Category Archives: Consumer Psychology

Adrift in the Metaverse

Humans are nothing if not chasers of bright, shiny objects. Our attention is always focused beyond the here and now. That is especially true when here and now is a bit of a dumpster fire.

The ultrarich know that this is part of the human psyche, and they are doubling down their bets on it. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are betting on space. But others — including Mark Zuckerberg — are betting on something called the metaverse.

Just this past summer, Zuck told his employees about his master plan for Facebook:

“Our overarching goal across all of (our) initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.”

So what exactly is the metaverse? According to Wikipedia, it is

“a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet.”

The metaverse is a world of our own making, which exists in the dimensions of a digital reality. There we imagine we can fix what we screwed up in the maddeningly unpredictable real world. It is the ultimate in bright, shiny objects.

Science fiction and the entertainment industry have been toying with the idea of the metaverse for some time now. The term itself comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” It has been given the Hollywood treatment numerous times, notably in “The Matrix” and “Ready Player One.” But Silicon Valley venture capitalists are rushing to make fiction into fact.

You can’t really blame us for throwing in the towel on the world we have systematically wrecked. There are few glimmers of hope out there in the real world. What we have wrought is painful to contemplate. So we are doing what we’ve always done, reach for what we want rather than fix what we have. Take the Reporters Without Borders Uncensored Library, for example.

There are many places in the real world where journalism is censored, like Russia, the Middle East, Vietnam and China. But in the metaverse, there is the option of leapfrogging over all the political hurdles we stumble over in the real world. So Reporters without Borders and two German creative agencies built a meta library in the meta world of Minecraft. Here, censored articles are made into virtual books, accessible to all who want to check them out.

It’s hard to find fault with this. Censorship is a tool of oppression. Here, a virtual world offered an inviting loophole to circumvent it. The metaverse came to the rescue. What is the problem with that?

The biggest risk is this: We weren’t built for the metaverse. We can probably adapt to it, somewhat, but everything that makes us tick has evolved in a flesh and blood world, and — to quote a line from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

It’s fair to say that right now the metaverse is a novelty. Most of your neighbors, friends and family have never heard of it. But odds are it will become our life. In a 2019 article called “Welcome to the Mirror World” in Wired, Kevin Kelley explained, “we are building a 1-to-1 map of almost unimaginable scope. When it’s complete, our physical reality will merge with the digital universe.”

In a Forbes article, futurist Cathy Hackl gives us an example of what this merger might look like:

“Imagine walking down the street. Suddenly, you think of a product you need. Immediately next to you, a vending machine appears, filled with the product and variations you were thinking of. You stop, pick an item from the vending machine, it’s shipped to your house, and then continue on your way.”

That sounds benign — even helpful. But if we’ve learned one thing it’s this: When we try to merge technology with human behavior, there are always unintended consequences that arise. And when we’re talking about the metaverse, those consequences will likely be massive.

It is hubristic in the extreme to imagine we can engineer a world that will be a better match for our evolved humanware mechanics than the world we actually evolved within. It’s sheer arrogance to imagine we can build that world, and also arrogant to imagine that we can thrive within it.

We have a bright, shiny bias built into us that will likely lead us to ignore the crumbling edifice of our reality. German futurist Gerd Leonhard, for one, warns us about an impending collision between technology and humanity:

“Technology is not what we seek but how we seek: the tools should not become the purpose. Yet increasingly, technology is leading us to ‘forget ourselves.’”

Imagine a Pandemic without Technology

As the writer of a weekly post that tends to look at the intersection between human behavior and technology, the past 18 months have been interesting – and by interesting, I mean a twisted ride through gut-wrenching change unlike anything I have ever seen before.

I can’t even narrow it down to 18 months. Before that, there was plenty more that was “unprecedented” – to berrypick a word from my post from a few weeks back. I have now been writing for MediaPost in one place or another for 17 years. My very first post was on August 19, 2004. That was 829 posts ago. If you add the additional posts I’ve done for my own blog – outofmygord.com – I’ve just ticked over 1,100 on my odometer.  That’s a lot of soul searching about technology. And the last several months have still been in a class by themselves.

Now, part of this might be where my own head is at. Believe it or not, I do sometimes try to write something positive. But as soon as my fingers hit the keyboard, things seem to spiral downwards. Every path I take seems to take me somewhere dark. There has been precious little that has sparked optimism in my soul.

