This episode features an interview with Tim Ash, Founder of TimAsh.com & PrimalBrain.com. Tim talks about getting inside your customer’s head and creating an intuitive website that feels familiar and drives sales.
This episode features an interview with Tim Ash, Founder of TimAsh.com & PrimalBrain.com. Tim talks about getting inside your customer’s head and creating an intuitive website that feels familiar and drives sales.
Quotes
*“You need to have focus and say no to 98% of audience expansion tactics. And then you have to have a super clear origin myth that almost acts like a magnet. A brand is not that visual styling you put on at the end. It's your brand voice and your attitude and your very reason for being. It's the mission. And that's what millennials and others will get attracted to. Nobody wants some generic corporate thing. It's very forgettable. So you have to have a narrow focus and a clear appeal to those people based on a deep understanding of their needs and their larger context. You may be just a small, transactional part of their life, but if you want to attract them, you should still resonate for them.”
Time Stamps
*[0:07] The Case: The poorly designed landing page
*[0:34] Introducing Tim Ash, Founder of TimAsh.com & PrimalBrain.com
*[5:34] Evidence #1: Low conversion rates
*[11:13] Evidence #2: Site has no clear visual hierarchy
*[25:01] Evidence #3: Landing page uses unfamiliar elements
*[27:23] Debrief
*[28:23] HGS Pub
Bio
Tim Ash is the Founder of TimAsh.com and PrimalBrain.com, and author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education, Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion, and understanding of online behavior, and landing page testing. In the mid-1990s, he became one of the early pioneers in the discipline of website conversion rate optimization.
Thank you to our friends
This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.
Links:
Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn
Lyssa Myska Allen: Hi, I’m glad you’re here. Come on in, we’ve got a case. I got a call from a client the other day with a customer experience mystery.
Client: Hey, CXI, you’ve got to help me. My company’s website sees a lot of traffic, but our sales conversion rates are extremely low compared to how many people are visiting the site. Our marketing funnel is working great, but we can’t figure out why people aren’t converting once they hit the site. We need some guidance, and fast. We don’t have enough insights into what customers are doing when they visit the site, and where exactly we’ve gone wrong. What do you think, can you help me figure it out?
Lyssa Myska Allen: I’m definitely up to the task, and I know exactly who to team up with on this one - Tim Ash. He’s Co-Founder and CEO of SiteTuners, a strategic Conversion Rate Optimization agency. In other words, he helps design websites to drive sales. SiteTuners has created more than $1.2B in value for fifteen-hundred clients in 56 countries worldwide since their founding in 2002. Tim is also a bestselling author, international keynote speaker and marketing advisor. And what’s really cool is that Tim is using his background in evolutionary psychology and marketing to really understand what drives people to buy. Today, Tim is my co-detective as we crack the mystery of the poorly-designed landing page. Because we are CXI: Customer Experience Investigators, solving your toughest CX challenges. I’m Lyssa Myska Allen, VP and Global Head of Marketing at HGS. Let’s get started.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Well, thank you so much for joining me on the CXI podcast, Tim, as my co-detective. Uh, do you want to introduce yourself and maybe give us some creds?
Tim Ash: Sure I'm very happy to be with you. I started a digital marketing agency back out shortly after Al Gore invented the interwebs, and, uh, help companies around the world improve their websites. Uh, that The field's known as conversion rate optimization. So I've worked with companies like Google, Facebook, Nestle, Expedia, uh, across all vertical industries. And we created a documented 1.2 billion in extra revenue for our clients when I ran my agency. And along the way, I studied evolutionary psychology and marketing and wrote a couple of bestselling books on landing page optimization, and founded the first conference series here and in Europe on conversion rate optimization. It was called Conversion Conference. Its now called Digital Growth Unleashed. So I have a real broad and eclectic background in making digital experiences better, uh, and also a passion for understanding human behavior. These days, I mostly do public speaking and keynotes around the world. I also do some senior advisory in, in the marketing area with executives.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's an incredible background. And you are our shiniest detective star, um, for this, this case that we're cracking, the case of landing page optimization, right. Which is clearly your sweet spot. Um, this is a podcast about customer experience. And so that evolutionary psychology combination with deep, like, um, growing up with the internet, if you will, is going to be incredible as we dive in.
