to be a part of our communities, how to monetize communities, how to get leads and opportunities out of communities, which you shouldn't do by the way. But I think the reality is that these communities that everyone is leaning into right now, it's a fantastic trend because number one, it plays into what we ever find lives here called Dark Social, which is really all about all the conversations that are happening outside of a lot of the attributable touch points that happen through content and websites and all that. But in these communities, you're surrounded by people that you trust, people that you want to engage with, that you want to learn from, that you want to influence you. And so I think just all the focus and the current trends around communities and marketing, great example of social influence and to some extent of cognitive bias that can come from all that social influence.
Another example that comes to mind is when you're, let's say, running some organic or paid social campaigns and you see all the comments on there and your eyes just kind of immediately gravitate towards those negative reviews and those negative comments. That has an equal amount of impact on a person. And it's also something that I recommend to each of our clients that you don't just delete these comments, you engage with them. As Jay Bair calls it, you hug your haters.
Number one, it's just a good look for a company to be kind of trying to diffuse these things and show this empathy in a public setting. And it's an even better look if you're able to really resolve the issue for your client right there on social media. But the fact of the matter here is, and what we're talking about today, these negative reviews, these comments on social media, again, are another form of social influence and can have a very large impact on people, which is why I always recommend that you embrace and acknowledge those comments instead of trying to hide them, delete them, nor ignore them. But here's the thing about cognitive bias, and I'm going to turn it over to Braden to collect some of his thoughts on the topic as well.
You have control over it. And the way that you can have control over it is by acknowledging that it is real, that it is a part of human nature, even if you don't want it to be, even if you feel like you're someone that bucks trends and stands out from the rest. The fact of the matter is there are things that happen around you, whether it be immediately around you or some point in your upbringing or engagements that you have with your friends or these communities that are going to impact the way that you make decisions and preferences that you have. And if you are more aware of these things happening and your natural inclination to whether it be jump on a bandwagon or need to validate something that you had a preconceived notion about, that there's some data that maybe suggests that preconceived notion is wrong, all of these cognitive biases and social influences are very real, and they can be controlled by some extent as long as you're embracing them and understanding them.
And so what I hope and get out of this episode today is to educate folks a little bit more on some of these unconscious decision drivers that happen within marketing so that we're all aware of them, so that we can ensure that they don't have too much of an impact on some of our decision making, but at the same time, so that we can use them to our advantage as marketers and sellers and find ways to better understand the way that purchases are made and that buyer behavior is happening behind the scenes and try to find ways that we can utilize them within our everyday work here. So, Braden, I want to turn it over to you. I've gone in a couple of different directions here, a little bit of a rant, if you will, but I know that you had an idea or two in mind about maybe some current examples that you see that are strong examples of these implications of unconscious decision drivers. So what's on your mind?
Yeah, thanks, Dorey. So I think one of the places that I'd like to start when thinking about this and kind of having this conversation is that as marketers, it's important for us to acknowledge and then we do, but there's this very meaningful intersection of psychology and marketing and the reason right is because whether we like it or not or whether we ascribe negative attention to it or not, our goal is to influence ultimately behavior right now in a bad way, but that's really what we're trying to do. And so I think what's so interesting to me about this topic is partly that I think it can be very easy to make people uncomfortable because we don't want to talk about things that are outside of our control, which is one piece, but then also it has really meaningful implications for how we think about executing and specifically measuring marketing. And so one of my favorite examples to think about here is kind of traditional media.
So the media channels that are offline. And so just to use an example, like I've been, I'm a hockey fan and so anyone who watches hockey knows it's the playoffs and so I've been watching it more hockey than normal. And so let's imagine that there's an evening game and like all hockey reigners, there's ads all over the place, right? And so let's imagine there's one for Chipotle on the ice, I like Chipotle.
And how many times do I see their logo over the course of the game? I don't know, but it's going to be a number that isn't zero, right? Now let's imagine that it's five or six p.m. I'm a little hungry and I decided that I don't want to make dinner.
So I decided I'm going to get something delivered. And the moment that I use Lord Ash or skip the dishes or whatever that may be and I choose Chipotle because I think of it and I make that choice to order Chipotle, everything about that is what we call a free choice because it is. We're not here to debate free will. I exercise my will in that moment to choose Chipotle because I wanted it.
