73 Behavioral Economics and Brand Loyalty: Driving ROI - Jeanette McMurtry Jan 3 2025

Episode 73 - Jeanette McMurtry

Tim Curtis: Hello and welcome to this edition of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Tim Curtis, your co- host.

Erik Martinez: and I'm Erik Martinez.

Tim Curtis: And today we have the one, the only, and dear friend of mine, Jeanette McMurtry. So, Jeanette is a global authority. She's a marketing executive with experience spanning radio sales, PR, advertising, corporate marketing, education, and consulting for startups and Fortune 500 brands. She's hosted a marketing radio show, delivered many global keynotes, and authored four international bestsellers, including Marketing for Dummies and her latest book, Market Your Business, Your Guide to Do It Yourself Marketing, which I've read, it's really good. Jeanette stands out by integrating psychology into marketing, drawing from Jung, Freud, and Kahneman. Her campaigns have achieved 200 to 500 percent higher results from traditional methods. Her six step psychology based marketing framework helps B2B and B2C brands boost ROI and sales. Learn more at JeanetteMcMurtry. com or in her books on Amazon. Jeanette, good to have you finally here.

Jeanette McMurtry: I am honored to be here. Thank you so much.

Tim Curtis: You are more than welcome. So, a lot to probably talk about, lots of things I think we can get through today. Having seen you in action over the years and just our interactions, there's so many things I would love the audience to know. But would you give us just a real quick background on yourself?

Jeanette McMurtry: You did a great job with my bio. Thank you. I think, there's a lot of chief marketing officers out there and we all can claim that we've really helped move the needle when it comes to lead generation and sales. But what really helped me do that more than I ever imagined I could do, as well as beyond the imagination of the clients for whom I was working, was when I applied psychology.

It all started years ago when I was working with Xerox. They were pushing me around the world to speak at their customer events about the power of personalization. You remember when personalization first came out, cause that's your world and you guys are phenomenal at it. Do you remember the days when everyone was boasting 600 percent increase in response and revenue and in sales action?

It was just phenomenal; the results were unbelievable. Pretty soon we saw that kind of come down. We saw personalization become a commodity because every one of us in the consumer world and the B2B world we started to expect it. We started to expect to see our name in the graphics. We wanted to see our transactional information in the copy. And we got it because it became so easy with the technology that Xerox pioneered. So I'm traveling around the world, speaking for them, I'm thinking I gotta figure out a better way. There's going to be another way to expand on this wonderful phenomenon, right?

So, I decided I was going to throw out all the marketing books, ironically. And really focus on learning how to personalize marketing to the psyche of us humans. The psychology of choice. Now I've never heard anyone doing this before. So, I've seriously read all these books and theories from Jung and Cialdini and Kahneman and Pink.

There's a ton of research out there. It goes back to a hundred years to now and is pretty consistent because human nature never changes. And I learned about how we really process information, how we really respond to marketing stimuli and what inspires us consciously and unconsciously to patronize one brand over another. And that was game changing for me. And the results you mentioned in my bio that applying those principles is how we got those results.

Tim Curtis: Yeah. It's amazing. I think back and I don't necessarily know why we weren't focusing a little bit more on the psychology. What was really driving the human need for comfort, protection a sense of self or a sense of, security. I think there were some great advertisers that did that, but not to the degree that we're seeing now with this new acceptance of psychology, psychology-based marketing. Now, of course that comes with, obviously some challenges and, questions about, Hey, are we creating dependencies in people by understanding and unlocking, what's really driving the psychology of choice, but, it's so much more than a campaign right when you're adopting psychology based marketing and you're understanding what you know, you're really thinking about the consumer first walk us through just a little bit. I know you've helped brands in all different sizes, but how do you begin the process of understanding how to tap into the conscious and unconscious?

Jeanette McMurtry: I want to go back just a little bit something you said, and it was about, the kind of the behavior and the psychology. There's a fundamental difference in psychology and consumer behavior. Now, we've been studying behavior economics for years. That goes back 20, 30, 40 years, even longer.

