Cosmos

Welcome back to the show, my fellow extraordinary Americans. For today’s guest, we have GEERanasinha. G has been in marketing since the days of dial-up Internet and AOL CDs. Today, he’s the CEO of Caxino, a marketing agency and behavioral science practice for small to medium-sized businesses. Over the past 18 years, Caxino has helped over 400 startups and small businesses in around 20 countries grow awareness, reputation, trust, and sales. A, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, G is also a visiting clinical professor at two business schools, teaching marketing and behavioral science to final year MBA students for more than a decade. 

He’s also an acclaimed international speaker, presenting at conferences and events throughout the US and Europe. He’s an extraordinary individual, and I’m glad to have him on the show. Jeez, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Gee

Well, thank you very much for inviting me, Cosmos. Delighted to be invited.

Cosmos

GEE, can you tell me a little bit more about the audience, or yourself, your background, and your story?

Gee

Yeah, I’m sure. don’t know how far back we want to go, but in the immediate history, I can tell you that for seven years, I was the worldwide director of marketing for a software company. The company was serving blue-chip clients such as Timex, IKEA, Nestlé, Airbus, Marvel Comics, that sort of thing. 

So when I was CMO there, I often, as you can imagine, invited marketing agencies to come to pitch for our business. But I was amazed that none of them would assume any fiduciary responsibility for the marketing plans they were proposing. Okay, so all the agencies, excuse me, all of the agencies I spoke with were more interested in the tactical side of things, the execution side. 

You know, websites and ads and events and PR and all that sort of stuff. Nobody was asking me about the business result the marketing plan needed to deliver on. Okay, I thought that was a bit wild. 

So this is going back to 2007, and it dawned on me that there were a ton of startups and small businesses out there needing help with marketing from a business perspective, designing and managing a marketing plan, generating qualified leads to produce a tangible commercial difference ultimately. Right? 

So, as you may remember, I don’t know if you remember, but certainly at that time, the Internet was really beginning to affect our daily lives. You know, we had the advent of affordable broadband. You know, the iPhone had just come out. And it was the big brands that were taking advantage of the Internet’s potential. Right. Based on the fact that they had greater Technical resources and, of course, deeper pockets, small businesses, or smaller businesses, anything smaller than Fortune 5000 companies were getting left behind. So I thought there was an opportunity to create a marketing resource for small businesses and startups to help them leverage the power of online engagement. 

So I looked around for a marketing agency that took that kind of approach, and I couldn’t find one. So along with two other colleagues, we started our own. So, in January 2008, I resigned from my comfortable corporate job, you know, with all the trappings that come with those roles. You know, international travel, company beamer, expense accounts, and all of that sort of stuff. And we launched the agency. As I said, that was in 2008. 

So 17 plus years later, we’re still here. We’ve now grown to 19 people across nine countries. Nine of us are in the U.S.; the rest are in Europe, South Africa, and Japan, with two in Australia. And while we like to think that we’re Europe-based, probably 80% of our business is with clients based in the U.S., well, North America, let’s say, based in North America. And we’re, we’re, I mean, we’re, it’s, it’s more than a marketing agency because we, we, we combine marketing and branding and positioning with behavioral science. 

So we mix strategy development and tactical execution with behavioral science thinking to design more salient, more resonant, more effective marketing output for our clients. Because at the end of the day, you know, what we’re talking about is a revenue event happening as a result, directly or indirectly, from a marketing action. Right? There needs to be a sale at some point in time because sales are the name of the game. Right? That’s what we’re doing. We’re not doing this for charitable purposes. Right?

It’s sales. We’re looking to increase sales above the industry’s general trend. You know, the way I say it is, if, you know, if it doesn’t move that revenue needle, it’s not marketing, it’s fluff, it’s noise. It’s just pretty pictures; it’s expensive art, so that’s who we are, customers, wise. We work primarily in the B2B space. B2B businesses, services, and products generally have up to about $25 million in revenue. If it’s a startup, then they’re usually externally funded. 

So they need to have private shareholders. Startup, accelerator, VC, private equity, something like that, and that’s us. Yeah.

Cosmos

I had a question since we were talking about behavioral science and marketing: like, what is the greatest revelation you’ve found about how behavioral science and that knowledge affect marketing and sales?

