Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Climbing the Slippery Slopes of Mount White Hat

First published August 30, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

On Monday of this week, fellow Search Insider Ryan DeShazer bravely threw his hat back in the ring regarding this question: Is Google better or worse off because of SEO?

DeShazer confessed to being vilified after a previous column indicated that Google owed us something. I admit I have a column penned but never submitted that Ryan could have added to the “vilify” side of that particular tally. But in his Monday column, Ryan touches on a very relevant point: “What is the thin line between White Hat and Black Hat SEO?” For as long as I’ve been in this industry (which is pushing 17 years now) I’ve heard that same debate. I’ve been at conference sessions where white hats and black hats went head to head on the question. It’s one of those discussions that most sane people in the world could care less about, but we in the search biz can’t seem to let go.

Ryan stirs the pot again by indicating that Google may be working on an SEO “Penalty Box”: a temporary holding pen for sites that are using “rank modifying spammers” where results will fluctuate more than in the standard index. The high degree of flux should lead to further modifications by the “spammers” that will help Google identify them and theoretically penalize them. DeShazer’s concern is the use of the word “spammers” in the wording of the patent application, which seems to include any “webmasters who attempt to modify their search engine ranking.”

I personally think it’s dangerous to try to apply wording used in a patent application (the source for this speculation) arbitrarily against what will become a business practice. Wording in a patent is intended to help convey the concept of the intellectual property as quickly and concisely as possible to a patent review bureaucrat. The wording deals in concepts that are (ironically) pretty black and white. It has little to no relationship to how that IP will be used in the real world, which tends to be colored in various shades of gray. But let’s put that aside for a moment.

Alan Perkins, an SEO I would call vociferously “white hat,” some years ago came up with what I believe is the quintessential difference here. Black hats optimize for a search engine. White hats optimize for humans.  When I make site recommendations, they are to help people find better content faster and act on it. I believe, along with Perkins, that this approach will also do good things for your search visibility.

But that also runs the danger of being an oversimplification. The picture is muddied by clients who measure our success as SEO agencies by their position relative to their competitors on a keyword-by-keyword level. This is the bed the SEO industry has built for itself, and now we’re forced to sleep in it. I’m as guilty as the next guy of cranking out competitive ranking reports, which have conditioned this behavior over the past decade and a half.

The big problem, and one continually pointed out by vocal grey/black hats, is that you can’t keep up with competition who are using methods more black than white by staying with white-hat tactics alone. The fact is, black hat works, for a while. And if I’m the snow-white SEO practitioner whose clients are repeatedly trounced by those using a black hat consultant, I’d better expect some client churn. Ethics and profitably don’t always go together in this industry.

To be honest, over the past five years, I’ve largely stopped worrying about the whole white hat/black hat thing. We’ve lost some clients because we weren’t aggressive enough, but the ones who stayed were largely untouched by the string of recent Google updates targeting spammers. Most benefited from the house cleaning of the index. I’ve also spent the last five years focused a lot more on people and good experiences than on algorithms and link juice, or whatever the SEO flavor du jour is.

I think Alan Perkins nailed it way back in 2007. Optimize for humans. Aim for the long haul. And try to be ethical. Follow those principles, and I find it hard to imagine that Google would ever tag you with the label of “spammer.”

Direct vs. Distributors: Clash of the Compensation Models

First published August 24, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The world of marketing is heading for a head-on collision, thanks to consumers who seem to think they have the right to inform themselves prior to purchasing. The problem? We marketers trying to jam a semi-trailer full of legacy channel baggage into the sleek new  two-door direct-marketing roadster we’re taking for a spin.  Simple physics dictate that something has to give. My money’s on that bloated distribution chain.

Here’s how this particular pain was recently expressed to me: “We’re double paying for our leads. We get them through pay-per-click, they come to our site, go through the quote engine and get a price, then they go to one of our dealers and buy there. We have to turn around and pay the dealer a commission again, on top of what we already paid to get the lead in the first place. We have to figure out how to stop people from doing that!”

