Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 42 of coffee with Cuch. We're carrying on with the series on psychological phenomenon in Marketing. And today we're going to talk about the Baader Meinhof phenomenon. By the man half was actually sort of militant terrorist organization in Germany in the 1970s. So what does that got to do with psychology? Well, it comes from like a throwaway statement. So someone on the news programs that I'd never heard of the bottom half, and then suddenly, I heard about them twice in a day. And this is a common phenomenon we have all experienced, I'm sure every single person listening to this watching this will have experienced this exact phenomenon. So let's say for example, you bought a new car, and you're driving down, you bought a new car, and then suddenly, every other car on the road is the same as your car, or you bought a red car. And suddenly every other car on the road is a red car. It essentially refers to a psychological phenomenon, which is called the frequency illusion. So sometimes it's called the Barnum is the Baader Meinhof phenomenon, more often than not, it's called the frequency illusion. So the frequency illusion is really around how your mind selectively notices and processes information. And in marketing, we use this quite a lot. And I'll come to specifically how we use it and when we use it a little later on in the podcast. So mostly, the sequence goes like this, you have a first encounter with a product, service, word car, whatever it is. And then that increases your awareness of that thing, whatever that thing is. And then you tend to perceive it more often. But the reality is that it was there just as often before, you were aware of it before your first awareness point. And as it was after, but your mind processes that differently. So another good example is like a word that you've never heard of before I was reminisce when I was like in, like 12, something like that, and the word juxtaposition. I had never even come across the word juxtaposition before. And it's not a word that is easily used in a sentence. It's not like a common word that you would throw out. It's not an adjective, for example, that like, you know, fast or hot that you would hear constantly. But then the moment that I heard the word juxtaposition, I remember vividly hearing it three, four or five times and over the next week, mostly on the news, or on TV programs. And I found that a lot when I was learning Arabic. So when I moved to Sudan, I was learning Arabic, there were words that I'd never come across like mo Hebrew, which means that talent. So I've never come across the word Mohamed before. And then I started hearing it all the time, even the moment I learned the word I heard about, and then we had someone called miroir him. And so it just kept recurring. And this phenomenon is common to everybody. I know you've all experienced this before. So it's called the frequency illusion, or the Baader Meinhof phenomenon. An example of when you have probably come across this and, and not realize that is, a lot of times people talk about how do the algorithms listen to us? Does Facebook listen to us? Does Instagram listen to us? Does Google listen to us to tick tock? Listen to us? Well, yes. So I'm sure. My personal and professional experience tells me that there is definitely some form of microphone based listening happening on all platforms. And in fact, if you dig deep into some of the platforms, terms and conditions, you can see how they are legitimately able to do this. But that doesn't. Mostly when people think that well, they what they're thinking is they have a conversation with someone about a topic. Let's say that that topic is spring water versus purified water, right. So you got like things like Aquafina. So they're like purified filtered water. So it's tap water that's basically filtered through the spring water, like everyone which comes from a place in the world. And so a lot of people don't know about the difference between the two. And so imagine you had a conversation about that. And then later on that day, you go to YouTube shorts or you go to Tik Tok or you flicking through Instagram reels and you see a video on that topic. And the mind goes up. That listening to me, because that's the most obvious explanation. More often than not, that is the frequency illusion at play. You have become aware of something if it's the As time you become aware of it, so you're having this conversation someone tells you about this phenomenon, you've become aware of something. And now your mind is almost looking for those things, it's looking for something to validate that new awareness that you've got. So that happens a lot. And a lot of people think, Oh, it's just the algorithms are constantly listening to us. I'm sure there's some listening happening. And I'm certain that there is some listening happening. But not to the extent that like, every conversation, and every nuance of every conversation is being heard, and every sort of conversation with someone else, that the algorithm is able to somehow pause between one person and another person, or people in a group, it's just not, I just don't see that being a reality. But nonetheless, there is definitely some listening happening. More often than not, though, what you're experiencing is the frequency illusion, you become aware of something for the first time, then your awareness of that thing begins to increase. And then you spot that thing, again, on social media algorithm on a reel or whatever. And you may think it's like highly improbable, but then think about it, like, how many videos do you flick through? I mean, just really, how many do you flick through, it can be into the 1000s, a day that you're just flicking through these videos. So it is very likely that you're going to come across some of these topics. And then the other side of the argument is, how many things do you discuss during the day that don't come up on the algorithm? Because that's equally important, right? You've got stuff that you talk about, and then occasionally pops up in the algorithm that you know, like everything else that you never talk about. So that you always talk about, but doesn't pop up, pop up on the algorithm. So there is definitely like a large element of that phenomenon. It's just the frequency illusion at play, and I think it's important that people are aware of that. There's