Monthly Archives: August 2013

Google Glass and the Sixth Dimension of Diffusion

First published August 29, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Tech stock analyst and blogger Henry Blodget has declared Google Glass dead on arrival. I’m not going to spend any time talking about whether or not I agree with Mr. Blodget (for the record, I do – Google Glass isn’t an adoptable product as it sits – and I don’t – wearable technology is the next great paradigm shifter) but rather dig into the reason that he feels Google Glasses are stillborn.

They make you look stupid.

The input for Google Glass is your voice, which means you have to walk around saying things like, “Glass, take a video” or “Glass, what is the temperature?” The fact is, to use Google Glass, you either have to accept the fact that you’ll look like a moron or the biggest jerk in the world. Either way, the vast majority of us aren’t ready to step into that particular spotlight.

Last week, I talked about Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Technology and shared five variables that determine the rate of adoption. There is actually an additional factor that Rogers also mentioned: “the status-conferring aspects of innovations emerged as the sixth dimension predicting rate of adoption.”

If you look at Roger’s Diffusion curve, you’ll find the segmentation of the adoption population is as follows: Innovators (2.5% of the population), Early Adopters (13.5%), Early Majority (34%), Late Majority (34%)  and Laggards (16%).  But there’s another breed that probably hides out somewhere between Innovators and Early Adopters. I call them the PAs (for Pompous Asses). They love gadgets, they love spending way too much for gadgets, and they love being seen in public sporting gadgets that scream “PA.” Previously, they were the ones seen guffawing loudly into Bluetooth headsets while sitting next to you on an airplane, carrying on their conversation long after the flight attendant told them to wrap it up. Today, they’d be the ones wearing Google Glass.

 

This sixth dimension is critical to consider when the balance between the other five is still a little out of whack. Essentially, the first dimension, Relative Advantage, has to overcome the friction of #2, Compatibility, and #3, Complexity (#4, Trialability, and #5, Observability, are more factors of the actual mechanics of diffusion, rather then individual decision criteria). If the advantage of an innovation does not outweigh its complexity or compatibility, it will probably die somewhere on the far left slopes of Rogers’ bell curve. The deciding factor will be the Sixth Dimension.

This is the territory that Google Glass currently finds itself in. While I have no doubt that the advantages of wearable technology (as determined by the user) will eventually far outweigh the corresponding “friction” of adoption, we’re not there yet. And so Google Glass depends on the Sixth Dimension. Does adoption make you look innovative, securely balanced on the leading edge? Or does it make you look like a dork? Does it confer social status or strip it away? After the initial buzz about Glass, social opinion seems to be falling into the second camp.

This brings us to another important factor to consider when trying to cash in on a social adoption wave: timing. Google is falling into the classic Microsoft trap of playing its hand too soon through beta release. New is cool among the early adopter set, which makes timing critical. If you can get strategic distribution and build up required critical mass fast enough, you can lessen the “pariah” factor. It’s one thing to be among a select clique of technological PAs, but you don’t want to be the only idiot in the room. Right now, with only 8,000 pairs distributed, if you’re wearing a pair, you’re probably the one that everyone else is whispering about.

Of course, you might not be able to hear them over the sound of your own voice, as you stand in front of the mirror and ask Google Glass to “take a picture.”

 

The Marketing Classic Few Marketers Have Ever Read

First published August 22, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It may be the best book you’ll ever read on marketing, but you won’t find it in the marketing section of Amazon.  They have it variously filed in three different categories: Politics and Social Sciences, Technology and Text Books. The book is Everett Rogers’ “Diffusion of Innovations,” and you should add it to your reading list.

The book is a comprehensive review of how new ideas spread and take hold in our society, and although it was first written in the 60s (it’s currently in its fifthedition), the findings are as fresh and relevant as ever. Its relevance to marketing is immediate and tangible. After all, what else is marketing but promoting the  adoption and diffusion of new things?

Rogers traces almost a century of diffusion research to see how everything from new high-yield corn varieties to birth control were adopted in various cultures. While there are not a lot of examples purely from the consumer marketplace, the generalized observations beg to be applied to marketing campaigns pushing new (and hopefully improved) products.

Consider these five innovation-specific variables that affect how quickly a new idea is adopted:

1)   Relative advantage – How much of a true advantage does the new innovation offer over what is currently being used? Rogers offers an important caveat here: “The receiver’s perceptions of the attributes of an innovation – not the attributes as classified by experts or change agents, affect its rate of adoption.”

2)   Compatibility – How well does the innovation fit into the framework of the customer’s current situation? Is it an incremental innovation, easily added, or a discontinuous innovation, requiring significant pain on the part of the user to adopt?

3)   Complexity – What is the learning curve that comes bundled with the innovation? The steeper the curve, the slower the rate of adoption.

4)   Trialability – Is it possible to try the product firsthand to determine the relative advantage (see #1)?

