Author Archives: ghotchkiss

The Psychology of Entertainment: Why We Love Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey and Phoebe

friendsIn a post last week, I dove into the question: Why are some TV shows enduring hits, some flash-in-the-pans and some none starters?

What separates a M*A*S*H, Friends or Cheers from a Baby Bob, Mama’s Family or Veronica’s Closet (Huh..you say? Exactly my point).

The difference, according to researchers Cristel Russell, Andrew Norman, and Susan Heckler (“Chapter Fifteen People and “their” Television Shows: an Overview of Television Connectedness,” The Psychology of Entertainment Media:  Blurring the Lines between Entertainment and Persuasion, ed. L. J. Shrum. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004) is our degree of connectedness with the show. Do we take the characters and situations into our own lives? Do we build a bridge between our reality and their fantasy? The stronger the bridge, the more durable the connection will be.

Successful Sitcoms have to go beyond the “Sit”

Imagine you were in a pitch for a new sitcom. “We have 6 20-something friends in Greenwich Village who hang out at a coffee shop and talk a lot” or “we have a middle aged sports writer and his family who move across from his Italian mom and dad in Long Island.”  In a Hollywood pitch for a new sitcom, it will typically be the “sit” part that gets pitched – what’s the situation? This is where the concept tends to trump character in most premises. But situations are only of fleeting interest to us humans. Situations engage the mind in the same way a puzzle or brain teaser would. They can introduce a partial picture and our curiosity wants to resolve it to our satisfaction. We want to see how the situation turns out. By the way, this mastery of unresolved situations is the basis of the appeal of humor and drama as well. But situations don’t have “legs” when it comes to consistently engaging us. We have limited attention spans for situations. Once we resolve them, or feel that we’ve resolved them, our attention moves on. This is the way it works in the real world. Life will throw us situation after situation, often several in a day. If we lingered over each one longer than was necessary, we’d never move forward. We’d keep getting caught in situational “eddies”, separated from the main current of our lives.

It gets worse. If situations can’t be resolved in a timely manner, we grow frustrated and bored with them. Our brain starts telling us, through our emotions, that it’s time to move on. So, for a show to be successful, it has to introduce a parade of situations, just like real life would.

So, how does a show keep us engaged in between situations? What keeps us tuned in? The characters. Characters are what we connect to. Characters engage us at a completely different level than situations. Situations are an intellectual challenge. Characters create emotional bonds. We care what happens to them. And this caring, this connection, provides the emotional overtones that keep the situations consistently interesting.

Let’s look at the mother of all entertainment situations, the budding romantic relationship. This has universal appeal. We all (hopefully) experience love. And we all experience sexual attraction. This is something we can relate to. When it’s simmering between two characters we care about, it’s almost irresistible. Hollywood has tested this formula thousands of times in all different situations. They have mastered the ability to mercilessly tease us through the various stages of outright hostility but inner intrigue, unrequited love, flirtatious exploration, tentative connection, secretive romance, open declaration, romantic entanglement, betrayal, the inevitable break up, and then, the cycle can start all over again. It seems contrived because it is. But it works. I’ve just described 10 seasons of Friends. The truth is, however, that we would have never stuck it out if we didn’t care about Ross and Rachel, Chandler and Monica, Joey and Phoebe. The appeal of Friends was the appeal of the characters, not the situations.

Tomorrow, I’ll look at humor. What strikes us as funny, and why? Why is there a fine line between a baby’s laughter and tears? How can we find both Tyler Perry and Oscar Wilde funny? What part of the brain processes humor? Why is this different in men and women?

Undecided about Bing, the Decision Engine

First published January 28, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

OK, I admit it. Bing is starting to show some glimmering signs of promise. But I still have concerns — big ones.

I had the chance to chat with Stefan Weitz recently about where Microsoft wanted to take Bing. It’s hard not to get swept up in Weitz’ evangelism. Microsoft is trying to do some very impressive things with search: parse the ambiguity out of our language; stitch together disparate fragments of content into a whole that’s useful to the user; and present all this in a results format that informs and assists without requiring extensive tweaking on the part of the user.

We all love to hate the evil empire, but let’s be fair. Microsoft has humbled itself dramatically, and the company is sincerely trying to do a good job with Bing. The team at Redmond is getting used to their unexpected position as the underdog and, based on my conversation with Weitz, they’re beginning to relish the challenge that comes from playing David to Google’s Goliath.

My quibble, however — and it’s not an insignificant one — is that Bing needs to step up its differentiation. Weitz said in the interview that Bing first wanted to at least match Google at its own game: algorithmic search. I understand this logic, but there are some other things to consider here.

To Break a Habit, You have to Break the Pattern

For Bing to gain market share against Google, it has to break a habit. And to break a habit, you have to force someone out of his or her rut. There are two ways to do that. One, you change the route they have to take so they have to consciously steer back into the rut. Secondly, you give them an alternative that’s so much better than the rut, they’re willing to do the heavy mental lifting required to consciously shut down their “autopilot”-driven, rut-seeking routines when they start to play out.

Make no mistake; habits are notoriously tough things to break. Our brain has a box-load of nasty little tricks it will employ to keep habits in place, because habits require less work from the brain than actually thinking our way through things. Our brains are inherently lazy (or, if you prefer, efficient). There’s no such thing as breaking a habit a “little bit” or breaking a habit “now and then.” You either break a habit or you don’t.

So what does this mean for Bing? The Bing philosophy right now is that for the vast majority of searches, it delivers what is basically a Bing-ized version of Google. And then, for some select searches, it delivers a more differentiated search result. For example, search for “Bristol England” on Bing and Google. On Bing, you’ll get what’s called a Task Page, tailored to be more useful for those trying to accomplish things related to Bristol: the current weather, favorite attractions and the official tourism site. This is Bing’s flavor of a decision-based guide. This, theoretically, is what makes Bing a “decision engine” rather than a “search engine.”

But now go to the Google results page. While it may be hidden in a more traditional presentation of results, still, most of the same information is there. I’d give Bing the edge from a usefulness perspective, but it’s not a knock-out. It’s more of a 12 round split decision.

Lets try another example:  the much-cited Farecast search. True, the latest airfares from Farecast are useful, but real interactivity is still one click away at Bing Travel. Bing is dipping a rather tentative toe in the waters of usefulness. Right now, Google isn’t matching the Farecast functionality, but even with its standard search results, the perceivable difference to the user is not all that great.