But what's really interesting, I think the crux of the, or one of the crux is if you can say that of this conversation is that in that moment, I'm not aware of the connection between Cin Chipotle's logo just an hour ago, a whole bunch of times and my desire and subsequent decision to order from there. And so I think often that we can make a conscious connection between the two. Like, oh, I saw this ad and then I did this thing. But what's even more interesting is when we don't make that connection.
And the reason that is so important for marketing is because if we're not aware, 100% aware of human beings of the connection and there's not a software or anything on the planet that is going to be able to adequately give you that information. And so the implication for marketers and business leaders is that part of evaluating marketing is a huge part of it is actually looking at business level outcomes because that's the only spot in the signal to noise. That's the only spot where we're able to adequately see these unconscious drivers to show up. If that makes sense.
It does. And so I think that there is an aspect of timing that plays into this, right? Like using the example that you mentioned, now this is all very imaginary to me because we haven't seen Play of Hockey in the Philadelphia area in quite some time here. So this is all kind of a make-believe fantasy for me right now.
But like using your example, if it were around dinner time and I am sitting there watching hockey and I see this ad, I think that there is a little bit more of that direct correlation between I saw this ad now, it's time for me to go grab something to eat and this is the choice I want to make. Whether I feel like it influenced me, whether I recognize it happened or not. And so that timing aspect is not always something that we have the ability to control as marketers. There's a whole lot of work that we can do from a targeting and audience building perspective, but we don't always know exactly when our ad is going to show up in front of a person.
And so what are your thoughts on just how we do measure the impact of some of these things, recognizing that it's not a straight line from the time that someone sees this ad, whether it be on social media or on the boards in a hockey rink versus when they actually go and convert it or make that purchase? Yeah, I love this question. It's super, it's really actionable and directional for marketers and but also people who are in marketing leadership positions to be able to think about this better. And so the way that I love to think about this and maybe I'll use another hockey analogy is around the subject, but I very strongly believe that I like to think about marketing ultimately.
It's a team sport. You measure teams on team outcomes. In other words, you measure marketing on business level outcomes, in my opinion, and then advertising as a tactic or a strategy depending on how you want to think about it. It should be measured on the KPIs or key performance indicators, the things that you align with advertising specifically.
So for example, if a goal of a campaign is to get a message in front of your ICP or your audience, you should be evaluating that on metrics that align with the goal of that campaign. So for example, things like engagement in region and consumption metrics that align with the goal of the specific effort. And then marketing as a team sport, if you will, overall is evaluated again on business level outcomes because that's ultimately what marketing is trying to drive. And so I think when you try to zoom in very, very far and be able to say particularly in a B2B context, which is even more complicated, but try to say this exact tactic or effort led to this exact outcome, it's really important for us to zoom out and try to remember that that direct level of relationship is just not something we're going to be able to achieve with accuracy given all of the places to your points where you're on dark social everywhere that people are getting information plus.
So all those untrackable places plus layered on the unconscious drivers of decision that we're talking about here today. So that's the framework I really like to use again, advertising being evaluated on specific metrics and then marketing. Again, just like a team sport, right? You don't evaluate a goalie on team level metrics, right?
You evaluate a goalie on things like goals against and say for such a gen that you evaluate the team on the things the team collectively are trying to accomplish. Yeah, I think that's a great example. And so how should we go about acknowledging these cognitive biases, the fact that they exist, what I was talking through in my preamble here is that acknowledging their existence is one way to hopefully steer clear from just getting into a place where you're just completely controlled by all these unconscious decision drivers. And so how do we go about making the case, let's say, to an executive team or a leadership team that we want to be running these advertisements despite the fact that we know we're not going to be able to track the efficacy of that.
We're not going to be able to track every single impression, especially like the example that you're talking about, right? Of a physical out of home ad, in this case, on the boards in a hockey rink, we can be talking about billboards on the side of the road or an airport as well. But how should marketers go about trying to justify this to their leadership team when they have to go get budget for these things that we're acknowledging they may or may not have a true influence on the purchasing decision. But we do, we can say with certainty that whatever influence it may or may not have, we're not going to be able to track it.