Gee

I think the underestimation of how influential buyers are, by factors that have nothing to do with the product or service we’re selling. Okay, so behavioral science, just to take a 36,000ft view, right? Behavioral science looks. It used to be. Well, it’s sometimes called behavioral economics. It’s the same thing, to be honest. Behavioral science, behavioral economics, they’re just sort of new age words for something that’s been around for, well, for as long as sales have been around, really. It’s understanding how customers buy stuff. It’s customer psychology. Okay. 

Behavioral science, in particular, examines the details of how and why people make buying decisions and compares those decisions with how they think they’re making them. Because the truth is that humans often act on unconscious biases, mental shortcuts, and emotional triggers instead of purely rational analysis. We like to think that we’re making a buying decision based purely on rational and logical factors. The fact is that we don’t. We are heavily influenced by context, environment, and emotion. 

And you know, you can just look at your own experience to know that, you know, you could, you. Depending on your mood, you can choose whether to click add to cart. It could be whether it’s a Monday morning or a Friday evening. Both of those instances feel very different to us, don’t they? Right. It’s also how we choose to articulate the value proposition to our customers. Even if what we’re talking about is the same thing, it looks like we’re talking about the same thing. Who, okay, so for instance, buy one, get one free, and 50% off, in terms of a business argument, in terms of economics and finance, they’re the same. Right. But as customers, we give them a different sense of what that company, brand, or product is about, don’t we? 

Yeah, because I think a better understanding of psychological triggers and the effects of context and environment can make the messaging we create for our buyers feel more intuitive, ultimately leading to more effective campaigns. You can think of behavioral science as a marketing cheat code if you’re a gamer. Ah, certainly for a gamer of a certain age. If I said to you, up, up, down, down, left, right, Left, right, B, A start. Okay. 

You’d know what I was talking about. And that was back in the days of old-school console games; it was like a cheat code you’d enter into the handset you had for your video game. It would give you unlimited life or unlimited weaponry, or the weapons that you would only get on level 27, you’d get on level one, and this sort of stuff. 

So you can look at behavioral sense as something like that. It’s like a cheat code for marketing. It gets us that much further down that road compared to our competitors because we’re understanding much more about why people make decisions, even if they’re not consciously aware of it. And this even bleeds into AI. Okay. 

Because we can think of behavioral science as the missing link between the technical capability and the actual practical value of AI, you know, so if AI is the tool, behavioral science is like the instruction manual. Right? 

So if we ignore the human component, we risk building systems that may be technically brilliant but practically useless. Do you see what I mean?

Cosmos

Yeah.

Gee

Because we’re working on a very cerebral, emotional, almost intuitive level with the buyer, now I don’t want to confuse people who are listening to this behavioral science. You may have heard of the term neuroscience. Now, behavioral science is not neuroscience. Neuroscience is a totally different field of study. Neuroscience looks inside the brain. 

So it looks at particular enzymes and chemical combinations that together affect brain chemistry and direct the brain to have a particular emotional reaction. Okay. 

So we’re not talking about that. What behavioral science is talking about is what people actually do. Okay. So, for example, it’s been proven, and there are plenty of studies that go back decades. Like wine tastes more expensive if it’s drunk from a heavier glass. Right? Like I said, you know, the way we choose to present a discount, buy one, get one free versus you know, 50% off, 50% extra free versus 33% off dramatically changes the perceived value of the product. Right. 

So we can use several behavior-based sticks or carrots, depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting on, to influence a buying decision. Wow. Okay. 

And it doesn’t. And we can do all of this without actually changing the product’s properties or capabilities. We’re creating value from nothing. We can create additional value and profit from a product without touching any of its physical characteristics. Wow.

Cosmos

I had two questions. First one is: what is your perspective on neuro-linguistic programming as it relates to Marketing? And the next thing is: how would someone create the right emotions, so you create value out of nothing?

Gee

Okay, well, neural programming is really outside my realm of experience, so I can’t comment much on NLP. I think it’s a very fascinating field of study. Still, I think it goes a little bit too much into the academia and theoretical side of brain workings and crossing the Rubicon into neuroscience rather than what we’re talking about, behavioral economics, behavioral science, which is more focused on why people behave the way they do.