I feel Bing is still trying to match Google rather than draw away from it. And to break a habit, you have to put a lot of distance between yourself and the habitual choice. You don’t abandon one rut for a similar rut headed to the same basic destination. What’s the point of that?

Search One-Up-Manship

There is some good news in all this. From the user perspective, I’ve seen more helpful features unveiled on both Google and Bing than I’ve seen in a long, long time. As Bing starts to experiment with more useful features, Google has been consistently matching it. And this brings up another fatal flaw in Bing’s strategy. It’s pretty easy for Google to keep a watchful eye on Bing for useful innovations. As long as those innovations are incremental in nature, Google can quickly match them. Bing will never build up the degree of differentiation needed to break a habit. But the byproduct is pretty compelling for the user. No matter whether you’re using Google or Bing, the pace of innovation has picked up dramatically.

In the Bing-Google battle, the user seems to be the big winner so far.

The Psychology of Entertainment: Our Connection with TV

TV viewing, like everything else, has changed drastically in the last few decades. America used to have fairly homogenous tastes in TV. Any given night, it was a safe bet that a significant portion of America was sitting down to watch Happy Days, or All in the Family or, in an early generation, I Love Lucy.

But, with the explosion of the multi-channel universe, our TV tastes have fragmented along several lines. The result? It’s difficult for an advertiser to gain critical mass with an audience by advertising on any one show. America now watches TV in thousands of small splinter segments. And, as we consume more video online, we can pick and choose not just from a broad swath of programming, we can also shift consumption to match out schedule.

This post, however, is not about the challenges of time shifting, market fragmentation or digital consumption. This posts asks a more basic question: what is it about TV that we find entertaining? Why are some shows hits for several seasons, some for a single season, and others complete misses out of the gate? Why do we love the boob tube?

Why We Love TV

Well, the answer, in part, explains the fragmentation of the TV universe. There doesn’t seem to be any universal answer. Humans are too unpredictable to allow Hollywood to forecast with any great accuracy the success of a TV show. There are several different levels on which we can connect with a TV show and the success of any show depends on it’s unique mix of factors that lead to it’s connectability.

TV shows somehow have to weave themselves into the fabric of our society. It becomes a resonating soundboard for our popular culture. This means that the popularly of TV has to not only successfully navigate the churning waters of the diversity of human behaviour but also has to do so against the ever changing snapshot of our cultural context. Obviously, in the 1960’s, the Beverly Hillbillies struck a chord with a significant number of people. It’s unlikely that it would survive today.

In The Psychology of Entertainment Media: Blurring the Lines between Entertainment and Persuasion. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2004. Page Number: 275) Cristel Russell, Andrew Norman and Susan Heckler explore the various dimensions of TV “connectedness” and identify just some of the variables at play here. I’ll touch on the more interesting ones.

There are some fundamental truths here when it comes to why we watch TV. At the highest possible levels, there is commonality across all of us. We watch TV to improve our moods, learn something, aspire to a higher place in our society and give us something in common to talk about with our friends and co-workers. But each of those things are much too general to give us much insight into why one show succeeds while another might fail. For example, most sitcoms are funny enough to lift our mood, but some last for 10 seasons and others die shortly after the pilot airs. Simple mood improvement is obviously not enough to explain TV success.

Connecting through the Tube

We start to gain more insight when we look at the level of connection people have with one particular show. The depth of that connection determines loyalty, the degree of social “grease” (how much you talk about a show within your social circle) and, ultimately, the longevity of a show. What is that distinct “something” that causes us to connect with a TV show? On the basis of connectedness, one could argue that, although it only lasted 10 short episodes, Star Trek might be one of the most successful TV shows of all time. It engendered a level of connectiveness that was almost obsessive (remember the backlash when William Shatner told a bunch of Trekkies on Saturday Night Live to “get a life?”). That connectedness created a franchise that spawned 11 movies, 6 TV series and a lifetime slate of speaking gigs (if they want them) for the original cast.

So, what is connectedness? It’s that quality of a TV show that goes beyond simple watching to directly influence the personal and social aspects of our lives. When we connect with a TV show, we seek to jump over the gap that separates us from the show. Russell, Norman and Heckler show that this can happen in three ways:

The Vertical Connection: Viewer to Program

The connection between a viewer and a program is very similar to a brand connection. We become fans of the “brand” of the show. We watch every episode, we feel anxious when we miss an episode, We admire the quality of the production (i.e. the writing) and we may extend our loyalty to the purchase of the show on DVD  or perhaps books, soundtracks or other spin offs from the show.

The Horizontal Connection: Viewer to Viewer

Here, shared appreciation for a TV show acts as sort of a “social lubricant.” It gives us common ground for discussion within our social circles. This level of connectedness leads to group watching of a TV show. Often, there are real or aspirational similarities between the cast of the show and these groups of fans. For example, med students love to watch Grey’s Anatomy (and ER before that, and St. Elsewhere before that).

The Vertizontal Connection: Viewer to Character

Here’s where the line between reality and fantasy starts to get disturbingly blurred. Often, fans begin to identify with the cast members in a show, seemingly forgetting that they’re fictional. This combines aspects of the two previous connections. The connection is between the viewer and the show, but it’s a social relationship that goes beyond simple brand-like loyalty. We want to be friends with Ross and Rachel. We want to have Ray Romano as our next door neighbour (preferably without his parents). We want to join the Glee Club at William McKinley High School. We begin to adjust our reality to incorporate the characters fictional reality. This level of connection leads fans to begin adopting gestures, facial expression and vocal characteristics. They want to wear the same clothes, eat the same food and experience the same things.

It’s these three levels of connectedness that account for loyalty to, and through that, the success of a TV show. What leads to these connections?

Growing a Relationship over Time

If you look at the great TV series that have endured over time, they often have one thing in common – few were hits right out of the gate. Cheers, All in the Family, M*A*S*H and many others all took some time to find their audience. And, if we look at our connection to a TV show as a type of relationship, this is not surprising. Relationships don’t suddenly blossom overnight. They take time to develop.