So, yeah, how are marketers to act here when going about trying to justify the spend and getting the approvals needed to maybe launch an effort like this and try to have an impact on that purchase at a later date? Yeah, another question I love. I think there's probably two prongs to this. I think the first is around really drilling home that the reality in the 21st century is that more things go untracked than tracked.
And that might ruffle some feathers we talk about naturally a lot at Refined Labs on this podcast and other places. And so we don't have to go down that rabbit hole too deeply. But I think just acknowledging that, like I said, more things go untracked than tracks. That's the world that we live in.
And software is getting a snapshot. We could argue all day about what percentage coverage that snapshot is, but it is nonetheless a snapshot. Now, the second problem of this that I mentioned, there were two, and I think one of my favorite ways to do this is to actually just think about or encourage people to think about what was the last thing that you bought, whether in a professional context or a personal context. You know, something probably with a higher ticket price.
And think about your decision to buy that thing. How many touch points? How many people did you talk to? Did you hear about it from a friend or go to a party for throwing by someone who you don't know and they have this really cool kitchen gadget and then you go and Google it later?
What does that process? What does that journey look like for you? And I think when you do this, it's useful because it allows the person to get the most accurate first party data ever, right? It's coming directly from their own head and it kind of helps externalize what it is that we're talking about because it's allowing other people to frame it.
In their own experience, which they know the best, right? We only know our own experience and it helps to illustrate when you really start drilling into this like, oh yeah, I saw YouTube video and then there was a YouTube comment that maybe Google the thing and then I talked to friends and I'm in this community. And so I think grounding it from the perspective of the individual is a really helpful thing to do. So the combination of to just kind of sum up those two points, number one, it's about drilling home and using data if you have to.
It's the fact that most things or the majority of things channels today go into track number one and then combine that or back that up with asking people to think about their own experiences. Yeah, I love that. And yeah, I think the asking people how to think back and into the last time they were a part of a team that made a purchase or when they went about making that purchase themselves and thinking through how they did that, chances are it wasn't from a cold email that they got from a sales rep that then they went and downloaded a white paper and started receiving emails and thought, boy, you know what? I had to say good thing this person decided to reach out to me totally out of the blue and thank goodness that I'm on their email cadence now because I'm constantly reminded of them and I'm sent their content.
And you know what? After I've gotten three weeks of their emails from a sales development rep, I think I'm ready to make a purchase here. Right? Like that just does not happen.
And even if maybe it happened to some degree of that, it's been a long time since that has been the reality. And I think what we're talking about here is this obsession with these attributable touch points, with data needing that data to validate everything that we're doing and that what you and I are talking about here today is suggesting that there might not always be data to help justify these things. However, for many of the marketers out there today, they do need to bring some data to the table to help justify these things. They don't have carplanche.
They don't have the total faith and trust of their entire executive leadership team that's going to get behind everything that they say and do. And so do you have any tips for those out there that are looking to get some level of data and insight around how people are at least making some of these decisions or perhaps different ways that they can kind of get in the minds of their customers and understand what makes them tick what leads them to a purchase or a conversion? Yeah, I love this because I think it's going to be more of what we see as we continue with being able to track less and less things directly and that is returning really to what we call marketing fundamentals, which is what everyone did, which is what businesses that had hypergrowth did before the internet. They did customer research.
They focused on who are we selling to first and trying to understand that group of people as best as they possibly could. And the good news for marketers today is that being able to do that is arguably easier than it has ever been with tools like Winter or software that facilitates whether it's like five second testing on landing pages or focus groups, etc. The internet has made it, I would say, easier than ever to get this qualitative data at scale, but it does return to getting some of that buy-in. So I think that's a tricky conversation, but to answer this kind of point more directly, I think it's returning to these fundamentals, focusing on understanding your customers as much as possible.
And when I say that, we've all seen that Google Doc with the quote unquote persona where it's like Maggie is 32 and has four kids and I mean, get out of the Google Doc and have conversations and do actual customer research. If you can bring, I think this is a really big piece of this, is if you can show an executive team like, hey, we've been messaging this way for four years and I talked to 10 of let's say you're selling to, I don't know, CFOs. If you can show interviews with 10 CFOs where they say what we like about your product is actually not X, which is what you've been messaging. What we like about it, the reason that we choose it is for A, B and C.