And I think, looking at those reasons and understanding those quite often hidden motivations behind certain behaviors is a lot more pragmatic and a lot easier for non-scientific-based studies to understand and implement within a commercial environment. Because at the end of the day, what we’re talking about is how to make our marketing work better, right? We’re spending more and more every year on marketing, right? This year, globally, we’re looking to spend more than ever before on marketing and advertising, around $1.7 trillion. 

So we’re spending more than ever. And yet the results of our marketing continue to fall. And we have to ask ourselves why that is. Right? Certainly, within the marketing industry, we’ve had things like marketing technology, automation, and even what, you know, the average person in the street is calling AI today, we have had for at least a decade in the marketing industry. Okay, it wasn’t called AI; it was called machine learning, right? But in terms of what it was doing, it was the same. 

So my point is that we’ve had all of these technologies, custom audience profiles, UTM codes, cookies, and all of this stuff. And yet the effectiveness of our marketing has continued to fall. And at some point, we need to ask ourselves why. Because, theoretically, if we’ve got all this technology helping us do our jobs, we should be walking down the corridors, high-fiving each other because we’ve, like, thrashed our sales targets within the first three months of the year. But we’re not, we’re struggling. And why is that? Because we’ve exorcised any semblance of creativity from the output that we’re publishing to our audiences. We’re absolving ourselves of responsibility for the efficiency of that communication and hiding behind the numbers and the tech. 

And we do that because it absolves us from blame. Because if we do what the technology tells us and it fails, then when we go to our boss, we say, well, look, I mean, it told us to do this and do this and do this, and we did all that, and it didn’t work. And then the boss would say, ” Okay, fair enough, you acted logically and rationally and pragmatically, but it didn’t work. Fair enough. 

But if we had acted irrationally, emotionally, to try to create a trigger, to generate a call to action that was emotionally based, and it failed, we’d get the blame, right? 

Because we, as a society, as a species, take the fact that something is automated, mechanical, and so-called error-free as having greater weight and greater truth than something that is more behavioral, driven. But we can’t do that in marketing because marketing is not like any other core area of the business. Okay? If you look at other areas of the business, if you look at manufacturing or if you look at finance, obviously. But if you, if you, if you look at engineering, all of these things, they are working on the premise that everything is very logical and sequential in its process. 

We know everything about each element of the system. Supposing we are a company making widgets, okay? And to make the company more profitable, we’re making widgets so we can do several things, right? We can increase the speed of the widget-making machine, right? We could buy a new, more productive widget-making machine. We could have more people working on the widget-making machine, maybe with different shifts, right? 

So you would be working, you know, three eight-hour shifts a day, right? So that you’re churning out more widgets. Or we could look at finding a cheaper supplier of the raw materials that we need to make our widget. You know, all of these things we would have the result of making, of increasing productivity, increasing efficiency of the system, right? Because we know every element in that widget-making process, how it affects every other element, and how changing one thing changes other things. 

Because we have perfect information, as they would say, if you, in the economics world, right? And that works if you’re dealing with widgets, numbers, or a purely Newtonian way of looking at things: two plus two is always going to be four, and that’s great. It’s absolutely fine.

The thing about marketing is two things. Firstly, we do not know; we do not have total transparency into the information. We don’t know all of the little pieces that together form a buying decision. We don’t know what those pieces are. We don’t know the weighting of those pieces that influence the decision. And we also don’t know how the size of those pieces changes depending on the mood. Someone simply set the mood, right? 

Also, it totally excludes the possibility of making an irrational or emotional decision about the sale. But since we’re not talking about machines or widgets or all that, we’re talking. Gee, what marketing is doing is talking about human beings. And human beings are not rational. They are not one plus one equals two-type people or entities, okay? 

They are unpredictable in their nature. Where it gets even more complicated is when you try to create a measurable metric to compare today’s results against what you’re going to do tomorrow. Because the units that we use don’t automatically translate across disciplines, right? 

So if you’re talking about engineering, okay, 6 inches is 6 inches, right? 32 centimeters is 32 centimeters. And that’s whether you’re in Seattle, Chicago, Amsterdam, Durban, or Sydney, right? It doesn’t matter. It’s a universal constant. A kilogram, a pound, a kilometer. All of these things are standard units that we can communicate in from a scientific or academic perspective, right?

