Unleash Your Primal Brain - Marketing Tactics That Will Change Your Business | Tim Ash | MMP #013

Unleash Your Primal Brain - Marketing Tactics That Will Change Your Business | Tim Ash | MMP #013 Speaker 1: Why you need marketing, rather, is it's the difference between cold dead fish and sushi. Unknown Speaker: You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin Kincaid. Kevin King: What's up, Mr. Norm? How are you doing, man? Mike Frekey: I am doing great, sir. And it's going to be awesome. You're going to be coming down for a little visit later this week. Kevin King: I ain't coming down nowhere. You keep getting this wrong. I'm coming up. I live in Texas. You live in Canada. And even when I land at the airport, I go up. I don't go down. I mean, last time I looked at a map, you know, but I know the earth is round. Maybe I am, you know, maybe I'm a flat earther. Maybe it's one of those flat earth things or one of those things like airplanes, the shortest distance is not what it looks like on the globe. It's sometimes to go over the over the North Pole. Speaker 1: Kevin, you're absolutely right. Because we in the US we call Canada America's hat. So that's definitely. Kevin King: That's right. How you doing, Tim? Welcome to the show as well. Speaker 1: Thanks. Great to be with you guys. Mike Frekey: Well, it's awesome. We were talking to Steve Wiedemann last week and we just asked him if he knew a marketing misfit and he goes, yeah, this is the first guy that comes to mind. You got to meet my buddy, Tim. So I'm glad you could make it. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Kevin King: What's your story? What's the lowdown on Tim Ash? Speaker 1: Well, starting way back, I was born in the former Soviet Union. My family emigrated when I was eight years old, ended up in the US and eventually moved around a lot and ended up going to University of California, San Diego on the beach. There's a new beach next door. Great place to spend it. Turned out to be 11 years because I ended up going to grad school there as well for AI. And then I worked at a variety of high tech firms and started my first digital marketing agency. And I ran that for about 25 years we. Did everything from build websites to do pay-per-click marketing, affiliate marketing, and eventually started focusing on conversion rate optimization or how to make websites more efficient. Written books on that subject, ran a conference series here and in Europe for about 14 years on it. And then about five years ago, I sold the agency and decided to focus just on the public speaking and advising senior executives about how to improve their marketing. So, that's the super short version of the long version. Mike Frekey: So, one of the things I noticed, and you've worked with pretty much every Fortune 500 company out there. Speaker 1: Yeah, a few good ones. I mean, the Googles, Nestle's, Expedia's of the world, absolutely, as well as small to mid-sized companies. So, we worked across all verticals and company sizes when I ran the agency. Mike Frekey: Who did you like working better with? The larger companies, the middle-sized companies? They're both very different. Speaker 1: Oh, I'd say it's easy. It's mid-size. Okay, so the big guys, they have so much corporate inertia, they can't get anything done. They couldn't, you know, find a marketing solution if they had, you know, Both hands and a compass, they couldn't find their butt actually. Small companies, they're busy. They're the one man oompa band wearing many, many hats and they just don't have the attention span to do anything useful. So for me, the sweet spot is either division of a larger company or a mid-sized company where I'm dealing directly with the senior management level. They have the team to get it done and they just have to say, hey, this is what I want and it happens. So, that's in my perfect world, I'm working only with mid-sized companies. Mike Frekey: Kevin, what about you? You work with a lot of larger companies, large, mid-sized, even small. What do you like? Same thing? Kevin King: Yes, same thing. I mean, the small guys can be a little bit more I mean, they can move, you know, on a heartbeat, you know, something cool comes out tonight, you can act on it tomorrow morning, versus a corporation is going to be going through three to six months of executive meetings and sign offs. And can we, you know, even just on a word or a color, can we use this color, seven people signed off on this color, on this font? No, I want 12 point, no, I want 13 point. So no, I think the midsize is probably the best, actually, for actually Moving quickly, but the corporations have the money. They got the investment money behind them. The big corporations have all that. They can do a $500,000 campaign versus the small guys doing a little $25,000 campaign or something. So it's trade-offs, I think, on both sides. Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's funny that you say that about big company decision-making. There's a very famous story about a creative director at Google that just quit in frustration because they were testing the RGB value of the blue to use on the button on the landing page. That's how specific they got and it's because they had the mother of all data rates and they could, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. Kevin King: So did you get your start doing just basic 25 years ago? You said you did AI. Was that 25 years ago? Is that more recent? Speaker 1: When I came out to UC San Diego, I had a double major in computer engineering and cognitive science. And then I stayed for PhD in computer science, which was focused on neural networks and would now be called machine learning. So it was early days of that. I guess you could say we had, we're working on the algorithm side, but we didn't have a lot of data to train the AI models on. Well, obviously, with the advent of the internet, training data is no longer a problem. Kevin King: Well, I think a lot of people when it comes to marketing, they confuse marketing and sales. They confuse what would you say is marketing is more to me is more psychology. It's data and psychology. And I think a lot of people miss that when even people that come up through marketing school, depending on how they cut their teeth. They still miss that. They're all trying to compete for what's the prettiest or what's something like that instead of actually the psychology of actually marketing. Speaker 1: Yeah, you're dead on. But the way that I described the difference between marketing and sales, it's the difference. Well, why you need marketing rather is it's the difference between cold dead fish and sushi. That's why you need marketing. No, but joking aside, you're spot on exactly about marketing is psychology. And what's psychology? It's how human behavior. So to me, and the reason I wrote my latest book, Unleash Your Primal Brain, about evolutionary psychology is that's the root. If you want to be effective in sales, in leadership, in marketing, in your personal relationships, you have to understand how people behave and why we behave that way. And the roots of all of that is how we evolved. I mean, so it's a, to me, if you want to have a great career in marketing, you should understand those fundamental rules of human behavior and not the latest, you know, what do we have? Virtual reality, you've got clubhouse and whatever that was