What is the difference between behavior economics and classic economic theory, behavior economics; that is why we really bought what we bought when it wasn't really that wise of a decision. But we didn't get into the psychology of why it stopped there because classic economic theory is you have a well informed decision. You look to the value. Okay, you might pay more for this product that's going to last 10 years longer. So what's the total cost of ownership right that's classic economic theory that we consumers we don't make decisions that way. Okay. 90 percent of our decisions are made with our unconscious mind.

If you don't believe me, read a book by Gerald Saltman. He's a Harvard business professor and he wrote a book called How Consumers Think. And he's done study after study, year after year, and he still comes up with 90 percent of our thoughts and our behavior is inspired and governed by our unconscious mind.

So that's where the difference for me really stood out. Instead of looking at consumer behavior like, okay, We respond to the fear of missing out, but that's a conscious fear, right? We also respond to social proof. Oh, my word. I'm not as cool as my neighbor. My neighbor looks awesome in hot pink. I'm still wearing turquoise blue. I don't fit in anymore. So, I have to look like her if I want to fit in. Social proof, right? That's a conscious process. What are unconscious triggers? Our neurotransmitters that go through our brain. Faster than we can even imagine faster than the speed of light, probably if we were to do a scientific study, and these are dopamine, cortisol and oxytocin.

These are neurotransmitters that we on the layman side know as hormones. When we are experiencing a dopamine rush. We become infallible. It taps our brain to think that we can do anything. There's absolutely nothing we can't do. And it causes us to believe things without evidence. It causes us to believe things that we don't even know ever could be true and causes us to move in directions and make decisions that really aren't practical or logical.

Let's just. Take a look. I hate to use this example, but I'm going to it's a little bit like religion. When you really believe in something you can't see and you believe so strongly that you feel joy and you feel, compassion and you feel love and you feel like you are living your higher life because you're doing something good for the world. You're following this wonderful path and that wonderful path tells you if you continue to be good in your religion, whatever it might be, and you obey the rules and you do all the things, you're going to have the most wonderful afterlife. So you continue down this path and you feel these amazing feelings of joy knowing what's ahead of you. But you know what? We really don't know. There's not enough people on this earth that have experienced the promise of the afterlife that all religions give us, and to come back and tell us if it's really what we think it is. You can equate that with a lot of different things beyond religion. We really don't know.

But we feel these feelings, and we feel like, we're in control, and we're really not. Dopamine's also associated with the high you get when you've just accomplished something, you just broke a personal record, and you feel like you can do anything and nobody can touch your goals, right? Because you just, won that Olympic medal or whatever it might be.

That's dopamine. You are euphoric. That's another way for it. And euphemism isn't always rooted in practicality or realism, right? And then you have the other one that's a really important one, and that's oxytocin. So, what are these? Let me back up. I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. Oxytocin. Is known as the love hormone. When we feel connected to somebody, whether it's a romantic connection or a professional connection or just a friendship, whatever it is, or if we even just feel like people approve of us, we're accepted in a tribe, people want to be part of a group, part of a community. And when you feel that people accept you for who you are, or they love you. It changes your entire feeling, changes your brain. There's some studies that show that when you feel those oxytocin hormones going through your brain, it actually shuts off judgment. Which I think is a funny study. But the point is, it changes how we think about things. It also changes how we think about brands.

So, I'm going to put this together just a little bit. When you're a brand and you can create this feeling that, hey, you buy our product, or you become one of our VIP customers, or you become part of our brand club, whatever it might be, you're going to be better than you are now, you're going to achieve your goals, and you're going to get to the top of that self-actualization pinnacle sooner than you think, and we're going to help you get there. They're creating this sense of euphoria, right? And then you feel like you belong to a tribe, they give you your little package, here's your VIP rewards, here's your sticker for your car, and you start to feel like you belong to something, and they send you emails and stay in touch with you and they make you feel like you're noticed and recognized.

Those two hormones create such a strong reaction that people will stay loyal to a brand even if the product is horrible. Harley Davidson's a great example of that. Do you guys ride?

Tim Curtis: I do not, but my brother-in-law and sister do and they ride Harleys.

Jeanette McMurtry: And they ride Harley's

Tim Curtis: Yeah, they're apart. They're part of that community. Yep.

Jeanette McMurtry: It's that they're part of that community. The hogs program is the Harley religion. Everyone who joins the hog program, you call a hog and you get your little hog jacket and your hog, swag. And you become part of that and you meet people you've never met before but you're instant friends.