I get the frustration. I truly do. But in this case, it’s just a byproduct of transitioning to a more efficient marketplace. There are also vestiges of hard-to-change buying behaviors. When you have one leg in the old world of marketing and one in the new, and the two are diverging rapidly, groin injuries are not a surprising outcome.

The problem here is that traditional distribution networks were created to get around the problem of geography. For many reasons, you had to be in the same market as your prospects to sell to them. Buyers simply didn’t have the resources available to adequately research future purchases, so they used relationships with distributors as proxy. They relied on the opinion of a person they knew, knowing that if that person steered them wrong, they knew where he/she lived. This risk mitigation mechanism became more effective the more you did business with a particular distributor, so distributors expanded their scope of service, becoming one-stop shops for multiple products or services. The religion of the relationship ruled the market.

But the advent of digital information is in the process of changing this system. Now we can research purchases — and we do. Information is slowly replacing relationships. While we still rely heavily on the opinions of people we know, including distributors (this emerged as the single most influential factor in B2B purchasing in our BuyerSphere research), online research is not far behind, and it’s gaining ground quickly. Humans being humans, we don’t switch en masse from one behavior to the other. We transition over time —  typically, a lot of time — as in several years or even decades.

This, then, is the marketplace that the modern marketer is trying to straddle. In many marketplaces, particularly B2B, we’re seeing a decoupling of product research from the actual purchase. Buyers are quickly learning that distributors have very limited information on the average product they carry, so they’re turning directly to the manufacturer. But when it comes time to purchase, transactions often go through traditional channels. Hence the double paying for each lead the aforementioned marketer was complaining about.  You pay once to gain entry into the prospect’s consideration set while he’s researching, and you pay again to actually win the business.

This double paying isn’t some behavior that can be corrected in buyers. It’s the price we marketers are paying for our efforts to transform the marketplace. In the meantime, as we build new information networks, we have to hold on to our traditional distribution networks. In the long run, it will be a good thing for marketers, as the problem of geography is slowly being eliminated. But it will never be gone, as long as consumers’ trust in information provided by marketers is less than total. If there is a lack of trust, we will still rely on proximate relationships as a mitigating factor. The higher the degree of risk in a purchase, the more we will turn to those relationships.

Living a B-Rated Life

First published August 16, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I love ratings and reviews — and I’m not alone.  4.7 people out of 5 people love reviews. We give them two thumbs up. They rate 96.5% on the Tomato-meter.  I find it hard to imagine what my life would be without those ubiquitous 5 stars to guide me.

This past weekend, I was in Banff, Alberta for my sister’s wedding. My family decided to find a place to go for breakfast. The first thing I did was check with Yelp, and soon we were stacking up the Eggs Benny at a passable breakfast buffet less than two miles from our hotel. I never knew said buffet existed before checking the reviews — but once I found it, I trusted the wisdom of crowds. It seldom steers me wrong.

Now, you do have to learn how to read between the lines of a typical review site. Just before heading to my sister’s wedding, I spent the day in Seattle at the Bazaar Voice user event and was fascinated to learn that their user research shows that the typical number of reviews scanned is generally about seven. Once people hit seven reviews, they feel they have a good handle on the overall tone, even if there are 1,000 reviews in total. This seems right to me. It’s about the number of reviews I scan if possible.

But we also rely on the average rating summaries that typically show above the individual reviews and comments. When I read a review, I tend to follow these rules of thumb:

  • Look for the entry with the most reviews.
  • Find one that has a high average, but be suspicious of ones that have absolutely no negative reviews (unusual if you follow Rule One).
  • Scan the top six or seven reviews to get an overall sense of what people like and dislike.
  • Sort by the most negative reviews and read at least one to see what people hate.
  • Decide whether the negative reviews are the result of a one-off bad experience, or possibly an impossible-to-please customer (you can usually pick them out by their comments).
  • Do the “sniff test” to see if there are planted reviews (again, they’re not that hard to pick out).

