MB NEUROMARKETING - Marco Baldocchi, Founder & CEO. Unveiling the brain's role in brand loyalty; the emotional journey towards purchase; why FOMO works; the power of subconscious priming in consumer behavior.

Unlock the secrets of neuromarketing with Marco Baldocchi, a trailblazer in the field of neuroscience and marketing. Ever wondered how the brain determines which brands we remember and which we forget? This episode promises to reveal how engaging key components of the brain such as the hippocampus and limbic system can transform fleeting impressions into lasting brand loyalty. 

Marco walks us through:

•  Cutting-edge techniques for measuring brain activity, such as gaze tracking and galvanic skin response
• The nuances of capturing genuine emotional responses.
• The critical role of emotions like fear of missing out and anticipation in shaping consumer behavior.
• Functions of key brain regions like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.
• Subconscious priming and how subtle stimuli like sounds and smells can influence consumer behavior without their conscious awareness. 

The episode wraps up with a discussion on the importance of deep work for productivity and what makes an ideal client. Don't miss this chance to elevate your marketing strategies with insights directly from the intersection of neuroscience and consumer behavior.

All episodes available at https://www.insightplatforms.com/podcasts/

Suggestions, thoughts etc to futureviewpod@gmail.com

Chapters

• 0:44 Guest intro
• 3:08 How a Jeep Cherokee got Marco interested in neuromarketing
• 6:35 How neuromarketing helps companies
• 10:48 The dangers of too much information
• 18:47 How the different parts of the brain work
• 27:12 Is neuromarketing expensive?
• 31:10 How subconscious priming works

Transcript

Henry Piney: 0:08

I can see if you're measuring that, you could probably start to see the activity in the brain and go ah, actually this is a piece of advertising or an experience which is starting to convert a short-term memory into a long-term memory. But how is it important in your experience?

Marco Baldocchi: 0:24

into a long-term memory. But yeah, how's it important in your experience? Very important, this part of our brain, because it plays a key role in how consumers remember and connect with brand experience. By understanding how the hippocampus works, marketers can create strategy that makes their message more memorable and impactful, leading to a stronger brand loyalty and consumer engagement. So the very important thing of this part to engage this part is that it's connected with the limbic system.

Henry Piney: 0:51

Welcome to FutureView. This episode is sponsored by MX8 Labs at mx8labscom. Now you just heard an extract of me trying to understand a little bit of neuroscience from the charming and very knowledgeable Marco Baldocchi, ceo of the company of the same name. Marco is a leading expert in neuroscience, working with some great brands to really understand what's going on inside their customers' heads. Now, that's not necessarily in terms of what they're thinking, but what parts of their brain are activated by experiences, for instance, in a car or a shop, or maybe how they react to marketing messages. I'm sure you've heard of system one thinking, representing your emotional or more intuitive processes, as opposed to system two, your more rational or considerate responses. Well, in this interview, marco explains the key parts of the brain that are activated as you experience the world, the methodologies that are used to understand those different processes and probably most importantly for listeners here, the types of actions and decisions this type of analysis can inform. Now just a touch more detail on MXA Labs. I'd definitely check out this platform if you want to supercharge the back office research functions that can often be so frustrating. Mxa's platform is built for AI from the ground up so that researchers at agencies and in-house departments can use tech to take care of all the time-consuming tasks like programming, link checking, running data, additional data queries you know the type of thing and they can apply their brains to what really matters. If you want to turn tasks that used to take days into minutes, then check out mx8labscom.

Henry Piney: 2:22

Now on to the interview. Mx8labscom. Now on to the interview. So, marco, firstly, thanks for joining today in the morning in Miami. I think that's where you are at the moment. Is that right? Yes, right.

Marco Baldocchi: 2:34

Thank you for the invitation. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Henry Piney: 2:38

So I wanted to get going and try and find a little bit more about you, so something that people might find surprising or that they wouldn't be able to find out just by looking on your LinkedIn profile or somewhere else on the internet.

