Marketing has always been about the ability to tap into emotion. Somewhere along the line we’ve lost that idea through excessive optimisation, (the wrong) metric obsessions and data analysis. This is a super smart framing that digs on deeper than just evoking emotion in customers, but actually understanding them at an emotional level. Great piece!
Curious where you land on this for B2B. The nervous system logic feels intuitive for DTC but the buying committee, the procurement cycle, the 14-person Slack thread does the framework hold or does it need a different translation?
The committee is still made of nervous systems. That's where I'd start.
The procurement cycle doesn't dissolve the individual states, it layers them. Someone on that 14-person thread is the 11:47pm person. Someone else is the skeptic whose nervous system is in threat-detection mode because the last vendor burned them. Someone is performing confidence they don't have in front of their VP. The "rational" B2B process is mostly people managing their own dysregulation in a shared space.
Where the translation gets interesting is that B2B has an official nervous system and a shadow one. The official one produces the RFP. The shadow one decides who actually gets championed in the room when you're not there. Most B2B marketing speaks exclusively to the official one and wonders why it loses deals it thought it had.
The shadow buyer section made me realize most brands are essentially interrupting their own sale. The person at 11:47pm has already done the work and then gets hit with a hero banner written for someone who just discovered the brand.
That's exactly it. The 11:47pm person isn't looking for conviction, they're looking for permission. And the hero banner written for the unconvinced is doing active damage at that moment. The brand is essentially saying we don't know you're here at the exact moment the customer is most ready to be known.
Marketing has always been about the ability to tap into emotion. Somewhere along the line we’ve lost that idea through excessive optimisation, (the wrong) metric obsessions and data analysis. This is a super smart framing that digs on deeper than just evoking emotion in customers, but actually understanding them at an emotional level. Great piece!
thank you! glad it was useful!
Curious where you land on this for B2B. The nervous system logic feels intuitive for DTC but the buying committee, the procurement cycle, the 14-person Slack thread does the framework hold or does it need a different translation?
The committee is still made of nervous systems. That's where I'd start.
The procurement cycle doesn't dissolve the individual states, it layers them. Someone on that 14-person thread is the 11:47pm person. Someone else is the skeptic whose nervous system is in threat-detection mode because the last vendor burned them. Someone is performing confidence they don't have in front of their VP. The "rational" B2B process is mostly people managing their own dysregulation in a shared space.
Where the translation gets interesting is that B2B has an official nervous system and a shadow one. The official one produces the RFP. The shadow one decides who actually gets championed in the room when you're not there. Most B2B marketing speaks exclusively to the official one and wonders why it loses deals it thought it had.
The shadow buyer section made me realize most brands are essentially interrupting their own sale. The person at 11:47pm has already done the work and then gets hit with a hero banner written for someone who just discovered the brand.
That's exactly it. The 11:47pm person isn't looking for conviction, they're looking for permission. And the hero banner written for the unconvinced is doing active damage at that moment. The brand is essentially saying we don't know you're here at the exact moment the customer is most ready to be known.