I’ve used the same approach for restaurants, hotels, consumer electronics, cars, movies, books, hot tubs – pretty much anything I’ve had to open my wallet for in the past five or six years. It’s made buying so much easier. Ratings and reviews are like the Cole’s notes of word of mouth. They condense the opinions of the marketplace down to the bare essentials.

It’s little wonder that Google is starting to invest heavily in this area, with recent acquisitions of Zagat and Frommer’s. These are companies that built entire businesses on eliminating risk through reviews. The aggregation and organization of opinion is a natural extension for search engines. Of course, we should give it a fancy name, like “social graph,”, so we can sound really smart at industry conferences, but the foundations are built on plain common sense. Our attraction to reviews is hardwired into our noggins. We are social animals and like to travel in packs.  Language evolved so we could point each other to the best cassava root patch and pass along the finer points of mastodon hunting.

As Google acquires more and more socially informed content, it will be integrated into Google’s algorithms. This is why Google had to launch its own social network. Unfortunately, Google+ hasn’t gained the critical mass needed to provide the signals Google is looking for. I personally haven’t had a Google+ invite in months. Despite Larry Page’s insistence that it’s a roaring success, others have pointed out that Google+ seems to be a network of tire kickers, with little in the way of ongoing engagement. Contrast that with Pinterest, which is all the various women in my life seem to talk about — and is outperforming even Twitter when it comes to driving referrals.

I personally love the proliferation of structured word-of-mouth. Some say it negates serendipity, but I actually believe I will be more apt to explore if there is some reassurance I won’t have a horrible experience. Otherwise, this weekend my family and I would have been having Egg McMuffins at the Banff McDonald’s — and really, is that the life you want?

The Virtuous Cycle of SEO

First published August 9, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Virtuous cycles are anomalies. They fight the universal law of entropy, and for that reason alone, they are worth investigation. Rather than a gradual slide toward dissipation and equilibrium, virtuous cycles build upon themselves, yielding self-sustaining returns cycle after cycle.

In marketing, there are not a lot of virtuous cycles. Most marketing efforts need to be constantly fueled by a steady stream of dollars. The minute the budget tap is closed, so is the marketing program. But there are a few, and SEO is one of them, if done correctly. Let’s take a quick look at the elements required to build a truly virtuous cycle.

The Power of Positive Feedback

Positive feedback is the engine of a virtuous cycle. It’s what drives sustainable growth. Think of it as the compound interest paid on your marketing efforts.

In an SEO program, positive feedback comes in the form of the algorithmic love shown to you by the search engines, dragging in an ever-increasing number of eyeballs. These eyeballs also contribute to the feedback loop, creating new links, new user-generated content, new activity, all of which continue to drive rankings, up, which drives new eyeballs, which… well, you get the idea. And the cycle continues.

Investment Required

Virtuous cycles require an upfront investment, and it’s usually a significant one. You can’t collect compound interest on a zero balance. Cycles don’t start from scratch.

In SEO, the investments required come in the form of content and an engaging user experience. You have to give a user a reason to come, to engage and to evangelize to really leverage the benefits of SEO. You can evaluate if you have the makings of a virtuous cycle by asking yourself the following questions:

–      What are my users coming for?

–      What will they do?

–      How can they engage?

–      Why will they care?

–      Will their expectations be exceeded?

If you have a less than satisfactory answer to any of these questions, you don’t have what it takes to create a virtuous cycle.

Appealing to Human Nature

If your cycle depends on human behavior, as most do, you have to appeal to one of the basic tenets of human nature. As complicated as we can be, we are generally driven by a surprisingly small number of basic needs. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Paul Lawrence, in their book “Driven,” identified four fundamental human drives: We need to acquire, to learn, to bond and to defend. Examine any virtuous cycle, and you’ll always find at least one of these drives at the heart of it.