Tim Ash: Yeah, and I, I am bragging a little more about the CX side of, well, the whole idea of user experience or user centered design came from one of my mentors at UC San Diego, way back in the eighties, Don Norman. He literally wrote the book on user centered design, and that was one of our undergraduate textbooks. So to me, this is in my DNA, as they say, and the rest of the world is just now catching up.
Lyssa Myska Allen: So when you chose to kind of focus on conversions, as you know, in your books and with your company, um, what made that the, the key pain point to focus in on?
Tim Ash: Well, actually it was a long and winding road to get the conversion rate optimization. We started building some database enabled websites back in the day. Um, and then we got into driving traffic. Early days of pay-per-click marketing. And then through that, we said, well, we can kind of do that better ourselves. So why not become a super affiliate? Just use our own money to drive traffic to other people's landing pages. And what we quickly found out is the traffic we were driving was great. The landing pages we were sending you to sucked. So we saw that as the bigger problem. So we'd go to a lot of our clients and say, Hey, let us fix your website so we can all make a lot more money. And eventually it turned into a tail wagging the dog situation, where we jettisoned our pay per click traffic business and instead started focusing on fixing websites. So around 2000 is when I started my CRO agency, which I'm not a part of anymore, very actively. And it's called Site Tuners.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Okay, so we know a bit more about Tim’s credentials now. Let’s take a little break and when we return, we’ll get into the case file.
Welcome back. Today, Tim and I are working together on solving the case of the landing page that is killing prospective sales. Let’s dive in.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Before we can even think about cracking the case, we need some more information. I asked our client for a forensic analysis of his website. What evidence did he have that the site wasn’t working?
Client: So we have a robust marketing funnel and we’re getting plenty of traffic. People are consistently clicking through to the site, but when we do the math, our conversion rates are frustratingly low. It’s now four quarters in a row of missed sales targets, and we can’t justify our marketing spend if we don’t start converting leads at a higher rate. Bottom line, we can’t afford another quarter of subpar sales numbers.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Ouch. It sounds like they’re burning through cash and starting to feel desperate. What do you think, Tim? How can they turn this problem around?
Tim Ash: Well, I think that the very focus on the customer is the important thing. In other words, most marketing activities are focused on the company. And it's like, how do we make more money? How do we squeeze the bottom of the funnel so more money comes out? I call it greedy marketer syndrome. And we're all infected with it. So it's really hard to fight that tendency and to be on the side of your long suffering visitors, the ones that are, you know, to us, it's abstract little friction points on our website. To them, they're show stoppers and I don't have enough time in my life to deal with your crap. So I've always tried to have everyone that worked for me, really, really advocate for the visitor and, and to be critical, to be unhappy, to find every little friction point to be a big problem. And I think that was what was responsible for our success. Not trying to figure out how to make money, but how to help people.
Lyssa Myska Allen: How do you get your employees to get into the visitor customer's shoes? How do you teach that as a skill?
Tim Ash: Well, it's not a skill, it's a mindset. I would say we brought in people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Um, some were technical, some were copywriters, or, um, we had people that were from a customer service background and I think of course, dealing with the public is a good way to get that. Uh, so I think the, the main way we tried to instill that was by getting as close to the customer as we could. And, you know, you hear a lot of lip service being paid to getting close to the customer. And what we actually did was say, go to the company's call center and listen to whatever complaints people are having. Uh, talk to the salespeople. They'll tell you plenty about objections that they're handling and problems that they're running into, or just do an unfiltered search on your company's brand name on Twitter. And what you'll find is there's often that hashtag, um, fail attached to that. And that will really tell you what people think of your brand. So basically get out there in the front lines, get out of the echo chamber. You know, all of us marketers or customer experience, product design, people are sitting there talking to colleagues all the time and paying attention to 17 slack channels. Well, that's not really being out there, you know, close to the customer.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. So it's really about building that sort of customer centric culture, which can be a dramatic shift for a lot of companies.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I love the examples of you can look at call center data, which is rich with insight. You can look at social media. Um, you can actually look at, uh, the queries that are coming in. Are there other kind of tricks or tips you have for how to get inside the customer's head?