Again, it's like that religion, that tribe that brings people together on like values. And. The joke about the Harley is it used to be, and I don't know if it still is, but you have to buy two, one to ride one for parts. And even though people had to constantly repair their bikes, nobody ever switches brand ask your brother and sister in law.

Tim Curtis: No, they don't. And, in an alternate reality where Don Draper existed it used to be called branding

Jeanette McMurtry: Yeah.

Tim Curtis: It was really, and psychology was very much a part of it. I don't. I know that they did not have access to the subtlest studies. They did not have functional MRI scans to be able to read, how the brain reacted to stimuli.

But what I can tell you is there are brands that have unlocked that and have created that appeal. Yeti is a great example of someone who has done that for years and they have, and I got my Yeti right there. They have created a sense of value. It's the social proof, right? Having the Yeti, having the cooler, having the drink where all of that. Really contributed to an aesthetic and an elevation of your aesthetic. Right now, the greatest example, Stanley. I'm like, what in the world are we talking about here? But that’s the concept being walked out right in front of you.

Jeanette McMurtry: I love your example. Because you're taking very non emotional products, water bottles and coolers, and you're turning them into emotional expressions of the consumer. And the emotional consumer, let's go back to Yeti for a second. They have been brilliant about branding them and creating a tribe around people who like adventure, who like to do things differently, who like to step out on the edge of the world and come back and talk about it, and also who appreciate the environment. They have created values around that. And that's if you look at the latest book, I wrote the very first chapter, it goes into kind of what they're doing and what you're talking about. That chapter is called defining your 360 degree value, because it's, let's go back to, you said you're branding.

In the good old days before those MRI scans that shows your brain on Disney commercials, which you can get a lot of evidence of those. It's pretty fun. If you haven't seen the brain scans, just Google it, brain scans of your brain, watching a commercial. And you can see the different parts of the brain that light up the dopamine, the cortisol, the serotonin, all the different things that light up and how it's creating engagement with an ad. It's phenomenal. What's happened in our side. In fact, scientists are even recreating images. They can go into your brain and recreate your dream from last night. But let's go back to it. We were creating brands around values and creating brands around, likeness and things that we care about.

Now you have to define it around, much more than just a few values, product, price and convenience. Those values are out the window because in today's world. Who can't replicate convenience quickly? Convenience isn't even a thing anymore because we all shop online. It's how convenient is that?

You can't prove that, you have, pick up at the curb, all that stuff. It's all there. What about price? You can do that too. It's simple. You just tell someone, match the price, they match it. So those aren't competitive advantages anymore. And the other thing too. Is customer service. That isn't really that's in the eye of the beholder. If you don't mind me being trite and cliche. All of these things can be easily duplicated. You come up with a new product idea. Maybe you have a new widget that does something a little bit differently than all the other widgets that were out there last year, even last month. If you're not the biggest game in town, the biggest game in town is going to come in and duplicate what you've done.

And pretty soon you're going to be catching up. Because it's really, those things are short lived. You can't be unique for very long anymore because it's so quick to keep up with all the technology that we have. So, what are the values that you have to create beyond the tangible values? The emotional value, the connectivity value, self-recognition.

You have a value to feel secure in your life. How do we make you feel more secure than anybody else does? How do we do this differently? How do, what are the values of how you feel when you use our product? Do you feel like you're infallible? Do you feel like you're on top of the world? Do you feel like you have an advantage over others? What do we do to make you feel recognized? And so, we think those VIP programs and loyalty programs that you and I grew up on, Tim, we think those are old and passe. No, anything that makes us feel valued creates a value that triggers those emotional reactions that we've been talking about consciously and unconsciously.

When those reactions take place, that's a much stronger reaction than saving a few dollars at the grocery store.

Erik Martinez: Jeanette, I'm hearing you talk, but I think the challenge for many brands is they don't know where to start with this. None of them have the background that you have they're very busy or they're very left brained or they're very right brained or they're just overwhelmed. So if you think about the really big brands, we'll talk about a Yeti or even an Amazon, when we talk about those brands, they have resources that a lot of our brands that we work with don't have. So how do you take all that goodness that you just talked about and start to break it down into a method that people can leverage as one first step? Because I think the challenge, and getting momentum is taking that very first step and then the next step and then the next step. So what is the very first step in, changing your positioning and the way you do things to apply these techniques?