popular a year ago, or I don't know, hologram suppositories tomorrow. Yeah, who knows what it's going to be? But the point isn't, The technology is what you're applying it to, and that's the human brain, and that hasn't changed. For practical purposes, that's frozen in amber. Kevin King: I travel a lot in my younger years. I'm an old man now. I'm in my mid-50s. Speaker 1: So you're younger than me is what you're saying. Kevin King: I'm younger than Norm. I know that for sure. I can see the gray in his beard. So I know I'm younger than Norm. No, I'm just kidding. But I've traveled a lot in my life. But for about seven years, from 2007 to 2014, I spent those seven years about half the time on the road traveling. And I've hit 94 countries. I've been to all seven continents. And one of the biggest things that I learned is that we're, us humans, however many are on this planet, seven, eight billion, whatever the number is now, eight billion, are all fundamentally the same. Yes, there's different cultures, there's different languages, there's different traditions, there may be some words that mean something in one language and mean something totally different in another language, but the fundamental principles of human nature are completely the same. We're one big tribe on planet Earth. I think a lot of people when it comes to marketing miss that, whether they're marketing in the United States and they're not segmented in their marketing based on we're a hodgepodge of people here or if they're marketing somewhere else. What do you see that people make a mistake in when it comes to something like that? Speaker 1: Well, yeah, no, I agree with you. There's actually a distinction I often heard as I when I used to run my agency Sightuners, as we'd say, well, you know, that's business to consumer, that's B2C marketing. We're in B2B, business to business marketing, as if those people don't have actual brains that you need to persuade also. So yeah, it's different in B2B, for example, in that you have personal risk to you, and then you have corporate risk to your company, you make the wrong decision, and the software doesn't work or The company blows up and you get fired. But it's still, I'm evaluating risk to me. That's human nature and that doesn't go away. And how people evaluate risk is the same for everybody. Kevin King: Aren't there like eight basic human needs? Is it six or eight? I hear different numbers. There are six basic needs that you need to appeal to in marketing. Speaker 1: Well, there are six universal emotions. Kevin King: Is that okay? Speaker 1: Emotions. Including joy, disgust, fear, sadness, things like that. And what we actually found is the way to, to me, like the thing that most marketers get wrong is they start doing happy, happy talk. So they think the only way to market say, we're the greatest solution for, you know, and, and that never works because happy, happy talk doesn't move people off of their comfortable spot. The thing that does that more effectively is actually fear. And loss. And we're much more attuned to threats in the environment than we are to upside. So it's like, I can go and, you know, break that coconut apart and get some yummy food at my leisure. But if the bear is attacking me, I got to deal with that right now. So we're prioritized to focus on threats, about two, two and a half to one compared to upside opportunity. And most marketers, they're just want to do that. We're nice, everybody loves us stuff, and it doesn't work. Kevin King: Yeah, I was just at a conference last week, DrivenCon, it's a mastermind, I don't know if you know Perry Belcher. Speaker 1: Yeah, I've met him at some conferences. Kevin King: Perry runs this mastermind called Driven, it's like $30,000 a year and I was just at it and one of his partners and it's Jason Flatland, one of the top webinar guys in the world. And he actually did a talk about exactly what you just said about, we've kind of gone down this path of like, let's show you how good this will make you or what the good side of, if you buy my product or do my, engage me in my services, rather than what you're missing. Instead of what you just said, the negative side, and he's like, you need to shift your focus and what you're doing, you're going to have better results. And he showed a whole bunch of stats and stuff. If you show this is what you, the pain you will get if you don't do this versus the pleasure you will get if you do do it. Speaker 1: Well, one of the little quick thought experiments I use in my book is like, imagine this, you have some kind of health issue, you have to have it dealt with, it's getting only worse, and may eventually kill you. And the doctor comes in, there's two doctors, nice doctor and mean doctor. And which one are you going to be more likely to react to? Okay, so here's a nice doctor comes in and says, Hey, you know, okay, good news, we diagnosed what the problem is, we can deal with it. It's a little operation that 98% of the time, it's going to be, you know, Great. A week from now, you're back at work. Problem solved. And then the other doctor comes in and says, well, yeah, so we've diagnosed the problem. We know what it is. We can cure it with some surgery. The thing is, there's like a 2% chance of you dying on the operating table. Okay. Now I've just said the same exact thing, but which one is going to elicit a stronger response from you? Mike Frekey: Yeah, definitely the last one. Speaker 1: Yeah, because for sure, Rhett and you know, fear of loss and loss aversion is why you're here because your great, great, great, great, great grandmother didn't get eaten by the bear. Mike Frekey: You know, Tim, we've talked about this on past podcasts, and that's building the proper demographic, the proper avatar. And that's how a lot of people aren't targeting that. They're not talking about the fears, the pain points, and just being able to target that specific audience. We had a podcast the other day that just when you build that perfect demographic, that perfect audience, the results are incredible. And I also know that you've written quite a bit about conversion. So, you know, just having those pain points and addressing them, that must be able to To increase the conversion rate right there. Speaker 1: Is that correct? Probably two thirds of the value that we create as an agency was based on these kind of neural marketing basics, I would call them. And that was about 1.2 billion in documented value for our clients. So this stuff works pretty much universally as we all have brains. And what you said, though, Norm, I want to focus on this. Knowing your audience. I think most marketers, the reason they get things wrong besides focusing on the technology is they do this ready, fire, aim approach. To me, marketing is really simple. Pick a very narrow audience, understand everything about them, and then design products and messaging and business models around that. The problem is we have a lot of these product led companies. Have you heard of that term at all recently? Yeah, everyone's product led or sales driven. Well, that means you don't know, you know, What you're doing because you haven't even talked about the audience or the problem they're having. So step one is pick a narrow audience because you can't be everything to everybody. You can't build another Sony or Coke type brand because you don't have decades or hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. Step two is live where they live. Figure out what makes them tick, go to where their center of gravity is. Chances are what they're buying from you is probably just peripheral to their life. So unless you really understand what their world, you're not going to be able to pick up the language, the messaging, the pain points, any of that. Or know what to put into your product because it matters to them and a bunch of other things don't. Just because you have them on your feature checklist doesn't mean people really care. So it's simple. Find an audience, understand their needs deeply, and design product services, marketing, messaging, campaigns, everything around that. Kevin King: A lot of people seem to build a product and then try to force it. Speaker 1: Right. As a hammer leaking for a nail. That's what I call it. Kevin King: I know right now, like Reddit is becoming a hot thing, at least in our, uh, in the e-commerce space for, as a research tool where people are going in and there's new, someone been around a little while, but they're gaining a lot of steam right now. Tools that actually analyze Reddit threads. And you can find a lot of, it used to be, you know, go into Facebook groups or something like that. If, or, you know, In the digital world, and the old world is focus groups and bring people into an office or into the mall or whatever. But these, these Reddit groups, and these software tools are going in there and just following chats, and they're following things. And they're picking up on all the pain points on all kinds of subjects that can really you can hone in on almost anything in the world. Speaker 1: I'm in the tone of your customer. Kevin King: And when you're writing, whether you're an Amazon seller, you're doing a Shopify site or whatever, you got to write in the tone using their vernacular, using their slang. And so many people don't do that. They write proper seventh grade English. Speaker 1: Oh, Kevin. Yeah, I am. You're preaching to the choir here. I want to focus unpack a couple of things you said. So the first is some of the best marketing copy my agency ever wrote wasn't written by us. We just go talk to customer service or where people were complaining. What hurts? Tell me about that in your words, right? We're just lifting stuff from customer service tickets and pissed off customers. That's the best sales copy there is. And which brings me to a broader point, which is how close are you to your customers? Like most of us, if we're marketing, we're inside of our own little bubble. We're like, oh, what's the return on ad spend of my, you know, targeted PPC campaign? And well, it's like, when was the last time you talked to an end user of your product or service? I mean, the closer you can get to the front line, the better off you are. So there's some companies that are really smart. They require all executives, for example, to rotate through the call center at least one day a year. You'll get an earful. You'll really understand your clients. And the closer you are to them and to the front lines and to the pain, the more effective you're going to be as a marketer. Mike Frekey: Can we talk a little bit about the unconscious decisions that people make? You know, we've talked about pain point, but what makes people tick? Speaker 1: Norm, there are only unconscious decisions. Okay, I started with this in my book, chapter one is called the lie of rationality. Because it's literally true, you cannot make a decision with the rational part of the brain. First of all, it's got limited bandwidth, very limited, it runs out of steam super quick, but it can give you information. Here's choices A, B, C, all through Z or whatever, but you can't make decisions on that. There are people that have had brain damage of various kinds and if that part of the brain is separated from the emotional part, you can't decide. So, there are no Mr. Spock logical decisions and what makes decisions for us is the strength of our emotion. That's the prioritization. It gets to be an embodied whole body response that's based on everything you've ever been through, your memories, your current state, is sensory stuff coming in from the environment and it goes, whoa, that's really important. And it could be good important or bad important, but the point is, emotions are the prioritization for decisions. And they've shown on brain scans, if you ask people, why did you do that? Well, the emotional part activated, and then a split second later, the conscious part got involved to give you the alibi, the after the fact explanation, which in fact, has nothing to do with how the decision got made. So, Robert Heinlein, science fiction author, once famously said, man is not a rational animal, he's a rationalizing animal. So, we can have all the after the fact cover stories we want, but that's not how we make decisions. All of them are emotional. Kevin King: So, how can we influence this emotion? How can we influence this emotion? Unknown Speaker: Oh, there's lots of ways to influence it. Kevin King: How can we? I mean, because it's, like you said, it's inherent in your past experiences and in who you are and the core of your being. So, is that the drip sequence in an email campaign where you're building them up? Speaker 1: Well, again, you're jumping the tactics, but I mean, the masters of this are, there's famous examples in the retail environment. Why is the milk in the back of the store, of the grocery store? Because they want you to go past all the impulse buy stuff that you'll emotionally grab. They don't want the milk up front where you just get it and walk out. Or casinos, they're famous for this. They'll pump extra oxygen in the room. On the roulette wheel, you get seven, seven, almost seven. And now it turns out the win rate of three sevens doesn't happen, you know, it happens on a certain percentage, but the almost win rate is actually disproportionately high, because the dopamine in our brain, the thing that decides how much more energy to put into chasing a potential reward, gets set off by the, oh, I almost had it, I need to try harder next time. So casinos are great at manipulating the environment, noise, distractions, stimulation, getting your executive function used up. Timeshare is another great example. They don't sit you down for the actual buying part of a timeshare presentation until they've worn you down for two or three hours with a bunch of other stuff. So there are well-known tricks for depleting whatever, I guess you'd say, executive function or reserves we have of rational support and how to just work on the raw emotions. Mike Frekey: Both of us, both Kevin and I work with Amazon for the most part. We do tons of Amazon sellers. And one of the things that's happening, everybody thinks they're a brand, which they're not, they're micro brands. And nobody knows them. And they always wonder, you come up and they have a bad, you know, just a bad landing page. Nobody's going to buy from them. But then you have some that are, you know, okay, and then some that are really great. Building trust, especially for a micro brand, is uber important. What are some other ways that you can build trust so people can look at your product, maybe look at the reviews, and feel that your micro brand is trustworthy? Speaker 1: Oh, that's a great point. And by the way, I'll concur with you, Norm. Nobody's