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The Brain Science Behind Influence and Influencer Marketing

Tim Ash on Winfluence

Influencing people isn’t just creativity and content mixed together. It’s the by-product of the way our brains function. As we experience that content or creativity, hormones release into our system that make us feel safe, happy, sad, angry or any of the other range of emotions. People are subject to their own brain chemistry and cognitive reactions to their environments.

When marketers and influencers understand how that works in their fellow humans, they can influence and persuade more effectively. That’s why Tim Ash, a computer and cognitive scientist with years of experience building digital experiences for brands, wrote his new book. Unleash Your Primal Brain – Demystifying How We Think and Why We Act. The book explains everything from the evolution of us as a species to the happiness hormones and what triggers them.

Tim and I talked about the book, how cognitive science can inform marketers about working with influencers and vice-versa. He also broke down the brain science behind influence in the first place. This episode is heady … because that’s what we’re talking about. Give it a listen and share it with someone you know who will find it as interesting as you do.

Tim Ash can be found on LinkedIn. You can buy a copy of the book, Unleash Your Primal Brain – Demystifying How We Think and Why We Act on Amazon.

Winfluence Transcript – Tim Ash – Unleash Your Primal Brain

Jason Falls
Hello again, friends thanks for listening to Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast. Whether you are a business or a brand and agency or vendor that serves them or an influencer, the ultimate goal you have is to impact influence or persuade an audience to think or act differently. The underlying requirement for us to know how to do that is to understand our consumers more specifically how our consumers brains work.

Jason Falls
Tim Ash knows a lot about not just the cognitive science of how the brain works, but how it applies to marketing. For years, his agency worked with some of the biggest brands in the world on things like user experience and flow landing page design and conversion optimization. He was successful because his background was both in computer and cognitive science. He’s got a nice book about landing page optimization called simply enough Landing Page Optimization. But he’s now pulled the other half of his experience together into a neat book called Unleash Your Primal Brain – Demystifying How We Think and Why We Act. The book explains everything from the evolution of us as a species, to the happiness hormones and what triggers them.

Jason Falls
Now, if you’re an influencer, or you’re researching influencers, and your audience is growing and engaged, you’re producing those hormones in your audience when they experience your content. If you’re a brand successful with your marketing and customer engagements, same applies, wouldn’t we do better if we understood that mechanism better, so we could know better how to produce the reaction more often. That’s what Tim Ash’s book does. I’m tickled to have him sit in with me and explain it all. I nerd out a bit over the psychology and neuroscience behind influence and persuasion. Tim actually breaks down the primal makeup of influencers, and how and why we are even here talking about this topic today. Great stuff for us here to all learn. So why don’t we? learn to unleash your primal brain with author Tim Ash next on Winfluence?

Jason Falls
Tim, this book is really a psychology text with some marketing implication mixed in, I think, what what was the thinking behind the book? Why why’d you write it?

Tim Ash
Well, great question. Jason. I so I guess, as you know, I ran a digital agency called Site Tuners for almost 20 years. And we’re known for conversion rate optimization. And we created 1.2 billion in value for the Googles, Facebook’s Nestle’s, Expedia’s of the world on down. And you can’t fake that stuff. So you really have to know what’s that zero moment of truth when someone shows up on your site, either they, you convince them to act or you don’t, there’s no way to fake that.

Tim Ash
And so we learned a lot about how to manipulate human behavior. And a lot of it was based on this kind of evolutionary psychology stuff. And our clients, for the most part, use that ethically. But there are a lot of big companies out there, as you know, and even governments that are using this kind of knowledge, whether it’s AI or behavioral science to just outright manipulate people to divide us to take money out of our pockets. And so this book was really my attempt to level the playing field, you know, to so we’re not as consumers bringing the proverbial knife to the gunfight. And I just wanted to people understand this is your brain, this is why it evolved. This is how it really works. And, you know, keep an eye out for people trying to manipulate you. So you.