I think that level of insight, any executive leadership team or person who ignores that, I mean, frankly, is just sleeping, right? So I think there's ways to get this type of data, but it might require kind of thinking a little bit outside of box, you know, leaving GA and going to the CRM and talking to customers, but finding a way to present it and show it, data doesn't only just mean numbers in a spreadsheet, I love spreadsheets, but it can also come in other forms. And so as long as you can back up what you're saying with truth from the horses, no, so to speak, I think you can be a good kid. Yeah, I hear you on that one.
And so I think a good point right now for us to maybe kind of start getting into the wrap up of our conversation here. And so I want to throw a question out there for you. I'll answer it while you're kind of thinking through what your response is going to be. But what actionable takeaways do you have for any of the marketers and sellers out there who are trying to come back this challenge right now that there is so much unconscious decision-making, cognitive bias that's happening, influences that are coming by way of effective advertising when not every single ad or campaign that you run is going to be trackable and attributable and that you very well might not have that provable ROI on your campaigns.
And so my favorite way to do it, it's kind of what you were just mentioning there, right? It's about collecting those qualitative insights. You mentioned a couple of great ways to collect qualitative insights like talking directly to your clients. One of my favorite ways to do it, which is very easy in any marketer can do, is when you're out there running your ads, your sponsor content, and you're starting to get engagements, which you should be getting engagements.
That's, you know, sign number one that you're, you've got the right audience and that you've got a message that resonates is people are going to start liking and commenting and sharing your ad. Take a couple of snapshots of the people that are liking that ad. You'll see the companies that are from their titles. That should prove that, hey, this ad is resonating with my ICP.
These people that are seeing it and liking the ad are who we want to be putting this in front of. Some of your target customers on there are something as well. And similarly, you know, those people that are leaving comments, right? Take a couple of snapshots of those as well.
So, you know, we're all going into so many of these meetings with our executive teams, our leadership teams, and we're presenting all different types of data, data visualizations and charts and graphs. Put a slide in your deck every once in a while that just shows a couple of snapshots of your ads and the people that are engaging with it. That is super powerful. And it does help drive home the fact that, hey, these people are that we want to be seeing our ads, that we want to be impacting, that we want to be getting our brand in front of.
We're having success doing it. Even if they're not going to come into our CRM, even if they're not going to get sent to an SDR for a terrible email automated follow up from there, we are making an impact. And to go back to your earlier point, if we keep making that impact and all of a sudden the time is right, guess who's going to be top of mind? It's going to be Braden sitting there watching Play-Off Hockey.
I'm super jealous of that he gets to watch his team play-off hockey and all of a sudden it's dinner time and he's going to head out the Chipotle because he's seen that ad a couple of times and it's top of mind for him. So, that, I think, is my tip and a great example of how to utilize some of these unattributable touch points that come with so much of the advertising that we're doing out there today. What do you have for the audience for the listeners today, Braden? Yeah, I think there's a couple here that come to mind.
The first I won't be labor too much because I'm sure anyone who listens to this podcast will have heard a talk in-depth about self-reported attribution, right? But the core there is just ask people and it doesn't only have to be on forums or online. You can be, even if you are massively adverse to adding an open text field, asking people how they heard about you on forums will then encourage your sales team to ask prospects how to do you hear about us because there's often, in fact, very often a huge discordance between what GA or how to spot our sales force says was the source and what the prospect or customer says, that's number one. Again, I won't go deeper than that.
People can if they want to. The second is, I think returns to what we touched on earlier, which is aligning with teams on business metrics, business level outcomes and metrics. I think sales marketing alignment is another podcast episode entirely, but it's really important that if you have that alignment, then you have a lot more to bolster claims about marketing because as you push and pull spend, as you test these strategies, you'll see that show up in the numbers over time. It's hard to argue with that.
Final step is I think leaning into tactics and strategies that you have an emotional barrier against, but you don't know why because often there might be something there. You might have an aversion to testing something. You don't know why it is. You just don't want to do it.
And I think you'll never know if you don't test it. So those were kind of my. Wow. Risk aversion.
One of the most frequent cognitive biases out there. I'll just gain full circle. We're seeing it on the marketing side as well. That's awesome.
Great way to wrap up this episode. So Braden, thank you. This was a great chat today. I really enjoyed our conversation and for all those listening, thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed it too.