Marco Baldocchi: 2:54

I mean, probably the most surprising thing that I can share about my professional and personal life is the reason why I started working in this field In 2012,. I was a digital marketing strategist and I decided to. I was very passionate for the snow and I decided to buy a car and that car was a jeep grand charity. But in that moment, I lived in lucca look at the very small town in it, with narrow streets, narrow parking lots. And I bought because I saw a lot of videos about this car and the things that you can do with that car on the snow. So I had a great expectation.

Marco Baldocchi: 3:35

So I ordered that car, I paid a lot of money and I waited a long time to have it and then, finally, when I had it, I figured out that it was a totally useless car for 325 days per year, and the rest of the year was the time that I spent on the snow. And it's true, the expectation was true. The car was amazing on the snow, but I lived in a small town and I had some streets I can't go through because they are too narrow for that car, and it was totally insane. So from that moment, I tried to figure out why. What was the trigger that pushed me to buy that car, and it was absolutely not a rational behavior. So I started having information about emotional marketing. At that moment, we talked about emotional marketing, but emotional marketing was the father of the neuroscience applied to consumer behavioural marketing. It was a commercial way to say the same things. From that moment, I started studying neuroscience and I decided to understand exactly what is behind the behavioural that we have.

Henry Piney: 4:50

Yeah, that is really interesting and so, okay, I told you we might not stick to the schedule. So here I am, I'm throwing the questions, the planned questions, out of the window. So, when you analysed yourself and the fact that you'd brought the Grand Cherokee or whatever it was, what was the trigger? Was it the fact that, I don't know, for 25 days a year you really struggle to drive in the snow and that was really frustrating, and therefore it was a decision that was born of frustration at some point, or was it something? The first, probably, was the expectation.

Marco Baldocchi: 5:27

I saw a lot of videos with all the things, the amazing things that you can do with that car on the snow. And the second one was the safety concept. At that moment I really loved to drive on the snow with a good perception, a good feeling, feeling myself and my family safe, and so this is the trigger that pushed me there and so I thought, oh, when I don't know when in my city will rain, I have a car that is absolutely safe for it. And when we have taken decision, we are more emotional animal that rationalize our process. And that's the big issue that all the companies do, considering people like rational and not like emotional that rationalize. And I was the same yeah, I see it.

Henry Piney: 6:17

And so it's a well-founded emotional feeling about wanting safety and security, but that almost overwhelms your ability or your process to evaluate everything as a whole. And so, mokka, what do you do now? Just briefly, what does your company do now, and how do you help companies understand this balance between rational and emotional?

Marco Baldocchi: 6:41

Yeah, my company is specialized in applying neuroscience to consumer behavior and marketing. We use advanced neuromarketing techniques to gain deep insight into how consumers think, feel and make decisions. Consider that we use biomedical tools to understand exactly what happens in the human mind during an experience and for the most, we go deep in the unconscious part of their brain. They don't want to tell you, because there is a huge difference between the things that people see and the things that people share with others sometimes also with ourselves, because we are not totally rational of all the emotion. So, based on that, we use these techniques to help brands to create more effective marketing strategy, design products that truly resonate with their target audience and optimize communication to drive engagement and sales. So, basically, we help companies in doing marketing based on science.

Henry Piney: 7:46

I've got it. So if we break that down into a couple of areas, what are the types of techniques that you use? And I know it may vary for different use cases and different problems that you're faced with but if we could just talk about some of the techniques to begin with and then maybe we'll get on to some practical examples.

Marco Baldocchi: 8:03

Yeah, sure. For example, we use IIG electroencephalography to figure out exactly what is the brain activation during an experience. Thanks to the IIG, we are able to figure out what happens and which emotion, the intensity of the emotion that people feel during an experience in real time that people feel during an experience in real time. So imagine that you have a new marketing campaign and you want to know exactly what is the emotion that this campaign is able to create in the potential customer. Our research are qualitative and not quantitative, so we need a group of people starting from 20, 30 people to each align to the public of our customers to do our research.