Today, for example, prior to writing this, I took three passes at writing something else. Each quickly took a swerve towards impending doom. I’m getting very tired of this. I can only imagine how you feel, reading it.

So I finally decided to try a thought experiment. “What if,” I wondered, “we had gone through the past 17 months without the technology we take for granted? What if there was no Internet, no computers, no mobile devices? What if we had lived through the Pandemic with only the technology we had – say – a hundred years ago, during the global pandemic of the Spanish Flu starting in 1918? Perhaps the best way to determine the sum total contribution of technology is to do it by process of elimination.”

The Cons

Let’s get the negatives out of the way. First, you might say that technology enabled the flood of misinformation and conspiracy theorizing that has been so top-of-mind for us. Well, yes – and no.

Distrust in authority is nothing new. It’s always been there, at one end of a bell curve that spans the attitudes of our society. And nothing brings the outliers of society into global focus faster than a crisis that affects all of us.

There was public pushback against the very first vaccine ever invented; the smallpox vaccine. Now granted, the early method was to rub puss from a cowpox blister into a cut in your skin and hope for the best. But it worked. Smallpox is now a thing of the past.

And, if we are talking about pushback against public health measures, that’s nothing new either. Exactly the same thing happened during the 1918-1919 Pandemic. Here’s one eerily familiar excerpt from a journal article looking at the issue, “Public-gathering bans also exposed tensions about what constituted essential vs. unessential activities. Those forced to close their facilities complained about those allowed to stay open. For example, in New Orleans, municipal public health authorities closed churches but not stores, prompting a protest from one of the city’s Roman Catholic priests.”

What is different, thanks to technology, is that public resistance is so much more apparent than it’s ever been before. And that resistance is coming with faces and names we know attached. People are posting opinions on social media that they would probably never say to you in a face-to-face setting, especially if they knew you disagreed with them. Our public and private discourse is now held at arms-length by technology. Gone are all the moderating effects that come with sharing the same physical space.

The Pros

Try as I might, I couldn’t think of another “con” that technology has brought to the past 17 months. The “pro” list, however, is far too long to cover in this post, so I’ll just mention a few that come immediately to mind.

Let’s begin with the counterpoint to the before-mentioned “Con” – the misinformation factor. While misinformation was definitely spread over the past year and a half, so was reliable, factual information. And for those willing to pay attention to it, it enabled us to find out what we needed to in order to practice public health measures at a speed previously unimagined. Without technology, we would have been slower to act and – perhaps – fewer of us would have acted at all. At worst, in this case technology probably nets out to zero.

But technology also enabled the world to keep functioning, even if it was in a different form. Working from home would have been impossible without it. Commercial engines kept chugging along. Business meetings switched to online platforms. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, as of the writing of this, is over 20% higher than it was before the pandemic. In contrast, if you look at stock market performance over the 1918 – 1919 pandemic, the stock market was almost 32% lower at the end of the third wave as it was at the start of the first. Of course, there are other factors to consider, but I suspect we can thank technology for at least some of that.

It’s easy to point to the negatives that technology brings, but if you consider it as a whole, technology is overwhelmingly a blessing.

What was interesting to me in this thought experiment was how apparent it was that technology keeps the cogs of our society functioning more effectively, but if there is a price to be paid, it typically comes at the cost of our social bonds.

Marketers and Funnel Vision

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

A couple of years ago, I saw an essay by Elijah Meeks, former Data Visualization Society executive director, about how “We Live in a World of Funnels.” It started out like this:

“You think you’re reading an essay. You’re not. You’re moving through a funnel. This shouldn’t surprise you. You’ve been moving through funnels all day.”

No, we haven’t.

Sorry, Elijah, but the world is not built of funnels. Funnels are arbitrary lenses, invented by marketers, that are applied after the fact. They have nothing to do with how we live our lives. They’re a fabrication — a tool designed to help simplify real-world data and visualize, one that’s been so compelling that we have focused on it to the exclusion of everything that lives outside of it.  

We don’t live in a world of funnels. We live in a world that’s a maze of diverse and complex potential paths. At each intersection we reach, we have to make choices. For a marketer, that seems like a daunting thing to analyze. The funnel model simplifies our job by relying on successful conversions as the gold standard and working backwards from there. By relying on a model of a funnel, we can only examine “the road taken” and try to optimize the hell out of it. We never consider the “road not taken.”