Jeanette McMurtry: Thank you for asking this question. I think it's so incredibly important. That people realize that just because you're not an Amazon and you're not one of the biggest brands in IBM, whatever field you might be in, you can still compete on this level. In fact, because you don't have the red tape and bureaucracy that they have, and the reluctance to change that many of these big brands have, you have an advantage.

So what is the first step? You have to define what I call the ESP of your brand. And you do that by developing the ESP of your category. ESP is the emotional selling proposition. Okay, what is the emotional selling proposition versus the unique? We've already said you're not going to stay unique for very long, so give that up before you even start. It's a waste of your time to try to be unique, but you can always be emotional. So how do you find out what those are? There are so many studies out there that are free or low cost that you can access about consumer attitudes towards categories. So, let's go to the financial services category for a moment.

It typically has been the least trusted brand or category for consumers for many years, but it's getting better because they're starting to realize what they need to do to develop one of the most powerful emotions that drives behavior, and that is trust. So, when financial services industries did research and surveys, they found out no one trusts us.

They don't trust us because we try to sell them things they don't need. We change their credit card rate. I had a wonderful experience with Capital One when they decided to change the due date on my credit card so they could, charge me late fees because I never ever had a late fee. So, all of a sudden, I have this racked up tons of late fees who looks at their credit card every month, right? I look at it and there's five, six months of late fees because they changed the due date and decided not to tell me. What a tricky way to get that. Yeah, why do we not trust financial services? Because they played games like this.

So the industry as a whole has been trying to focus on, branding them as the one financial institute that you can trust, to be honest with you, take care of you, help you out when you get in trouble a couple times. Let's waive those fees right. And just and be a partner rather than just a provider. So, they're actually getting better. But my whole point and I'm getting off track and I apologize for that. But there's tons and tons of data out there. Deloitte puts out a consumer report every single year, and they show what consumers attitudes are towards health care, towards financial services.

Edelman. Write this one down. E. D. E. L. M. A. N. Puts out a trust barometer every single year and they show how categorically consumers trust changes to how it's changed in financial services, how it's changed for health care providers, how it's changed for retailers. You name it, B2B, B2C. Where is the trust going and why they give examples as to why these categories are increasing trust or decreasing in their trust.

There's a Nielsen puts out a lot of studies on the consumers around the world, and you can see their attitude so it's not just their emotions of trust and believing in somebody and how they feel, connected to different organizations. What are their attitudes? We are learning from these studies that there's about 80 percent of consumers that will not buy from your brand. If you can't promote your ESG and anyone listening today. I hope you know what an ESG is because if you don't, you're already behind. Significantly, there are big corporations that are changing the world because they're showing businesses how to operate with responsibility to the environment. So, society and governance.

 You have consumers out there that are looking at ESG reports put out by some of the groups I just mentioned. You Google it, you can find them and they tell a consumer. Okay, these guys are ruining the environment. They spilled oil in the river in their town, and they didn't care to clean it up, and they refused to clean it up. They refused to be responsible for their behavior. Okay, consumer's going to walk away. The other score, what are you doing for society? How are you giving back? Are you giving your profits, only to yourselves and your shareholders, or are you giving back to communities? Big score. That CSR. And in governance, how do you treat your employees? Are they the poorest paid in the industry? Are they abused? Are you the one that, won't let them take bathroom breaks or water breaks and they complain about on social media? Because of social media, we can find out anything about what you do in those two categories.

More than 80 percent of consumers, and this is coming from the Consumer Confidence Index. Every year, there's a group called the CCI, and they put out confidence reports, confidence in brands by name and in categories. So you can get an idea what some of the emotions are. There's anger, there's distrust, there's You know, respect, there's admiration. There's, hey, you've got like values. Your values are like mine. You care about being good to people. You care about being honest. The other kind of values that are extremely important, which I wrote about extensively towards the end of the book, the whole chapter at the end. Authenticity. How authentic are you? Are you trying to greenwash me? Are you trying to tell me that you're really doing your part in those ESG categories when you aren't? Because if I find out you're not being honest, I'm done. 80 percent of our consumers feel that way.