Marco Baldocchi: 8:46

And then we use another tool, a very interesting tool. It's the eye tracker. The eye tracker is like glasses that help us to analyze the visual attention of the people and a lot of different reactions, like the pupil dilatation. That means a different level of attention. Our brain is able to memorize only the 5% of the environment around me, so when they grab your product in their hand, it's very important that that 5% they find the right information to choose your product and not an useless information. We use other tools, like the implicit association time test. It's a test that we use to figure out if there is an implicit, unconscious association between a brand and a value. For example, If I show you the Volvo Cars logo and you have two different buttons one is safety, one is sportivity you click on safety in less than 300 milliseconds. Why it happens? Because Volvo concentrates all their marketing communication to the value of safety.

Henry Piney: 9:57

So, if I well actually I guess I've got so many questions on this, but maybe let's go back to the first methodology you described Is that the one where you're basically plugging things onto people's heads and trying to work out what's going on, the movements in their brain?

Marco Baldocchi: 10:12

Correct. In this case we put that on. The people had an IG and headset and they can have an experience. We have different types of headsets. We have headsets that allow people to move or others that are more delicate. Our customers come to us with a problem and we decide which tool and which research protocol create for them, dedicated to solve their issue.

Henry Piney: 10:35

I guess just pulling on the thread of this methodology in itself. So what type of outputs would you get?

Marco Baldocchi: 10:42

from that. So we have some KPI like attention, cognitive overload, positive or negative emotion, stress and all these type of. We have a lot of different KPIs. It depends on the research we are doing. Thanks to that, I can tell you, okay, your product is very engaging with people, or your video can be very engaging with people, but probably you put into too much information and the cognitive stress level is too high. So people probably are disengaged to buy your product or to, I don't know, continue viewing your video because you send them too much information.

Marco Baldocchi: 11:21

Or, basically, one error that I often see is that people try to send too much rational information. Because when we talk about persuasion, the persuasion is a path made by three steps and the very important thing is the order of the three steps. The first step is to get the attention of your potential customer. The second one is to create an emotion in them and the third one is to engage the rational process of our brain. But there is an order that is physical order and if you are able to engage in this order, you are able to create a really engaging process and that's your message to really resonate inside the right part of their brain so they are able to memorize that it's the Eldorado for all the brands.

Henry Piney: 12:08

And is that kind of? I mean, it sounds like similar in some ways to the system one system, two type of analysis, and it sounds like what you're saying is that it's not necessarily one or the other. It's actually the way in which they interact with each other. So the emotional and the rational it's actually the way in which they interact with each other. So you know the emotional and the rational.

Marco Baldocchi: 12:28

Is that fair Totally? It's absolutely correct. We are talking about system one and system two, the economic theory, and it's an amazing dance of the rational and unrational part. Sometimes I read create an emotion that you engage your customers. It's not totally correct. It's not only an emotion. We are not 100% emotional. We have an important rational part in our brain, but it depends on a lot of different parameters and so Mokka.

Henry Piney: 13:00

What benefit do questions have? Do you still believe in having questions as part of the process? Because obviously that's what a lot of the consumer insight industry has been based on historically, whether survey questions or focus groups and I know there are other methodologies as well but are questions still important?

Marco Baldocchi: 13:20

The question is absolutely important and the very important thing is to figure out what's happened behind the rational barrier we have when you have a focus group.

Marco Baldocchi: 13:30

Basically you are asking to someone what do you think about my product? All the traditional way to do this type of research is based, for the 95% 99% on the rational answer that we can find If you are able to have a measurement of the irrational reaction, all the things that is behind the opportunity to share. And sometimes the very interesting thing is that people are not conscious of their emotions, they are not conscious about their needs, and it happens often, but not because they don't want to share with you their answer, because they don't know. And the success of the brands often is connected with a small detail. Our brain receives tons of stimuli nowadays and we are not able to memorize all these stimuli because our brain has not changed so much since we lived in caves. So sometimes there are small details that make all the difference in this world, because it is the details that is able to catch your attention and start the processing that brings you to the persuasion, to be persuasive.

Henry Piney: 14:41

Yep, I see, yep, I see. And so, going back to the types of techniques that you use whereby you know it's your monitoring gaze or your measuring activity inside people's brains, and I'm sure lots of other techniques as well galvanic skill and response like in that type of thing, do you believe that just asking people how they feel and what their emotional response is is effective?