Indeed, Robert Frost’s poem, from which I borrowed a few lines to start this post, is the ultimate misunderstanding of funnels. It is, by most who have read it, considered the ultimate funnel analysis, a look back at what came from choosing the “road less traveled.” But as reviewer David Orr pointed out in this post, it’s at least as much about what might have happened outside of the “funnel” we all try to apply to the poem:

“Because the poem isn’t ‘The Road Less Traveled.’ It’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’ And the road not taken, of course, is the road one didn’t take—which means that the title passes over the ‘less traveled’ road the speaker claims to have fol­lowed in order to foreground the road he never tried. The title isn’t about what he did; it’s about what he didn’t do. Or is it? “

The funnel model is inherently constraining in its perspective. You are forced to look backward through the tiny hole at the bottom and speculate on what prevented others from getting to that point.

Why do we do this? Because, initially anyway, it seems easier than other choices. It’s like the old joke about finding the inebriated man outside a bar looking for his car keys under the streetlight. When asked where exactly he lost them, he points behind him to a dark alley.

“Why are you looking for them here then?”

“The light’s better here.”

It certainly seems the light is better in a funnel. We can track activity within the funnel. But how do you track what happens outside of it?  It may seem like a hopeless task, but it doesn’t have to be. There are universals in human behavior that can be surprisingly predictive.

Take B2B buying, for example. When we did the research for the Buyersphere Project, our “a-ha” moment was realizing what a massive role risk had in the decision process.

Prior to this research, we — like every other marketer — relied on the funnel model. Our CRM software had funnel analysis built into it. So did our website traffic tracking tool. Funnels were indeed pervasive — but not in the real world, just in the world of marketing.

But we made a decision at the earliest stage of our research project. We tossed aside the funnel premise and started at the other end, understanding what happens when a potential buyer hits what Google calls the ZMOT: the Zero Moment of Truth. This is defined as “the moment in the buying process when the consumer researches a product prior to purchase.” When we started asking people about the Moment — or the moments before the ZMOT — we found that in B2B, risk-avoidance trumps all else. And it gave us an entirely different view of the buying journey we would never have seen from inside the funnel.

We also realized we were dealing with multiple definitions of risk, depending on whose risk it was. In the implementation of a new technology solution, the risk definition of the person who would be using the solution is completely different than that of the procurement officer who will be overseeing the purchase process.

All this led to a completely different interpretation of buying motivation — one driven by emotions. If you can understand those emotional factors, you can start to understand the choices made at each intersection. It lets us see things beyond the bounds of the “funnel.”

Marketing funnels are a model — not the real world. And as statistician George Box said, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” I do believe the funnel can be useful, but we just have to understand that there’s so much you can’t see from inside the funnel.

Why is Everything Now ‘Unprecedented’?

Just once, I would like to get through one day without hearing the word “unprecedented.” And I wonder, is that just the media trying to get a click, or is the world truly that terrible?

Take the Olympics. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen an Olympics like this one. Empty stands. Athletes having to leave within 48 hours of their last event. Opening and closing ceremonies unlike anything we have ever seen. It’s, well — unprecedented.

The weather is unprecedented. What is happening in politics is unprecedented. The pandemic is unprecedented, at least in our lifetimes. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m watching a blockbuster where the world will eventually end — but we just haven’t got to that part of the movie yet. I feel the palpable sensation of teetering on the edge of a precipice. And I’m pretty sure it’s happened before.

Take the lead-ups to the two world wars, for example. If you plot a timeline of the events that led to either July 20, 1914 or Sept. 1, 1939, there is a noticeable acceleration of momentum. At first, the points on the timeline are spread apart, giving the world a chance to once again catch its collective breath. But as we get closer and closer to those dates circled in red, things pick up. There are cascades of events that eventually lead to the crisis point. Are we in the middle of such a cascade?

Part of this might just be network knock-on effects that happen in complex environments. But I also wonder if we just become a little shell- shocked, being nudged into a numb acceptance of things we would have once found intolerable.