got a brand. Again, unless you're Coke or Disney or Sony, you don't have a brand. I mean, people say to me like, well, SAP, well, okay, maybe in business to business, SaaS systems, you have a brand, but the consumer's never heard of you. So there are very few real brands out there. But there are other ways to build trust online. It's a one-sided conversation because normally you could convince people by interacting with them that you're a good and honest broker, if you will. But on the web or on an Amazon product description page, it's a one-way street. So there's several things you can do. One is the professionalism of the site. And that means product photos, graphics, things like that. I mean, I can't tell you the number of Creative English, I've seen on, you know, most of these sites are, you know, like Chinese brands. Oh, tastes so good and fit three people. I mean, it's like, come on, run it through these, you know, chat GPT to get proper English out of it. So, the professionalism of the pictures, the professionalism of the writing, all of that stuff, the videos. So, the look, look the part, dress for success. I usually wear a jacket when I'm on podcasts. I mean, not what I wear at home, but I'll throw one on for a podcast because it's a different role. Another is trust symbols and indicators and that can be in the form of badges, third party awards, you know, anything like that that is not you saying we're great, it's people saying they're great. And that's very different. When other people or other entities say you're great, that's really carries a lot more weight than you beating your own drum. The final thing I would say is social proof. What you want is a lot of people interacted with us and had a good outcome. McDonald's used to have this like on their double arch signs by their places. They'd say over 100 or 98 million or billion burgers served or whatever. That's social proof. And then they were dumb enough and they just, they decided they didn't want to add one more letter to the counter. So they said, billions and billions served. That was actually a mistake and a downgrade. And then the final one I would say is validation from other people in my group. And that's where the reviews come in and the star rating really matters and all of that stuff. So if you can, well not bribe, but incentivize people to leave Reviews, especially with visually striking ones, so either with a video or a photo attached to them of them using your product, then you know it's real. In other words, I may like my relatives, I may think they're really smart, but do I care about their movie recommendations? No, I don't. If I'm buying hiking shoes, do I care about my relatives think about that? No, but someone that's bought hiking shoes, yeah, they're in my... Hiking shoe buying tribe and I care a lot about them. So go, one of the things we tell people is go have a formal process for collecting testimonials. It's critical. Now, obviously that happens automatically on an Amazon page, but on your own website, when someone buys from you, do you have a process for soliciting testimonials? And if you don't, you should consider making one and making it as easy for people to do that as possible. Kevin King: That's what you see sometimes on landing pages, click funnels or go high level or something. Someone's got like 70 freaking reviews just plastered, just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Most people are never going to read all that, but it's just overwhelming like, okay, okay, okay, I get it, I get it, everybody likes this. What do you say about, there's a big trend right now towards experiential marketing and to set yourself apart. Are you seeing anything around that or what do you think, what are your thoughts around The whole customer experience and people paying more attention to every step along that way, whether that's a word by itself in the copy that's just on a line, they call that a widow, or that's their experience with the customer service all the way through to the packaging and to the delivery. Or if it's like in my case, I host a high-end event, $6,000 a ticket to come for the Amazon space and we make it a total experience. It's not just a conference with listening to a bunch of PowerPoints and going to a networking thing where there's loud music and you can't talk, but we add in tons of experiences to that like helicopter rides and doing an amazing race contest around the island and it works. And nobody else seems to be able to pull that off. Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's three different spheres you mentioned. One is online, one is in the product experience, and the third is events. And so those are kind of separate in my mind. Very hard to do stuff online and differentiate yourself experientially, because we're looking at it through a 2D screen that's got audio attached to it. Okay, those are your two modalities. Kevin King: But can you do that? Like an example of that is I'm about to do this. I have a newsletter that goes out to the Amazon space. And how do you add experience to a digital product? Like it's just a newsletter. And the way you do that is you add a little button at the top that says listen to this newsletter. Speaker 1: You should have it in different modalities. Like people, there's kinesthetic learners, there's visual learners, there's auditory learners. You should take your content and slice and dice it. Do I want to download it as a PDF? Do I want to listen to it? Do I want to You know, get a, have you send me a paperback version of some guide or whatever, whatever works, absolutely. That's, but that's different modalities. What I'm talking about just on the web, unless you add dimensions to it, well, you could do VR, you know, which makes sense for limited things. But like you remember the Google Glass, we used to call those people glass holes if they wore the Google glasses. You know, most people don't have the equipment or you're going to have like some scent thing like, oh, it's the Fartinator and you can smell our product. You know, I don't know. Kevin King: Back in the day it was Flash. You know, when you, 20 years ago, if you had Flash on your site, you were cool because. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I know. I don't, I don't, so I don't think there's much you can do there. Now, in terms of the product packaging, so here's my, hold on one second. I'm going to show you my book. You see the cover there, right? Now, if I'm going to mail it to you, it's coming out in a mailer of the same color and then the label on the mailer. It's gonna have my caveman picture on it, just like the book cover does. And so that packaging experience or the unboxing experience in the case of products matters a lot. You took the extra care to do that. I bought an overpriced hiking jacket from a company called KUHL, K-U-H-L, and they send a candy bar, a nice chocolate bar. It's a little weird, not sure what that has to do with clothes, but all the packaging and that candy bar, it's all branded. It makes you feel like they care a little more. So you can definitely do stuff with the unboxing experience. If it's a higher end product, you know, we donated a tree in your name to do carbon offsets and here's the name of your tree or something like that. And you can definitely do it with experiential stuff. Having run a conference series for 14 years here