Marco Baldocchi: 15:08

people don't like to share their emotion. There is a huge barrier about sharing their emotion and because, uh, there is some biases, like the social acceptance and other issue, that block them to share their emotion. And so we are very jealous about our emotion. And another interesting thing is that we leave tons of emotion every second and we are not able to fix in our memory all the emotions we leave, because sometimes emotions are so fast that the rational part of our brain is unable to say and to memorize. So if I ask you which emotion did you feel in the last 30 minutes, we are able to tell me two, probably three different emotions, but probably your mind finds I don't know 50, 60 different emotions, but very fast.

Henry Piney: 16:02

So, under your methodologies, how would you work out then, which are the most important emotions that in this case, me as a respondent has been experiencing over that period of time?

Marco Baldocchi: 16:14

the most important emotion depends on the case, but the most important important is the fear, especially the fear of missing out. When you have a fear of missing out something, you are nudged to do something and that's incredible because people prefer don't lose something to gain something. If I propose use and often it's used those in marketing strategies, ebay, when eBay started, you have X time to do something, to do an action. Or when you watch the booking portal, there is just one room and something similar. They nudge you. I don't like to say push, but they nudge you to do the action now because there is just one room in the hotel you are watching for and just one, and you have to be fast.

Marco Baldocchi: 17:07

And for our brain, the emotion to lose an opportunity. It's an incredible trigger. We have two incredible triggers in our brain. One is the expectation. If you're able to create the right expectation of your product or your services to let people imagine great things they can do living the experience with your product or your services, to let people imagine great things they can do living the experience with your product or your services, you win absolutely. And happily screaming that when you see the advertising, you can see guys on the beach with the around the fireplace play and doing amazing video and blah blah. So you buy that iPhone thinking you'll do the same and after one month probably, you take this. You took the same picture to your cat from the couch that you can do with the old iphone, but your expectation was great that's so fascinating, isn't it?

Henry Piney: 18:00

this balance between, I guess, loss aversion theory, which we could talk about for ages, which I agree is a huge, huge factor in all sorts of things, yes, an expectation and aspiration as two of the two interrelated sentiments. I probably should ask some of the other questions I was planning to do as well. I wanted to just pick up on some of the things I'd seen in your newsletter which, by the way, I should call out, I should say to everyone, is really really good on linkedin, follow marco's newsletter. It's a really concise, very easily readable explanation of some of these kind of theories. So I was reading um in terms of the different parts of the brain and the different types of things that they do, so things like, you know, the hippocampus, what it does, why it's important, yep.

Marco Baldocchi: 18:49

The temporal lobe, yeah, all those types, those key areas, starting from the hippocampus. Hippocampus is a vital part of the brain involved in the memory formation and special navigation. It helps convert short-term memories into long-term ones and create content maps of our surroundings. You can imagine that this process to convert from short-term memories into long-term ones is the elder of all the brands. All the brands would like to be memorized by their customers.

Henry Piney: 19:24

Sorry, I was going to ask in marketing and in terms of how that works. So I'm beginning to piece it together because I can see. If you're measuring that, you could probably start to see the activity in the brain and go ah, actually this is a piece of advertising or an experience which is starting to convert a short-term memory into a long-term memory. But yeah, how is it important in your experience?

Marco Baldocchi: 19:46

Considering that in marketing is very important this part of our brain, because it plays a key role in how consumers remember and connect with brand experience. By understanding how the hippocampus works, marketers can create strategy that makes their message more memorable and impactful, leading to a stronger brand loyalty and consumer engagement. So, the very important thing of this part to engage this part that's connected with the limbic system. This part is also engaging this part of our brain because it's the starting process to create a memory, a long-term memory. Another very interesting part is the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. It's located at the front of the brain and it's essential for the decision-making process, the self-control and planning. In this case, it's the third part of our step. It plays a key role in managing emotions, in focusing attention and in critical thinking. Managing emotions, in focusing attention and critical thinking. When I told you before, the last step is to engage the rational part of our brain. This is the moment. This is the part that we have to work with. The PFC is crucial because it influences how consumers evaluate options and make decisions and regulate their response to different stimuli. It's very important to not overstimulate this part. We don't like to have too much cognitive stress.