Author and geographer Jared Diamond calls this “creeping normality. “ In his book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” he used the example of the deforestation and environmental degradation that happened on Easter Island — and how, despite the impending doom, the natives still decided to chop down the last tree: “I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn’t simply disappear one day—it vanished slowly, over decades.”

Creeping normality continually and imperceptibly nudges us from the unacceptable to the acceptable and we don’t even notice it’s happening. It’s a cognitive bias that keeps us from seeing reality for what it is. Creeping normality is what happens when our view of the world comes through an Overton Window.

I have mentioned the concept of the Overton Window before.  Overton Window was first introduced by political analyst Joseph Lehman and was named after his colleague, Joseph Overton. It was initially coined to show that the political policies that the public finds acceptable will shift over time. What was once considered unthinkable can eventually become acceptable or even popular, given the shifting sensitivities of the public. As an example, the antics of Donald Trump would once be considered unacceptable in any public venue — but as our reality shifted, we saw them eventually become mainstream from an American president.

I suspect that the media does the same thing with our perception of the world in general. The news media demands the exceptional. We don’t click on “ordinary.” So it consistently shifts our Overton Window of what we pay attention to, moving us toward the outrageous. Things that once would have caused riots are now greeted with a yawn. This is combined with the unrelenting pace of the news cycle. What was outrageous today slips into yesterday, to be replaced with what is outrageous today.

And while I’m talking about outrageous, let’s look at the root of that term. The whole point of something being outrageous is to prompt us into being outraged — or moved enough to take action. And, if our sensitivity to outrage is constantly being numbed, we are no longer moved enough to act.

When we become insensitive to things that are unprecedented, we’re in a bad place. Our trust in information is gone. We seek information that comforts us that the world is not as bad as we think it is. And we ignore the red flags we should be paying attention to.

If you look at the lead-ups to both world wars, you see this same pattern. Things that happened regularly in 1914 or 1939, just before the outbreak of war, would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. The momentum of mayhem picked up as the world raced to follow a rapidly moving Overton Window. Soon, before we knew it, all hell broke loose and the world was left with only one alternative: going to war.

An Overton Window can just happen, or it can be intentionally planned. Politicians from the fringes, especially the right, have latched on to the Window, taking something intended to be an analysis and turning it into a strategy. They now routinely float “policy balloons” that they know are on the fringe, hoping to trigger a move in our Window to either the right or left. Over time, they can use this strategy to introduce legislation that would once have been vehemently rejected.

The danger in all this is the embedding of complacency. Ultimately, our willingness to take action against threat is all that keeps our society functioning. Whether it’s our health, our politics or our planet, we have to be moved to action before it’s too late.

When the last tree falls on Easter Island, we don’t want to be the ones with the axe in our hands.

Respecting The Perspective Of Generations

We spend most of our time talking to people who are approximately our age. Our social circle naturally forms from those who were born in the same era as us. We just have a lot more in common with them. And that may not be a good thing. I just turned 60, and one of the things I’m spending more time doing is speaking to people in the generation before me and the generation after me.

Each of us become products of the environment where we grew up. It gives us a perspective that shapes the reality we live in, for good or bad. Sometimes that causes frustrations when we interact with those who grew up in a different generation. We just don’t see the world the same way.

And that’s OK. In fact, as I’ve learned from my intergenerational discussions, it can be tremendously valuable. We just have to accept it for what it is.

Take the generation after me — that of my nieces, nephews, and my own children. Armed with determination, energy, and a belief that the world not only should be better but must be better, they are going forward trying to find the shortest point between today and the tomorrow they’re fighting for. For them, there is not a moment to lose.

And they’re right. The sooner we get there, the better it will be for all of us.

As hard as it might be for them to believe, I was once among them. I remember myself having the righteousness of youth, when what was right and what was wrong was so clearly delineated in my own head. I remember being frustrated with my own parents and grandparents, who seemed so stuck in a world no longer relevant or correct. I remember reprimanding them –seldom patiently — when they said something that was no longer acceptable in the more politically correct world of the 1980s.

But — in the blink of an eye — it’s now some 40 years later. And now, it’s my turn to be corrected.

I accept that. I’m unlearning a lot. I believe the world is a better place than the one I grew up in, so I’m willing to do to do the work necessary to change my perspective. The world is a more tolerant, fairer, more equitable place. It’s a long way from being good enough, but I do believe it’s heading in the right direction. And when I’m corrected, I know the generation that follows me is usually right. I am literally changing my mind — and that’s not easy.