Ask yourself how your online presence contributes to these drives. Remember, for a cycle to begin, positive feedback is required. And positive feedback depends on engagement from your visitors.

Universally Beneficial

Finally, a virtuous cycle needs to benefit all parties in order for it to be sustainable. It needs to be a win/win/win. If, somewhere along the line, someone gets screwed, the cycle will ultimately fall apart.

In SEO, this means you must play along with the algorithm rather than try to beat it. Short-term thinking and virtuous cycles never go well together. One algorithmic update to crack down on a SEO loophole will shut down your cycle in a heartbeat. But if you work with a search engine to make a great user experience discoverable, the cycle will begin.

Three Catalysts for Healthy Social Networks

First published August 2, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Look at any graphic representation of a social network, and you will see a somewhat globular cluster of nodes — and, at the center, you’ll find the subject or owner of the network. The density of the nodes will be greater near the center, but there will be small clusters of interconnected nodes that will appear throughout the map. This pattern, the visual interpretation of human connection, looks much the same now as it did for tribal humans 100,000 years ago. But there is one important difference. Then, you probably only had one network you belonged to, which was defined by geography. Today, you can belong to many networks, and they’re often defined by ideas.

Connecting the nodes in a typical social network map are small lines representing the glue, or ties, of the network. At the simplest level, a network can consist of just two nodes and one line, called a dyad. The line represents the relationship between the two nodes. But what is the raw material of that line? What causes it to exist in the first place? Sometimes, we can find clues in language. If that line represents a relationship, what causes two people to relate to each other? The word relation comes from the Latin noun relatio, which has two relevant meanings: carrying back and to narrate. Both meanings depend on communication. Communication, in turn, has its etymological roots in the latin comoenus, which means shared. From this, we see the structure of a network depends on both the sharing of a common concept (a value, goal or ideal) and communication. These are the raw materials of those little links in the diagram.

Those who analyze social network structure often look for reciprocity in those links: are they two-way links?  Reciprocity is hardwired into humans. Evolutionary biologists and behavioral economists have found that the most successful survival strategy is something called “tit for tat.” Even if you’re among the 46% of Americans who don’t believe in evolution, you still can’t ignore reciprocity. Every single religion has as one of its tenets its own variation of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It all comes down to the same thing: it’s not beneficial to keep investing in a one-way relationship. If we keep inviting you for dinner and you never invite us, sooner or later the invitations will stop coming (offspring and certain relatives being the exception — and then there’s another whole evolutionary dynamic at play).

Here we have the three foundations for a stable social network: communication, sharing and reciprocity. Not exactly rocket science, just plain common sense. Yet it’s amazing how often we lose sight of these three things when we start applying them to our marketing efforts. Let’s take just one example. Look at any company’s social presence, whether it‘s their Facebook page, their Twitter feed or their Linked In profile, and see if there’s evidence of reciprocity. Is all the communication going out, or are people responding? Active user feedback is one of the primary signals we look for in a healthy social network.

Another signal is clear evidence of shared values. As I’ve said before, frequency of engagement (especially if it’s of the nonreciprocal variety) does not lead to brand loyalty, but shared values do. Are the values of an organization clearly evident in their social outposts? Are there active conversations based on those shared values?

Finally, we have communication. Marketers have to take every opportunity to facilitate communication. Often, commercial social networks are based on the sharing of required information. Companies (especially in the B2B space) have to become much better at sharing the wealth of information they have in their own particular industry. They have to start thinking like publishers. And they have to enable forums to allow for active feedback.

Get these three things right, and strong social networks will grow organically.

Marissa Mayer and Yahoo’s Regression to the Mean

First published July 26, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There is not a lot of overlap between the universes of Gord Hotchkiss and Marissa Mayer, but our orbits have intersected on a few occasions in the past. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Mayer about various aspects of search on a handful of occasions, so it was with some interest that I watched the announcement and subsequent buzz about her appointment as Yahoo CEO.