The most successful TV series rely heavily on strong characters. And the series with longevity seem to have characters with some depth and complexity. It takes time to get to know a Hawkeye Pierce, a Sam Malone or even an Archie Bunker. What at first seems to be a one dimensional character reveals more of themselves over time, in a multitude of situations. Strong writing drives this character development.  Just like in real life, our strongest TV relationships tend to be with people we’ve known for awhile. Their initial appeal first catches our interest, but there better be some depth there to maintain our interest.

A Continuing Storyline

Just like relationships, a narrative that bridges the gaps from episode to episode seems to lead to greater loyalty. The price of entry is higher (you need to invest in watching a few episodes to pick up the threads that carry from show to show) but once you make the investment, it’s much easier to get hooked.

A personal example shows how powerful this loyalty can be. One of my favorite shows on TV was West Wing. My level of connectedness was primarily between viewer and show – I was awestruck by Aaron Sorkin’s writing. But if ever a TV show required a substantial investment on the part of the viewer, West Wing was it. If you missed an episode or two, the rapid fire dialogue between Toby, C.J. and Josh might has well have been in Mandarin. You had no idea what the hell was going on. I managed to make this investment for the first 3 seasons of West Wing but then lost the storylines somewhere in season 4 and, despite trying a few times, never managed to pick them up again for the rest of the show’s primetime run. Last year, I bought the show in a box set and I’m now working my way through it. The advantage of watching on DVD is that you can always go back to listen to a particular piece of dialogue again.

The Human Connection to the Narrative

A continuing storyline gives us a narrative to follow. And we are huge fans of narratives. We tend to see the world, and even ourselves, through the narrative lens. As I said in a previous post, our brains have a inherent connection to stories. Our brain is built to process a story.

Narratives give us a self view that we use to make sense of the world and our place in it. It provides a frame of reference for the very tricky question of consciousness: Why do we exist? How do we exist? What causes us to act? What causes others to act? Good, evil, God, the Devil, nature, catastrophe, our place in the world – all these questions that we have relentlessly pondered since we were first able to, all have been woven into narratives that form our common mythology. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely actors.” Shakespeare was on to something, but he had it backwards. The stage is in our minds, a construct of our brain. The script is written by us, and we assign the roles as we see fit, including our own.

If we constantly participate in this ongoing narrative we write of our own lives, deciphering the motivations of others from our vantage point in our own life stories, is it any wonder that we find  continuing story lines particularly appealing in our favorite TV shows? This is, as we see it, life. And these story lines bring the characters alive (sometimes too alive) for us.

Why We Love Happy Endings

If we see life as a story, it makes sense that we’re suckers for a happy ending. Aristotle figured this out about humans 2000 years ago. ” A good man must not be seen passing from happiness to misery,” and “a bad man from misery to happiness.” Narratives have to make sense to us, based on our understanding of what is right or wrong. In other words, shit happens, but don’t let it happen in my favorite TV show. Of course, script writers use our inherent dislike of this moral unfairness to tweak us on a regular basis. But in doing so, they run the risk of losing us. After getting hooked on an entire season of 24, I was so upset at the resolution of season 1 that I never watched it again. I had the same reaction when Mark Green died in ER. There are consequences if you decide to break Aristotle’s laws of narrative.

Tomorrow, I’ll further explore how we connect with TV. For example, I’ll look at why women tend to accept fictional characters at face value, while men remain more detached, treating characters as a literary device to be manipulated by the author. Why teenagers in particular are susceptible to being influenced by characters in TV shows. Why some of us go “over the edge” in our degree of “fan-ship”. And why some of us love action packed shows and others like to relax with more sedate shows.

Interview with Stefan Weitz posted at SNL

Apologies for my brief hiatus from blogging last week. I was in Santa Cruz for an extended weekend with my wife, which was fabulous…thanks for asking. Also got a chance to catch Wicked in SF. It was a great way to kick off the weekend.

In between Defying Gravity and bird watching on the California coast, I did get a chance to post Part One of an Interview with Microsoft’s Stefan Weitz on Search Engine Land. It was the kick off of a series I’m doing on where Search goes from here. Stefan and I talked mainly about Microsoft’s “Decision Engine” strategy and what Microsoft currently thinks is “broken” about search. An interview with Stefan can’t help but be interesting, so I encourage you to check it out over at Just Behave.

In the meanwhile, I’m still hopping across the country, but am hoping to get a few new posts done on the Psychology of Entertainment in between plane rides and racking up Hilton HHonors points. Why do I feel a compelling kinship to George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air?

A Frog in Boiling Water: are Fortune 500 Clients all They’re Cracked Up to Be?

First published January 21, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

P&G’s new CEO, Bob McDonald was asked, in a recent interview with Ad Age, what keeps him up at night:

The biggest thing is the parable of the frog in the boiling water. That’s why today, of the Fortune 50 from 1955, only nine of those companies still exist. P&G is one of them. I want P&G to be on that list 172 years from now, because that means we’re touching and improving more lives. The only thing that can kick us off that list is complacency or inability to learn new things or unwillingness to change.

The Allure of the Trophy Client

In search, we love to deal with marquee clients. We love to put the brag badges on our Web site, the list of logos showing the Fortune 500s we all deal with. A quick non-scientific survey shows that every digital and search agency in the world has worked with HP, IBM, Microsoft, P&G and GE. If one is to believe the plethora of logos slathered over the Web, these companies have more agencies of record than employees.

I get the temptation. I really do. In search, we all struggle for credibility. These clients bring the sheer mass of immediate credibility with them — if you’re good enough for P&G, you’re good enough for me. Come on, admit it! We’ve all done it. We’ve all slipped the logos into our PowerPoint “About Us” slide.

But McDonald’s observation deserves our attention. The Fortune 50 in 1955 only had an 18% survival rate. I suspect the toll will get even greater as the digital landscape accelerates the pace of online marketing evolution dramatically. This means that dinosaurs will be dropping right and left. And as the lumbering behemoths keel over and crash to the primordial forest floor, might we SEMs be caught under them?

How Do You Steer an Elephant?

Look at McDonald’s trio of evolutionary sins: complacency, the inability to learn new things and the unwillingness to change. My suspicion is, despite the reams of rhetoric to the contrary in the typical annual report, that McDonald’s fears represent the norm rather than the exception for the average Fortune 500 corporation. I applaud his self-awareness, but can’t help but wonder if even a tuned-in CEO is enough to overcome the inertia, bureaucracy and legacy investment that typify many mammoth multinationals.