Tim Curtis: Credibility,

Jeanette McMurtry: It's scary. It's scary, but it's wonderful at the same time. But like I said if a company's not looking at those values, Erik, they are going to be out of business soon. I don't care how big you are, how small you are, because with social media people can trash you in a heartbeat. They can go to your store and see that you are over here. You're yelling in the back room to one of your employees. You better wait. It'll take five minutes or less before someone starts trashing you online.

Tim Curtis: What do we call it? That online reputation,

Jeanette McMurtry: It's important because it's all about, again, people want to do business with groups that have like values. In order to come up with your emotional selling proposition, you need to know what those values are. And then, the next step, to go back to your question, is I put together ESP profiles. Okay. We know what the emotions are. People want security. They want to feel secure, let's go to the insurance industry. You buy insurance because you want to be secure. You want to make sure that you're not going to lose your house with an earthquake or whatever else happens. You're covered, your family's protected, you've got health care insurance, all the things, right?

That is a fear-based industry. Okay, so fear is a huge factor. Fear of loss, fear of losing everything you've worked for, fear of not being able to have an income to take care of your family, fear of failing your family. So, insurance is so laden with so many tangible and intrinsic fears. Okay, so your emotional selling proposition is how you're going to minimize those fears.

What are the promises that you're going to tell those customers that you have that you can deliver on that's going to take those fears away so they can sleep at night? And there's a lot, right? So that's your emotional value. So, let's that's those are associated with the category. So, your ESP profile, when you're looking at your customers, what are the specific fears for your kind of insurance that you sell?

That's your ESP profile. And how do those specific fears among your customers Adults, 30 to 60, whatever they might be. What are those specific fears and how do they manifest their behavior? How does that change for a 30-year-old, a 50-year-old, and a 70-year-old? So, what are the ESP profiles for your different market segments?

Let's go into geographics. How do those ESP profiles change for people In, one culture or if a country is a pocket of different cultures. We learned that from our election processes. So how does those ESP profiles change? You need to put those ESP profiles together, and then you build your messaging around it.

When you do that, you are psychologically relevant in everything you do, and the next thing you have to follow it up with is making sure your customer experience follows suit.

Erik Martinez: That customer experience that's still a lot to unpack just there, because you just talked about two things, but in those two things are lots of little, subtle, nuanced, elements that people need to pay attention to. And thank you for giving us a couple of examples of where we can go as a starting point.

So, I guess the next question for me is, as we look at this psychological piece, what do you do with the people who are just skeptical about everything? We just completed a market research study and partnership with another agency. And one of the things that struck me was the fact that there's about a third of the people that we surveyed were completely skeptical about the whole process of buying, particularly online. They're just skeptical about everything. They don't trust the information. They don't trust the brands. They don't trust reviews. They don't trust anything. One third of the respondents. Came out that way. And so I guess when I look at that and say, what is different about that group of people psychologically that makes them so distrustful of everything that's going on and that's pervasive in our marketing world, in our consumers world.

Jeanette McMurtry: I have to ask you a question. What category was your survey focused on? Are these B2B consumers? Are these B2C?

Erik Martinez: B2C primarily.

Jeanette McMurtry: For what particular product category? Cars or financial?

Erik Martinez: Broad based e-commerce.

Jeanette McMurtry: Okay. And they don't trust brands anymore.

Erik Martinez: Yes, there's a third, of the people who are just skeptical on every single dimension. They're still transacting, but they don't like it.

Jeanette McMurtry: They are still transacting because they need the product that they don't trust in it anymore. And I think a lot of it's because we have over done some, I think too much of a good thing can be bad. A lot of these retailer brands, and I'm sure you're going to agree with me on this, have spent so much time buying off, influencers and doing all sorts of other things to try to create this impression that if you buy this product, you're going to have this glamorous life like ABC celebrity does, self-made TikTok celebrity, by the way.

Or other forms of advertising and communication that's not authentic. And when you do that, that's when people know, you're trying to make me believe that I'm dumb enough to think that I will look like that if I buy your product and, and that's, it's people need to go back to being authentic.