Jason Falls
So there’s there’s a lot of parallels, I think, and I think what you’re what you’re sort of inferring here. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, I imagine you have The Social Dilemma on Netflix, which Yeah, you know, talks about how the social networks manipulate us into basically being addicted to them. And so your book is sort of the kind of the peeling back the curtain to show consumers This is how your brain works. And this is how companies can manipulate it. Is it meant for consumers to be able to understand that or is it really meant for businesses to be able to know how it works too?

Tim Ash
Well, I’m going to broaden it out. So as you know, my first two books were about landing page optimization making websites more effective and those are applied, you know, business to business for marketers working in the field. This book isn’t for going cold consumers or for businesses. It’s the basic operating system for your brain. It’s what all a billion of us on the planet have in common. So it obviously has implications for leadership and sales, marketing, persuasion, but also personal relationships, culture tribes, and then yes, you’d say self develop. Everything from sleep to memory to how we chase happiness. All of that’s in there.

Jason Falls
So help me with this because, you know, obviously you’ve already mentioned your your first couple of books, and they’re very, you know, digital marketing oriented. And yet I really I go back to the first thing I said in this interview, I really think this is a psychology book.

Tim Ash
Absolutely. It’s evolutionary psychology.

Jason Falls
So what makes Tim as qualified to teach me evolutionary psychology?

Tim Ash
Okay, well, fair enough, I actually my own, I ended up going to UC San Diego many, many moons ago. And my undergraduate double major on a full UC regents scholarship, there was computer engineering and cognitive science. So I’ve been studying the brain from day one. And I stayed there for grad school, and studied neural networks, what would now be called Deep Learning or AI, and seven years in the Ph. D. program, although I never finished. So I’ve always been interested in how the brain works, and cognition and how we learn all of that stuff. And I applied it for 25 years to my online marketing career. But now I’ve kind of come full circle, I just, instead of making money for companies, I just want to tell the world about how this thing called the brain really works. from an evolutionary standpoint.

Jason Falls
Very nice. So so you start out by explaining that we’ve all been told a lie that humans are distinctive, because we’re rational. And you say that’s not true. How so? And what’s the truth?

Tim Ash
Well, in in the Western world, we have this tradition going back thousands of years to Socrates, and people like that, that basically said was the rational mind that matters and the reasoning mind and we have to tame these wild horses of emotion, that course throughout our bodies and our brains, right.

Tim Ash
In fact, it’s the other way around this is what constitutes logical thought, is only a relatively recent thing. And that new part of the brain is primarily to model the consequences of our social actions. So you have 100 200, close members and your tribe and says, like, oh, if I do a crap podcast interview with Jason, he knows my other buddy, who I’m trying to get on his podcast, what are going to be the implications of that, it’s really freakin to minimizing social pain while getting maximizing the payoff from being in our social group. So microwave ovens and rocket ships are all wonderful. But literally the split second that we’re done with a computational task, or a planning task, we go back to modeling our place in the social world. That’s the default for our new brain. And then the primitive part of the brain is really the one that’s in charge and making decisions anyway. So the conscious part of the brain isn’t even lit up most of the time.

Jason Falls
So I mean, I think certainly anyone in advertising or marketing business knows the truth that consumers don’t make rational decisions. They make emotional decisions.

Tim Ash
That’s right.

Jason Falls
What what part of the brain is that coming from? maybe help me map that out?

Tim Ash
Well, sure. So the one that’s verbal, the one that we’re using right now to communicate, that’s the conscious part of the brain, we choose where to put our attention, what to think about what to talk about. Below that is the fully automatic subconscious. And that’s a combination of stuff we picked up from mammals earlier reptiles, and really early life on Earth. Like people talk about dopamine as a reward chemical, right? Well, we share that with fruit flies. Okay, so there’s nothing particularly human about that. It’s just stuff underneath the covers, that’s worked for hundreds of millions a year. So we inherited it. So that part of the brain is automatic works all the time processes, massive amounts of information, and ignores the vast majority of it. Most of it doesn’t have survival implications. But the stuff that does, we have either an automatic or a strongly emotional reaction to, that’s what makes us act. And so maybe the best way to think about is the logical brain gives us a bunch of options. Maybe the emotional brain instantly narrows that down to the actionable you know, path forward that we’re going to take.