And if the CEO can’t change a company’s direction, how the hell is a search agency expected to? For a puny little search agency (and let’s face it, compared to the sheer bulk of a Fortune 500, we’re all puny) to try to change the direction of one of these corporations is like a spider spinning a web to stop a stampede of pachyderms before they plunge off a cliff. I give it an “A+” for intention, but an “F” for grasp of reality.

Where Do You Invest Your Time?

So, this brings up an acutely pertinent question: What is a better investment of an SEM’s time and resources, fighting the inertia of those marquee clients so we can use their logos on our Web sites, or instead, actually doing something with the clients that will eventually replace the dinosaurs in the inevitable march of marketplace evolution?

It’s a good question to ask. And, philosophically anyway, not a hard question to answer. But in practice, well, in the words of Hamlet”: “Ay, there’s the rub.”

Perhaps, for a select few companies, the two categories are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps the answer lies in CEOs like Bob McDonald, who can steer at least some of the Fortune 500 safely into a new digital reality. Let’s hope there are more where he came from.

The Psychology of Entertainment: A Nation of Watchers

In Brock and Livingston’s investigations of our need for entertainment, they ran up against a problem: how do you define entertainment? In attempting to answer that question (at least for the purpose of their study), they uncovered an interesting finding that provides some troubling commentary for our society.

Watching vs. Doing: The Evolution of Entertainment

Brock and Livingston were seeking to separate passive entertainment (watching TV) from active entertainment (playing a sport). They asked study participants to further define what they meant when they used the word entertainment. In two separate groups, 3 out of 4 participants defined entertainment in it’s passive sense – sitting down to watch a TV show or movie. Now, perhaps this is just a question of semantics – the word “entertainment” and the word “activity” may seem to have different meanings for us. But there are reams of social data to show that as we have adopted more forms of passive entertainment, the most ubiquitous being television, our level of activity has steadily dropped. This, however, is not the only fall out of our addiction to TV.

Watching vs Belonging: The Erosion of Social Capital

s-curve-real-lifeI’ve talked before about Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, the Collapse and Revival of American Community. Putnam investigated a dramatic reversal in our desire to engage in community minded activities that occurred in the mid-60’s. These activities ran the gamut from voting and being active in PTA’s to having friends over for a card game and joining a bowling league. In chart after chart, Putnam showed how this community-mindedness peaked in the late 50’s and early 60’s and then went into a long and steady decline over the last half century. As TV invaded our front rooms, we abandoned the community hall, the voting booth and the local chapter of The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (one of the biggest fraternal organizations in the world). We stopped spending time with each other. Our definition of entertainment moved from the active to the passive.

This expectation to be passively entertained has spilled into other areas of our society as well. How we perceive our world may have changed from an environment we interact with to a parade that we simply sit back and watch go by. Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, speculates that as America turned from a culture revolving around the printed word to one revolving around images (especially images that jump cut from one to the other, set to a pounding aural beat, saturated with high impact stimuli like violence and sex) we have become a society of attention deficit watchers that have high expectations of being passively entertained, no matter where we are:

What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. … The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

This trend shows up in our consumption of news, political issues and education. Classrooms now are not the Socratic arena of debate so much as they are a theatre, where the professor or lecturer is expected to entertain with a bag of tricks including animated Powerpoint presentations and multimedia content. Consider the difference in the campaigns of two politicians from Illinois. In 1858, debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglass took 7 hours and the entire audience stayed put in the hall, their butts glued to hard wooden chairs for the entire time (the bladder control alone boggles the mind). 151 years later, we had trouble making it all the way through a 37 minute YouTube video of a Barack Obama speech.

A Different Definition of Thrill Seeking

SnvOn Monday, I talked about the normal distribution of variance in any human characteristic, typically plotted on a bell curve. Our need to seek sensation is just such a trait. Some of us are quite content to keep our pulse ticking away at a rate barely above comatose. Some of us constantly seek a massive jolt of adrenaline, always riding the ragged edge of disaster. Most of us fall somewhere in between. Marvin Zuckerman created a scale that measured our need for sensation back in 1971.

This need for sensation has an impact on the type of entertainment we seek. Historically, one would expect a strong correlation between our need for sensation and our level of activity. Traditionally, the need for sensational thrills was satisfied through participation in high adrenaline sports and activities such as rock climbing, various forms of racing and other “extreme” pursuits. The neurological loop here is fairly easy to understand. By pushing our bodies to the point where our brain decided we were in danger, our neurological defence mechanisms were duped into taking the appropriate response: a massive release of neuro-chemicals, including adrenaline, that jolted our body into a higher state of awareness and readiness. The seeking of sensation provided a natural high. On the upper end of Zuckerman’s scale, extreme sensation seeking can be clinically addictive.

But technology has thrown us a psychological curve ball when it comes to sensation seeking. There used to be a fairly well defined divide between most forms of passive entertainment and sensation seeking. The exceptions were gory spectacles such as the gladiators of ancient Rome and, in more recent times, wrestling and boxing. However, the line between the two has become more and more blurred in the 20th century. Passive entertainment now regularly relies on unabashed tweaking of our inherent subliminal defense, retaliation and sexual modules. Modern entertainment plays directly to our animal instincts.

This is where we get an especially grim view of our future. Yesterday, I mentioned that Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found evidence that TV was addictive, in the true biological sense of addiction. Sensation seeking also has found to be physically addictive. Are we becoming a nation of passive voyeurs that only truly become alive when we’re plugged into the entertainment grid? Suddenly, the premise of The Matrix doesn’t seem that far fetched (ironic, considering the movie series was a perfect example of sensation seeking through passive entertainment).

The modern video game raises this ambiguity between sensation seeking and passive entertainment to a new high (or low, depending on your perspective). Through lifelike graphics and the game producer’s mastery of what appeals to our baser instincts, video games now efficiently deliver high octane jolts that we used to have to get by actually doing something. What does this mash up of passive entertainment and sensation seeking mean for marketers in the future?

That, alas, is a topic for a future post.

The Psychology of Entertainment: Our Need for Entertainment

Anytime we talk about human behavior thats triggered by the equipment we all ship with – namely our brains-we have to account for variations in how that equipment operates. We are not turned out by assembly line, with quality control measures insuring that all brains are identical. Each brain is distinct, formed both by our own genetic signature and by our environment. While variation across the human genome is remarkably minor, we are all products of bespoke design – handcrafted to make us uniquely us.