Much has been said about Mayer’s personal qualifications for the job, and the general consensus is that this is a good thing for Yahoo. If this were a movie, I’m thinking she would score an 82% on the Tomatometer, handily qualifying as “fresh.” Personally, I would agree. Mayer has a razor-sharp (and somewhat intimidating) intellect, a core love for search and an innate sense of what’s right for the user. All of these things will be big plusses for Yahoo. What she hasn’t been tested on is her ability to run a big company. And that’s where things could get interesting.

No doubt Google still imparts its own “halo” effect on anyone who has spent time at the “Plex” in a leadership position. And few have spent as much time there as Mayer, who, as hire number 20, was Google’s first female engineer, logging 13 years with bosses (and hopefully still friends) Page and Brin.  These three tied a tight little knot in the early days of Google, but from the outside, that knot seems to have frayed just a little in the past few years. Mayer’s recent moves in the company have been more lateral than vertical, as later additions to the Google team were promoted above her. Undoubtedly, this was a contributing factor to the parting of the ways with Google.

But how much value does Mayer’s vast inside knowledge of Google and its past successes bring to Yahoo? It must have played a major role in her selection as the new chief Yahooligan. But was she instrumental in the streak of seemingly picture-perfect management calls in the early days of the Internet’s Golden Child? And, even if she were, does it really matter?

Earlier this year, I took part in an open forum on search at an industry conference. Our moderator tossed a ticking time bomb at the panel, in the form of this delicately stated question: “What the #%^&$ is Google doing lately? Have they gone insane?” We each offered our opinions, which ranged in the degree of madness ascribed to Google’s executives. I started my response with this, “I think we tend to downplay the role luck played in the early days of Google. Maybe their luck is just running out.”

There is a much fancier name for the hypothetical situation I described, which is called “regression to the mean.”  In his recent book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” (a HIGHLY recommended read) psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explores how this can lead us to overvalue executive talent when it’s combined with the halo effect. Kahneman even uses Google as an example: “Of course there was a great deal of skill in the Google story, but luck played a more important role in the actual event than it does in the telling of it. And the more luck was involved, the less there is to be learned.”

Regression to the mean simply means that when you take a snapshot in time that represents either exceptionally good or bad performance, subsequent snapshots tend to move closer to the average. And those highs and lows generally involve luck to some extent. So you can poach talent from a company on a hot streak, only to find that it wasn’t the executives responsible for the performance, but simply the planets aligning in a favorable way.

As an ex-CEO of a company, albeit a tiny one, I find it hard to swallow that leadership might not be as important as we think in the fortunes of a company. But I generally find Kahneman to be an incredibly astute observer of human errors in judgment, so I have to resist the urge to go with my own cognitive biases here and trust Kahneman’s research.  He doesn’t say leadership is inconsequential, but he does caution against ignoring the role of timing and sheer luck.

This is also not to downplay the role Marissa Mayer will play in the future of Yahoo.  Somebody has to lead the company, and Mayer is at least as good a choice as anyone else I can think of.

Who knows? Maybe Yahoo’s luck is due to change. In their case, “regression to the mean” means there’s no place to go but up.

Bet Big on Digital Acceleration

First published July 19, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The other day, I was going through some background research for a client. What struck me, as I waded through the reams of PowerPoint decks and research reports, was how integral digital was to the core functions of this particular industry. Whether it was key influencers in the purchase decision, reasons for doing business with a company or competitive differentiators, technological proficiency was right up there with traditional factors like price, value, convenience and reliability.

As potential customers, we expect companies to have their digital acts together. More than this, it appears we’re ready to reward companies that aggressively invest in raising the bar of their own connected maturity level. Why, then, are companies so loath to place significant bets on their own digital future?