Jason Falls
So it is that would you say then, that that’s the reason, the core reason that advertising even exists? I mean, if every decision were rational, we wouldn’t need ads, other than to make maybe the rational argument, you know, you’re hungry. You don’t have much money eat ramen, or Taco Bell?

Tim Ash
Yeah, I think it was Robert Heinlein. He’s a science fiction author, one of my favorites, he, he said something like, Man is not a rational animal. He’s a rationalizing animal. So anything that comes out of our mouth that we say verbally is an after the fact rationalization, the real decision was made emotionally and you can see it on brain scans proceeded that rational mouth movement by a by a fraction of a second, and we don’t even have access to it.

Jason Falls
So what is it about our primal brain we need to understand so that we can unleash it and then why should we unleash it in the first place?

Tim Ash
Well, I think it’s like I said, Do you have to think about how do how does my brain really work? And as marketers, of course, we intimately care about that because we’re trying to influence other people. So right now the problem is that We’re focusing on the technology and not the biology and I don’t care if it’s Twitter today, hologram suppositories tomorrow, it doesn’t really matter, as marketers, if you want to have a durable career, you should be thinking about, hey, what’s this brain? And how does it work?

Jason Falls
So you’ve got a line in there that I found really interesting for advertisers and writers and the creative thinkers out there, surprise and novelty make us pay attention. And remember, is that a version of something that I’ve said, it sounds a lot like something I’ve said for years, and I wonder if it’s just a version of what I’ve been saying, which is, our job as marketers these days is to create Holy smokes moments, we’re trying to create, you know, content in this, you know, noise ridden world, we’re trying to create content that makes people go Holy smokes, that’s insert adjective here.

Tim Ash
Yeah, well, yes. And no, I think anyone that says, you know, here’s the various needs, there’s your basic needs, and so on, then you can match my needs, and you can see them, then you can make me into a raving fan, by having delight moments, you know, we have our little marketing hierarchies we like to talk about, but no, this is a little different that the point is that anything that the brain can commonly find in its environment, it’s not going to pay attention to if you’re dying of thirst in the desert, and you see some tiny little plant shoot, you’re going to look for evidence of water, because your survival depends on it. If you’re sitting there in the bank of a river, and you can scoop up a cup full anytime, you’re not going to give a crap about water because it’s abundant in your environment. And so in that same way, anything that’s you have easy access to is going to get normalized by the brain is going to get tuned out. And it’s only like, oh, wow, this, this is new. I haven’t seen this before, what do I do with it? Or I really need this like food, or mating opportunities, you’re going to pay attention to those signals. So you can’t manufacture delight, but you canposition your stuff. So it’s unique in the environment and requires the conscious brain to take a look at it.

Jason Falls
That’s fair. So in the book, you go into detail about the hormones that fuel our happiness. You mentioned dopamine, earlier, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, I think are the other three

Tim Ash
Yep, those are the big four happiness chemicals.

Jason Falls
So remind me what each of those are, and maybe why we as marketers or influencers even might want to produce them in our audiences.

Tim Ash
Yeah. And by the way, there’s a lot of common misunderstanding about what they do. And I talked about the evolutionary reason that they exist and like, so we share them with a lot earlier life forms. So dopamine is one of the most basics it’s essentially how to meet or out energy in the pursuit of goals is this worth spending my energy on, it gives you these little little nudges to move forward for things that have survival implications for you. The other thing dopamine does is if you don’t get what you expect, there’s kind of like this Oh, shit circuit in your brain that says, I didn’t get what I wanted. Well, then dopamine updates the mental model of the world, so it’s more accurate next time. In other words, if you’re not failing, you’re not learning. You’re in your comfort zone and you get exactly what you expect all the time. There’s no opportunity for learning so dopa means for energy metering and updating the mental model, okay. Endorphins are for temporary pain suppression. So for example, you know, the, the bare bit your arm off now, should you try to bind the wound so you don’t bleed out or run away from the bear. Okay, it’s it’s temporary pain suppression. And when you’ve done physical damage to yourself, runner’s high, you know, that sort of thing, you trigger it, but you’re really hurting your body.