And all of these things can all, you know, possibly have influence in whatever we’re talking about, from the case of making a productive system, from a logical, rational, pragmatic perspective.

Now, in marketing, the units, the interchangeable units of measurement, do not exist. Or if they do, they’re very hard to measure. Okay? For example, there is no standard SI unit for trust, fear, or anger. Yet these are all influences that can affect a buying decision. Right? If you look at the entire insurance industry, it exists because of fear. Yeah, right. Exists because of fear. And if you have somebody come to your home and try to sell you health insurance, for example, what do they say? Imagine if. Right? That’s how they start their spiel, right? 

So they’re playing on the emotions. So how do you measure that? How do you measure the efficacy of one particular type of communication to trigger that fear emotion against another? It’s very difficult. So, because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s not important. But what we’re doing is excluding that whole area of study and experimentation and just defaulting down to this is what we sell. Here’s a bunch of bullet points listing the features of our product or service, and then we bash it out, and we expect the phone to ring or the email to ping, and it doesn’t because we’re just generating absolute crap that nobody can remember. And even if they do remember, they quite possibly confuse our communication with the communication of our competitors. 

Because we’re not creating any form of differentiation or distinctiveness that separates what we’re doing from what everybody else is doing, I’ve spoken a lot. You haven’t asked any questions. I shall shut up now.

Cosmos

No, this is actually really good stuff. I mean, we’re just, I’m just trying to understand the secrets of what makes good marketing versus because most businesses, like they are doing marketing, they spend a lot of money, as you mentioned. Still, they’re not; they don’t get the results compared to the money they’re putting in. So it’s coming down to people’s behavior.

But the question I wanted to ask, for the sake of the audience, is: what have you found out about human nature and people’s behaviors that make them tick towards a successful marketing campaign?

Gee

 Humans are by design unpredictable entities, unpredictable creatures. Okay. And we like to think that we’re very rational and pragmatic about how we make decisions, but we’re not.

Cosmos

Greeks would disagree with you, but this is interesting.

Gee

I’m not sure the Greeks would disagree with me. I think it depends on how far back you want to go. Because if you look at the basic Aristotle columns of logos, ethos, and pathos, the whole essence of logos of storytelling is exactly to invoke an emotional connection and reaction, which is precisely what I’m talking about. 

So I think it’s, you know, obviously these things are open to interpretation, and you know, over the years things have, you know, changed a lot. But what’s going wrong is that most of the marketing we’re doing comes from a position of pragmatism and rationality. As I said, the targets are anything but rational because they’re people. 

Okay, so what we need to do is get back to the concept of having both types of communication. And by that I mean the, the longer term slow burn, brand awareness, type communication that elevates the notion of our existence in the minds of our target audience together with the short term, what’s, what’s called performance marketing, which I don’t really like the term because it’s almost like there’s a type of marketing which is non performance, you know, of course marketing’s performance, any marketing has to be performance. That’s the whole idea. Otherwise, why would you do it? But performance marketing is more of a hard sell, okay?

It’s, you know, it’s the buy one, get one free, free delivery until the end of the month. You know, only available in blue for this short amount, you know, whatever it may be, to sort of push you over the edge. But the point is, we need both sides, okay? Because there’s a rule in marketing called the 95.5 rule. And what that basically says is that if you look at your entire possible target market, everybody who could be in the market to buy whatever you’re selling, okay? 

Whenever you choose to send out a piece of marketing communication and add social media, post, whatever, okay? 95% of the people you’re trying to attract aren’t in a position to buy at the precise time they’re seeing your marketing. They may be in a position to buy tomorrow, next week, or next year. It depends on what you’re selling, right? You know, for me, for instance, haircuts are about once every three or four weeks, right? 

So if I’ve just had a haircut, I’m not. And I see an ad for a new hair salon offering a fantastic deal, but only until the end of the week. Doesn’t really matter to me, does it? Because I’m not going to have another haircut three days after having my first haircut.

Cosmos

Yeah, right?

Gee

Now, if I saw that piece of communication three or four weeks later, I might say, “Oh, okay, I’m game, I’m open to it.” Let’s have a look. Right? But the point is not that we need to be in front of our buyers’ faces when they’re ready to buy, because, to be honest, that’s too late. We’ve missed the boat. The point is that we need to do this, this background, brand awareness, type marketing continuously, so that when buyers are in the market to buy, they think of us, right? 