One of my favorite influencers is a woman. I think she's a little older than I am. She's midlife. She started a blog on what it's like to be a midlife woman and have your children leave. And she loves fashion. So, she says when I became an empty nester, I found joy and self-validation again by dressing nice everywhere I went. So now she has this blog. And an Instagram page where she has videos of her dressing up in all these incredible clothes that brands now send her and ask her to please rep because she's got such a great following. She's a size extra, extra-large, maybe extra-large on some. She doesn't care. She's completely authentic and proud of who she is. And she'll say, here's my extra-large pair of pants, but you can get them in small or medium too. She's as real as who she is. She's not trying to be the normal everyone expects her to be. And she's completely and totally authentically joyful. Happy, smiling, just so fun to listen to. She's a real person. I think brands have to go back to that. Going back to being real because they're working and selling to real people.

Erik Martinez: And I think that's, dead on. But what's really interesting about the results from the study is that's not what the consumers are telling us. So, here's one of the questions. What things have you done when you're considering a purchase. Okay. And 10 percent have researched the brand's commitment to social causes. 14 percent have researched the brand's commitment to sustainability. So, we were talking about that tribe. So that's a dichotomy between What you're saying, and by the way, I agree with you versus what people are telling us. And one of the things that struck one of our team members as we were doing this survey reveal yesterday was the fact that there was some skepticism within my team about what the consumers are telling us.

And we've seen this in the election just looking at

Jeanette McMurtry: I was just going to say, “Who believes polls anymore”?

Erik Martinez: Yeah, who believes polls? So here we have this really interesting, compelling study that's contrasting what the consumer is telling us they do versus. what you're providing here and maybe it is because it's all automatic it's I think you started at the top 80 percent or 90 percent of what we do is automated.

How do we resolve that conflict between what people are saying they do. In the real psychological behavior that they're actually following

Jeanette McMurtry: It's funny because I quit doing surveys for this very reason. People do not, first of all, not enough people take surveys anymore for me to feel confident in the results. And you look at the polls for this election, they were pulling 888 people. Really? Out of 80 million, 160 million voters, and we're supposed to think that this is accurate.

One of my favorite people, Nate Silver, has said for several years, and he went right back to it again this year, is polling is dying because people do not really tell us how they plan to act. Because again, we're trying to see ourselves within a social norm and we're scared to be different and we're afraid because we're in a society where there's so much anger and divisiveness and mean spiritedness across social media, even in our own life circles. So, everyone wants to live a little bit more of a private life. And that happens. There's a great saying, it goes back to wonderment days, asking people, how did you hear about us? And they'll say, Oh, I saw it on the radio. It's never been accurate. Consumers have never really been real with themselves for why they buy what they buy.

But the truth of the matter is you just simply need to pay attention to where the human mindset is. Take a look at some of these studies that are out and there's some really cool ways to do instant surveys and about, purchasing trends and purchasing behavior. That's where I would probably do more of the research to find out what are the frequency and the recency of a purchase and what your price threshold is.

Those are the things that people will tell you about but telling you that I'm going to really research your ESG, Oh, I should know about that. So that makes me sound like a decent person. Yeah, I'll say I do it. I don't know that you're going to get actually accurate data from that. From a small sample pool, like I said the larger organizations that I have followed, Nielsen has that same factor. They say the same thing about brands, ESG and CSR. Use those to guide your human values. That's what they say. But I would use more local surveys to really find out, the intention to going back to behavior economics and versus economics, what is the pattern of what you're going to purchase in this category? And what are you looking for in a brand? That's a tough one. I also think that consumers tell you what you want to hear. And a lot of times you're asking them questions they haven't thought of before, and they don't really know what they think. So they're just going to take a wild guess for what they're going to do when they get to that point. Does that make sense?