Tim Ash: Yeah. One of the key things for me is, um, of course understanding how the brain really works, literally all decisions are made emotionally. There is no such thing as a logical objective decision. Uh, we prioritize them based on either aversions or affinities and things that help our brain survive. Um, and so one of the things I like to do is watch people's actions, not their, uh, explanation of their actions. I see a lot of user testing, for example, that involves a talk track. Well, do this task while you talk out loud about it. Well, that means it's pardon me, total bullshit. Um, because it's been shown that know decisions are made in one part of the brain and then a split-second later, other parts of the brain get activated to explain it and talk about it. And they're unrelated parts of the brain. So, uh, Robert Heinlein, a science fiction author, once famously said that a man is not a rational animal. He's a rationalizing animal. And I really love that quote. That means we basically justify and make up the reasons, but that's not the real drivers of our behavior. So for example, with online website tasks, what I like to do is set them up so there's extreme time pressure, and then just watch what people do. So for example, let's say you're buying women's red high-heeled shoes on a women's website on a shoe website. I'd say, okay, find the cheapest pair of red high-heeled shoes. You have 30 seconds, go. And then you just watch what people do. You might ask them a few follow up questions after the fact, but that's just, um, you know, random stuff coming at you. The main thing is watch what they do, not what they say.
Lyssa Myska Allen: What do people do usually?
Tim Ash: Well, they do a lot of weird things you wouldn't expect. And that, and that's what gives you the insights into what's broken with, with your customer experience. Um, my friend Steve Crew, who wrote one of the seminal books on, on this subject, um, it's called Don't Make Me Think. Uh, It's a book about web usability. Some of the examples might be dated, but the principles are absolutely timeless. And he's a big fan of informal user testing, for example, and, um, small groups, they don't have to be experts. They don't have to be carefully chosen, but just watch what people do.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Ooh yeah, that’s a great piece of advice - “Just watch what people do.” It’ll tell you a lot about what’s going wrong with that website. Or any customer experience, really. Okay, we need to gather a little more evidence before we conclude our investigation.
Client: Well, we designed the website in-house to save some money. And I feel like it’s coming back to bite us. The site looks nice, but there’s something about the usability that’s creating friction. We thought we should provide consumers with all the information possible so they could learn about our products. But now, I’m thinking that was a mistake. There’s too much going on and people are getting overwhelmed by all the information.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I have a feeling we’re already getting to the root of the issue. But let’s hear from the master. Tim - what do you have to say about it?
Tim Ash: So time and time again, we see people clicking on things that they don't, that aren't clickable or not clicking on things that should be obvious to click on. And it just, even basic things like that, I find that the probably the most common class of problems is not having a clear visual hierarchy on the website. So, this is a concept that I developed for our designers and as text, graphics, and motion in that order. So in the presence of graphics, texts don't get read. In the presence of motion, graphics won't even be looked at. It's just how our visual system and our brain works. And so you'd see a lot of people just over decorate their site, and then they put this really thin outline little button and they'd float it against a complicated photograph or something like that. And that's the most important thing on the page ostensibly. So people wouldn't be clicking on the button, big surprise.
Tim Ash: You'd be surprised how much money we made clients by properly prioritizing that visual hierarchy. You start with the end in mind. Um, One of the things we do when we design websites for example, is we have the wire frame stage and most people actually skip that. They go, well, actually they jump right into visual design. And, um, the problem with that in, in the immortal words of one of my friends is, um, people get attached to the visuals and then they have an opinion. And in my friend's words and opinions like an asshole, everybody's got one, uh, you can bleep that out if you need to. But basically as soon as you, you get to a visual mockup, the CEO, everybody will have an opinion about it. And so we found is you need to be really rigorous when we redesign websites and actually have them sign off on the wireframes. And say, look, this is the functional purpose of the page. This is the most important stuff on it. This is what we're trying to have people actually do here. And then when they go back and they start modifying that at, during the visual design stage, because the designers aren't that disciplined, then we go, no, no, no, let's back it up. This is what we all agreed on and signed off on. Um, I actually had one client. Um, we won't name them, but it's a Fortune 500 company, take our detailed information, architecture work and wireframes, and then say, well, our designers understand our brand, so they'll take it from here. And they came back with something that had no connection at all to our wire frames. And we said, what happened? And they said, well, the visual designers used it, and I quote, as a "rough point of departure" for their final design. And that's not the way to go.
Lyssa Myska Allen: You actually jumped ahead to my next question. Like, based on that, which is how do you balance what you, what you could almost call science, um, although recognizing all of our decisions are emotional, so none of it is science, right? Um, with what, what you would call aesthetic? So what the, you know, what looks good versus what actually works and converts.
Tim Ash: I'd say a couple of general observations. One is less is more, I mean, it's, it's companies like Apple have succeeded on the back of that, that their are big innovations with new iPhone releases is to take away things. Oh, you really don't need that, uh, microphone jack.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I'm bitter about the home button. I'm not going to lie.