definitely some listening happening with the algorithms. And that's a different topic, probably a different podcast. Part of the psychological phenomenon at play here is selective attention. All right. So right now, let's say, imagine that you are watching this on YouTube. Let's say that you're watching this podcast on YouTube, you're not listening on on Apple podcasts or anything else. Okay. So you're watching the video, but how much are you actually aware of how much have you actually noticed, if this is the first time that you've watched this podcast, then you'll be aware of the surroundings, you'll be aware of the fact that always wear a hoodie, and things like that. But how many of you noticed, for example, the Rode mic that's here, and the green lights? Yeah, most people don't consciously notice it. Because it's become so common, it's so common. So you don't, your attention doesn't fixate on the thing that's common. This is kind of a defense mechanism for the brain. You are bombarded with 1000s and 1000s of pieces of information every single day. It's your brain that decides what to focus on, and what not to focus on. More importantly, what not to focus on. If you focused on everything, I mean, it would just become overwhelming. And like you just have so much over activity in your mind that you'd never rest. I think about it, like even just sitting here, there was so much I could focus on, you can see me on the screen, but I can see all past the screen, I can see past the camera, I can see to my office door, I can see my desk, I can hear the guys outside, I can hear the guys in the street over there. And then if I really focus, I can hear my breathing. And if I really, really focus, I can hear my heartbeat. And if I really focus that I can feel like the blood rushing through different parts of my body, I can feel the clothes on my body and I can feel my feet on the floor and I can feel my feet in the shoes and my feet and the socks and the amount of sensory perception that is available to me is overwhelming. So if I didn't, if as a human being we focus on all of those things, we probably go mental, we probably go insane, right? So your mind decides your mind decides what to look at. And it's called a selective attention mechanism. And it decides what to give attention to and what to ignore as part of like the day to day operation. And then the second element that's a place is called cognitive filtering. So cognitive filtering is
is similar in that like, given the so much stimuli available to us in a day, it will pick out things your brain will pick out things to give its attention to. And that is to an extent that is how the algorithms work. So the frequency effect is really valuable because as a marketer, what you're really trying to do is you're trying to Make sure that people engage with your concept your brand your business as often as possible. Because the more they engage, the more likely they are to engage because of the frequency effect. That's why doing one podcast and thinking, oh, that didn't work is usually we've spoken about this in the past, right, we've spoken about how Tiktok, our process for getting viral videos is we do a minimum of 10 of every single concept that we play with. Because to do one is pointless, like, there is there's no value in just doing one unless it's like exceptional. The reality is that it won't go viral. But if you hit that concept 10 times, and then it doesn't go viral, then there's something wrong with the concept. But unless you hit it 10 times, there's no way that you're going to know for sure whether that has viral potential or not. And that's just us as marketers playing with the frequency effect. saying we're doing a podcast, you decide as a business, you want to do a podcast, you do the first episode, and you get five listeners and you're like, Ah, it's not worth, it's not worth an hour of my time to do a podcast because I only got five listeners, well, you're not gonna get more than, like 5000 listeners in the first podcast in the first 100 podcasts, you're going to get that. Look at the world's most famous podcaster Joe Rogan, if anyone who listen to the Joe Rogan experience, there's 3000, Episode 3000, I guess or something like that, but go back and find episodes one to 300. Before the before he got his producer, and the festival, it was hardly any listeners. And secondly, it was just awful. Like it was just like badly produced. And again, you just got to keep pushing through, keep going, keep going keep going that frequency creates, creates basically the cognitive filter for people to focus on whatever it is whatever message you're trying to get across to them. The other psychological element at play within the frequency illusion is relevance to personal experience. So how relevant is this thing to me? So let's go back to the car example. In the car example, you just spent a large chunk of money on a new car. And then you see that car everywhere. That's really, really relevant to you. Now the amount of cars like yours. Were the same before and after you bought the car, it was exactly the same. Okay? But because this is now super relevant to you, you are you're noticing that car more often on the road. And it kind of depends on how you bought the car and why you bought the car as to how you perceive it. Okay, so if it's a normal family saloon, often, the cognitive dissonance that happens in the mind through the filtration is I'm not alone. That's good. That's good. I'm not alone, I made a good decision. And all of these people made the decision. So then we've got like, social norms and social influence. And we're going to come on to that in another podcast for that psychological effects. But that gives you a sense of comfort, I made the right decision in this car. If however you bought, you know, a Lamborghini specific year Lamborghini, and you start seeing that on the road, you have a totally different experience in your mind, which is like, oh my god, I thought it was being exclusive. Turns out everyone in their dad has this car. I mean, you have to be a certain possible in Dubai, that will happen, I suspect. So, the relevance of that thing to your experience to your life experience also dictates how strong and how effective the frequency illusion or the by the the Baader Meinhof phenomenon will be experienced by your by yourself and by your own mind. So how do we use this in