Marco Baldocchi: 21:13

The occipital lobe is located at the back of our brain. It's primarily responsible for the visual processing. It examples information from our eyes, allowing us to understand and interact with the visual world around us. Before I told you that we are able to memorize and to send to our brain only the 5% more or less of the information we have in front of us, so you can imagine how many details we lose every single moment. It processes visual stimuli such as images, colors, videos, and here it's very important to be easy to simplify the visual message, because people and our brain is able to work better with easy design techniques.

Marco Baldocchi: 22:09

Another amazing part is the amygdala and probably was the most famous because a lot of people talk about the amygdala. The amygdala is a hormone-shaped structure located deep within the brain and it plays a key role in processing emotions. Particularly, this is related to fear, pleasure and reward, and you can just imagine with these three words how we can be helpful in marketing. And it's essential in how we perceive and react to emotional stimuli, helping to trigger quick responses, treats or rewarding experience, and in marketing, the rewarding experience is absolutely great. Also, the amygdala is contributing to the formation and storage of emotional memories, making certain experiences more memorable due to the strong emotion associated with them.

Marco Baldocchi: 23:03

In the context of marketing, the amygdala is crucial because we are really triggered by emotion. Ads, for example, or brand messages that successfully tap into strong emotion, whether joy, excitement, nostalgia, nostalgia is another great emotion that works very well with that or even fear, are more likely to be remembered and actioned upon. And the last one is the temporal lobe is located on the side of the brain, near the temples, and is primarily involved in processing auditory information, language and memory, and it plays a crucial role in how we perceive and understand the sounds, including speech, and it's also important for recognizing faces and objects. Marketing the temporal lobe is significant because it influences how consumers process and respond to auditory stimuli, and I can do a simple example. If someone starts Netflix in another room, you are immediately able to figure out that Netflix is on, just thanks to the sound logo.

Henry Piney: 24:15

Got it Okay and I have to confess I'm going to try to do a summary, but I have to confess I've cheated slightly because I was taking notes going along. But thank you, it's really helpful and I can start to see how you would use this in whether it's marketing or product design, like a range of different ways. And I've slightly butchered this, probably, but from my notes, okay. So hippocampus is basically about short-term to long-term memories. So if you had an experience that's activating that component of your brain, you're doing a good job on that front. You've got the prefrontal cortex, which is a bit more about logical, rational type of things. So, again, product or experience. If you're seeing activity there, which is a bit more about logical, rational type of things, so again, product or experience. If you're seeing activity there, you're doing a good job activating that. Then you've got the occipital that's how you say it, the occipital kind of lobe, which is really more about communications. Is that right?

Marco Baldocchi: 25:13

It's more about the visual processing.

Henry Piney: 25:16

All the information from the eyes to the brain From the eyes, okay. So if your experience is activating that, you're doing a good job on that, you're getting a lot of activity there, okay. Then you're getting them glidia Is that the right way to say it? Amygdala, amygdala, sorry, amy. Them glidia is that the right way to say? Amygdala, amygdala, sorry, amygdala, okay, but that's your deep, that's your deeper motions. So, again, like the experience you're exposed to will be activating, that all right. And then you've got the temporal lobe, which I can say and that's really around speech, auditory recognition and that type of thing correct, correct, and so I could see potentially, let's say it could be a product, a piece of marketing, a shop experience, whatever. It might be that, if you're able to measure people's reaction and the different parts of the brain that are being activated, you're able to see the relative strengths and weaknesses of your experience. Yeah, absolutely.

Marco Baldocchi: 26:11

But I just add some example to have an idea of your experience. Yeah, absolutely, but I just add some example to have an idea of practical application. Imagine that you are developing a new car and you want to figure out what's happening in the first seven seconds when a driver comes inside the car and you have to design a new cockpit. Okay, the sound of the door. When you close the door, engage the temporal lobe, for example. The new luxury cars have a special sound. The smell that you perceive inside the car is a part that is connected with other parts of our brain. The frontal cortex is able to analyze the functionality of the dashboard, for example, so measuring different reactions in the human brain. We are able to analyze different variables and have different KPI to give them an insight.