You can think of it as like SEO for your brain, okay? When I’m setting up widgets, I’m not ready to buy a widget today, right? Two weeks later, I’m in widget-buying mode. Which widget am I going to buy? I know I’m going to buy Cosmo’s widget because I’ve seen some stuff somewhere that’s gone somewhere deep inside my brain. And I create what we call in marketing a consideration set, which is a list of possible suitors that will address my problem. Okay?

So all we can do as marketers is get on that list. Because the thing is, by the time you’ve come up with that list and that list is obviously the category leader is always going to be there, right? 

So you know, what, what, what, whatever, whatever category, whatever industry you’re selling into, and whatever category within that industry you’re selling to, there’s going to be one or probably two 800-pound gorillas that pretty much own most of that market share, right? Those are the ones that always instantly come to mind, right? You know, if you’re looking to buy a cola-flavored drink, right, there are two main brands that you instantly think of, all right? 

So it’s the same thing. Gee, you have a particular category, and those guys are automatically going to come to mind. Now, after that, there may be two, three, perhaps four others, maybe less well known, maybe more nuanced, more niche, but you remember them for whatever particular reason. 

So you now have a short list, and that is your shortlist for, okay, I’m going to buy my widget. It’s going to be from one of these people, and 99 times out of 100, it is going to be one of those people. Because once that list is created in my brain, the chances of somebody coming in and being added to that list or even winning the sale at that late point are almost zero. Because half of the buying decision has already been made here. I’ve already decided I’m going to choose between these guys. And now I need to choose which one of these guys. 

Okay, this is why I dispute the argument that AI asks AI which I need the best toaster oven, delivered the next day, that wins all the reviews. Which one is it? Okay, because as people, as human beings, we still want choice. 

There may be buying criteria we didn’t even consider when specifying the objective that will influence our decision. Oh, that one’s available in pink. Never thought about that. Do you see what I mean? It wasn’t even on our radar, but now that we’ve seen that it exists, it totally skews our buying decisions.

Cosmos

Well, no, this is a lot.

Gee

Sorry, is it too much?

Cosmos

This is actually pretty good.

But for the sake of the audience, I want to know, like, if someone is listening to this and wants to know how to do marketing properly and understand people and behavioral science, where can they go, and what resources can they look at? To gain more knowledge of this matter.

Gee

Well, obviously, being ego-driven and having worked in marketing for far too many years, I would say, come and see me. Okay, find me on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I post one-minute videos on LinkedIn twice a week about exactly these sorts of topics. 

And I’ve been doing it for over three years. The videos are available if you’re not on M. LinkedIn. They’re available on other channels as well. You just need to Google them. You’ll find me. Okay. On LinkedIn, it is very easy. Would you believe, Cosmos, there is only one GEERanasina on LinkedIn? Can you imagine the chances of that? 

So you can Google me, and you’ll find me. Otherwise, if you come to the website kexino.com, k-E X I N O, there is a ton of information about behavioral science, customer psychology, and how to better align your marketing with the wishes and expectations of your target audience.

Cosmos

Let’s say somebody in the audience wants to connect with you personally. Do they just reach out to you on LinkedIn

Gee

Or reach out to me on LinkedIn. It’s going to be, going to be the best way, the fastest way.

Cosmos

Yeah, that is amazing, GEE. And yeah, I obviously want to ask so many questions, but then we could go for hours on this. Right. But obviously, the time is coming to an end. But I wanted to, like, thank you so much for taking the, like, I really appreciate the knowledge you’re sharing on marketing and behavioral science because there’s a lot of stuff out there on the Internet about how to market and how to do sales. 

But ultimately, understanding people and behavioral science and what makes people tick is what will lead to success. And I do hope people reach out to you and, like, get more information, and I hope you come back to this show at a later time.

Gee

Absolutely. Let’s do it. Let’s do it again. I’d love to come back.

Cosmos

No, for sure. And yeah, thank you, GEEI appreciates it. And I want to conclude this episode by letting my fellow extraordinary Americans know that there’s an extraordinary within each of us. It’s our duty to awaken it and unleash it. Until next time. Bye for now.