But I’m also learning to value the perspective of the generation that came before me — the one I was once so quick to dismiss. I’m working to understand the environment they grew up in and the life experiences that shaped their reality. What was the context that ground the lens they see life through? If we are willing to understand that, it can teach us a lot.

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of my time talking to a generation born during or just before WWII in Italy. Many of them came from the South of Italy. Most of them were left with nothing after the war. The lives of their parents — their possessions, their livelihood, their communities, everything they knew — was trampled underfoot as the battle spread up the boot of Italy for two long years, from July 1943 to May 1945.   When the dust and debris finally settled, they emigrated, continuing the greatest diaspora in history, because they had no other choice. You don’t leave home until there is no longer a future there to be imagined, no matter how hard you try.

Before we dismiss the perspectives that come from this generation, we have to take a long moment to appreciate the reality that formed their perspective. It is a reality that most of us have never experienced or even imagined. It is a reality that belongs not only to Italians, but almost every immigrant who left the lives they knew behind.

In my conversations with people who came from this reality, attitudes emerge that definitely don’t always fit well in today’s world. They have learned by hard experience that shit can and does happen. Their trust is hard-won. There is a suspicion of people who come from outside the circle of family and friends. There is a puzzlement with the latest cause that is burning up our social media feed. And yes, there is some cultural baggage that might best be left behind.

But there is also a backbone of courage, a long-simmering determination and a pragmatic view of the future that can be admired, and — if we take the time to listen — should be heeded. While the generation after me is rushing into their life in this world, the generation before me is limping out of it. Both perspectives are enlightening and should be considered. I am stuck in the middle. And I’m finding it’s not a bad place to be, as long as I keep looking both ways.

As any navigator can tell you, it’s much easier to pinpoint your location when you have a few different bearings available. This cross-generational view has long been embedded in Iroquois tradition, where it’s known as the Seven Generation principle: “The thickness of your skin shall be seven spans.”

The saying is commonly interpreted as looking forward to create a sustainable future for seven generations. But indigenous activist Vine Deloria Jr. had a different interpretation: that we must honor and protect the seven generations closest to us. Counting ourselves as one of those, we then look back three generations and forward three. We should make our decision based on a approximately 150-year time span, looking 75 years forward and 75 years back.

In our culture, we take a much shorter view of things. In doing that, we can often lose our bearings.

Seeking “Burstiness” When Working from Home

I was first introduced to the concept of “burstiness” by psychologist Adam Grant in his podcast, “Worklife.” In one episode, he visits the writers’ room at “The Daily Show” and probes the creativity that crackles when those writers were on a roll. A big part of that energy, according to Grant, was because of “burstiness.”

The term was initially coined by Anita Williams Woolley, associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University.

Burstiness is, according to Grant,

“like the best moments in improv jazz. Someone plays a note, someone else jumps in with a harmony, and pretty soon, you have a collective sound that no one planned. Most groups never get to that point, but you know burstiness when you see it. At ‘The Daily Show,’ the room just literally sounds like it’s bursting with ideas.”

Last week, we reran a post I wrote at the beginning of the pandemic wondering if we might be forsaking some important elements of team effectiveness in our rush to embrace the virtual workplace. Our brains have evolved to be most effective in creating relationships with others when we’re face-to -ace. There is a rich bandwidth of communication through which we build trust in others that is reliant on physical proximity.

Zoom just doesn’t cut it.

So, would this idea of burstiness be sacrificed in a remote work environment? Let’s dig a little deeper.

Grant outlines the things that need to be in place for burstiness to occur:

  • Spending time with each other
  • Psychological safety
  • A proper balance of structure
  • The right people in the room

Let’s look at these in reverse order.

The right people in the room

First, how do you get the right people in the room – or, in the case of a remote workforce, on the same Zoom call? Here, diversity seems to be the key. You need different perspectives. Creativity comes from diversity, not sameness.