Henry Piney: 27:10

I also just want to go back to the methodology piece, because this all sounds amazing and I can imagine lots of also just want to go back to the methodology piece because this all sounds like amazing and I can imagine lots of people would want to use it. But in order to get a read on all those types of things that we're talking about, I mean that sounds like you've probably got to be going back to the methodology, where you've got things stuck all over people. Is that really the only way of doing it? I mean, in people, um, is that really the only way of doing it? I mean in terms of things like, um, you know, gaze tracking or eye tracking or facial coding or some of the other techniques we've talked about implicit response time, those types of things that they won't give you as much depth uh, we have different way and depends on the research you want to do.

Marco Baldocchi: 27:51

For example, if you want to analyze the emotional reaction to a video, we can use the facial coding uh, a facial coding software. The fashion coding software is a software that is able to recognize the micro expression that are connected to the emotions, thanks to the paul f1 theory that in 1960 you grow up, the people from different areas of the world have the same expression connected with the same emotion. So this software is able to give us this information. It's probably a little bit less accurate than the AIG, but it's easier to use.

Marco Baldocchi: 28:28

The Galvaninsky response that you talk about is a measurement of microsweeting or the count to tons, and it's connected with the intensity of the emotion we are feeling. So you can imagine having an IG or a facial coding that gives you an information that people are feeling here and the Galvaninsky response tells us how much fear they are feeling. Galvanic skin response tells us how much fear they are feeling Because we measure a line base and we say, okay, this is the normal level that you have of fear and when you have something different, I can see the difference in the level. And the galvanic skin response can be also used when we analyze the cognitive stress If you are in front of a very complicated message. It sometimes happens with the videos or the content on the website or something similar. We have a high intensity of galvanic skin and so we are able to measure it and say, okay, this is too much for people for experience.

Henry Piney: 29:32

Isn't the challenge, though, though people would say I've been having work with lots of companies over the years that when you start to do those types of methodology, the in-person methodologies yes, there's lots of detail and it's really fascinating, but it's also really expensive and you can only use a few people, as you say, as a result, because it's really expensive or has that all changed now? And it's much?

Marco Baldocchi: 29:54

no, it's, it's a little. Yeah, it's a little bit change. Uh, it's more affordable and depends from the tools we want to use, for example, uh, often we have the same prices of a focus group and but we we go deeper than a focus group and basically, basically it depends on the tool we want to use, because if we use a Galbanski response or high tracking or facial coding, it's not so expensive. But if we use the IG on and it depends on how many people you want to analyze, because starting from 20, 30 people, we can have scientific proof. So my data is correct. The very important thing is the people we analyze are aligned to the customers, but it depends really how many people we have to analyze. Obviously, if I analyze 500 people, I will have more accurate results. If you are a small or medium company, you can analyze 20, 30 people and you have a good result, better than the normal market.

Henry Piney: 30:57

Now, Marco, there's so many things I want to ask you. I'm consciously getting towards the end of the time. Could we just spend just a moment on a couple of things I'd read in your newsletter that I thought were really interesting? This whole subject of priming, which I know something about. I've read around it, but in particular of priming, which I know something about, I've read around it, but in particular, subconscious priming. So what is that and how does that work?

Marco Baldocchi: 31:19

This effect can be either conscious or subconscious, and the subconscious priming refers specifically to a process where stimuli, often sub-alternatives, trigger central responses or behavioural without the individual realising it. And I can tell you there is a lot in our daily life really with a lot of subconscious priming stimuli.

Henry Piney: 31:46

Okay, could you give some examples?

Marco Baldocchi: 31:50

Yeah, I told you before. For example, when you start Netflix, the sound logo of Netflix is a subconscious priming. For example, we create one of that with my lab. I had a Chino bar in Italy and they didn't cook like pastries or something similar, they just have preheat, pre-cooked and they just eat this pastry. We put a central stimuli the smell of pastry. It was absolutely a priming, because it's a priming and the smell, it's the only senses not processed by the rational part of our brain. It's totally unconscious. It goes directly to the limbic system system, skipping the prefrontal cortex. So it was an incredible trigger and that priming pushed people to go and buy more pastoring than the usual, just because they perceive the smell yeah, and now I think about it.

