[Off-Topic] People: Rational Animals? The id and ego in marketing

First published on 2013-05-16T17:54:01+00:00

On different levels we consider ourselves “rational animals” — we understand our ability to reason as the characteristic that differentiates us from other animals.

In particular, in this world of startups, we are constantly trying to answer the difficult question of “How do I demonstrate the value of my product to the world?” Is it the cheapest product? The easiest product to use? The most elegant product?

To understand the root of this problem, let’s go back a few centuries and then advance to what we know today: understanding how we reason.

"I think, therefore I am"

Everyone has probably heard and repeated this phrase at some point in life — usually with dubious interpretations — but few have reflected on what it means. The phrase is by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, a man who doubted and questioned everything, including his own senses, because we’ve been fooled by them countless times. But at the very least the fact of questioning, of thinking, defines the only certainty we can have: that we exist.

The name Descartes, in Latin, is “Cartesius,” from which the word “Cartesian” derives. It names Descartes’ philosophy, or “Cartesian Dualism”, the complete separation of mind and body. “The intangible Soul exists despite the material body.” It’s the introduction of mathematical thought into philosophy and the idea that all possible knowledge can be deduced purely through reasoning, despite the body, the senses, and emotions.

Let’s jump from the 17th century to the 19th and meet another name: Phineas Gage, a US construction worker who is remembered to this day for an unusual episode. An explosion at the railroad work site launched a huge iron rod, 4 cm in diameter and weighing 6 kg, which entered under his left jaw, passed behind his left eye, pierced his brain, and exited through the upper part, leaving a hole in the top of his skull. By the force of the explosion the rod crossed his head and landed 25 m away. He remained conscious, although literally leaking brain from the hole.

What makes the case interesting is that Phineas survived and lived another 12 years. But the result, according to reports from the time, is that the person before the accident and the one after were completely different. Although the reports aren’t reliable, they describe him before the accident as “balanced, meticulous, and persistent about his goals, besides being a responsible and skilled professional.” After the accident his personality changed, “he was belligerent, ill-tempered, lazy, and irresponsible. He became impatient and stubborn, using coarse language he had never used before.”

"Phineas was no longer Phineas."

This episode could be considered the catalyst for modern neuroscience and its effects on psychology, sociology, and even modern behavioral economics. In particular, the Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio mentions this case in his famous book “Descartes’ Error”.

"I feel, therefore I am."

Modern neuroscience has already knocked down the old Cartesian notion of separation between mind and body. On the contrary, today we know that the body influences the mind. For the purposes of this explanation, let’s simplify the definition of our emotions as being the expression of the physiological state of the body and brain, affected by stimuli. We see this every day — anyone who has used legal or illegal drugs, Prozac, Zoloft, LSD, or even hormonal anomalies, knows the devastating effect this has on their own definition of “SELF.”

Damasio’s hypothesis is that the region damaged in Phineas was the left prefrontal cortex. It’s one of the bases for the “Somatic Markers Hypothesis” which proposes that our decision-making process, far from being purely rational and Cartesian, is guided by emotions. Research done on several people who, like Phineas, suffered damage to the neocortex region have problems with decision-making and social conduct, having difficulties in long-term planning, learning from mistakes, behaving in a socially acceptable way.

"A man always has two reasons to do anything: the good reason and the real reason."

The origin of this article was when I stopped to reflect on this phrase, commonly attributed to the finance giant who helped constitute General Electric, John Pierpont Morgan — better known as J.P. Morgan.

Returning to the world of biology, we know that nothing and nobody designed us the way we are. We are the most recent result of constant mutations and survival tests in the environment, for millions of years. We are at the top of this chain, Homo Sapiens, and thanks to thinkers like Descartes, we define ourselves as “Rational Animals.”

Indeed, one of our most striking characteristics is having a brain equipped with a prefrontal cortex (PFC) that allows us to have cognitive skills, personality, expression, decision-making capacity, and to moderate our social behavior.

But our brain is the result of evolution — the PFC is only the most recent episode. According to the triune brain theory, the second oldest part is what we know as the limbic system, the source of emotions, and the proto-reptilian brain. A characteristic present in the brains of all animals, from invertebrates up to us, is having the instantaneous mechanisms we can summarize as “emotions.” Joy, sadness, fear, courage, pleasure.

Fortunately we have emotions like “fear” — it’s what makes us react even before reasoning about it. It can be the millisecond of reaction that will make you dodge the car you didn’t consciously notice but that would have killed you. The millisecond that will prevent you from keeping your hand too close to the mouth of an animal that’s about to bite you. Technically, emotions aren’t just instincts, but emotions are instinctive.

The importance of this, and the theory behind Somatic Markers, is that first we have an emotional reaction, then we have a rational reaction, which takes longer to process. This order is important. If we use a metaphor borrowed from Freud’s psychology, we could equate the emotional brain with the “Id” and the rational brain, the PFC, with the “Ego.”

The order we’re used to is that at least in our slower, more “pondered” decisions, we are able to “turn off” almost completely our Id and use only the Ego’s cognition, do cost-benefit analyses, evaluate the facts impartially, and make the best possible decision.

But what neuroscience shows is that the opposite may be happening: first your Id has already made a decision (“I want that!”), and then your Ego will rationalize and try to justify that decision (“I want it because of reason X”). Some call this “gut feeling,” “intuition,” visceral emotional reaction.

That is, first you have a “real reason,” the emotional reaction. Then you justify and express it with the “good reason,” the rational reaction.

This is important because we don’t think in that sequence. Without being rigorous, look at what’s known as the “Marketing Mix” or the 4 Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, Place. In the 1960s, Jerome McCarthy coined the term, and Philip Kotler dogmatized it in his magnum opus, the Principles of Marketing. The 4 Ps have already grown to 7 Ps, then 4 Cs, 4 Es, and they keep creating derivations.

Looking at it superficially, most of us are conditioned to rationalize: comparing technical specifications, trying to justify one product as superior to another because of price, technical characteristics, availability. And when we think about how to present our product or service and how to differentiate it, we’re usually focused on making it “better,” “faster,” “cheaper” — all rational justifications we imagine will most influence other “rational animals” like us.

The role of Marketing isn’t just or merely to justify a product — it’s not to satisfy the Ego. The primary thing is first to provoke the Id, to create the visceral emotional reaction. Objective characteristics aren’t dispensable — on the contrary, they’ll be tools for the Ego’s use when trying to justify the choice. But the choice will already be made! That’s the beauty of the theory.

You can justify as much as you want about how many goals your team scored this championship, how many victories it has had through history, the lineup — that’s your ventromedial prefrontal cortex trying to rationalize the emotional choice that your brain’s limbic system has already made. Notice that if you’re a football lover, no amount of rationalization will make you change your “heart team.”

It’s not possible to adjust the levels of noradrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine directly by injecting chemicals into people to affect their emotions (only psychiatrists can legally do that). But we can affect these reactions through other channels: human beings have five senses that serve as an interface. For example, any advertising campaign that features children has the goal of manipulating your limbic system into having the first emotional reaction before you stop to rationalize.

So far we’ve only scratched the surface of what areas like medicine, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, economics have been researching in recent decades, but the intention is just to make you understand that these areas exist, that knowledge about human behavior is evolving all the time, and we can have many new perspectives by accessing this knowledge to use it in the real world.