When a client buys a product, what goes through their mind?
Often you'll notice they have a similar product, so why do they buy again? There are four reasons why your client (and you and I) keep searching for products and buy in what looks like an irrational way.
And no matter how saturated the market seems, clients will keep searching. This is good news for you, because if you give them what they want, they'll keep coming back. It seems irrational, but it's perfectly rational.
Let's find out why this behaviour exists.
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(Note: This is an unedited transcript)
When we talk about Napoleon Bonaparte, we bring about this topic of Waterloo and how he got defeated there.
But eight years before Waterloo something happened and that involved rabbits. Around July, 1807 Napoleon was probably in a good mood because he had signed a treaty of Dilset and this ended the war between the French Empire and Imperial Russia. So they decided, “Okay, let's have a rabbit hunt.” And the Chief of Staff was put in charge of that. And he arranged for this big outdoor lunch.
A lot of big bigs were invited. And when you have all these big shots, you need to somehow organize things. So you can't just go around finding rabbits. They decided to have a colony of rabbits. We don't know exactly whether they were in their hundreds or thousands. But there was an assumption that there was around 3,000 rabbits. 3000 of these rabbits all cageed up and ready to go.
It's the day of the hunt and you have all of these drum beaters and guns going off. And the rabbits are off. They're off from their cages and the hunt is officially on. Something weird happens at this one in time. The rabbits don't scamper, they don't go running off in every direction.
Instead, they go straight towards Napoleon and his men.
All of these hundreds or thousands or whatever they were, they all go straight for Napoleon. It's like a comedy in action, and of course the whole group starts laughing. But as this continues, they're not laughing anymore. They try beating them back, they have sticks, they try pushing the rabbits back, there's continued to come at Napoleon and his men in wave after wave after wave.
And the actions that they're taking seems to be working, but it's only a short respite. The rabbits turned the Emperor's flank and they attacked him frantically in the rear, refusing to quit their hold. They piled themselves between his legs till they made him stagger and forced the conqueror of conquerors, who was now fairly exhausted, to retreat and leave them in possession of the field.
At this point Napoleon has had enough. He rushes to his garage, but that doesn't stop the rabbits. Because they seemed to be coming from both sides from the flanks and they were headed to the Imperial Coach. The attack it seems stopped only once the coach had rolled away. Why were the rabbits doing this? This was not normal behavior.
You'd expect them to do completely the opposite, but there they were, engaging in what you and I would consider to be very irrational behavior. And probably in the fact that they were not wild rabbits. They'd got these rabbits from local farmers and rabbits are fed every day. To them, Napoleon was just someone who was serving the food. Their eagerness was enhanced by the fact that they hadn't been fed all day.
When we started listening to the story, it seemed slightly irrational, but there's a very clear rationale behind it.
And this is kind of what happens when clients want to read something, want to engage with something, whether it be audio or video. We have this perception that everything that needs to be done is already done, what with anybody listening to us and we covered this in the last one. But today we're going to cover the reasons why people behave in this rather irrational way.
He'll matter how much information is out there. These four reasons are how I clients keep coming back. And yes, they're looking for the next lettuce. So let's start out with today's podcast and let's find out what's in store. The question is why do people keep looking for new writers or new content creators?
There are several reasons why we read, why we watch, why we listen. The first is to solve a problem right now. The second is to solve the problem but to understand the bigger picture. The third is pure entertainment and the fourth is to stumble upon something that we want looking for in the first place.
Let's start out with the first reason why people behave in this manner.
They have enough, they have enough content but they're still looking. And that is the solving a problem right now. the most common form of learning, that's what we do in Google. Recently, we had these fruit that you get in New Zealand called, “Fijower.” And we had quite a few disfigured fruit. So we were trying to figure out what's wrong with this fruit.
And what we learned was that there is a guava moth that kind of gets after these fruit as well. It goes after guava as then it goes after “Fijower” as well. Now we need to know, is it good? Is it bad for you? Do we just remove that worm and eat the fruit? Is it really as bad as it seems for your intestines? We don't know the answer. So we're looking for information. And this is the kind of thing that people are always looking for.
They're looking for that information that fills that gap, that gap of knowledge that they have. If I'm trying to figure out a dance step, I will search for it on YouTube. And if I'm trying to figure out a word, maybe a word like “shill off” in Spanish, then I would have to go to an online dictionary or some source where I could get that translation. That's a transaction, that's a transaction based action and one that we tend to do most of the time.
You don't tend to pop into a library to figure out a word, you don't buy a book to understand a line.
But what we do is this transaction. When we want instant information, we go out there. So we have information on how to get clients. We have information on how to retain clients. We have information on pricing. We have all of this information, but today we have that unique problem and we're going to go online.
If we find an article that solves the problem, well, if we find a podcast, well, and good, but often we'll find a book or a course or something. And that's the primary reason why we go online. We go there to buy something, to buy information. and that's the first reason why people go. So even though we have all this information, it has existed before, we're still going there to get the information and to create this first transaction. That's the first reason.
What's the second reason?
The second reason is to understand the bigger picture. Let's say that you wanted to understand why you're struggling to learn a language. You run into the video and let's say that the person speaks ten languages. It's at this point that you realize that the person has systems or at least an understanding that is slightly different from yours that you need depth.
You need a bigger picture. Now this point, it's no longer just you dipping your toe, doing their transaction, buying something and running away. You want to jump in, you want to stay a while. When you find yourself reading more than one article or more than one book, watching more than one video, or continuing to do a course from start to finish, what you're doing is you're digging into that bigger picture.
It's possible for instance that you joined psychotactics because you read a single article.
