Founding story:
psychological customer creation
The problem is not what we think.
We were doing everything right at the world’s largest ad agency, but our results were on the decline. We had "the big idea,” "360 execution" and followed all the "fundamentals" the ad industry loves to talk about in the press and social media.
Agencies, consultancies, clients side teams—they are all comprised of people who hate Mondays, drink too much coffee, and are thinking about the next job on their career paths. They are as irrationally human as the rest of us. The usual agency promises of “our ideas are better,” consulting’s “our processes are more logical,” and both saying “Trust us, we’re famous,” when laid against human nature are difficult to believe.
I founded Manzanita by asking one simple question: setting aside all assumptions about persuasive communication and the buying process, advertising, marketing, and consulting, what will I find if I take it apart and put it all back together?
The Real Problem: We Filter 99% of Reality
Manzanita discovered early that consumers see as many as 10,000 ads each day, yet less than 3% of us remember even one 24 hours later. The reason is not a lack of creativity or bad strategy or any other ad industry measure or metric. The real reason is revealed only by exploring the irrational science of cognitive psychology. We have a filter in our brains called the “reticular activating system” that filters out over 99% of reality, and the classical best-guess, “our ideas are shinier” version of big-idea-advertising runs head-long into the filter. This is especially true given the massive volume of information we take in daily. The RAS is a greedy thief and it just stole your ad budget.
If you want to ensure your message gains access to the mid-brain where decisions are made, it must have the key to pass through the RAS: cognitive resonance. Or stated simply, high relevance to the target, determined from data with a high degree of statistical confidence.
Manzanita are a group of irrational people who have created a next-generation platform that discovers the precise psychological buttons to push in irrational consumers, employees, and teams. Working with human nature—rather than against it—is far more profitable, ethical, and rewarding than guesswork.
Christopher Demetrakos
Founder & CEO
Manzanita KK