Henry Piney: 32:48

I mean there's so much subconscious priming in, as you say, in retail restaurants, all these types of things, Because rationally it actually probably doesn't make a great deal of sense in terms of you're going to a certain restaurant that's four times as expensive, but it's still food and it's probably hard to argue that the food is four times better. It's perfectly hard to argue that the food is four times better.

Marco Baldocchi: 33:23

There's a whole load of priming and different experiences and social presentation and so many factors going to these choices images associated with wealth, exclusivity to, for example, in advertising, to subconscious prime consumers to perceive their products like high-end and desirable. And because often so. For example, a store makes a lot of calming music to prime customers to spend more time inside the store browsing, which can increase the likelihood of making a purchase. There are a lot of different stimuli that we can create, dedicated to different experience or to different application.

Henry Piney: 34:04

Now I have kind of run out of time, so I was just going to jump onto a quick fire round, if that's all right, and just I'd ask you some questions which maybe you could just give an answer in 30 seconds or so or less, if that's okay with you. Yeah, absolutely, it's a pleasure. So if you could be the CEO of any company outside your own company, which you're currently the CEO of, which one would it be and why?

Marco Baldocchi: 34:28

It's an amazing question. I think that one of them would be probably Tesla, because it's totally innovative. They went to the blue ocean, they created a market that didn't exist, and I really love when people use technology and use innovation to create something that doesn't exist. Innovation to create something that doesn't exist. In that case, they intercept and they still intercept in the needs and conscious needs of the customers and the people to create a business area.

Henry Piney: 34:59

What have you changed your mind about recently? So is there something that you once believed to be true, but you now no longer think is true?

Marco Baldocchi: 35:08

Yes, recently I changed my mind about the importance of multitasking. I used to believe that being able to juggle multiple tasks once was a key for success productivity, the attention is a very complicated topic and sometimes doing too much things together can create a big hole in your level. So now I prioritize deep work. Otherwise my result was lower. And it's still connected with how our brain works.

Henry Piney: 35:49

Interesting. So I usually ask brands what makes a good agency, but I'm going to ask this one the other way around. So, in your view, what makes a really great client?

Marco Baldocchi: 35:59

For me and for my company. My best client is a visionary, someone that is really interesting, go deep in and try to search different answers from the marketing. Often customers are convinced that their product is the best one, and if something goes wrong it's connected with the reaction of the customer. So the customers are not able to understand the quality of their products. That's not my customer. My customer is someone that has doubts. I want to figure out how I can improve my product, because probably I can try to communicate better and I can try to figure out which is the best experience for my customers with my products.

Henry Piney: 36:41

Yeah, I guess it goes to that old thing, doesn't it? I mean, if you think your customers are idiots, then you're probably being the idiot. So final question what's your favorite book or recent book? It doesn't have to be a book, it could just be a piece of media, so you know, movie, podcast, whatever. It doesn't matter.

Marco Baldocchi: 37:01

The book is easy. The book is easy. You talked about it before because you talked about Daniel Kahneman, and thinking Fast and Slow is one of my favourites. It absolutely influenced how I understand the human decision-making processes and this game interplay between our intuitive and our rational way to think, and it's one of the best ones.

Henry Piney: 37:23

Fantastic, brilliant. Marco, thank you so much for your time. I'm conscious we're slightly over time, but it's been a pleasure talking to you again and really insightful as always.

Marco Baldocchi: 37:34

thank you it's a pleasure to be here and I hope that we make a little simpler this very complex content. Thank you so much now.

Henry Piney: 37:45

I hope you got all of that. However, if you do need a primer on the hippocampus prefrontal cortex temporal lobe and all that good stuff, it's all available on the transcript tab of this interview. You can, of course, also check out Marco's very good newsletter, which is on LinkedIn. Thanks once more to MX8 Labs for sponsoring. I definitely check them out if you're in the research world and looking to free up time spent on programming, link checking, DP, all that type of thing and getting to spend more time on analysis. Thanks again to Marco for doing the interview, to Insight Platforms for their support and to you for listening.

Marco Baldocchi: 38:19

See you next time.