Tim Ash: No joking aside, that simplicity is really, really key and that takes a lot of discipline. Um, and so I'd say the less clutter there is the fewer visual boogers, the better off you are and let the, the, the standard that I ask, uh, from our visual designers is this: how does this visual embellishment directly support an intended call to action on this page? And if you don't have an answer to that, it's not going to be there. It's that simple. That's just you decorating because you're bored and you really wanted to be an artist, but you had to get a graphic design job instead, I'm sorry. That's that's not a reason to make my company poorer.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. Well, and so how, but, but does any of that play into, so like if a, if you're trying to create a brand look and feel, and that is some, some, whatever it is, elegance or, um, you know, with gen Z, like everything is bright and loud and screaming and that's like their aesthetic that they love. Um, how do you balance that customer experience of the, the, you want them to experience the brand a certain way with the, the knowledge that this is, or is the right way to do things?
Tim Ash: Yeah. And again, I don't think there even any cultural differences or generational differences in terms of clarity. And clarity is clarity. And in younger people want clarity, older people want clarity. I don't know anybody that says I'd rather be confused and wander around this page and figure out what's important here. So, yeah, I don't, I don't subscribe to that personally. What I'd say, is that there it's the basic ideas that the branding should take a back seat. Yes, you can use your brand colors. I'm sure you have a primary palette and a secondary color palette, and you can make sure that whatever the dominant call to action on the pages gets your most dramatic treatment. And that's the only thing of that color on the page. It's not that hard. It's, but basically it's stay within the lines, color inside the box, whatever you want to call it. It's a paint by numbers, um, in a visual, um, pass that you do at the end, but you have to be super clear about the priorities and the purpose of all of those visual.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That clarity, I think is as equally as hard to find within the business as it is on the business's website. So, do you have any, um, insight into one, how to get clarity within your own business, and two, how to kind of work with it cross-functionally with different departments to agree on that? Because I think that's where a lot of the ambiguity does come from.
Tim Ash: Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's like the tale about the blind men touching different parts of the elephant and disagreeing about what it is, because one goes, it's a snake and other ones, it's a wall. And the third one says it's a tree trunk and they're all right. Uh, well it turns out that, um, without that top line marching orders, nobody really is doing their job. And so I think one of the keys for any brand is to be super clear about your target audience and that's where it begins and ends. I see a lot of ready, fire, aim stuff going on, and really it begins with who are you trying to influence? Understand who they are, then understand their belief system and values and only then design products and services and messaging and campaigns for that audience. So without a super clear laser-focused understanding of who your audience is and what their cultural values are, you're going to miss. So I think, um, you need to have focus and say no to 96, 97 98% of, um, audience expansion, I guess, tactics. Um, and then you have to have a super clear origin myth that almost acts like a magnet to attract your tribe. So a brand is not that visual styling you put on at the end. It's your, it's your brand voice and your attitude and your very reason for being. It's the mission. And that's what millennials and others will, will get attracted to. Nobody wants some generic corporate thing. It's very forgettable. So you have to have a narrow focus and a clear, uh, appeal to those people based on a deep understanding of what, of their needs and their larger context. I mean, you may be just be a small, transactional part of their life, but if you want to attract them, you should still resonate for them.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I love that, that notion of, um, like an origin story, kind of bringing in, uh, customers to the like brand ethos, right. Do you have a good example of that or like one of your favorite, um, past experiences or consulting projects where you saw that play out?
Tim Ash: Well, I, I, we try to instill that in every one of our clients, and I'm not going to talk necessarily about specifics, but I'll tell you how to do it, if that would be helpful. Um, I mean, usually it takes the form of the, the hero's journey. Um, Mo one of the things I talk about in my latest book Unleash Your Primal Brain is about storytelling and the purpose of it, but it's essentially to, um, share secondhand experience so somebody else doesn't have to go through the same trials as we do. So the hero's journey is okay, the world was good, then something bad happened. I went on a quest, I picked up some unexpected allies. I slayed the dragon and overcame the big problem. And then there was a re-greening of the earth. Okay. That's that's your that's Star Wars. That's The Odyssey. That's any story you've ever heard. Right. And so you need one of those for your company. The, so that's the first observation. You can't be just an e-commerce store and then in, in your, About Us page, you say, well, we use organically grown fair-trade hemp materials to make our t-shirts. I was like, okay, that's buried somewhere. It should be like, ah, all this, uh, I worked in for Adidas and Nike, and I saw how they exploit their workers. And I thought that this was outrageous and I wanted to have quality clothing at a fair price. So I researched out, you know, the Vietnamese hand beat hemp, uh, in order to make something softer than cotton. And I, I worked to source it. And I make these t-shirts and they're dyed in organic stuff. And, uh, so I'm on this passionate mission to bring affordable hemp clothing to the world. And then if that, if that story doesn't catch me, the generic e-commerce store selling t-shirts certainly won't.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Does that apply differently to a services company?