Distribution of Our Uniqueness

SnvThis variation typically plays out in a normal distribution curve, more commonly known as a bell curve. Most of us cluster towards the center – the norm. And as we move out from the center, venturing one or two standard deviations from the norm into outlier territory, our numbers drop dramatically.

If we talk about the phenomenon of entertainment, we are definitely talking about how our brains operate. This means that we could expect to find a normal distribution in attitudes towards entertainment, with a peak in the middle and rapidly descending slopes on both sides. For example, one would expect such a distribution in the types of entertainment we prefer: the books we read, the shows we watch, the music we listen to. in fact, with a little statistical origami, we can do a quick check on this. Take a standard distribution curve and fold it in half along the “norm” line (shown as 0). The shape should look familiar. We have Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. The similarity of tastes close to the norm accounts for blockbusters and best sellers. These are the forms of entertainment that appeal to the greatest number of individuals. More esoteric entertainment tastes live well down the curve, in outlier territory.

Long_Tail

The Need for Entertainment Scale

I’ll come back to the types of entertainment we prefer and why in a later post. Today, I want to concentrate on another variable in the human psyche that also can impact our engagement with entertainment: how much do we need to be entertained? Why are some of us drawn more to fiction and others to non-fiction. Why do some of us like the escapism of a TV sitcom and others prefer to watch the news? Why do some of us have 5 TV’s in our house, with hundreds of digital channels, and others have none? What does the normal distribution curve of our need for entertainment look like. That was exactly the question that Timothy Brock and Stephen Livingston from Ohio State University tackled (The Psychology of Entertainment Media: Blurring the Lines between Entertainment and Persuasion. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Mahwah, NJ. Publication Year: 2004. p 255-268).

The need for entertainment seems to be almost addictive in some cases. In the study, Brock and Livingston restrict their definition of entertainment to passive consumption of some form of entertainment, either TV, radio, film, print, theatre or sport spectacles. Of these, television is the most common, so many of the measures revolved around our relationship with that specific entertainment medium. I’ve talked before about the impact of TV on society, but some of the empirical research on our reliance on the tube is astounding. In 2002, Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found troubling evidence of a true biological addiction to TV:

“To track behavior and emotion in the normal course of life, as opposed to the artificial conditions of the lab, we have used the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). Participants carried a beeper, and we signaled them six to eight times a day, at random, over the period of a week; whenever they heard the beep, they wrote down what they were doing and how they were feeling using a standardized scorecard.

“As one might expect, people who were watching TV when we beeped them reported feeling relaxed and passive.

“What is more surprising is that the sense of relaxation ends when the set is turned off, but the feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue. Survey participants commonly reflect that television has somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them depleted. They say they have more difficulty concentrating after viewing than before. In contrast, they rarely indicate such difficulty after reading. After playing sports or engaging in hobbies, people report improvements in mood. After watching TV, people’s moods are about the same or worse than before.

“Thus, the irony of TV: people watch a great deal longer than they plan to, even though prolonged viewing is less rewarding. In our ESM studies the longer people sat in front of the set, the less satisfaction they said they derived from it. When signaled, heavy viewers (those who consistently watch more than four hours a day) tended to report on their ESM sheets that they enjoy TV less than light viewers did (less than two hours a day).

What value do we place on the ability to watch TV? Brock and Livingston gave 115 undergrads two scenarios. In the first, they could correct a hypothetical mix up in their official state citizenship in return for a one time cash gift. The undergrads were asked to put a value on changing their official allegiance from one state to another. 15% would do it for free and another 40% would do it for under $1000.

The next scenario asked the students what compensation they would require to give up TV for the rest of their lives. A permanent tracking implant in their ear would notify a monitoring service if they cheated and the entire gift would be forfeited. 8% were willing to do it for free, but over 60% would need at least a million dollars to give up TV forever.

Findings: Men Need More Entertainment & The More You Think , The Less You Need to Be Entertained

In their scale of the need for entertainment, Brock and Livingston assessed three factors: Drive (how actively do you pursue passive entertainment?), Utility (how useful is passive entertainment, both to you specifically and in general?) and Passivity (how active do you like your entertainment to be?).

So, how do we fare on our need to be entertained, based on Brock and Livingston’s scale? First of all, men seem to have a stronger drive to be entertained than women. Males scored higher on the amount they spend on entertainment, the daily need for entertainment and the inability to function without entertainment. One would assume that the “couch potato curve” would skew to the male side of the demographic split.

Also interestingly, Brock and Livingston found an inverse relationship between the need to be entertained and the “need for cognition” – a measure of how much people like active problem solving and critical thinking. Again, the more you think, the less reliant you are on TV.

In a follow up study, Brock and Livingston tried to draw a defining line between entertainment (in their definition, passive consumption) and sensation seeking. I’ll touch on this in tomorrow’s post.

The Psychology of Entertainment: How Our Brains Connect with Stories

Andi Bell has an amazing memory. In fact, if you shuffled together 10 decks of cards, put them in front of Andi and gave him 20 minutes, not only would he have memorized every single card in the pack, he would have memorized them in order. 520 cards, and Andi will remember every suit, every value and what order they came in. It’s a feat that boggle the everyday mind. Andi, however, has a secret. And that secret is the power of narrative. We love a good story!

As I mentioned last Friday, I want to explore the psychology of entertainment a bit more today as we explore it’s role in marketing. In a post last week, I said that audience patterns have to establish some stability before we can effectively market to them. We have become a society of early adopters, or, at least, marketers treat us as such. Because we are continually rushing from bright shiny object to bright shiny object there is tremendous churn in most online audiences. I called it “chasing Digital Fluff”.

Keeping Your Audience in One Place

But what could create the audience stability I’m talking about? I put forward usefulness as one element. In a comment, Lance Loveday also suggested entertainment value. I found this intriguing, but of course, Lance’s suggestion also raised a number of  questions for me. What represents “staying power” in entertainment? Why are some entertainment channels fads and some long enduring trends? How do our brains respond to entertainment? What is the difference between a TV show and a video game, for instance? What is it about entertainment that makes it so…well…entertaining? And finally, is Lance right? Will the entertainment factor be enough to move some digital channels from fad to trend? And, if so, where should we place our (or more correctly, our client’s) bets?

