Marketing products effectively and consistently require understanding the buyer’s mind; this involves a depth of knowledge about how the brain operates. Many marketers may think of the brain in terms of psychological definitions, but there is a large difference between the mind and the brain.
The mind evolves from environmental shaping and experiences, whereas the brain is pure chemical and physiological matter. Oren Klaff, the author of Pitch Anything, explains that it is imperative to speak to the crocodile brain to market building products and building materials more effectively.
What exactly is the crocodile brain?
There are three parts of the brain: Neo-cortex (frontal), mid-brain, and the crocodile (reptilian) brain. The crocodile part of your brain, although beneath and behind the neo-cortex and mid-brain (both of which take up more space) is the first to receive information from outside sources.
It must decide what to do when confronted with a person, situation, visual stimuli, and so on. In other words, this part of the brain is the first to receive marketing visuals and information, and it will either pass it on to the main part of your brain or ignore it.
No new information ever gets to the rest of the brain (the place where someone will decide that they want your product) without passing through the reptilian brain.
How can I get my marketing materials past the crocodile brain and on to the neo-cortex?
This is the ultimate question and the most important; if the crocodile brain of the buyer decides to ignore your message, visual, or pitch, then your product will not sell. It’s important to understand how the crocodile brain thinks or works in order to get through on its level.
Here are characteristics of the crocodile brain, which, when analyzed give a perfect guide to marketers on how to present their material:
Driven by survival.
Filters out all extraneous data.
Selects only information received fast and summarized.
Looks for strong contrast cues (this can be in words or visual images).
Seeks visuals and narratives.
Ignores the ordinary/desires the unique (the survival mode says if something is ordinary or familiar, it is to be ignored because it’s not essential to survival. Only something perceived as unique, different, or dangerous will be passed on to the neo-cortex brain).
By understanding the workings of the brain, marketers can tap into greater selling power. When developing visuals, digital marketing material, or other advertising items, speaking to the crocodile brain means getting your message all the way through.
Bottom Line – don’t let the crocodile brain hijack your building material marketing message
Your message must be :
Simple, Clear and Big Picture – distill the conversation down to the core and filter out all the other details, those can come later . . .
Unique and Positive – The information you are giving the crocodile brain has to be new in some way, or it won’t even be noticed. Giving a hint that something great is coming if they keep paying attention.
Some things to think bout when you are considering how to approach explaining your products to your target audience.
How can you use this information to hone your message today? right now?
Regards and I hope you find beauty today, even in your crocodile brain.
-Jason Yana
About the Author :
Jason Yana has 2 decades of experience in architectural technology, 3d graphics and construction marketing. This unique combination provides highly-effective visual representations of building products that fuel marketing and support efforts.
His award-winning body of work informs, inspires and educates building product customers.
“people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel” – Maya Angelou
The Brain Retains Image Information Far Better Than Words
For marketing building products, or anything, for that matter – there is one pitfall which we face constantly.
Sure there are manufacturing costs, spiking labor costs, competition and countless other pitfalls we can run into when trying to convince design and construction professionals to use our latest greatest building product. However, if we don’t address this one evil thing, everything else we do will be sure to fail.
So what is this horrid evil pitfall?
Simply put, it is when our audience tunes us out – changes the channel – so to speak. We can have the best product in the world, which economically solves our potential customers problems, but if we don’t hold their attention long enough to present our idea to them, nothing else matters.
So How do we Defeat this Evil Tune Out?
By way of Pat Flynn’s SPI podcast, I came across a gentleman named Bryan Kelly who has done the research on this topic, gathering the latest information from neuroscientists and other experts covering what helps people succeed in presenting, speaking and pitching. We all hate the word “pitch” but the truth is that we are always selling, all of the time.
Be a Teacher and Strive for Learning
When we are presenting building products, we become teachers. We want our audience to learn about our products. Learning, as Bryan’s research shows, is an active process which takes place in the working memory as the learner abstracts meaning and connects it with existing knowledge to place it in long term memory.
In the podcast episode, Bryan explained how to defeat the evil of tune-out with a five letter acronym S-P-L-A-T as a way to remember this information.
The biggest thing I took away from all this Neuro-Babble is that we are all visual learners. How many times have we heard that some people learn by hearing things, some learn by doing things, some learn by seeing things etc.? The truth is that science shows that we are all visual learners.
Check out these numbers :
80% of our brains processing power is dedicated to visuals
6 Parts of the brain have been shown to be dedicated to processing images
Just hearing something, the retention level is around 10%
Using an image alone, that number jumps to 35%
Combine the two, as you would in a video and you now get to 60% retention!
Bottom Line – Leverage the Power of Visual Learning for Marketing Building Products
Listen to the Podcast (link above)
Use great visuals of finished projects
Use great images of your products
Use marketing videos to explain your products professionally
Create animated installation instruction videos to allow your customers to learn about how your products work in a way they will remember
I hope this information was helpful to you, please let me know what you think.
I’m a big fan of Nancy Duarte. If you don’t know who she is, check out Duarte Design, www.duarte.com a progressive and very successful graphic design firm built around Nancy’s passion for the art of presentation. She has a few great books out and the central theme of her work involves studying the techniques of the great storytellers throughout history and breaking them down into a formula that can be replicated.
