The Hidden Driver: How Testing and Unconventional Approaches Shape Subconscious Decision Making

You consciously make thousands of decisions every single day. But subconsciously, you make hundreds of thousands of decisions every second. Who cares? If you want to learn how to get more customers, then you, hopefully.

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In the book Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath, they argue that decision-making can be described by the analogy of thinking about a person riding an elephant down a path. The rider certainly has influence on where the elephant goes, but if the elephant disagrees with the rider, the elephant is going to go wherever on earth it wants to go. This is similar to how we make decisions. Our brains have a logical pull on our decision making, but our emotions, our feelings, ultimately dictate our decisions. When you want something bad, there is very little to stand in the way, even if there is something out there that might be a more logical use of your capital. I’ve always admired this analogy. It applies to marketing, leadership, and just about all facets of life where human beings are involved. 

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Maya Angelou said it beautifully: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

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Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist who has written and published many books and papers. I certainly haven’t read them all, but The Drunkard’s Walk and Subliminal are books that completely change your perspective as soon as you get through the first chapter. As a marketer or a business owner, I’d highly recommend you take the time to read these two books. The Drunkard’s Walk explains the way our lives are ruled by random chance in a simple and pragmatic fashion. Subliminal is mind-blowing in revealing all of the ways the subconscious affects our day-to-day life. 

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You may wonder why business owners and marketers should read these two books considering they don’t appear to provide any practical tips on how to reduce overhead or acquire more customers. Here’s why: everyone is aware of the conscious decisions we make (it’s literally in the definition of conscious), but few understand the power of two of the most powerful forces on earth. 

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Those two forces are 1) random chance; and 2) the subconscious mind. Even if you would never dream to fully understand how these concepts work and the math and technical findings behind each of them, understanding the high-level ideas will enable you to market more effectively so that you can stand out, attract more customers, and impact more people.

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Random Chance and How to Overcome It

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I’m not going to try to take the place of the theoretical physicists who devote their life to this work, but here’s what can be said with certainty: life is full of random chance. We’ve all heard the stories about the entrepreneur on the brink of giving up when suddenly they sit down at a coffee shop right by a major investor, or their first big customer, or the employee to bring everything together.

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So what happens if you’re sitting here right now and your ads aren’t working, your sales emails are getting bounced, and you haven’t stumbled upon your one in a million lucky break yet? 

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Well, according to Leonard Mlodinow, based on the rules of probabilities, the only thing you can do is just keep trying. The more you try the more your odds go up, simply because the numerator is increasing. IBM’s Thomas Watson said it better when he said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.” 

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There are a lot of marketers out there, lots of whom work at big fancy firms, who believe they have the secret sauce that no one else has. They know just the right words to say, just the right campaign to launch, just the right demographic to target. It’s very possible their track record of success backs up their perspective. But the truth is that because humans make decisions in such an emotional way that is hardly understood, even by ourselves. No one truly knows what is going to work and what is not. 

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The result? The best marketers in the world are the ones who know they don’t know it all. They enter campaigns with an open mind, ready to test and iterate until they identify that secret sauce. 

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If you didn’t read all of that about random chance, here’s what you need to know: 

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Test and iterate constantly on marketing campaigns because you do not know what is going to work best. “The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic.”

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The Subconscious Holds the Purse

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You really need to read that book, Subliminal. It’s likely that it’ll do more for your business career than 99% of ‘business’ books. I’m just going to zero in on one topic, there is so much more out there. 

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When you are communicating with your prospects and customers with your marketing messaging, it’s vitally important to remember that the human brain is designed to dump data so that we can keep what is MOST important.  As a result, we’re often very good at remembering the gist of a business proposal, a good advertisement, or a great conversation with a potential vendor, but we’re awful at remembering the exact words that were said in each conversation and in the exact order. 

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That’s totally fine; here’s how to use it to your advantage. 

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Have you ever had a conversation with someone and you felt like they just never shut up? Someone like that has to be VERY interesting in order for you to not walk away from the conversation hoping to never see them again. Most people intuitively know that no one likes to just be talked to for hours on end, so in our interpersonal relationships we don’t behave that way. Yet, sometimes that doesn’t get translated to marketing. 

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You may think your website is amazing and that it’s way more informative than your competitors’, but maybe your prospects just see ‘me, me, me’ and struggle to connect amidst all the fancy slogans and facts and figures. Maybe your sales pitch is so well-refined that you can’t believe you’re not converting more prospects. Is it possible that your prospects think you have a great product, but they don’t feel like you care about them at all? People buy emotionally and they justify logically. Even if you’re B2B, companies don’t buy from companies, people buy from people. 

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In order to stand out from the pack and differentiate yourself, focus on leaving your prospects with a feeling every time they interact with your brand. That feeling will be different depending on your brand, but it might be pride, optimism, happiness, sadness (ASPCA), or anything else. 

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Remember, the logical brain is the rider on top of the elephant representing our emotions. 

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As much as you may want to spew facts and figures and appeal logically, you need to connect with prospects emotionally in order to actually create sales. Even more important than sales, remember Maya Angelou’s words: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” 

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Go make someone feel amazing today.

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You have consciously made it to the end of this blog post, and whether that was the result of one quick scroll or a couple of minutes of reading, I’m glad you’re here. If you’d like to connect about marketing or business-building, whether it be the foundational aspects like testing your activations or the nitty-gritty like how to optimize a landing page with an amazing offer and story-led copywriting, please send an email to info@thecourtsidegroup.com. I would love to chat with you about your business, your goals, and some ideas for how to get there.

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Kyle Fenner

Founder of The Courtside Group

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