Today, I want to begin by exploring how we respond to what seems to be the oldest form of entertainment in the world: stories. We humans have a deeply wired connection with stories. I suspect that as soon as humans began communicating, we began telling stories. In fact, stories are so important to us, it appears that we have a special channel in our brains to interpret stories – evolution has equipped us with a specialized story processor. And it’s this story processor that Andi Bell uses to memorize 10 packs of cards. Bell discovered the power of the story processor, what he calls the Linking Technique, and it made him the three time World Memory Champ.

How to Memorize 520 Playing Cards – Tell 1 Story

The human mind never evolved to deal effectively with random facts. Our brain does not deal that well with the abstract. That’s why we invented writing, symbols, alphabets and math. These are the ways we take the non-concrete and manipulate them for our use. The world of our ancestors tends to play out in much less abstract terms: Where is food? Where is water? What happens when I sleep too close to predators? What happens when I steal my neighbor’s dinner? What happens when I overstep the boundary between my tribe and the neighboring tribe?

These were the realities of our ancestor’s lives and, as such, our brain evolved native mechanisms for dealing with these realities. The ability of our brains to navigate through an physical environment or to remember parables (which are nothing more than behavioral reinforcing stories) is highly developed. But in this world, our evolutionary environment, the abstract mechanisms we take for granted may be completely absent. For example, many primitive tribes have no numbering systems, or, if they do, they may be limited to three words: one, two and many. We can remember how to navigate through hundreds of places we’ve been before, or we can remember the important details of thousands of stories, but remembering a phone number consisting of just 7 or 10 digits can be a challenge. It’s not because we’re addle minded, it’s just because our brains use different mechanisms.

Andi Bell discovered this and found a way to link the abstract to the more highly evolved memory modules of our brains: our on-board navigation computer and our capacity for remembering a story.  Bell’s technique is fairly simple. In his mind, he has a standard route imagined through his home town of London, England. He’s memorized the route in detail. That’s the first step. The second step is to create a story that plays out along the route. Here, he takes each card in a standard deck of cards and creates an imaginary stand-in for it. He replaces abstract numbers and symbols with concrete images from the real world. The 8 of clubs could become a brown bear. The 3 of diamonds could become a pineapple. These become the “characters” of a story imagined on the fly. 520 random cards becomes 520 elements in a story spread through the streets of London. To recall all the cards, Andi has to follow the route through London, retelling the story as he goes. Bell’s technique is not new. It’s called the Method of Ioci, otherwise known as the Memory Palace, and was used by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Why do stories seem to have a more direct path to our memory? What is it about the power of a story that’s so compelling to humans? Whatever it is, Malcolm Gladwell is a master of the power of a story and it’s kept him on top of the best seller list for several years now.

Gladwell’s Secret for Writing Bestsellers

Writing non-fiction is a challenge. It almost always involves the writer getting a bunch of facts or opinions from their head onto paper. That in itself is not a challenge. But getting facts into a form that is compelling to read is. But at least with facts, the writer can choose interesting ones. Opinions offer even more of a challenge. We are naturally suspicious of other people’s opinions. They have to pass through the filter of what we ourselves believe in. So how does the non-fiction writer take this unwieldy bucket of fact and opinion and craft it into something that someone else will want to read? How do you write a non-fiction best seller?  With half a million books published every year (and that’s just the ones we can keep track of), there is an extraordinarily long tail in book selling.  The 100 best selling non fiction books of 2009 represents just .02% of all books published, yet represent a huge chunk of the revenue. If there is a magic formula to making this list, Malcolm Gladwell seems to have found it. Right now, Gladwell has 2 of the 15 top selling non fiction books on the New York Times best seller list – Outliers and What the Dog Saw. Gladwell’s Blink and The Tipping Point were perpetually on top of best seller lists for the better part of the last decade. So, what’s Gladwell’s formula?

Like Andi Bell, Gladwell has discovered the power of narrative and it’s appeal to humans. Malcolm Gladwell collects social observations, both through his experiences and that of his network of friends. When he uncovers a compelling question, he first goes to his collection of observations and then, with a journalists instincts, he uncovers the stories behind the observations and tells these stories with a lucid, clear style. He lets his stories make his point for him, rather than pad his narrative with reams of opinionated rhetoric. Gladwell’s style is irresistibly compelling, making him the most successful non-fiction writer of the last decade.

How We Process a Story

So, why is a story so much more compelling than facts that are simply strung together. Why does Gladwell go to the trouble of finding the stories to illustrate his questions, essentially creating a scientific and sociological “whodunnit” (and in this case, the answer to who is always the same – we did it)? Well, for one thing, the basic premise of any Gladwell book could probably be told in 500 words if all the stories were stripped away. But then, no one would read those 500 words, would they? And additionally, stories make things stick in our brains. We are more accepting of a story and we remember it better. As with memory, our brains were built to accept stories.

There is empirical evidence (Prentice and Gerrig, 1999) that we process narrative differently than we do simple factual rhetoric. Narrative slips in through a different window, one more aligned with the physical world around us. We imagine ourselves experiencing the story. There are concrete hooks in our mind that we can hang the story on, making it more relevant to us. We become engaged with characters in the story. Gladwell wisely adds a generous helping of personal detail about the central characters in his story, as in his compelling description of Lois Weisberg in the Tipping Point :

loisLois (everyone calls her Lois) is invariably smoking a cigarette and drinking one of her dozen or so daily cups of coffee. She will have been up until two or three the previous morning, and up again at seven or seven-thirty, because she hardly seems to sleep. In some accounts — particularly if the meeting took place in the winter — she’ll be wearing her white, fur-topped Dr. Zhivago boots with gold tights; but she may have on her platform tennis shoes, or the leather jacket with the little studs on it, or maybe an outrageous piece of costume jewelry, and, always, those huge, rhinestone-studded glasses that make her big eyes look positively enormous.

Gladwell has conjured an image of Lois in our minds. To make his point, which is that the make up of most social networks include hyper connected hubs like Weisberg, Gladwell invests hundreds of words in creating a vivid profile of her. Why? Because it makes it more real to us. It turns a simple observation – our networks contain super connected hubs – into a story that engages us at a totally different level. We drop our rational guard and allow ourselves to become part of the story. In doing so, he avoids that trap that keeps most non-fiction off the best seller list – he knows that best way to inform is to entertain.