I deal with big companies all the time, and when it comes to investing in their own websites, online marketing, web support platforms and other planks in their digital platform, they seem to prefer hedging their bets, squeezing out miserly budgets at a level that would make Ebenezer Scrooge seem hopelessly profligate. None of them are looking at digital proficiency as a way to distance themselves from the competition. Instead, it seems that they prefer the security of the herd, nervously watching the pack for signs of movement and only investing when they feel they have to to avoid being trampled by a stampede. It’s Geoffrey Moore’s classic Crossing the Chasm behavioral pattern, writ large.

It’s not the first time this has  happened. The same thing took place about 100 years ago, as Industrial America embraced electrical power. The entrenched manufacturers had all invested heavily in steam power. Despite the obvious benefits that electricity offered (cleaner, safer, more efficient factories) they never did fully embrace it, jury-rigging factories and doing ad hoc retrofits, stranding themselves in a competitive no-man’s land between electricity and steam. New competitors built new factories that maximized their advantages, and the old guard never recovered. In a decade, most of them were gone.

Economists refer to this as a regime transition. In hindsight, it seems hedging your bet when it comes to new technology is not really “playing it safe.”

To me, it seems obvious we’re in exactly the same place. History is repeating itself. If these companies look at their own research, it’s easy to see the signs. Yet research tends to be digested in context, and often people see what they want to see in it. What’s potentially worse, they fail to see what they don’t want to see. Even more frustrating, the cost of making a significant, best-in-class investment in accelerating digital maturity is relatively minimal — perhaps even infinitesimal — given the other operating costs these companies are carrying.

When it comes to digital maturity, I find the real acid test is how effectively companies connect with their customers, both present and future, through online channels. Is the website truly effective? Do they have good search visibility? Have they found a way to play in social that recognizes the importance of authenticity and the forging of true relationships? Do they understand how their customers might use a mobile device to connect with them? If a company can do these things right, chances are they’re well advanced in the digital maturity model.

The other thing to look for is how the company is using digital technology to reinvent the traditional ways it does business, especially when it comes to handling relationships with real people. I find sales to be one of the last bastions of “we’ve always done it this way” thinking. If a company is seriously considering how to make its sales force more effective by leveraging digital channels, it’s a good sign for the future.

In my opinion, betting the farm on digital maturity seems to be a no-brainer — especially when, in terms of real dollars and cents, it’s a relatively small farm we’re talking about here.

A Cyclist’s Farewell

First published July 12, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This past Sunday, I spent the day riding a bike 100 miles through searing 95-degree heat in Canada’s only desert. Bet you didn’t even realize Canada has a desert, did you? Well, we do. Trust me. And it’s freaking hot. After about 60 miles, I was ready to pack it in and grab a beer. But I gutted it out for another 40 miles, because that’s what cycling is about: gutting it out.

Just to put my accomplishment in humbling perspective, in the Tour de France, cyclists cover over 2,200 miles in 21 days, averaging somewhere around 110 miles a day. And they do it over some of the toughest climbs on the European continent and still have enough left to attack at the end.

If you’ve never ridden a long distance, you can’t fully appreciate how mind-boggling it is that these guys have enough left in their legs to sprint across the finish line. You can’t win the Tour without gutting it out. Luck plays a huge role, both positively and negatively (just ask Giro d’Italia champion Ryder Hesjedal, who got caught in a crash and had to withdraw), but at the end of tour, it’s the gutsiest performer who will prevail. I love cycling because it matches my personality: putting your head down and slogging it through to the finish line.

I give you this preamble because last week, the world of search marketing lost a very gutsy guy who also happened to be a cyclist.

I met Ron Jones when we both served on the board of SEMPO. I never really knew Ron that well, but within moments of meeting, we were both talking about cycling. That’s another thing you’ll learn about cyclists. It’s kind of like a secret handshake. We recognize each other immediately and then bore everyone else to tears talking about our favorite bikes (I ride a Trek, but damn those Pinarellos look fine), our favorite ride (aforesaid ride through the desert with none other than the incomparable Eddy Merckx), our own near-death experience (every cyclist has one) or our preferred brand of chamois butter (don’t ask).

