Around 8 o’clock in the morning, a young psychology student enters her classroom and sits in her chair. She leaves her things behind her chair (as usual) and takes her pencil out of her bag to put it in her chair.

But she doesn’t take a notebook. Nor anything to write about, really.

The reason is simple: this particular day, she isn’t here to take any classes; she is having an evaluation. An “individualized personality test”, her professor explains as he hands her a paper, with individualized questions for every student to respond honestly and calmly.

There are 13 questions. All of them are very simple. But funny enough, as she answers them, she realizes the professor is not lying: all the questions feel personal, almost to a disturbing level. As if the test was talking directly to her, to her fears, her deepest wishes, as if with every answer she discovered something new about herself… or at least, what she believes to know.

The test is over. Now the professor asks his students to evaluate how truthfully the tests described them from a scale from 1 to 5. Without thinking twice, she gave it a 5. And feeling a little more self-realized, she left the classroom.

This “test” was real. And as a matter of fact, in 1948 this evaluation went down in history as one of the most important studies in the history of modern psychology, mainly due to two reasons:

First of all, the questions were not “customized”; Each of the 39 students who participated answered the same 13 questions, and all written in the same way, in the same order, and yet the vast majority of students said that this test was “extremely truthful” when it came to describing their personalities, with an average rating of 4.3 for accuracy.

Second, the questions weren’t even “designed”. And of all the possible places, the teacher took the questions…. from a local horoscope (yeah, the title wasn’t for decoration

only) and then pasted them as they were originally written, without modifying even a comma.

These results received the name of the teacher who did the test: “the Forer effect”, a psychological phenomenon explaining why people accept any descriptions as if they were made to them… as long as these said descriptions are extremely general, ambiguous and positive (generally) in nature. But more than anything, what the study showed is that the brain is an incredible, extremely complex, extremely mysterious… but after all… extremely imperfect thing.

Susceptible to trickery under the right conditions.

Deceptible.

This article is not about how to “exploit” some psychological phenomenon to sell things, or how “successful” marketing is about manipulating the masses. Unfortunately, this is the mentality that all marketers would carry on for the next 80 years: that being “successful” involves “psychological maneuvering”; that being “successful” is making people believe that they need things that are not even half of what they promise; that “to be” successful is taking those things that people consume the most networks and squeeze them without pain or glory.

That being “successful” is having the realization that change is inevitable and your only concern should just be “riding the wave”, confidently lying to people to buy something from you.

We do not believe that.

Being a good marketer doesn’t mean knowing how to manipulate, That is a dangerous lie.

Being a good marketer is knowing that every word, image and sound that we use should help people find practical solutions to their daily problems, help companies make the world see its value, being useful in the daily lives of people and of those companies that want to provide them

Being a good marketer, for us, comes from understanding and applying a single principle in each campaign, project and future meeting with the companies that shall come:

We are not, nor do we pretend to be more than what we are. On the other hand… what we want to be, what we believe, what motivates us, those things are constant:

We are Growth marketers. We believe that marketing change is inevitable … but growing is always a choice.

We are passionate about making people’s talents shine, which is why we are always looking to attract the best talent we can find, to give them an opportunity to show it off to the world.

We are guided by results, always aware of the value of what each client offers

We believe in the power of data, always working on solutions based only on deep analysis and creativity.

And lastly, of course, we believe that a marketer does not create a problem, but rather provides a real solution.

We are Nomad Digital, a growth marketing agency with the desire to help shine the companies of tomorrow.

And we have the conviction that it will be a pleasure working with you.