5)   Observability – Being the herders we are, adoption is sometimes a matter of “monkey see, monkey do.”

These factors may seem fundamental, but every day new “innovative” products are turned loose on the market, there to wither and die, simply because one or several of these check boxes remain unchecked.

Rogers also spend significant time looking at the social dynamics of diffusion and adoption, including the role of early adopters, change agents, influencers, mass communication channels and interpersonal persuasion. I found amazing close correlations to the findings of my own research into buying behaviors in the B2B world.

At the risk of oversimplifying this seminal work, Rogers found that adoption balances at the intersection of risk and reward. Risk stalls adoption, reward drives it forward, and clarity of communicating this risk/reward balance in a relevant way is either the catalyst or the inhibitor that determines how steep the adoption curve is.

This is a textbook, so expect a small investment of effort to wade through the rather academic delivery, but if you persevere (and to be fair, I’ve suffered through much worse in other books) you’ll come away with perhaps the clearest summation of marketplace dynamics ever put in print.

Maybe We Need More Skin in the Game

First published August 15, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I think our world, — or, more specifically, our marketplace — is a little too abstract. We — and by we, I mean the marketers, the suppliers to the market — live too far removed from the market itself: the consumers of the supplied goods.

It’s a point touched on by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his most recent book, “Antifragile.” Marketers and manufacturers, he suggests, don’t have enough skin in the game to keep them honest. They’re too far removed from accountability. There are too many protective buffers between them and the consequences of their actions.

The law is supposed to provide the accountability — but let’s face it, when it comes to enforcing accountability in the marketplace, we’re a long way from the Code of Hammurabi (one of the first legal codes known), where sloppy workmanship enacted a pretty definite penalty: If a builder has built a house for a man, and has not made his work sound, and the house he built has fallen, and caused the death of its owner, that builder shall be put to death.

Or, consider if the actions of the captain of the Exxon Valdez would have been different if he would have been answerable to a law like this: If a man has hired a boat and boatman, and loaded it with corn, wool, oil, or dates, or whatever it be, and the boatman has been careless, and sunk the boat, or lost what is in it, the boatman shall restore the boat which he sank, and whatever he lost that was in it.

The world was a smaller and more intimate place back then. You couldn’t hide behind corporate lawyers, malpractice insurance and legal loopholes. If you screwed up, chances are you’d lose an eye, a hand or even your life. If you built a bridge that collapsed, you might as well have been under the bridge, because your fate would be the same.

Now, I’m not sure we’re ready to return to the brutal simplicity of an “eye for an eye” legal code, but it does bring up a rather thorny issue: If there are little to no consequences for shoddy or unethical work, what keeps us honest? There’s nothing like skin in the game to provide some pretty compelling motivation for ethical business practices. And there’s nothing like a consequence-free pass to encourage fast and loose corporate behavior.

The good news, I suppose, is that technology is once again making the world a little more intimate. McLuhan’s Global Village is coming to pass, and the unethical of the world are increasingly being held accountable for their actions. In fact, the speed at which this is happening is confounding the legal systems of many a nation, as vigilantism and frontier justice are increasingly springing up, unchecked by due process and judicial oversight.

I avoid trying to predict the future, but fairness and accountability are hardwired into us, so I suspect that as technology allows us to identify those responsible in the most egregious cases, we will be moved to demand action. We will force the market to have more skin in the game, as our opinions and beliefs, in aggregate, will define that market.

Reengineering Hiring

First published August 9, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In all my years in business, the one thing I found consistently difficult was hiring good people. We spent a lot of time honing our screening skills, but I sometimes suspect we would have been just as far ahead by flipping a coin.

Over time, we found we achieved pretty good success rates with our lower-level hires, but the one area where consistent success eluded me was in our management recruitment. It seemed that the more senior the position, the worse our track record was. We had a few outright disasters.

When it comes down to it, hiring someone is making a prediction. You examine the evidence and try to foresee if that person will perform at an acceptable level in the position you have vacant. And, as I said in my last column, we humans don’t tend to be very good at making predictions. The more there is at stake in the position to be filled, the worse the consequences if our predictions are faulty. In looking at our past management hires, I realize that it wasn’t that our predictive powers were any less effective, it’s just that the pain of being wrong was more acute.

So, it was with some reassurance and more than a dollop of schadenfreude that I learned that Google has had exactly the same problem. That’s right, Google — the same company that has a zillion brilliant engineers working on every problem known to mankind. But those engineers have to come from somewhere, right? Someone has to hire them. And there, ay, there’s the rub!

In a recent interview in the New York Times, Laszlo Bock, senior vice president for people operations at Google, confessed that Google has tweaked, and, in some cases, massively overhauled its recruitment process.  Take, for example, Google’s famous early predilection for college G.P.A.s. According to Bock, based on actual performance, “G.P.A.s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.”

Google has also slowly backed away from its ironclad requirement that every hire have a degree. Bock revealed, “The proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14% of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.”