Her recent blog post on linkedin entitled “Like Yoda you Must Be” ( read it here) inspired me to explore her concepts and how they apply to my own work performing visual marketing and demonstration for building products.
The Mentor Archetype
A good marketer, or salesperson will tell you without a doubt that a true product evangelist is an educator, a mentor. Yoda, for example, is a great example of the mentor. When Yoda trained Luke Skywalker, he did not waste any time boasting about his own credentials, His 800 years of mastery was not the focus of the training, his young student was the hero.
Your Audience is the Hero, not You
Duarte explains the most common mistake she sees after seeing hundreds of presentations. The presenters focus their presentation on themselves. She expounds us to remember that as the presenter, we are not the most important person in the room, we are merely the mentor. If we assume the role of mentor and make our audience, our prospective customers the heroes, we can resonate much more soundly.
Your Products are not the Hero Either, they are the Sword
If you could place yourself in the role of mentor the next time you present your products to the world, position your potential customers as the hero. Offer them your products as a sword with which they can achieve their goals and you will be much farther along than your competitors.
My wife, Lizzy, is a fabulous, exciting and dynamic human being. I tell you this, not because I like to talk about her, which I most certainly do, but because she is my secret weapon. Along with the myriad advice she has given me in business, sales and how to live a life of abundance, joy and integrity, she has become a very valuable tool in my work providing visual demonstrations of building products.
The Silent Marketing Killer
Due to the highly technical and specialized nature of most building products, it can be a great challenge to demonstrate exactly what the product in question is, how it works and why someone should specify or purchase it. Like myself, if you are involved in manufacturing, selling or using building products, you have probably spent most of your life looking at things like cad details, assembly drawings and other highly technical marketing materials. When you get too close to something like this, there is a very real danger which can develop. This silent marketing killer is a communication breakdown between you and the casual observer of your marketing materials. The decision makers you are trying to influence are busy people and they have not spent the thousands of hours looking at your products.
Your Brain Loves Your Products
It is very difficult to step outside of yourself and view your product marketing information as an outsider. To resonate fully with your target audience, you must get in their shoes, see what they see and think the way that they think. This cannot be done . . . not really. Unless you have found some new technology that allows you to jack into the brain of another person, you need to find the next best solution. Your brain has been looking at your products for so long that it has developed the ability to interpret the visual representations of your products. Your brain loves your products, because over the years, like a muscle, it has adapted to see more than what is actually on that catalog page, spec data sheet, or web site product page. Your brain sees that product on the page and it sees all the thousands of decision that were made creating it. So what is the next best thing to wiping your brain clean of all these biases? Lizzy is . .. let me explain.
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You’re not looking for this reaction
Assume your audience has no knowledge of your product
Most of the time, I am trying to present and demonstrate a product in a manner that looks visually appealing, but that is far from enough. At the same time, the goal is to demonstrate how the product works and why someone should want it. I know that the architect, engineer, contractor or consumer who is viewing my work is most likely a busy, impatient person who does not need to be bored with overly technical jargon, empty rhetoric or unnecessary marketing fluff. I know that I only have seconds to make a favorable first impression, and less than 2 minutes to take them from zero understanding of the product, to fully grasping the what, the how and the why of that product. So what does this have to do with Lizzy? Let me show you the Lizzy test.
The Lizzy Test
Lizzy is a perfect example of a type A personality. She has no patience for boring technical information. She once asked me how they get mail from place to place and I went into this huge lecture about the post net barcode, adc distribution centers, zip + 4 routing and automation, etc. Her beautiful eyes glazed over and I lost her immediately. She didn’t want to hear about the details, she wants to see the big picture and she certainly doesn’t want her time wasted. I realized very quickly that I had a gold mine on my hands here. I took an animation I was working on which showed how a metal fire-stopping product worked. It was a 2 minute video which first shows the product, some bullet items highlighting it’s main features and benefits and then a step by step installation animation which shows how it is installed in a wall. Her attention was caught by the visual quality and photorealism of the product rendering and she followed along quietly. After the 2 minute video was finished, I asked her if she understood what the product was and how it worked? She matter-of-factly responded “Of course, it keeps fire from going from one side of the wall to the other even if the structure above moves up or down, I’m not stupid”
Success!
Since then, I don’t let anything leave my studio without having passed “The Lizzy Test”
Do you have a Lizzy to preview your marketing materials to make sure you aren’t missing the target?
Arm your sales and marketing staff with the tools they need to stand out in the crowd and inform prospective customers with the best tools, learning aids and laser focused marketing, sales and support materials available
Early Disclaimer – Yes I am writing this article trying to convince you that my services are valuable and necessary. You can look at this as self-serving, and it is, but I don’t write about the value of visual marketing because I provide it as a service, I provide visual marketing as a service because I believe it is paramount to success in the marketing of building products. If all my writing does is make you take a second look at how your present your products to the world, I count that as a success.