Ron had all the earmarks of a serious cyclist: quiet determination, passion, drive and a ready smile. Ron had guts. He could go the distance — and he did, in pretty much every aspect of his life. He was a driving force in the world of search, founding his own successful agency, writing a book and always giving back to the greater SEM community. He was a consummate family man. I never met his family, but you couldn’t talk to Ron long before the subject of his wife Tracey and his four kids came up.  He was a mainstay in his church and community.

Yep, Ron knew how to gut it out and get it done.

But as I said, luck has a big part to play here as well. In Ron’s case, it was luck of the worst kind: a diagnosis of cancer. I haven’t seen Ron for a few years, so I learned about his passing from an email that went out to past members of the SEMPO board who were fortunate enough to have served with Ron.

I was devastated.

Ron was vital and alive and vibrant. He was a contributor. He was one of the great guys that cause you to smile automatically when you mention his name, because you hold the memory so fondly. It’s circumstances like this that cause you to say, “@#$%#, that’s not fair!”

I don’t know how Ron’s battle went. I wasn’t there for the climbs and descents. I don’t know how often he “bonked” on the way to the finish line. But I do know this. Ron gutted it out. He finished like the champion he was. And now, he’s got the wind at his back.

As part of this weekend’s ride, I got a souvenir shirt. I’m actually wearing it right now. On the front it says, “Ride Hard. Smile Often.”

That pretty much describes Ron Jones. He will be missed.

 

Three Myths About Customer Love

First published July 5, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Today, I want to talk about the last of the three posts by Harvard Business Review bloggers, Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird  I have been surveying: “Three Myths about What Customers Want.” Specifically, I want to look at this post’s implications for online marketing.

Myth #1: Most consumers want to have relationships with your brand.

This myth is at the crux of many, many social media campaigns. The theory is, a “like” = “intent to buy.” I have said before that I believe this is hogwash. The HBR bloggers concur:

“Only 23% of the consumers in our study said they have a relationship with a brand. In the typical consumer’s view of the world, relationships are reserved for friends, family and colleagues. That’s why, when you ask the 77% of consumers who don’t have relationships with brands to explain why, you get comments like ‘It’s just a brand, not a member of my family.’”

Marketers being marketers, we tend to think the entire world revolves around whatever it is we’re trying to sell. We believe people actually give a damn. They don’t, at least not in the vast majority of cases.  In contrast, relationships endure. They are there for the long haul. Consumer consideration runs on much shorter timelines.

There are degrees to consider here, however. What consumers can develop for a brand is loyalty. This falls into the category of beliefs, and that is what drives a lot of consumer behavior. We can believe a brand offers good value without having a relationship with it. Beliefs are heuristic decision shortcuts, which help consumers cut through cognitive overload.

Myth #2: Interactions built relationships.

Actually, say the HBR team, relationships are built on shared values:

“Of the consumers in our study who said they have a brand relationship, 64% cited shared values as the primary reason. That’s far and away the largest driver. Meanwhile, only 13% cited frequent interactions with the brand as a reason for having a relationship.”

Values can be a powerful driver of how we form beliefs. The brand I probably have the strongest affinity for is Apple. And it’s not because I have a relationship with Apple (never having visited its Facebook page). It’s because I believe Apple shares my values of creative freedom, uncompromising design and aesthetically pleasing experiences. I interact with an Apple device every day of my life. But I interact with the company only when I need something.

Myth #3: The more interaction, the better.

Marketers want to dominate a prospect’s time, in the mistaken belief that it will make the relationship “stickier.” If “stickier” means frustrating and annoying, they could be right.

“There’s no correlation between interactions with a customer and the likelihood that he or she will be ‘sticky’ (go through with an intended purchase, purchase again, and recommend),” writes the HBR team. “Yet, most marketers behave as if there is a continuous linear relationship between the number of interactions and share of wallet. That’s why, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, you see well-established retailers like Neiman Marcus, Lands’ End and Toys R Us sending customers over 300 emails annually.”