So, we’ve learned that entertainment works best when it slips past our rational processing mechanisms and hits a more concrete, ancient part of our brain. There needs to be ease of access by respecting what our brains were built to do. Tomorrow, I’ll pick the thread up again when I continue to look at the psychology of entertainment.

Everyone’s a Critic: The Splinters of our Discontent

First published January 14, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I had a bout of inbox convergence today. Just as I was speculating what this week’s Search Insider might cover, two separate emails surrounded a juicy little topic and delivered it to me on a platter. First, a post from Ad Age about how marketers are reluctant to use online conversations as a source of customer feedback: “‘Listening’ ostensibly has become the rage in consumer research, but the Advertising Research Foundation is finding that many marketers view what would seem one of the digital age’s biggest gifts to marketers — the torrent of unsolicited consumer opinion — as more of an added expense item than a blessing.”

And then, a small blog post on Echouser got me thinking: “It’s a concept for what an iPhone app designed to measure experiences (any experiences, from surfing a website to hopping on BART) could look like… Can you imagine if we were able to rate experiences on the fly, all day every day?”

Customers are Talking…

There’s been a lot of talk about the shift of control to the consumer and empowerment. As 2009 drew to a close, I talked about the shape of marketing to come. One of the key foundations I identified was participation — actively engaging in an ongoing conversation with customers. The two posts in my inbox start to get at the potential of this conversation.

In the first post, ARF laments advertisers’ reluctance to tap into ongoing online conversations as a source of customer feedback. Valid point, but I can understand their reluctance. This is unstructured content, making it qualitative, anecdotal and messy. Marketers balk at the heavy lifting required to mine and measure the collective mood. Some tools, such as Collective Intellect, are starting to take on the hard task of migrating online sentiment into a dashboard for marketers. The easier it gets, the more likely it will be for marketers to actually do it. Until then, we’re stuck with consumer surveys and comment cards.

…Anytime, Anywhere…

But it’s the second post that really got me thinking. Always-on connections have already given a voice to consumers, one that’s heard loud and clear. But what if we did indeed have a convenient and commonly structured way to provide feedback on every single interaction in our lives through mobile connections? What if marketers could know in real time what every single customer thought of them, based on the experience he or she just had? Some cringe at the thought. Others are eager for it. The second group will inevitably prevail.

Given the level of investment required on the part of the user, I suspect this channel would only be used in extremely negative and extremely positive circumstances. We don’t tend to take the time to comment on things that come reasonably close to meeting our expectations. But even so, it’s a powerful feedback channel to contemplate, giving the truly user-centric company everything they could ever wish for.

…So Listen!

Last week, I talked about the mother lode of consumer intent that exists in search query logs and how we’ve been slow to leverage it. This week, we have an equally valuable asset rapidly coming down the pipe — a real-time view of our customers’ sentiment.  That’s a one-two punch that could knock the competition out cold.

Winning Through Tweaking or How to Screw Up Successfully

self_adjusting_wrench1We spend our lives looking for a revolution. But the more I learn about the world, the more I realize that everything is evolutionary. Our lives are lived through a million tweaks here and there, pushing the world ahead a little bit at a time.

The difference between success and failure in evolutionary change comes down to something I call the Rate of Tweaking (giving us the unfortunate and misleading acronym ROT). Some of us have a high rate of tweaking, and for some of us, our ROT is almost zero. The same is true for companies. Some are constantly tweaking. Others do everything in their power to discourage tweaking. In fact, as a rule of thumb, the bigger the company, the slower the Rate of Tweaking.

Four Factors determine ROT….

Passion

If we don’t care about something, there is little motivation to tweak it. Tweaking comes when we can’t leave well enough alone – and I mean that in a good way. Tweaking requires an unwillingness to settle for the status quo, a drive to make it “just a little bit better.”

I could care less about the storage room in our basement. In the 10 years I’ve lived in the house, I’ve spent a sum total of 2 hours improving this room, consisting of putting some cupboards up after a prolonged persuasion campaign on the part of my wife. For me, this is a room that, under drastic circumstances, I go to, seeking some obscure possession that we suddenly have need of, with the goal of spending as little time possible in the room. My strategy is seek – secure or surrender – scramble. My motivation to tweak this room = zero.

But our yard is a different matter. for the first 6 years we lived in the house, it benefited from minimal tweaking. But in the last 4 years, once I started to invest in it, landscaping has suddenly become a passion. I have a picture of the ideal yard in my head and I won’t rest until it’s realized. I hate winters, primarily because it keeps me out of the yard. From late March to October, I’m constantly outside, digging, trimming, pruning, building or cutting (although I’ve yet to develop a passion for weeding). I’m not saying I’m good at it, but I am passionate. The result? Our neighbours are considering dropping the petition to have us driven off the block.

Being Willing to Make Mistakes

One of the biggest obstacles to tweaking is a fear that the tweak will be a mistake, that it will move you backwards rather than forward.

This fear is not irrational. The odds for successful tweaking is less than 50/50. I suspect it’s closer to 1 in 3 or 4. So, for every success, you will have at least 2 or 3 failures.

The biggest mistake most people make, however, is in reducing the rate of tweaking. They believe by spending more time thinking about each tweak, they can improve their success rate. However, when factoring in time, you quickly realize their math is faulty.

Tweaking Scenario A – Cautious Tweaking

Company ABC decides that they will carefully deliberate each tweak, which because of the resources required and control systems in place means their ROT drops to 4 tweaks per month. However, through deliberation, they achieve a 60% success rate on their tweaks.

4 x .6 = 2.4 successful tweaks

Tweaking Scenario B – Aggressive Tweaking

Company XYZ takes a different strategy. They endorse wholesale tweaking throughout the company (it’s not, however, a free-for-all, due to point #3 below) and achieve 25 tweaks per month, a not unreasonable number when the restrictions and bottlenecks are removed. The success rate, however, drops to 33%.

25 X .33 = 8.33 successful tweaks

By being willing to make mistakes, Company XYZ out tweaks Company ABC by a 4 to 1 margin. But, you counter, what is the cost of failure? Good question.

Ability to Learn from Mistakes

In the scenario above, Company XYZ had 4 times as many successful tweaks, but they also had almost 12 times as many failures (1.4 vs 16.33). Surely, these mistakes come at a cost. They do, but the ROM (Return On Mistakes) is far greater than the investment, if you’re smart about making mistakes.