Step One – Give them excellent visual representations of your products
I’m sure you have the most talented people out there on the streets showing your products off to your prospective customers and regardless of how talented they are, they still need ammunition. Whether you hire the best consultants and product photographers to showcase your products, or someone like me to do great 3d renderings of your products – you just have to do something to make a positive visual impression. It sounds so simple, but it is often overlooked. It is most often overlooked for products that aren’t meant to be pretty – the utilitarian things that will never be seen once a project is finished – I think it’s more important than ever in this case to act like McDonald’s and make something that isn’t necessarily pretty look awesome in your advertising and marketing. See this article to see what I mean about McDonald’s.
Step Two – Give them great details
Construction details provided by the manufacturer are a big part of sales and marketing. Sure, they can be a mundane pdf or dwg download that you bury seven levels deep on your web site, and that is fine, but think for a moment about what that says about your products, your loyalty to the success of your customers and your commitment to making this world a better place by providing a product that adds value in some way to the world. You and your colleauges have most likely lost many nights of sleep hashing out every detail about how your product is best used in the real world. That moment when the sales pitches are over, the dust settles, your product is specified and the designer is trying to use it correctly and the contractor is actually holding it in his hand – that moment is really what matters. If you don’t show that you take pride in this very serious moment, you are putting your company in jeopardy. Imagine now, looking at this a different way, creating beautiful details in crisp life-like 3d. You don’t pick the simplest application of your product or the simplest thing to draw to just get it over with, you show the down and dirty real-world details. Of course, the final decisions on how the building is designed and detailed lies with the engineer and architect of record, but so does the decision to use your product again.
Step Three – Demonstrate with the fourth dimension
Video, people just love it. I have approached many people trying to give them the elevator speech about what I do, why I do it, and how I can help them improve their business with varying success. Nothing works better than handing them my ipad which is loaded with a two minute video reel of my work. They sit quietly and watch for way more time than they will sit and listen to me babble. Many architects and contractors are visual learners and they are way more likely to remember what the heck your product is, how it is used, and most importantly why it should be used. Social media marketing is great, but have something to share. Things are becoming more and more about the mobile internet – video and animation is perfect for this.
I humbly appreciate you taking your time to read this and please don’t hesitate you let me know what steps I missed to properly arm a sales and marketing staff to hit the streets well-prepared. Leave a comment below, call and holler at me or drop a message in the box that slides up on the bottom right.
Some of the best sales people in the building product world are great teachers. They have a way of understanding the needs of their customers and can communicate solutions to real problems in an eloquent way. The act of taking someone from ground-zero and walking them step-by-step through a solution from beginning to end is an act of teaching.
The customer experience used to be done largely in person, when it comes to building product sales. A representative would put on a suit and tie, carry a large heaping pile of samples in to an architect’s office and make a great and informative presentation.
Arm your Sales Staff
I recently got a tour of a brick plant and one of the shocking things to me was there seemed to be more people, effort and expense going into creating the product samples than there was actually making the actual end product. The time and monetary investments are being made on the front-end of the sales process making the product samples look just right. That sample room is an arsenal of ammunition for the sales staff to use. Here is a new weapon for your sales staff – the 3d animation.
Bring a Machine Gun to a Knife Fight
Educate your sales team with 3d animations which demonstrate the what, how and why of your product in high definition detail. It is a very powerful sales training tool that can make sure that all the most important technical points and installation nuances are being addressed correctly.
Even the most boring and invisible aspects of a product can be illuminated and highlighted with a great 3d animation. Once the sales team is armed with this information, they can hit the ground running.
Take Customer Experience to the Next Level
The days of the boring powerpoint presentation are coming to an end. Your customers are completely desensitized to moving bullet lists and boring slides. Instead, if you show them full resolution, full motion 3d animated product tours and installation demonstrations, you will get their attention, you will educate them more thoroughly and they will be far more likely to remember the information you present to them.
Improve the customer experience with video demonstrations that do not just list features and benefits, they demonstrate them in real time.
Why is YouTube the Second Most Popular Search Engine?
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world because people love video. Video is engaging and is particularly effective when you are trying to demonstrate a highly technical concept. We will be at a point where customers are going to expect a much higher level of sophistication from product manufacturers and I think that time is drawing near.
Support the end-user and decrease problems in the field
A multimedia demonstration can help contractors and do-it-yourselfers understand the processes and procedures that need to be followed in order to correctly use your products. A step-by-step animation, often the same animation that you used to sell the product, can also serve to reduce warranty claims, callbacks, complaints and litigation.
An end-to-end solution
I have a map on my wall from Mark Mitchell (seethewhizard.com) it is a map of all the different paths a building product can take through the building product channel. At every touchpoint from architect, to general contractor, distributor – every point at which a building material moves from manufacture to installation can be improved and even transformed by a simple 2 minute video like the one shown above.
It’s There When you Cannot Be
Here is a quote from a customer who had a product animation done recently “I’m a product manager and I cover the entire US. Obviously I cannot accompany each salesman during their sales presentation but having a 2-1/2 minute video point out all the highlights of the system is huge help. Our customer’s time is very valuable and many times you only have a few minutes to pitch a product. The video gets directly to the point, pecks their interest and opens up the dialogue.”