You then decided, okay, let's take a minimal amount of risk and let's buy a book that's low priced, something like the brain audit or chaos planning. And it's at this point you're starting to roam widely in the PsychoTactic universe. We do this kind of deep dive a lot when we get better explanations or faster results. Some might be 10,000 other books and websites. They might be 10,000 personal trainers or yoga classes.
But the person that you choose and this is your choice is over other people. Is because you know that it's more than just the one-time transaction. Our behavior is not as irrational as you think. We have all the stuff, but then we want specific information.
Once we have specific information, we go, “Oh, so this person knows a fair bit about all of the stuff. Let me look for more information and we start going through that universe and getting more books or courses or whatever, from that one person.” Or if it's fiction, then you start reading more of, say, Dan Brown, one book, second book, third book, four book. You go round that pathway.
But the third reason, it's funny that I mentioned downground because the third reason is pure entertainment.
And we call it entertainment but really it's an understanding of structure. When you watch a terrible movie what you're doing is you're going through just a transaction. It's just bad. So you've just got the movie, you're having a meal, you're sitting down on the sofa, and it's like, “Too much work to go looking for more stuff on Netflix.” So you're going through a transaction.
You may do the same thing on YouTube, which is you watch one video, maybe a second one, and then you'll leave. But when someone is truly entertaining, they are working on two separate levels. giving you information, but they're doing so in a way that makes you curious to want to learn more. And I mentioned Dan Brown, who's the author of The Davinci Code.
And he's writing that story and you're following the story and it's a thriller and he knows how to do that, but he's also giving you historical context.
Now if you were to read a novel that has a great story, you'll still read it, but if you have a novel that also informs you, gives you historical context or geographical context or something where you get smarter at the same time as you being entertained, well, now that's a whole new level, which is why when we're writing something or creating something that's entertaining, then we have to add information.
And when we're writing something that's information based, maybe a course, maybe a presentation, maybe a book, maybe anything that you're doing, then you have to add the layer of entertainment. And then it's like the bunny's coming at you at high speed, from both flanks. And the reason for this is that we don't just want information. We have had enough of information.
We just really at some level want to be entertained.
In fact, we just want to magic wand. We don't even want the information if someone could just come in and show us how to do pricing. Just tap us on the head and hey, it's done. We will be happy over that. If someone said, okay, you don't have to do this article right, and of course you don't need any notes, you don't need any videos, you will just be able to magically write.
Well, that's much better, isn't it? So when you have information, if you don't have some level of entertainment, well, that doesn't work. But if you do, then you've got the bunny attack again. People coming towards you, even though they've got other article writing courses or books on planning or whatever it is that you're selling, whatever it is that you do. So far we've seen three levels why people behave irrationally.
They want new information. The second is once they get that information and they're happy with the information, they still want to go around that universe and figure out what other stuff do you have.
But then we get to that herd level which we just discovered and then we get a full attack and the full attack is because now you have added either information to entertainment or entertainment to information and that's what most of us deal with. We have the information and we need to add the entertainment and finally there is the fourth one. This is called the stumble.
What is the stumble?
When we go on a trip abroad, we might stumble on a little restaurant, or maybe a shop with lots of fountain pens and fancy paper. We didn't set out to find it, but we have found it and then we are very excited. A lot of YouTube watching is almost always a stumble because that's what YouTube does.
It presents stuff based on what we've seen so it throws more of that stuff that universe, but it also throws stuff at you that you would not expect or things people that that you've not viewed before. So there you are in this new country, this place where you're having a holiday, and you know where you can get fountain pens on the internet. But you still want to stumble upon that place.
You still want to find out whether we get these fountain pens, because it's different. It's creating a whole new feeling for you. And when you do, when you stumble upon something and it works for you, you're deliberately excited. Most people come to psychotactics because of marketing. But then they stumble upon something like cartooning, or they stumble upon some weird workshop that we're having somewhere in Spain, or something like that.
And there is this stumble upon factor that also draws people because suddenly they realize that, oh, there is this fun activity that I can do as well. And we now live in the age of AI. We live in an age where we don't know what's going to happen next. But what we do know is how humans have behaved and how they will continue to behave whenever they're looking for information.
And they have these four steps that they take, the first is, I'm going to solve the problem right now. And if you can solve my problem, then I'm going to buy from you. Once they buy from you, they still want to explore what else you have. It's almost like wandering into a shop and figuring out, hey, I came here for this one thing, but now I want other stuff as well. And once they do that, they look for a different level.
They're looking whether your information is also entertaining, or if you're entertaining, you're also informational.
And this doesn't just apply to information products. This applies to anything. If you've got a retail shop, you can make it entertaining. If you're selling shoes, you can make it entertaining as well. There's no limit to the factor of entertainment. People want to be part of that. They want to feel happy about what they're doing.
And of course, entertainment is a whole different topic, but this is the third reason why people are looking for new stuff all the time. Even though they're all this other stuff. And finally, there's just this serendipity. They just want to find something. They don't know what it is. They know they can get it elsewhere, but they just want to stumble upon it. It's a happy feeling.
And these are the reasons why you should learn to write. You should learn to draw. This is why you should learn to speak. Speakers in front of an audience may be better on Zoom, maybe in front of a smaller group or even a a bigger group because humans may do what they do which is transactional but they also want to do what's more interesting.
Napoleon got a big fright but I'm sure that when they went back they would have had their drinks and they would have had all the food that was laid out for them and they would have had a good laugh and you can have a good laugh too because you've understood What is it that causes people to come back even though there's all that information out there?
But what is the one thing that you can focus on?
And this is the thing that most people don't. And that is if there is information, how will I make it more entertaining? And if it's entertainment, how will I make it more informational? It's almost something that gets slipped under and you don't notice it, but it's very crucial.
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