If a company is going to increase it’s ROT, it has to build a process for dealing with failure, and the fact is, failure can be tremendously valuable. In fact, it might be more valuable than success. Why? Because you learn more from failure than success. Failure dictates your future direction.

I’ve been doing market research in one form or another now for almost a quarter of a century. And one thing has never changed in all that time. You always learn more from the negative results than the positive results. Positive results don’t cause you to change direction. Negative results do. They allow you to adjust course, or, in extreme cases, do a 180 and head in an entirely new direction. In a Darwinian contest, without losers there can be no winners. That’s why the words “winnowed” and “winners” share the same etymological roots. And everything (EVERYTHING!) in life is a Darwinian contest.

Course correction through failure has three fundamental requirements:

  • The ability to quickly tell when you’ve made a mistake
  • The determination not to let mistakes slow down your ROT
  • A process to make sure you don’t make the same mistake twice

For the ultimate case study on how these three requirements can make being mistaken your best investment ever, let’s turn to the ultimate arbitrator of winners and losers, evolution.

How to Tell When You Make a Mistake

There’s a pretty clear judge of winners and losers in Nature – it’s called differential reproduction. Winners have more offspring, generation after generation. Losers don’t. Winners thrive in the population. Losers die out. The judgement is brutally effective, if somewhat long in duration.  To introduce effective evolution in an organization, you have to be just a brutal. You need a crystal clear metric to measure success or failure by, similar to differential reproduction and you have to be brutal about holding your efforts up to this metric, cutting the losers, then taking your lessons learned and investing that in your winners.

Don’t Slow Down your ROT

Nature doesn’t deliberate about evolution. Evolution happens by chance. Richard Dawkins called Evolution the Blind Watchmaker. There is not master plan or blueprint. And so, there is no predetermined timeline for evolution. Mutations and adaptions just happen, allowing the very few successful ones to thrive and the far greater number of failures to be winnowed out. But the incredibly high ratio of failures in evolution does nothing to slow down the overall rate. It grinds on relentlessly, paying no attention the scoreboard of winners and losers. The ROT in nature remains constant.

You have to adopt a similar approach in your organization. Create a mandate for experimentation and tweaking. Embrace failure and make it clear there’s no repercussions for it. Find ways to reward all tweaking, good and bad. Separate the judging of winners and losers from the motivation to try in the first place. In nature, we have the comfort of having, at a minimum, years or even generations in between the initial tweak and the ultimate determination of success or failure. We don’t have the same luxury of time in our corporations, but we can build organizational buffer zones between the initiation of tweaking and the judgement of effectiveness.

Don’t Make the Same Mistake Twice

I said above there’s no blueprint for evolution. Actually, that’s not entirely true. There is a blueprint. The difference is, the blueprint is not planned out in advance. It’s created “on the fly” through constant tweaking and then passed on for further rounds of tweaking. When it is passed on for more tweaking, at least in some species, half the blueprint is arbitrarily thrown away and then remaining half is “mashed up” with another blueprint, just to see what might happen. If there is a time in evolution where there is an opportunity for what would be a tweak that would represent a relative “leap forward”, it’s during these mash ups. I’m speaking, of course, about DNA and sexual reproduction. The point, however, evolutions successes and failures are tallied in our DNA, reducing the odds of making the same mistakes over and over. Success is, over time, coded into the DNA that’s passed on.

Organizations need corporate DNA. They need a way to tally success and failure and save it for further reference. Here is where we have an advantage over evolution. Evolution has no intelligent agent to review all the DNA prior to a mutation or a reproductive combination to make sure that this particular genetic tweak hasn’t been tried before. We do. Once we embed our history of success or failure in some form of corporate DNA, whether it’s procedures, documented process, product specs or corporate culture, we have the luxury of being able to review prior to future tweaks, keeping us from making the same tweak over and over again.

Our Environment

The final element that dictates our Rate of Tweaking is the environment we’re in. In nature, environmental factors have a direct correlations with the ROT.  The pace of evolution has been found to pick up dramatically in environments that require rapid adaptation. Here, we can learn a lesson in corporate survival from Galapagonian finches.

Peter and Rosemary Grant have spent a good part of their lives since 1973 on a tiny speck of volcanic rock in the Galapagos called Daphne Major. They’ve spent that time catching and measuring birds and recording their diets. The payoff is that they’ve seen evolution happen before their eyes. In 1977, a severe drought on Daphne Major forever changed the nature of food available there. The vegetation withered and the seeds of that vegetation, the primary source of food for the native population of finches, became much scarcer. The softer seeds were quickly eaten by the finches, which left only the harder seeds. Finches typically didn’t have beaks powerful enough to crack these seeds. On Daphne Major, nature was going to be an incredibly harsh judge of tweaking.

When our environment becomes adverse, as on Daphne Major, it’s not the initial rate of tweaking that changes. Evolutionary changes happen at random. What happens is the pace at which the losers are winnowed from the winners picks up dramatically. The Grants found that on Daphne Major, the finches with less powerful beaks died off in a generation, quickly altering the nature of the Galapagonian finch population.

The lesson we can learn here is that adverse environments force a harsher judgement of tweaking. While that might seem like a drawback, it actually speeds up evolution. For example, the adoption of digital marketing has been accelerated because of the adverse economic conditions over the past two years.

The Tweaking Reading List

If you approach corporate management from a Darwinian perspective, you’ll find evidence of the success of the approach in all of the best books, from Drucker to Peters to Collins. But three books in particular have focused on the benefits of evolutionary tweaking:

Dealing with Darwin – Geoffrey Moore

The author of Crossing the Chasm tackles the question: How do great companies retain their appetite for innovation throughout their life cycle? The evidence shows that start ups, by their nature, realize the importance of constant tweaking but the Rate of Tweaking drops dramatically as companies mature. Moore shows how to fight this tendency.

Survival is Not Enough, Why Smart Companies Abandon Worry and Embrace Change – Seth Godin

Godin directly applies the logic of evolutionary biology to the corporate arena, borrowing from notables including Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and others. This is one of the lesser known of Godin’s works, and that’s a shame.

Do It Wrong Quickly – Mike Moran

My friend Mr. Moran does a great job of applying the benefits of tweaking to digital marketing, a niche where the pace of change has accelerated so dramatically, winners and losers are determined in a fraction of the time typical in the offline world. Call digital the Daphne Major of marketing.