Dr. Woolley offers the example of the Kennedy and Lincoln presidential cabinets. Kennedy’s cabinet was comprised of Ivy League intellectual elites who all came from similar backgrounds and had the same ideological view of the world. Lincoln’s cabinet was fractious, to say the least. After his election, Lincoln reached out to bitter rivals who ran against him for the presidency — including Salmon Chase and William Seward — and gave them senior positions in his cabinet. Lincoln’s cabinet is generally considered by historians as the most effective political team in American history. Kennedy’s cabinet suffered from a debilitating case of “groupthink” that launched the Bay of Pigs invasion and almost ignited another world war.

There is no reason why a virtual workplace cannot embrace diversity. You just have to recruit the right people through bias-resistant practices like blind auditions and using multiple interviewers.

A proper balance of structure

Grant says the right structure provides the rules of engagement for creative bursts. You need some basic guidelines so you can focus on the work and not the mechanics of the process. To use Grant’s example, jazz improv seems unstructured, but there are actually some commonly understood ground rules on which the improvisation is built.

This brings to mind psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow, the condition where creativity just flows naturally. Structure allows Flow to happen by providing the structure the brain needs to focus wholly on the task at hand. There is no reason why the structure can’t apply equally to traditional and virtual work teams.

But the next two conditions get a little trickier for the virtual workplace. Let’s look at them together:

Psychological safety and spending time together

Psychological safety is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson. When it comes to promoting “burstiness,” psychology safety gives us the confidence to contribute without being punished or ridiculed. It allows us to take creative risk. Another word for it would be trust.

And that brings us to second part — spending time together — and the challenge for that in a virtual workplace. Trust is not built overnight, and it is not built over Zoom or Slack.

As I said in my previous post, organizational behavior specialist Mahdi Roghanizad from Ryerson University has found that the connections in our brains that create trust may not even be activated unless we’re face-to-face with someone. We need eye contact to nudge this part of ourselves into life.

So, if creativity is a requirement in the workplace, and connecting face-to-face is required to foster creativity, is a virtual office a non-starter? Not necessarily. In my next post, I’ll look at some ways we might have still be able to have burstiness — even when we’re at home in our pajamas.

Getting Bitch-Slapped by the Invisible Hand

Adam Smith first talked about the invisible hand in 1759. He was looking at the divide between the rich and the poor and said, in essence, that “greed is good.”

Here is the exact wording:

“They (the rich) are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.”

The effect of “the hand” is most clearly seen in the wide-open market that emerges after established players collapse and make way for new competitors riding a wave of technical breakthroughs. Essentially, it is a cycle.

But something is happening that may never have happened before. For the past 300 years of our history, the one constant has been the trend of consumerism. Economic cycles have rolled through, but all have been in the service of us having more things to buy.

Indeed, Adam Smith’s entire theory depends on greed: 

“The rich … consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements.”

It’s the trickle-down theory of gluttony: Greed is a tide that raises all boats.

The Theory of The Invisible Hand assumes there are infinite resources available. Waste is necessarily built into the equation. But we have now gotten to the point where consumerism has been driven past the planet’s ability to sustain our greedy grasping for more.

Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, for one, recognized that environmental impact is not accounted for with this theory. Also, if the market alone drives things like research, it will inevitably become biased towards benefits for the individual and not the common good.

There needs to be a more communal counterweight to balance the effects of individual greed. Given this, the new age of consumerism might look significantly different.

There is one outcome of market driven-economics that is undeniable: All the power lies in the connection between producers and consumers. Because the world has been built on the predictable truth of our always wanting more, we have been given the ability to disrupt that foundation simply by changing our value equation: buying for the greater good rather than our own self-interest.

I’m skeptical that this is even possible.

It’s a little daunting to think that our future survival relies on our choices as consumers. But this is the world we have made. Consumption is the single greatest driver of our society. Everything else is subservient to it.

Government, science, education, healthcare, media, environmentalism: All the various planks of our societal platform rest on the cross-braces of consumerism. It is the one behavior that rules all the others. 

This becomes important to think about because this shit is getting real — so much faster than we thought possible.

I write this from my home, which is about 100 miles from the village of Lytton, British Columbia. You might have heard it mentioned recently. On June 29, Lytton reported the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada  a scorching 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit (49.6 degrees C for my Canadian readers). That’s higher than the hottest temperature ever recorded in Las Vegas. Lytton is 1,000 miles north of Las Vegas.

As I said, that was how Lytton made the news on June 29. But it also made the news again on June 30. That was when a wildfire burned almost the entire town to the ground.