and in Europe, the conversion conference, I agree with everything you're doing. The more sensory inputs you give people at one time, and it's unfamiliar and novel, the more they'll remember it. So like you say, the tired old networking happy hour at the end of the conference day, Snore City, right? We've all been there. But you take them on that helicopter ride, they're like, there's wind in their hair, there's amazing views, there's g-forces, there are luncheons, conspiring with their throat to figure out if they want a two-way meal ticket, you know, whatever. There's a lot of sensory stuff wrapped up in it. And multi-sensory experiences tied to strong emotions is what makes things the most memorable. So that's your biggest bang for the buck. Kevin King: You also did something, you're a specialist in landing pages and conversion, I think you just showed an example and maybe you can talk about this a little bit about a mistake a lot of people make, but you don't obviously because you teach it, where you showed your book and you had the colors and the logo on the book, and then you showed the packaging and the red packaging and then you showed the label, actually is consistent with the design of the book. And that's where a lot of people online especially, there's no cohesiveness between their website or their marketing or their video to the landing page and they're totally different designs or totally different looks and feels or something. And a lot of people miss that there needs to be a congruency all the way through or you're just You're throwing away possible conversions. Speaker 1: Yes, that consistency of experience or jumping from the Amazon environment to their website, for example, if there's no continuity, then it's like I have to reorient myself on the new web page. So everything you can do. And by the way, I mean, it's not a coincidence that I picked really strong colors, red, Yellow, white and black for my cover with a very strong caveman element. I don't know if you can see that, but you know, crazy caveman jumping out of the screen at you because it's got to work everywhere. Just the colors have to transmit it. If I say cigarette brand bright red. Mike Frekey: Marlboro. Speaker 1: Marlboro, of course. The color is enough to evoke the brand. One color, right? So it's got to be that strong, that obvious. It's like, oh, that's those guys. Every touch point has to be, it's like, oh, that's obviously those guys. One of the exercises from a copywriting perspective that I go through with my advisory clients is I say, okay, if your brand was a person, use three adjectives to describe them. And they're like, and they have a brain freeze, they don't know how to answer that. And that's a problem. Because if you don't have your editorial voice, shining through everything, you got a big problem. That is one of the cheapest leverage points you can have, you can make things so much better by having a consistent editorial voice. So for example, might be one of my clients is, we're trustworthy, we're honest, and we're funny. So, everything from the menus on your website to the titles of your emails to the thumbnail graphics on your video previews, everything's got to be trustworthy, honest, and funny. Mike Frekey: You know, Tim, I don't know if you remember this. I don't know if you're an F1 fan. I'm a huge F1 fan. Speaker 1: I've watched the TV series. That's a lot. Unknown Speaker: Okay, there you go. Mike Frekey: But back in the day, and I'm talking about 95 ish, the cars used to have on their wing Marlboro Rothmans. Speaker 1: Yeah. Mike Frekey: And there was a major shakeup. I live in Canada, and they're not allowed to have that on their cars. But sure enough, when they came to Montreal in 95, 96, all they had was the red and white on the wing. Speaker 1: And that's enough to carry the brand, right? By the way, one more thing I want to say about a brand. There's a great book I love by Phil Barton called Decoded. It's mostly about consumer brands, but he's got a lot of insights in it. But I mean, my definition of a brand isn't like the logo or the packaging or the tagline or the name. It's what's associated with it in people's heads. Okay so for example Marlboro is not a brand because the red white those are just the triggers or the tall black letters okay what is actually the Marlboro brand is. Rugged individualism and masculinity. Mike Frekey: The cowboy. Speaker 1: The cowboy. Actually, the original campaign for that, they were going to run a series of them. The others were war correspondent, weightlifters, sea captain, and I forget. Yeah, those were the four. So they were going to cycle through them, but they had so much success with the cowboy that they just like, we found the winning ticket. Great. But originally, Marlboro, because it was filtered, Back in the 30s or whenever they started, do you know what their tagline was? Mike Frekey: What's that? Speaker 1: It was aimed at women and the tagline was Mild as May. Kevin King: What? Speaker 1: Yeah, look it up. I'm making this stuff up. So yeah, but the point is that the brand is the things that are evoked inside of your audience's head that's associated with the trademark and the visual dress is just the trigger to activate that rugged individuality, masculinity, self-sufficiency stuff. Kevin King: How do you get to that point? How do you get to that point where you're an Apple, you're a Coke, you're a Marlboro? Is it just being around a while? Is it just consistency? Is it spending a heck of a lot of money and just being everywhere and omnipresent? What is it, if I'm starting now and I'm like, I wanna build the next whatever, how can I, I probably can't reach their level, but how can I get to half of their level or something? What are some things I can do? Some actionable steps or something I should- You ready? Yep. Speaker 1: It's gonna save you a lot of time. Kevin King: Nothing, right? Mike Frekey: You can't. Kevin King: That's right. It's nothing. It's nothing. Speaker 1: It is not nothing. There's something that's equally powerful. And again, you're not going to be everything to everybody. That's too hard and too expensive. And with the amount of advertising and imbalanced stuff coming out as it's basically impossible to build a new one of those. But what you can do is you can be the magnet, the attractor for a very narrow niche. So instead of you taking the bullhorn out and broadcasting for decades about how great you are. What you do is instead you think of it being as a magnet and you're sucking in members of the tribe that wants to look for you. So like on the internet, think of it this way, there's this continuum, you go from one side which is like, what the hell is this, I don't get it, to where has this been all my life, that's amazing, I've been looking for that. Now most of the time we spend it over here, right, on the I don't know what the hell this is side of the internet. But if you could, if somebody could have the reaction to like, wow, this is fantastic is exactly what I've been looking for. Now, what does that require? It requires you to not give a crap about anybody else and only appealing to those to those narrow people so that you get that wow reaction. So that you can do. And usually you do that in the form of an origin myth. So if you're selling, I don't know, give me one of your clients or your own like product categories. Kevin King: Dog bowls, pet dog bowls. Speaker 1: Pet dog bowls. Okay. It's like, well, you're just competing with a bunch of different categories. But what about this? If I say, Kevin, you know, like I used to work for Purina and they always had these stupid plastic dog bowls everywhere. And I just thought that was like the grossest thing and it was killing the planet and I tried to get some changes through and nobody listened. So, you know, I quit my job and I decided to go and figure out exactly what both dogs and humans and the planet wanted out of a dog bowl. And I just wrestled with this stuff and I had many missed starts and I went and got patents and, you know, and today I've come out with the The Titanator, it's a titanium dog bowl and I'm now on a mission to make sure that I save the planet for all of those grateful dogs and humans out there so we can have this great relationship with our pets while keeping our planet alive. That's what I burn and yearn for. Now I got my flag out, follow me. Kevin King: Now you called it the origin myth, so this doesn't have to be, and I think that's an important point that could have easily gotten passed over, this doesn't have to be a completely true story and I think a lot of people think that origin stories or founder stories are always truthful. Speaker 1: No, it needs to be, it's like most of them are designed around the very common idea of the hero's journey. You know, the earth, the earth was okay. And then there was a crisis. And I picked up some allies along the way, eventually, I slayed the dragon, and there was a regreening of the earth, you have to follow that story arc. But the point is, if you just say, titanium dog bowls, you know, 37% off, okay, if you just have a generic ecommerce website, no one's going to give a crap. So, you do have the advantage as a nimble small business to create that origin myth, to create that brand name, to really zero in on who would care about, you know, like there's a subset of owners that love their pets, want them to have the best quality stuff and want to save the planet. Now, that may not be all dog owners, probably only 5%, but you could own them. Kevin King: What about the people that are afraid to offend somebody? Like you just said, you got to find your niche and pull them out. But so many marketers, especially in a woke society that we have today and all the crap that's going on, people are afraid to step on anybody's toes. Speaker 1: Now, I don't know if this is a PG rated podcast or profanity acceptable. Mike Frekey: Go for it. Speaker 1: Okay, so fuck those people. Unknown Speaker: I love it. Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, I'm serious. So like right now, we obviously are very polarized, at least in the US, elections going on and all kinds of fun stuff. You know, the only, and I may be pissed off by a bunch of stuff I see, but my vote doesn't matter. It's undecided swing voters in five states that matter. So you should only be talking to your target audience and 99% of it is noise. I don't really care what they think. Again, you don't have the same blowback or downside. I mean, like, you're Disney, you piss off DeSantis in Florida, and he takes away your special tax status. Okay, when you're big, you have stuff to protect. But when you're little, you know, like not having a point of view, not having an opinion, not standing out, that's your biggest weakness. So go pick a fight. You know, it's funny for something. Mike Frekey: Kevin has, and I'll let Kevin tell the story, but it's perfect about this PC stuff. You remember the, uh, the nude lady and the guy wrote you and said that he, you know, he's not gonna read your stuff anymore because of that. Kevin King: Yeah. Mike Frekey: And then you met him at the trade show. Go ahead. Kevin King: I'll tell him the story and the audience the story real quick. So I have a newsletter that goes out to the Amazon world and I keep the newsletter edgy. It's not just here's the latest tactic to get a better return on ad spend or here's the latest hack or whatever. I add some humor to it. I add a personality to it. Speaker 1: So you have a brand voice. Congratulations. Kevin King: Yeah, I have a brand voice. And one of the things, I started this newsletter last August of last year. And in the beginning, I was doing a lot of like personal stories and tying those into business. And one day, I live in a high rise in downtown Austin. And one day I'm going out on my back porch to pick up my little grass pad out there for my dog to relieve itself instead of having to walk him all the way down. And I go back up there to clean up her mess and I look over the balcony of the building next to me, which is about 15, 20 feet away. And two stories down, there's this woman just butt naked on the balcony, just leaning up against the back of the rails. And I'm like looking at first, I thought she was just topless and she had something on. But I looked down, I'm like, no, that's not a shadow. That's not a panty. That's her. And then across the way is this on the balcony, the opposite side is a man fully dressed. And they're just having a conversation at 1030 in the morning. And just for the world to see, and I was like, no one's gonna believe this. So I have some tinted windows in my place that you can't see in during the day. So I go behind one of the windows, I take a little picture, not because I'm a pervert, because I'm like, oh my God, I gotta like, I gotta tell Norm about this. They're not gonna believe this. So I take a picture and I send it to people like, no way, dude, no way. So I was like, you know what? That's a good analogy in business. So the next newsletter I put out, I put them out twice a week, the subject line, which got, Crazy Open was Naked Girl on Balcony. That was the subject line. And then I told the story and I tied that into business about how sometimes, you know, we're out there flapping in the wind, we're naked, we don't care what anybody thinks and you shouldn't either and blah, blah, blah. Well, I got a lot of guys replying back, a lot of people, not just guys, but a lot of people replying back like, this is awesome, Kevin, keep this up. I love this, not being PC. And I got some complaints like, I can't believe you did this because in the newsletter, I told the story and then I said, scroll down to the bottom and you can see the picture. And I had the picture in there, but I blurred everything out. So it was it was censored. So and I had one guy message me and say, I can't believe you did this. I'm here to learn and to to further my business and to get, you know, make some money. I'm not here for your sick sense of humor. If you keep this up, I'm canceling." And I did it again a few weeks later with an ad, an Aston Martin. It's a fake ad, actually, but it's an Aston Martin. You might know the fake ad, but I got a lot more feedback. But then I see this guy three months later at a conference, and this guy comes up to me and says, Love the newsletter. I was like, oh, great. I appreciate it. He's like, I'm the guy that wrote you when you put that picture in there saying I'm going to unsubscribe. I was like, well, I thought you were going to unsubscribe. He's like, no, I can't. It's too good. Don't subscribe. So that's why when I got those, if I'm sending out 10,000 emails and I get 2,000 complaints, then I may have an issue. But if I send out an email and I get three