marketing? There's lots of ways first thing is awareness. driving awareness, right? We will often have clients and we'll run ad campaigns, let's say we're just running a just a basic Facebook sales ad campaign to drive leads, okay. And then the frequency of the ad being delivered, will be let's say hits three. All right, that means that people have seen the advert on average three times. And the concept then is that, oh, we should change the creative. We should change the ad we should pause the campaign because people keep keep seeing you. But if you just be patient, if you just be patient with that. Let it go. When you get into like 567 frequency, that's when you're going to start to see a shift in your numbers because that frequent See, again, it evokes this sense of familiarity with yourself and those people who who would consider your product your brand, who just need to see it often enough. So that's why retargeting ads are so effective. There's a great study out. Wasn't recently it was, it was quite a while ago. But essentially it showed that retargeting ads had a 50% higher conversion on site than direct ads. Retargeting for those who don't know, it's like, you go to a website, I'll drop a cookie, on your browser, wherever you are. And then you'll go to other websites, and you'll keep seeing ads for that website. And, and sometimes you'll add something into your cart. And then you'll see, you know, your cart in other areas on other websites. And that's just retargeting basically. And that is super, super effective. And the reason it's effective is because of the frequency illusion. It's a really big element of it. Is that, yeah, God, yeah, I must remember to do that. There it is, again, you got to do that. And the frequency illusion just works. Yeah, when it comes to remarketing. Another example like is Coca Cola. Remember, a few years ago, Coca Cola started putting names, they would replace the coke logo with like names. So you'd have David or Akhmad or Muhammad or Carl or whatever it was, or Susan was that? Now people think if you're just looking at my campaign, people would think, Oh, I saw my name. And I bought it. No more. Mostly what happened is people would see the name of someone they knew and bought their Coke, they actually increased sales. They were having stagnant sales for a long time in the US alone increased sales 2%. Through that campaign, and I did it I remember personally do I have a friend called Joe, I saw a joke. I picked it up. When I went back to the office, I gave him his coke. I mean, it's so weird, but it's just, again, it's frequency. It's like reminding you of the person if you like and then just doing that small thing for them. And it's so meaningless, but it kind of has some meaning in our weird human brains.
One of the other studies that I saw not too long ago. Yeah, going back to the Facebook ad frequency thing is that you'll see an 80% uplift in I think it was Korea who did this study. Yeah, and 80% uplift in conversion. Of that they do they the people who saw an ad once versus saw an ad between seven and nine times, seven, eight or nine times. And those who've seen the ad seven, eight or nine times had a 80% higher conversion rate than those who had seen it once. And again, there's definitely the frequency illusion at play here. Frequency, create light creates familiarity, as well. So if even if it's just brand awareness, constantly pushing that brand creates familiarity, it's my reaches so important in organic myself how to achieve as well. Like, clients often think, you know, if we get like a viral video, I will get loads of sales doesn't really work like that. It's not really the point of getting a viral video or ever getting any viral content on LinkedIn or any other time. The point is to build trust and awareness, right. So the more you build familiarity with a brand, the easier it is when the time comes for a prospective customer to become a customer, because they already have a sense of familiarity with you. And so frequency is super important, particularly in organic, that's why organic is not dead, and never will be it's so important that brands constantly push content out. And in doing that, what they'll do is they'll create familiarity with that brand. They'll create that sense of trust. And that will ultimately help them in their conversion rates. And there's another expert it's quite an old one now from Nielsen that you know, TVs in the US and how they see and all that Nielsen it showed that brand recognition went from 50% to 80% When people saw an advert more than twice so people saw an advert once had a 50% brand recognition if they saw it more than twice, they had an 80% brand recognition and so, you know that familiarity is is super valuable. So, there are some ethical implications of course With with the frequency effect, particularly with retargeting, right? And we're starting to have more of these discussions on a, on a sort of a macro scale now, because at what point is it intrusive? Right? So you want to tie it people you want them to engage with your brand. But what point does that become an intrusive experience? And I think that I think that as long as there's openness and clarity, and it's opt in this choice, then I think that we're on the right side of the ethical line. I think when we start to get into surreptitiously recording data on people, then we start to edge into the wrong side of the ethical line. So I think that's probably where the line is. But nonetheless, I guess my key takeaways for you guys in this podcast is that the Baader Meinhof phenomenon is real, the frequency illusion is real. You've experienced it in your daily lives over and over again. It is really valuable in marketing. And that's why remote retargeting is really valuable. It's why organic is really valuable. It's while building a sense of trust comes through organic and getting content that has a high reach. And that used ethically, it can nudge people toward a decision that ultimately you hoped they would have already made anyway, but it uses nudging them toward that. So it's a real phenomenon to use to look out for in your marketing playbook. And of course for you as consumers to be aware of. Now, you know, next time you see that video, and you think, Oh, they're listening to me, actually, probably not. What was probably happening was the frequency illusion at play. All right. Talk to you in the next one.
