Why Great Marketers Think Like Scientists

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I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details.

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[0:52] 

What are some things that I used to believe five years ago about this business that I would completely disagree with today? And the other question I was thinking, what are some things that I used to believe five years ago about this business that I agree with even more today than ever before?

And what I found myself kind of doing is sitting down with a list, and I couldn’t come up with a single item for the first question. Like, there’s nothing that I used to believe five years ago that isn’t true today anymore. I couldn’t find a single truth that was true for me in my business five years ago that isn’t true today.

Now, as far as the things that I believed five years ago, even 10 years ago, that are as true today as they were five years ago, or sometimes even truer, I ended up coming up with a really long list of things that I won’t get into today because it’s kind of raw. I might do like a dedicated call for that. But just in the first five minutes, I came up with 15 different things.

And so when we talk about, you know, 22nd century principles of marketing, they actually don’t differ very much from the 21st century principles of marketing and probably don’t differ very much from the 20th century principles of marketing.

[2:44] 

The technology does change, right? Technology changes. But as far as what influences us to buy things and how we make decisions, how we choose whether to trust a brand or a solution or not, those things don’t actually change at all.

And there’s a great book called Alchemy by Rory Sutherland where he poses a great observation about how in the school system, we get taught to solve narrow problems in narrow contexts. And what he means is that, you know, let’s take math. You’ve got a bus leaving the station, heading north at 60 miles an hour, and at the same time a car or a bike heading west at the speed of 50 miles an hour. And the question is, in how many hours will they have collectively traveled 500 miles? That’s a narrow context, narrow problem, because there’s one answer. That’s what school is about. You’re given a circumstance and you have to figure out the answer to the question or the solution to the problem.

That’s fine. It teaches us to use tools, to use logic, to use math and other things we learn in school. But most of life’s problems are not like that.

[4:02] 

Most life’s problems are wide context problems with more than one solution, with almost an infinite number of variables that half the time we don’t even know half of. And there is usually more than one right answer.

And again, he poses a great example. Let’s say you live in New York and you have to make a decision on how to get to the airport. Let’s say you’re flying out of JFK. So do you get there by cab? Do you get there by train? Do you get there by bus? And the answer to this question is: it depends. It depends when you want to wake up. It depends how much luggage you’ve got, because if you’ve got like three or four suitcases, you’re unlikely to want to schlep through a train station or take the subway. Right. It depends what your travel budget is. It depends on your luxury preferences. It depends on the traffic. Are there accidents on the highway? Is the train under construction or something? Right. So it depends. And you actually have to compute quite hard with your brain to make the decision that is right for you.

Very important: the decision that’s right for you. Because for you, one answer is sufficient. For someone else, it’s going to be a totally different right answer.

[5:42] 

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Now let’s get back to the episode.

[6:19] 

Now, marketing. And it doesn’t matter if it’s internet marketing or not, but marketing in general and the way we generate sales and conversions is also a wide context problem with more than one right answer. And so when the customer, the potential customer, the prospect, the person getting our emails, when they’re researching solutions, when they’re trying to solve a problem, they also have a wide range of considerations to make. They have a wide range of both known criteria as to how they want to purchase solutions, as well as unknown criteria.

Because we’ve talked about this many times. People make emotional decisions and justify those decisions with logic. Right. So oftentimes they’ll make a decision, they’ll make up their mind to buy something you’re promoting. And if you ask them why they bought whatever it is you’re promoting, they’ll give you the logical explanation. But the decision to buy it was completely emotional, of which fact they are completely unaware.

And that’s why it takes a great mind, almost like a scientist, because you have to experiment a lot until you get lucky. For great marketers, the likes of Rory Sutherland, the likes of David Ogilvy, they’re able to uncover these completely invisible to us emotional reasons why we buy different things and why we make the decisions we make.

[8:07] 

So if purchasing things was as straightforward as cost, then the cheapest product would always win. But that’s obviously not the case. If the purchase decision was always a matter of reliability, then the most reliable brand would always win. Or maybe it’s a matter of customer support. Then Amazon would always win. But of course, it’s never the case. So it’s a wide context thing that we’re trying to solve here.

Now, we can guesstimate what would get us closer to getting that conversion. But oftentimes there are so many different things outside of our control that just play in our favor and we don’t even know it. The amount of times in my life when I launched different offers or promoted stuff and had no idea why it converts is mind boggling. In fact, most of my initial experiences with internet marketing worked exactly like that. Because I looked at the promotion and I would say: I would never buy this. And then I would generate dozens of sales. And it’s crazy. And the things that I would be like, oh, I would totally buy this, in fact I’m buying it right now, would just flop.

So there are tons of unknowns here.

[9:37] 

And as far as the 22nd century principles of marketing, I assure you, they’re not very different from the 21st century principles. Because they still come down, fundamentally, to two people transacting. Sure, they’re transacting across a screen and communicating through a medium, which could be a website, an email, a webinar, a video, a text of some kind. And sometimes it’s two people actually communicating over chat or phone or Zoom, but it’s still human beings communicating.

And so when you’re sending an email, you’re sending out a communication piece, and that communication piece represents who you are and your ability to communicate in a way that is interesting to them, in a way where they want to respond to what you’re sending, in a way that is congruent to what they’re trying to achieve, in a way that speaks to their emotions or their emotional side, in the way that generates trust and the like factor, et cetera, et cetera.

So those are the primary things as far as marketing and the 22nd century.

[11:20] 

Now, of course, this is a very narrow assessment specifically for the direct response industry. And this may change down the road. Maybe in five years time, we’ll find ourselves in an economy where it’s someone’s AI robot browsing the internet to engage with a business that communicates with this AI robot with its own AI robot. And that’s two AI robots communicating with each other to make the transaction.

So the AI agents become the extension of who we are. But even if that’s the case, the AI agents would still make the decisions based on the criteria that the humans would give them. So while it’ll probably take the magic out of it a little bit, there’s going to be less ambiguity because the agents would be like, oh, this is cost-effective, but this is getting better reviews, blah blah blah, so you should go with this and not with that. You know, that could be a different economy.

Because then it would probably boil down to social proof, authority. But then again, these were also the principles in the 21st century, described in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: social proof and authority. So those principles didn’t change.

[12:44] 

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