We all have lots to do. The last thing on that list is to spend unnecessary time interacting with a brand because they’ve targeted us as a “loyal” customer. Here’s a question to ask yourself: Who benefits most from all these interactions — the customer or the marketer? If the answer is the marketer, then why should the customer care?

The danger of becoming marketers is that we gain a distorted perception of reality. Our job is to love a brand. It consumes our professional lives. This does weird things to a human brain. It makes it almost impossible to look at our brands the same way the rest of the world does. We care because we have to. We get paid to. The rest of the world doesn’t share the same motivation.

Paralyzed by Choice

First published June 28, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s column, I looked at how Harvard Business Review bloggers Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird spelled the end of the purchase funnel. Today, I’d like to look at the topic they tackled in the second of the three-part series, “If Customers Ask for More Choice, Don’t Listen.”

Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice,” believes we’re overloaded with choices. In fact, we have so many choices to make, often about inconsequential things, that we live with the constant anxiety of making the wrong choice.

This paradox meets today’s consumer head on, over and over, in situation after situation. The other factor, which I’ve seen play a massive role in buying behaviors, is the degree of risk in the purchase. The bigger the purchase, the higher the risk.

The final piece of the buying puzzle is the reward that lies at the end of the potential purchase. Our brains are built to balance risk and reward in fractions of a second. But we don’t do it by a calm, rational weighing of pros and cons, thus engaging the enlightened thinking part of our brains. We do it by unleashing emotions from the dark, primitive core of our brain. The risk/reward balance whips up a potent mix of neural activity that sets our decision-making engine in motion.

The degree of risk or reward sets the emotional framework for a purchase. High reward, low risk generally means a fairly fast purchase, such as an impulse buy. High risk, low reward may mean a very long purchase cycle with an extended consideration process. Whatever the buying path, there will be an undercurrent of emotion running just below the surface.

Now, let’s match up the findings of the HBR team. High-risk purchases automatically ramp up the level of anxiety we feel. We’re afraid we’ll make the wrong decision. And, in a complex purchase, there’s not just one decision to be made – there are several. At each decision point, we’re bombarded by choices. If the hundreds of purchase path evaluations I’ve done are any indication, the seller spends little time worrying about presenting those choices in a user-friendly way. Catalog pages are jammed with useless and irrelevant items. Internal site search results are generally abysmal. And product information typically takes the form of a long shopping list of features. Very little of it speaks to buyers in a language they care about.

This is a dangerous combination. We have the natural anxiety that comes with risk. We have a gauntlet of decisions to make, each raising the level of anxiety. And we have websites that contribute greatly to the frustration by making it difficult to navigate the information that does exist, which is either too little, too much, too irrelevant or too salesy — never does it seem to be just right.

Again, Freeman, Spenner and Bird ask us to make it simpler for the buyer. Provide them with fewer choices, and make them as relevant and compelling as possible. Ease the burden of risk by providing information that reassures. Realize that one of the components of risk is the degree of bias in the information we’re given. It that information reeks of marketing hyperbole, it will be discounted immediately.

In our numerous eye-tracking studies, we’ve found that in most instances, three to four options seems to be the right number to consider on a Web page. These can be easily loaded into working memory and compared without causing undue wear on our mental mechanics. So, on a landing or home page, three or four groups of coherent and relevant information seems to be an optimal level. We call them “intent clusters.” For navigation bar options, we try to keep it between five and seven choices. If we expect mostly transactional traffic, we ensure there is a “fast path” to purchase. If we expect a lot of purchase research, we aim for rich promises of relevant and reliable information.

As Freeman, Spenner and Bird remind us, “The harder consumers find it to make purchase decisions, the more likely they are to overthink the decision and repeatedly change their minds or give up on the purchase altogether. In fact, regression analysis points to decision complexity and resulting cognitive overload as the single biggest barrier to purchase.”

As marketers, our job is to eliminate the barriers, not erect new ones.