Tim Ash
The then oxytocin is the mother child bonding mechanism. Okay, so basically, if you had this screaming pooping, monsters little thing that sucked all your energy out normally you’d have an aversion to that situation and yet with oxytocin mothers bond to children and are happy to provide all kinds of services to them to overcome that. So essentially, oxytocin is avoidance and approach in group members are in Super in out group members, that same mother, if she’s a bear is going to tear you apart if you’re a stranger, so is keeping outsiders out. And might not want to think, yeah, serotonin, yeah, serotonin is, was developed mostly for our mammalian ancestors. And it’s about dominance. It’s about the payoff, you get for feeling that all your needs in the tribe are taken care of. So if you’re an alpha male, you’re a happy camper or alpha female. If you’re on the outskirts of the tribe fighting for scraps and mating opportunities, and you’re, you’re the first line of defense against predators. That’s a problem. So seratonin says basically, our tribal needs have been taken care of.

Jason Falls
Okay. And and and and what’s melanin? That’s, that’s not something different. Nevermind.

Jason Falls
So, okay, so understanding the primal brain perspective, then let’s let’s package all this together, I’m a brand, I want to engage influencers. How is this information going to help me do that well?

Tim Ash
Okay, great question. So let’s talk about what influencers are, from an evolutionary standpoint, okay, as I mentioned, we have, like this close group are, by far the most gregarious of, of animals 100 to 200 people we can have close knowledge of, and that’s basically our tribe wandering around wherever we, we lived from an evolutionary standpoint. And it was important for us to have intimate knowledge of all of those people. So gossip is actually the glue that keeps small tribes together. And it’s, you know, things about like, often gambling, deviant behavior, sexual or otherwise, and those are like that’s, that’s the juicy stuff, like we like to trade around, right? Violations of social norms, we’ll spread that kind of gossip all day long. So it but it’s really the model our place in the tribe. And so what happens is, unfortunately, we live in a society, which means billions of people. And, and I think the Beatles famously declared, I think john lennon once said, like, we are more famous than Jesus Christ or something like that, right? You might have been right. So we have celebrities, whether it’s worthless ones like the Kardashians, or otherwise. And what we do is, we think of them as members of that small hundred 200 person group. And so finding out and keeping up with their lives, and knowing whether they’re in or out of their relationships is really important. So People Magazine and all those, you know, rags at the checkout stand of the supermarket, there, where we’re essentially doing is considering those people part of our tribe, but we don’t get the payoff from it, because we can influence behavior and then not really interacting with us. So it’s this false transference of gossip onto somebody who’s not really in our tribe, just because of their notoriety. So that’s what influencers are from an evolutionary perspective.

Jason Falls
Interesting. So So if I’m a business or a brand then and I want to reach a certain audience, what I need to do is find influencers who I can model as being a part of their, you know, their tribe of people there 150 200 people.

Tim Ash
Exactly, except you’re gonna find that it’s not 100 to 200 people that the there’s millions of people potentially that each have a tribe of 100 to 200, that consider your influencer as part of one of their 200.

Jason Falls
Okay, so let now let’s flip it. I’m an influencer. And I want to leverage this knowledge to improve my content or my agent, so that I can grow and or be more attractive to brands, how does the primal brain knowledge help them?

Tim Ash
Oh, is it this, this is really profound. We evolved, our big evolutionary bet was on culture spread. So it’s all about how cohesive our tribe is because the human history is really the competition among tribes. So individually, we’re weaker. But if we have a super cohesive tribe, like the Spartans, let’s go get naked and then kick ass on everybody else and chop them into pieces. That’s high tribal cohesion. Whereas like, you know, hippies at Burning Man, they’re all doing their own thing. That’s not a very cohesive tribe, right? You with me? Spartans come in, they take, you know, the Black Rock desert apart in a heartbeat. So if you think about it that way, what’s important for any tribe is to very tightly adhere to his cultural values, and its stories and its norms. And so what you have to do as an influencer, I think is not try to be a broad brand, just like this is true for brands in general, but and certainly influencer brands, you have to stand for something. So have a point of view, have a strong opinion, it’s like what do they say in public relations? Any? Any publicity is good publicity is kind of true, you don’t get publicity by saying, well, it kind of depends. I’m on both sides of this issue. Right? Your brand has to stand for something. So editorial point of view, strong stands, excluding people as you know, if you want your tribe there in everybody else’s on the outside looking in, so you have to create an out group as well, to have a point of view with the opposing side, if you will.