complaints and 25 hell yes, keep this up, Most people focus on that negative like, well, I can't do this again. I just upset three people. But no, I'm like, get the hell out of here. If it bothers you, go somewhere else. You're not my tribe. Yeah, and that's what a lot of people are afraid to do. Speaker 1: Primalism is a very powerful mechanism. Again, we see this in the political realm and so on. But, you know, we cannot survive on our own. So our biggest Evolutionary adaptation, the thing that makes us uniquely human that I talk about in my book is actually the ability to learn and transmit culture. So we don't adapt our bodies physically to the environment, we go, okay, yeah. Eskimo tribe, teach me how to survive here in the Arctic. You know, Zulu tribe, teach me how to survive in Africa. Okay, so we're learning the cultural package around us. Now, in order to do that, we have to be good team players and repeat like parrots without any changes the cultural package so it's easily transmitted. And the best tribe wins, not the strongest individual, but the best tribe. So we're almost designed to override our own direct experience in order to be better team players and be trusted members of our tribe. And so you just have to figure out where the boundaries of your tribe are. And to your point, that means there's an outside to it. We are this, we are definitely not that, or we're against that. So, you have to have stuff you stand against. There's got to be a boundary to your tribe. And if you make that clear and you make that a razor's edge, a lot of people end up on the outside of it. That's okay. When you get inside is a super loyal tribe that punches above its weight. Kevin King: And you see that right now in what's going on politically in the United States. I mean, it goes across all marketing. You know, whether you like him or you hate him. I'm not trying to make this political or anything, but Trump does a lot of good things from a marketing point of view. Eight years ago, we're going to build a wall and make them pay for it. That's a negotiation tactic where he's going to meet somewhere in the middle, but he's drawing people to his tribe and he's honing in on it. Speaker 1: Yeah, and again, regardless of which side of the polarization you're on, I will say this. I will step into politics and just to give you an idea of this cultural package I was talking about. So as you know, Republicans haven't won at the national level in a long time. They're a minority. There's quite more Democrats than Republicans and a bunch of independents in the middle. But they punch above their weight because they have a really tight cultural package. Unlike the Democrats. So there's Will Rogers, I think famously said once, I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat. It's the big ten coalition. It's the umbrella. It's the, you know, I care about climate change. Well, I care about, you know, gay rights or, you know, and you put all those together and you got this, you know, parade of people that are have their own axe to grind. Whereas I can give you the reactionary MAGA cultural package in four items. And that makes it a lot easier to transmit. You ready? Kevin King: Yep. Yeah. Speaker 1: White, evangelical, individual rights, guns. That's really easy to put into one tight little unit and it's really easy to pair it and it's really easy to spread. So because of that, like I said earlier, the Republicans punch above their weight currently. It's not the numbers, it's the tightness of the cultural package and how easy it is to transmit throughout the tribe. Anyway, I know that has nothing to do with Amazon sellers, but the idea and principle still apply, which is that you have to stand for something, you have to know clearly where your boundaries are, and you have to repeat that cultural package over and over and over and over again until other people are repeating it without mistakes. That's how simple and tight it's got to be. Mike Frekey: So one of the things I like to talk about towards the end of the podcast, we talked about it with Steve Wiedemann last week, and I'd like to talk about it with you. And that's content marketing, the role of content marketing, the quality of content marketing, especially how it's working with AI right now, there's a lot of crappy copy that's going up there, because people are just relying on AI. Speaker 1: Oh, so that was there a question there? No. Mike Frekey: Yeah, yeah. So content. No, no, just what, what are your thoughts on content marketing? And what are some mistakes people? Speaker 1: Okay, so have you heard content is king? Mike Frekey: Yes. Speaker 1: More horse hockey. Okay. Content is not king. Your audience is king or queen or sovereign or whatever you want to call it. So what you really need to do, and I talk about this in my book, Landing Page Optimization, is when you design websites or online experiences or anything really, you have to think about roles and tasks. So who are the roles of people? What's their relationship to me or my product coming to my site? And then what is the specific task they're there to do? You can think of that as a sideways sales funnel, right? So they might be in an awareness stage, interested in something, building up the desire for it or ready to act. The typical ADA sales funnel, right? So what you have to have and what the mistake most people with content marketing make is they don't have clearly defined roles. So they don't know who they're speaking to and they don't have something for every stage of the sales funnel. Most of the time it's kind of like, buy my stuff, you know, 20, extra 20% off if you give me your email in the cart, you know, that kind of stuff. It's trying to squeeze the bottom of the sales funnel hoping that money comes out. And instead, what you should be doing is getting them early. You can't make money off of them at the very early educational stage. But if you get the right to communicate with them, that's huge. You just took the legs out from every one of your competitors who are screaming loudly and paying a lot of money to try to engage them at the bottom of the sales funnel. For example, we're working with a lot of educational institutions and one of them was specializing in mostly moms, but single parents going back to school. And so we had a piece of content marketing, which is the single parent's guide to getting your online degree. Now that was a great educational piece, really rich and everything, but we were educating them at the point where the client couldn't make money off of them yet. But what they got is the right to communicate with them and you slide them down the funnel. Okay, so I can handle this, I can do it part time, I can still take care of my kid. Great. Okay. Next is like, what's the best majors? What's the best prospects for me making money? Okay, great. How, where are those offered? How much does that cost? You know, so you're, you're baking these micro conversions, but you have to map out the whole customer journey and not skimp on the front end, which is where the competitive advantages. So, clear roles, clearly defined tasks, and micro-conversions to keep moving them through those. Take them where they are. Don't try to shove stuff down their throat. Mike Frekey: All right, so let's talk a little bit about your book. You've got a new book out. What's it about? And I know we've mentioned it