Tim Ash: I don't think it really changes anything. I think there is a, a, a, um, another layer of difficulty with services is because they're intangible. So to sell services, there's a great book by a guy named Harry Beckwith that I read decades ago, but it's called Selling the Invisible, and it's all about how selling services is different from selling tangible products. And it had a lot of great points in that, that, uh, but, uh, in terms of the psychology of it, the need for an origin myth or to attract a certain tribe, I think that those are those fundamentals are the same.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Okay. And so earlier you, you brought up neural networks. So I'm going to, I'm going to bring that back full circle.
Tim Ash: Nerd. Okay.
Lyssa Myska Allen: No, um, with the, with the addition of automation into the website experience, the customer experience, um, how a customer is interacting with the brand, how do you maintain that loyalty when you're adding in that non-human element?
Tim Ash: Oh boy. I think that's a question only for the 1%. And I don't mean the rich, although it's highly correlated, but it's only for big companies that have sophisticated business intelligence units and can do data mining and build predictive models. But in my experience, it's a, um, well, it's not even a crawl, walk, run. It's more like flop around on your belly versus crawling situation. I mean, there's such fundamental things that need to be fixed and online experiences that talking about advanced stuff for most companies is, is a waste of time. We all have this shiny object syndrome. What's the next technology? Oh, it's virtual reality. Oh, it's voice activated. Oh, it's hologram suppositories tomorrow. I don't even know. I don't know what it's going to be, but what we're missing is that we're trying to influence the human brain and from an evolutionary standpoint, we're, we're frozen in time, it's not going to change. And so the thing to pay attention to are these universals and to get the basics fixed. And a lot of companies are falling down on that. So as much as I love, um, neural networks and artificial intelligence, I don't think that that's really where most companies should focus. Forget about the technology. It's about the, you know, the behavior and the evolutionary psychology part.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, I completely agree with you. But you also said something that piqued my interest a little bit, which is that we're in a, as a human where we're fixed. Um, our brain is not evolving anymore. Is that true?
Tim Ash: Well, you can, you can change as a human. And I think as you go through life stages, what you find meaning in it definitely changes. And, uh, I'm sure you'll learn painful lessons, but the fact that you learned lessons from pain versus pleasure, um, that's not gonna change.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Okay. So I'm, I'm trying to draw the parallel now back to I, as an individual, want to be uncomfortable and challenge myself. And I, as a marketer business, do not want people to be uncomfortable and challenge themselves when they reach my landing page. Right. And.
Tim Ash: You don't want them to have the painful experience on your website?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Right. I don't want their mental model of my website to change. Uh, but it's interesting because we're using the same terminology. So we're saying, what are the pain points? What are the, like, where's the friction point of this website when we're looking at optimizing it? And so that, that is I'm trying to like, just be like, huh?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Speaking of pain points, let’s hear one more piece of evidence about how this website is tormenting its visitors.
Client: Well, I suppose we were trying a little too hard to stand out. We tried a bunch of unique design elements that we thought made the site different from everything else out there. But now I’m wondering if we were just confusing people. Maybe so many websites look the same for a reason.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I’m wondering that, too. Is it a good idea to use unique style elements, Tim?