Jason Falls
That’s interesting. Now you’ve got a section in there towards the end, where you talk about who we want to learn from. Acknowledged experts is on the list after the people who you know, look and just like me, so both of those people who look like me and acknowledged experts scream influencers to me, is that why they’re so powerful? Because they look like the person in question.

Tim Ash
Yeah. And so let’s talk about this for again, from an evolutionary standpoint, most people that were in your tribe are probably your relatives. Mm hmm. And I don’t mean just in you know, backward places. There’s just because they’re only 100 to 200 of them, right. Probably your uncle, cousin, nephew. One kind of thing. And so most people that you want to learn from automatically and this is across all cultures are the following. There are people that was the same color as you that speak the same language, even if you don’t understand the language, even babbling in the same dialect, nonsense words are more interesting to babies then babbling in a foreign dialect, they already get that people have the same skin color code, gender, you know, so girls learn from women and boys learn from men, that’s not a normalizing thing, or binary, right? Kind of whatever you want to call it, gender thing. It’s just a, we model more successful others like, Okay, I’m one of these, I’m a boy, I’m gonna grow up to be like a man. So I need to model the man that’s just built in. And as you said, outside experts, which means often older people, and, you know, people that are acknowledged authorities in their field, that’s the other thing we look for. So basically, modeling successful others, means modeling people like us, and people that are recognized by others. It’s kind of a second order learning. We learn who to learn from from other people, because they’re telling us that someone’s an expert.

Jason Falls
Interesting. So, you know, your, your, this whole conversation about, you know, we gravitate to people that look like us that are the same gender, the same color, etc. How much of today’s I guess the way to put it is social anxiety can be explained by what you cover in this book?

Tim Ash
Well, again, there’s a lot of it pretty much all of it. The problem is we were designed to compete in small tribes against each other. That’s what we evolved for. Right now. It’s not the same survival imperative, but we’re now forming communities of billions of people. And so but again, the principle of wanting to be in a tribe, super strong, wanting to spread tribal knowledge and culture without changing it. I mean, I use the analogy of like, you’re in a flat earth tribe. And you’re saying the earth is flat? That’s the word and I say, Well, I was on that mass, that sailing ship, and I kind of saw the curvature of the ocean. So I’m not so sure, I think we might be honest fear. Well, that kind of guy gets thrown off the mast and on the ship altogether. So unless you’re spreading culture without changing it, unless it’s efficiently spreading the tribes doesn’t isn’t as cohesive. So basically, will sanction people that don’t follow the rules.

Jason Falls
Hmm, interesting. Well, there’s a hell of a lot of sanctioning going on these day.

Tim Ash
Exactly. And so that that really explains it. So you can say it have the same objective reality and then have people look at it very differently based on what their cultural package is. And here’s the really scary part. When we’re uncertain, or we’re afraid, we fall back on cultural knowledge, we’ll ignore our own direct experience, what our eyes and ears tell us and what we experienced. And we’d rather fall back on tribal knowledge. And unfortunately, a lot of people actively Stoke those fires and activate differences because they’re going to get a predictable response of what our tribal behavior is going to tell them we’re going to do.

Jason Falls
Interesting. Well, I’m assuming that people can learn a heck of a lot more in this book. Where can they find the book and where can they find you on the internet?

Tim Ash
Oh, it’s pretty easy. The book is called Unleash Your Primal Brain – Demystifying How We Think and Why We Act and it’s at primalbrain.com, and get the ebook audiobook narrated by me. And then pre release autographed copies available. pre launch so primalbrain.com. About my own keynote, speaking, digital marketing consulting timash.com very easy to find.

Jason Falls
Awesome, Tim, thanks so much for the time it’s great stuff.

Tim Ash
Oh, Jason has been my absolute pleasure.

Transcribed by otter.ai

The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.

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