a few times. Speaker 1: Well, the first two editions where my book was landing page optimization, and that one's a bit of a hit, I guess you could say, and, and, you know, aimed at marketing professionals, and it's got Five different translations and 50,000 copies sold, so it's a bit of a hit. This new one has nothing to do with marketing, you could say. It's called Unleash Your Primal Brain, demystifying how we think and why we act. And it's a very readable overview of evolutionary psychology. And I think it goes to the root of what we've been talking about. So think of it this way, it's the operating system for all human beings. It's what we all have in common and some of the stuff we picked up along the way and we share with insects and lizards and other things at the end, like the cultural transmission and tribalism part that I mentioned are uniquely human and why we've taken over the whole planet. But to understand kind of how people make decisions, what parts of the brain are operating and Our basic tendencies gets you a long way towards being an effective persuader. So whether you're a leader in sales, in marketing, your personal, interpersonal relationships, it's the operating system for human beings. And so I went back to my first love, like I said, cognitive science was one of my majors in college, to just explain that because to me, evolutionary psychology is like the through line that underpins pretty much everything we've talked about on this podcast and many other things. Kevin King: Is there anything in the book, any stories or anything that you can share with us that was maybe from a thousand years ago or five thousand years ago, the way humans were acting that if you just lifted that whole psychology and planted it down there, down today, the only difference is technology. Is there some kind of example where you can share with us about how human psychology really hasn't changed? Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I can tell you that, you know, what we're designed for is being in small hunter-gatherer groups of a few dozen, maybe 100, 200 people max, running around the plains of the Savannah with a lot more dangerous animals around us. That's where modern humans came from. Right? So in that environment, you depended on your small group, your hunting party, if you will. And what bonded us into the tribe is the same tactics that I recommend using to create strong corporate cultures or strong brands. I can give you five elements of what it takes to create an intentional initiation experience into your tribe. Kevin King: That'd be great. Speaker 1: The first is overcoming adversity. If you give me a branded coffee mug, it's like, thanks for being our client. I'm not impressed. If you make me work for it, that's actually more valuable to me. So we have to overcome struggle in order to bond. It seems counterintuitive. Synchronized group activities. We need to do things together, ideally at the same time in the same way. You don't even have to like the people around you in a group. Think of the wave in a sports stadium or tai chi class or singing in a church choir. It doesn't matter. You feel better doing things in a synchronized group with others. Of course, that leads to peer pressure in ethical ways, but we're norming off of the behavior of people around us. But a key thing that we pay extra attention to is modeling by the leaders. We have to actually follow the example. I want to be like somebody. And that's where that origin myth and that hero's journey and the founder of the brand having a very important role can't be replaced by anybody else is because people are prizing that. They go, I want to join this tribe. I want to be like them. So these are some of the elements that if you put them together into this cocktail of a special initiation experience, whether it's for your prospects, for your existing clients, for your partners in your ecosystem, then they'll really feel a sense of powerful belonging to your tribe. Kevin King: Awesome stuff. Mike Frekey: So, Tim, you've been awesome today. You are truly a misfit, a marketing misfit. Speaker 1: It takes one to know one. I'll take that. Mike Frekey: Look, at the end of every podcast, we have one question for our guests, our misfits. Do you know a misfit? Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess I surround myself with them. Let me narrow it down. Kevin King: He just talked about it. He's part of his hunter pack. Speaker 1: Yeah, I would I would say that a truly iconoclastic, powerful man in my life is I was my former business partner. I sold my stake in my conversion rate optimization, optimization agency site tuners to him. Fellow keynote speaker, amazing guy. Marty Greif is his name. Mike Frekey: Awesome. Speaker 1: Marty is definitely a misfit, but man, is he fun. Kevin King: All right. Mike Frekey: I can't wait to talk to him. And by the way, how do people get a hold of you? Speaker 1: Well, if you want to find out more about the book or my public speaking, just go to primalbrain.com. And if you're interested in my executive advisory for digital growth, basically where I'm unlimited on call for a senior executive at a company, and they can have other people on the calls as long as they're on them, that's my service, the executive advisory for digital growth. That's on timash.com. You can find that there and all the details. Mike Frekey: Fantastic. Speaker 1: All right, Tim. Mike Frekey: Anything else, Kevin, by the way? Kevin King: No, I think this has been great. It's been fun. Mike Frekey: All right, sir. Well, I hope you can come back for another round of The Misfits. Speaker 1: Say the word. We're going 15 rounds since it's a championship match. Kevin King: Yeah, thanks, Tim. I appreciate you coming on today, man. Looking forward to chatting with you again soon. Speaker 1: Likewise. It was a lot of fun, gentlemen. Mike Frekey: All right. Thanks again, Tim. Kevin King: Norm, that was good. There's a lot of misfits out there and Tim definitely is really leading the way and talking about some stuff I think that just kind of gets shoved under a lot of times. I mean, it may be talked up at the big corporate level because more there than at the small and medium-sized level because it's not, they're worried more about, you know, paying rent the next month, but this type of stuff and the long-range thinking and the long way, the way you approach thinking from a psychological point of view can make all the difference. Mike Frekey: Yeah, this podcast is definitely worth another listen. There were so many little points that came out. Yeah, one of our better podcasts. It was great. And again, I can't thank Steve Wiedemann enough for introducing Tim Ash to us. So until next time, sir. Kevin King: Yeah, until next time, make sure you hit that subscribe button if you're watching on YouTube or if you're listening on your favorite podcast program, make sure you hit that subscribe button. You can always go to marketingmisfits.co. Is that .com or .co? Mike Frekey: .co. Kevin King: That's right, .co. We couldn't get that .com. Someone wanted like a half a million bucks for it. We're like, ah, not yet. Mike Frekey: Not yet. Kevin King: So it's .co. But marketingmisfits.co. We'll be back again next week. Remember, another new episode comes out every Tuesday. So until then, keep being a Misfit. Mike Frekey: All right, we'll see you later.