Tim Ash: My professor, Don Norman, who's brilliant in this field and he was talking about convention ones. I forget where I read this, but, um, is basically saying convention is just, uh, an agreement among a group of people about how to do something. I think, you know, being here in the U.S., we drive on the right side of the road. In England, they do it on the opposite. And, and there's not one's inherently better. It's just what you're used to in some initial starting point that somebody made a decision, right. Um, and so, but it's a convention that people follow. So. Um, over time for mobile sites, that hamburger menu, those three horizontal lines that indicate a dropdown menu, became a standard. But for awhile, people had no idea what that symbol even meant. And so one of them as, as customer experience designers. One of the things we need to look at is how can we take advantage of existing conventions? I want to piggyback on that as much as possible so that, um, I, at that effortless habitual understanding. And that's what I mean by removing friction points and pain points. If you came up with a user interface that was a 3d hologram, and you have to walk around with your avatar in a virtual world, um, that's a lot of stuff for me to learn. And it might be a lot better, but without that common agreement and a group of people understand how to use that kind of interface, it's not some big innovation. It's actually making me consciously think, creating uncomfort and discomfort rather. And putting me on guard, which is not the state you want me, and you want me to feel safe and comfortable. And again, have clarity about what you want me to do on your website.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Right. Yep. Yep, yep. Yeah, that sense of safety is a really interesting framing of how you want an a in it is like, you know, am I in the right place? Am I here for, am I getting what I came here for? You know, like that safe sense of safety is really like a human need that you're also trying to fulfill in this like sort of business website landing sense.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I’ve learned a lot working with Tim today. I feel like I’ll be examining every website I visit with a magnifying glass now. Okay, let's debrief. I’m taking some really useful lessons away from our conversation. One, get in the customer’s head. You’ll learn more about their pain points by talking to your contact center team, monitoring social media, reading reviews, and simply watching what they do. Two, create a simple website with a clear visual hierarchy and low-key branding. And make your call-to-action the most eye-grabbing element. And three, tap into what your customer effortlessly understands. Give your website a sense of familiarity. This will make it more intuitive to customers and easier to navigate.
Client: Thank you both so much for your help. We clearly have some work to do, but you’ve given me some simple ways to make our website so much better. I think there are a few improvements we can make right away that will make a big difference in our conversion metrics.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Let’s celebrate cracking the case! Let’s head to the HGS pub, kick back with our virtual drink of choice and cover some light hearted ground. We've cracked the case on, uh, website optimization. I would love to hear about, um, how you moved about the book specifically. Kind of, what was your process? What made you want to write the third one that was so different from the first two? Um, how your own evolution to get to that point where you're like, this is it. I have to write this.
Tim Ash: Well as I mentioned back in my college days at UC San Diego, I had already a psychology, as well as a hard sciences focus. And it was great preparation for a career that didn't exist at the time, which is internet marketing. And so I had a good run in that. Um, the accomplished a lot of things, ran my agency for over 20 years. And at some point I realized that we were helping our clients. And yes, we made them a lot of money. Uh, but I wasn't reaching a broad enough audience with my message. I tried to do public speaking. I wrote the books on landing page optimization, but I really felt like my calling, my purpose on this planet was to be more of a teacher and an evangelist and to help, um, people to lead better lives. And my particular way of doing that was to, I think fulfill in this giant gap that we have, you know, there's specialists in silos and behavioral economics, medical imaging, um, social sciences, um, all kinds of areas that inform our behavior. But the elephant in the room that wasn't being addressed is the fact that evolution is the thread through all that. And there weren't any accessible books on the subject. And so I wanted to just condense it all without, um, tables, without footnotes, without screenshots, and just distill it down to the essentials. And like I said, retrace this arc of evolution to describe how we behave and where we picked it up. So it was really the, um, my mission is to explain human beings to human beings. It's a pretty ambitious book because it covers memory, learning, sleep, storytelling, um, a lot of things, eh, but it, it, I've never seen that in one place. So I said, ah, this is my mission.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. I mean, you're making me want to read it. I will go to the local bookshop and not Amazon. And, um, I look for it, but, Um, well, is there anything that I, that you wanted to talk about that I kinda missed or glossed over, um, throughout this interview or in the HTS pub? Um, we, that we want to cover right now?
Tim Ash: I would say that just want to emphasize again, it's not about the technology. It's not about the, the new, new thing. It's about evolutionary psychology. So if you want to have a good career in customer experience, study customers. And they're not customers, they're people. So study people. And evolutionary psychology is the, is the, uh, is the foundational discipline for all of that and say, and again, the reason I wrote the book was to make it accessible. I didn't want it to be buried in some academic journals. Uh, so you can go to primal brain.com to find out more about the book.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here with me. Um, we will go to primal brain.com. Check that
Tim Ash: Yeah, that's that's for the book. If you want just information about my keynote speaking or marketing advisory services, I go to Tim Ash.com. I'm very easy to find him. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very open to connecting there.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Awesome. Thank you so much again, this is, this has been incredible.
Tim Ash: Lyssa, it's been my pleasure.
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