The Hunt for Good Marketing

A colleague of mine recently sent out an email to the team showing the importance of video in online marketing, and how it dramatically increases the amount of time people spend on that particular website.

This started me thinking, and unsurprisingly it takes me back to my training in Biological Anthropology.

7 million years ago we split from our most common ancestors and started our journey into habitual bipedalism, larger brains and eventually, our pretty hairless appearance. But let’s get down to specifics, and as is the case with most of my blogs – behaviour. In particular: hunting.

So, we hunt. And we still do. But what’s significant is how we have honed our hunting techniques and developed them into something quite special in the 21^st Century world we have created – I refuse to use the term modern!  And I’m not just generalising to men here, women hunt too – get rid of the stereotype that men are the only ones that know how to throw a spear!

But why do we hunt? To get resources, yes. But also for status, respect, showcasing skills and providing for your family and peers. And these still play a part – but hunting has become easy for us, so we continue to challenge ourselves to make it more exciting. Think about the pride you feel in finding a bargain at the supermarket – or how proud you feel to find the exact pair of shoes to match that dress. Or what about if you’re really hunting for some information that seems impossible to get hold of, but when you do it feels pretty good, right? 

It really doesn’t seem that far beyond what we were doing hundreds of thousands of years ago. Our hunting has changed yes, but the satisfaction of succeeding still plays to our Neolithic needs. And what do we need to be able to hunt proficiently? Speed, yes. Agility, yes. Tools, yes. But what about sight?

The human eye is fascinating – trust me on this! Men are particularly good at spotting small movements – and are more easily distracted by movement, and women pick up particularly well on colour. Let me expand on this. Research has shown that men are able to better identify more rapidly changing images, whereas women tend to be able to distinguish between different hues better than men. Sight is interpreted in the brain’s primary visual cortex – and the development of these neurons is controlled in the womb by male sex hormones, so it’s no wonder that sight differs between men and women.

How does this relate to marketing?

Think: movement + colour = video?! The link really isn’t that difficult to make when you trace back our steps and how we have gotten to where we are today. I maintain the notion that our minds are far beyond the capabilities of our bodies – our biological form has remained unchanged for about 120 000 years, but how much have our minds and culture developed since then? 

Therefore, developing an online hunting ritual, where you have to find what you what on the internet and keep engaged, it’s no wonder that video appears to be taking us by storm. We constantly want faster connections (speed?), better links (agility?) and gadgets (tools?) that make the hunting ritual more effective. And so the type of media that captures our attention the most… video. 

So join the hunt and start utilising video in your marketing campaigns. And if you’re not sure who to approach to help you – why not start with us?