Sometimes, interviewers fall into the trap of over-playing their own cleverness and “expertise.” We spend more time trying to stroke our own ego by staging an impromptu show of power during the interview than in really listening to what the interviewee is saying. Google found that tricks like brainteasers, while they may make the interviewer feel clever, are worthless in screening out duds. The much less flashy but tried-and-true list of standardized behavioral questions (“Give me an example of when you…”) is a far better predictive indicator.

Finally, Bock admits that screening for leadership positions is the most difficult challenge, because leadership is something that defies easy definitions. “We’ve found that leadership is a more ambiguous and amorphous set of characteristics than the work we did on the attributes of good management, which are more of a checklist and actionable.” So you can ask questions, probing for effective leadership, but because leading people tends to fall into the category of ill-defined problems, you often have to do the best job you can in the hiring process, and then track performance religiously. In this case, “slow to hire, quick to fire” is a good principle to follow.

I found Bock’s last words, on the role of Big Data in management decisions, including those involving people’s performance, revealing: “Big Data — when applied to leadership — has tremendous potential to uncover the 10 universal things we should all be doing. But there are also things that are specifically true only about your organization, and the people you have and the unique situation you’re in at that point in time. I think this will be a constraint to how big the data can get because it will always require an element of human insight.”

Marketing in the “Middle”

First published August 1, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In case you haven’t heard, email is dead. In fact, it’s died several times. You could call it the cat of digital marketing, working it’s way through its nine lives. And it’s not alone. Search has died more than a few times. Display was DOA over a decade ago, and has resurrected itself, only to suffer several more untimely demises. In fact, for any digital channel you might care to mention, I can probably find an obituary.

For some reason, we love to declare things dead. We like clarity and finality, and there’s nothing like death for getting an unequivocal point across. Death, by its very nature, should be the final word – except that, in these cases, it almost never is. These channels, like Mark Twain, have had “the rumors of their deaths greatly exaggerated.”

It’s yet another example of how we hate ambiguity. We don’t like being in the middle, drifting between two far off anchor points. It feels uncertain and “mushy”. Humans don’t do well with “mushy”. We prefer predictability. We like to know where we stand, which requires knowing what’s under our feet. The middle represents “terra incognito” – undiscovered and unstable. We know, if we stand here, we have to be prepared to be nimble and fleet of foot.

This tendency comes down to an unfortunate human fragility – we like predictable outcomes, but we suck at making predictions. Not just some of us suck at it – we all suck at it. Philip Tetlock conducted a two-decade study looking at the success rate of “experts” in making predictions in a wide variety of subjects, especially politics. The outcome? Experts come out slightly ahead of coin tosses and chimps throwing darts. Tetlock’s long list of blundered predictions is staggering. Expertise does not lead to accuracy in divining the future. Yet, we still cling to this false hope. We crave a universe that unfolds as it should, or, at least, as we expect it to.

The messiness comes from the complexity of real life. There’s just too much “stuff” happening for us to make sense of it with our limited intellectual horsepower. Evolution, in its blind wisdom, has allowed for that by building in some natural defenses against complexity. We refer to them as instincts, emotions and beliefs. The nasty “gotch ya” in this is that the more we accumulate experience and knowledge, the more inflexible those beliefs and instincts become. We tend to adopt “big ideas” or “macro-beliefs” as guiding principles and philosophical anchors, which become the lens through which we see the world. We trade off open mindedness for expertise. Tetlock calls these “hedgehogs”, from Isiah Berlin’s essay. “Foxes”, on the other hand, draw on a wide variety of experiences to shape their views. They, by their nature, tend to live in the middle.  Tetlock found that foxes have much better track records when it comes to prediction. So, if you want to know what might happen, don’t ask an expert, especially one who is regularly seen on TV. Ask a dilettante – who is much more comfortable with “mushy.”

Ironically, Jim Collins, of Good to Great and Built to Last fame, also taps Berlin for the hedgehog and fox analogies, but he believed that “hedgehogs” are what makes great companies great, because they provide a single objective to focus on – the “hedgehog” concept.

So, who’s right – Tetlock or Collins? The answer, as you would expect in a column on this theme, is that they’re both right. The world is neither a place exclusively for foxes nor hedgehogs. The sweet spot is in the middle.

Nowhere is this truer than in marketing – which has to mirror all the irrationality of human behavior. There are no absolutes in marketing; there is just a lot of mushiness in the middle.  We need hedgehogs for the “big ideas” that make great marketing great. But we also need foxes to help us navigate through middle successfully.  In fact, the more time I’ve spent in marketing (trying assiduously to avoid becoming an “expert”) the more I’ve realized that the middle is where all the action is: between quantitative and qualitative, between strategy and big data, between creative branding and direct marketing, between science and art.

And here, in the middle, we hate to call anything “dead,” because you just never know what might happen.