Erik Martinez: It does. It does. Again, we just saw this data for the first time yesterday, right? So we haven't had a chance to go pull apart all the threads and see where we have questions. But I think it's really interesting because. I think brands are stuck. One of the other things that came out in this particular study was, I think the reaction from our team was, huh, wow, purchasing. And in this case, we're talking about purchasing online. It's so ubiquitous. Almost everybody has some level of experience with it. That, to a certain extent, I'm also wondering, in the back of my head, that psychologically, they're giving us the answers to the fact that the industry has propagated a certain way of doing things going back to your word norms, right? A certain way of doing things. And so we're also getting that the survey is reflecting the fact that the industry has taught us to purchase in a certain way. And what you're saying, which I think is really compelling is, Hey, you know what? There's a better way. And that better way is exhibited in brands like Yeti or Stanley, where we are building a tribe and a connection, and we're doing it in a very authentic way yet 90% of the people out there are responding to the fact that 90 percent of marketing activity is really geared towards making, I hate to say it, meaningless purchases.

Jeanette McMurtry: I bet you that people are never going to tell you that they were influenced by an ad. So, if you were to say what an ad that told you this brand was environmentally conscious influence you, of course not. I'm going to say no, but consciously it does. So, let's go back to I'm going to take it back to an example.

That's why I don't do surveys very much anymore, except for those that are transactional and frequency and timing and things that people can admit to themselves. And there's no moral compass associated with that pattern or with the questioning because people will not say they don't even know. We don't even know ourselves. At some point, we really don't because we're constantly changing the norms and the expectation in a chaotic society.

Let's go back to B2B. B2B is the most emotional decision you're going to make. Why? It's not just about making a good decision for your company. So, you can get that promotion. You can look good and you can meet your sales quotas, whatever it might be. There's a lot more at stake because if you make a bad decision on your job. What do you lose? You lose credibility with, you lose confidence with your team. You have a supervisor who's sitting there across the table, listening to what you're going to do. And you make a mistake or you say something stupid, you might get passed over for the promotion for the guy at the other side of the table. And then look at all the fear. You look at LinkedIn these days, and all it is a crying room for people that can't find work . No one wants to be in that situation where they're losing everything they have because they've been out of a job for a year. So that goes back even deeper. What I just said, Oh no, if I lose a job, I can't go on a vacation. I could lose my house. I could lose all the equity I paid in my house. I could lose the ability to raise my children. I could lose the ability to give them Christmas presents this year, vacations, to take them to college.

It's this huge, huge cycle of emotions, right? But if you were to ask that B2B decision maker, so we're trying to sell you a SaaS product. Can you tell me what your criteria is? What influences you in making these decisions? They would say price and performance and maybe implementation. When we know, it's much deeper than that. And they need to have emotional reasons to believe that you are going to be that kind of partner that's going to deliver on every single promise that you make. Because if you don't fulfill every aspect of this ERP implementation, I'm the one who's head rolls. I used to work for a SAS company, and the SAS company could not implement correctly, we lost many customers in implementation, and I saw this in live action.

Does that make sense?

Tim Curtis: Yeah. It goes back to the old saying nobody got fired for hiring IBM, it's just the reality of the world we live in. People are making decisions based on what they think whether they're conscious about it or not, they're making decisions to say, is this going to make me look good? Is this going to make me look bad? And they'll follow that, to its logical conclusion which I guess you could say is that, psychology based decision making. That they may or may not even necessarily be aware of that they're using that as a decision criteria.

Jeanette McMurtry: They're not. They're not.

Tim Curtis: But it is, a great point to emphasize and oftentimes when I'm speaking, I have questions that come from the audience about B2B and people ask how would you change this for a B2B? I'm like B2B, they are still making human-based decisions. They are still making the same emotional decisions that a B2C person is. The only instance you have is in some cases, they're even more important. Like the one we've just discussed in terms of how will my credibility be impacted as a result of this?

So yeah, that's good stuff there. Jeanette, as we kind of pivot to close here real quickly, I wanted to do two things. I want to ask you a question just briefly what you think the future of psychology-based market is going to look like. But I also want to talk about the market, your business book, and. Where I've gone back to several times is in chapter three, which is that behavioral economics where you go into the social motivators. So it's that, FOMO scarcity, authority cognition, and then the dopamine, oxytocin and cortisol. Those are, that is like the most fascinating chapter.

And if you go back and you apply it to different instances,

Erik Martinez: I'm sorry. I have to laugh there because you just said a bunch of scientific words. And that was the most exciting piece.

Tim Curtis: It is totally.

Erik Martinez: We are total nerds.

Tim Curtis: Even if you don't understand it, when you start to read it, it's eye opening. But where do you think these predictions are going to go for the future?

Jeanette McMurtry: I really like what you just said, Erik, about the scientific piece. Marketing without science is nothing more than entertainment. If you're just out there pushing out great blogs and social media posts and viral reels, And your one minute video to go along with the attention span we have it's less than a goldfish by the way all these different things that we have at our disposal of all the technology you have you're just entertaining the masses And you're not going to have attributable sales to any of that.

It's just not going to happen when you can put your marketing behind the kind of things we're talking about now. The science of marketing, the science of behavior, the science of transactional patterns. That's why you have a CRM. Your CRM can give you all that stuff. It pushes it out, tells you who your best buyers are, who hasn't purchased on their normal cycle, who's purchased more frequently.

You have your RFM analysis at your fingertips within seconds. When you have all these data analytics from all the technology and tools we have so you can monitor all of that. But you also have to monitor the science of data and data that goes beyond just consumers in terms of attitudes towards categories and expectations towards brands that we patronize. It goes to the marketplace. One of the things you have to pay a lot of attention to is the data of the market. You can't. Start a business in declining industry where people don't want to buy typewriters anymore because they've discovered computers and think that you can start that typewriter business and you're going to succeed because you're emotional.

You have to put all of this together and you need to have a scientific and verifiable data driven profile for your business model and for how you're going to market your brand and make sure that you're relevant to the emotional needs and the transactional needs of the people that you're targeting. Marketing is changing drastically. We have not only because of AI, a lot of the marketing skills and tactics and jobs we used to have don't really exist anymore. Is graphic design really a sustainable career path? That's a really good question, because you can do all the things that I used to take weeks to do with a graphic designer or videographer, you can do in five minutes with the AI stock videos and AI voice voiceovers and AI music. It's all there. So you have to really think about how you want to bring everything together and how best to produce.

The other thing that I think is in terms of projections is marketing needs to really start to talk about the data and science and marketing and promote it. If we're going to go to the C suite and say, Hey, look at this. I just got a thousand impressions on one post. We are successful. We're killing it. We're crushing it. You are so dead and you shouldn't even be in your job. Because impressions don't sell a thing. Impressions are not attributable to your bottom line. Your CFO is going to look at you and say, you've spent twenty grand for one thousand impressions. I want to know what you're doing to get me qualified leads. How are you nurturing those leads on a touchpoint journey? It used to be five touchpoints. We're now up to thirty or more because of our attention span and our need for information before we make decisions. And our trust factor. What are you doing to get qualified leads, nurture them on a journey, and then capture their lifetime value, which is more than just one transaction. And how are you going to attribute that to my bottom line?

So if we cannot, put the science behind the entertainment, then we shouldn't be in our jobs. Because we have to be able to prove it. And this is what I'm so afraid of is so many marketers think that it's just fun. That I see a bunch of people going into marketing because it's clever and it's creative and I want to produce videos and I'm really good at social media. I put all these contests out there and I get all these followers. Great. But what does that do for the business side of business? If you can't attribute marketing, To revenue and then to profitability. So what I'm doing with the consulting business that I have is I'm integrating with not just sales executives, the CRO, but also the I T suite. You need to have systems in place, and you have to have the CRM operation systems. You need to have, technology and communication systems at your organization. You need to help that organization optimize efficiency at every level because then let's say you bring in all this new revenue, but the costs are going up. So now the profit margins go down, not up. And then even though you brought in new revenue, the company is still operating at a really low profit margin. What's marketing's role in all of this? It better be very robust. Otherwise, we are not going to be able to justify what people call a cost center for much longer.

Tim Curtis: No. And that's how the game has changed. But for the listeners, the book is Market Your Business. You can get it on Amazon. You can also look it up on Jeanette McMurtry dot com. You'll find a lot of good information in here. It's written in such a way that it explains it without talking down to you.

If I could, paraphrase it that way. But again, fantastic book, Jeanette. Thanks again for coming on. It's been something we've been hoping to do for a while. It's been great to have you.

Erik Martinez: It's been fantastic. Thank you

Tim Curtis: All right. This is the conclusion of today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast.  I'm Tim Curtis.

Erik Martinez: And I'm Erik Martinez. Have a great day, folks.

Tim Curtis: Thanks so much.