In one week of an unprecedented heat wave, hundreds of sudden deaths occurred in my province. It’s believed the majority of them were caused by the heat.

We are now at the point where we have to shift the mental algorithms we use when we buy stuff. Our consumer value equation has always been self-centered, based on the calculus of “what’s in it for me?” It was this calculation that made Smith’s Invisible Hand possible.

But we now have to change that behavior and make choices that embrace individual sacrifice. We have to start buying based on “What’s best for us?”

In a recent interview, a climate-change expert said he hoped we would soon see carbon-footprint stickers on consumer products. Given a choice between two pairs of shoes, one that was made with zero environmental impact and one that was made with a total disregard for the planet, he hoped we would choose the former, even if it was more expensive.

I’d like to think that’s true. But I have my doubts. Ethical marketing has been around for some time now, and at best it’s a niche play. According to the Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals, the vast majority of egg buyers in Canada — 98% — buy caged eggs even though we’re aware that the practice is hideously cruel.  We do this because those eggs are cheaper.

The sad fact is that consumers really don’t seem to care about anything other than their own self-interest. We don’t make ethical choices unless we’re forced to by government legislation. And then we bitch like hell about our rights as consumers. “We should be given the choice,” we chant.  “We should have the freedom to decide for ourselves.”

Maybe I’m wrong. I sure hope so. I would like to think — despite recent examples to the contrary of people refusing to wear face masks or get vaccinated despite a global pandemic that took millions of lives — that we can listen to the better angels of our nature and make choices that extend our ability to care beyond our circle of one.

But let’s look at our track record on this. From where I’m sitting, 300 years of continually making bad choices have now brought us to the place where we no longer have the right to make those choices. This is what The Invisible Hand has wrought. We can bitch all we want, but that won’t stop more towns like Lytton B.C. from burning to the ground.

Why Our Brains Struggle With The Threat Of Data Privacy

It seems contradictory. We don’t want to share our personal data but, according to a recent study reported on by MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan, we want the brands we trust to know us when we come shopping. It seems paradoxical.

But it’s not — really.  It ties in with the way we’ve always been thinking.

Again, we just have to understand that we really don’t understand how the data ecosystem works — at least, not on an instant and intuitive level. Our brains have no evolved mechanisms that deal with new concepts like data privacy. So we have borrowed other parts of the brain that do exist. Evolutionary biologists call this “exaption.”

For example, the way we deal with brands seems to be the same way we deal with people — and we have tons of experience doing that. Some people we trust. Most people we don’t. For the people we trust, we have no problem sharing something of our selves. In fact, it’s exactly that sharing that nurtures relationships and helps them grow.

It’s different with people we don’t trust. Not only do we not share with them, we work to avoid them, putting physical distance between us and them. We’d cross to the other side of the street to avoid bumping into them.

In a world that was ordered and regulated by proximity, this worked remarkably well. Keeping our enemies at arm’s length generally kept us safe from harm.

Now, of course, distance doesn’t mean the same thing it used to. We now maneuver in a world of data, where proximity and distance have little impact. But our brains don’t know that.

As I said, the brain doesn’t really know how digital data ecosystems work, so it does its best to substitute concepts it has evolved to handle those it doesn’t understand at an intuitive level.

The proxy for distance the brain seems to use is task focus. If we’re trying to do something, everything related to that thing is “near” and everything not relevant to it is “far. But this is an imperfect proxy at best and an outright misleading one at worst.

For example, we will allow our data to be collected in order to complete the task. The task is “near.” In most cases, the data we share has little to do with the task we’re trying to accomplish. It is labelled by the brain as “far” and therefore poses no immediate threat.

It’s a bait and switch tactic that data harvesters have perfected. Our trust-warning systems are not engaged because there are no proximate signs to trigger them. Any potential breaches of trust happen well after the fact – if they happen at all. Most times, we’re simply not aware of where our data goes or what happens to it. All we know is that allowing that data to be collected takes us one step closer to accomplishing our task.

That’s what sometimes happens when we borrow one evolved trait to deal with a new situation:  The fit is not always perfect. Some aspects work, others don’t.

And that is exactly what is happening when we try to deal with the continual erosion of online trust. In the moment, our brain is trying to apply the same mechanisms it uses to assess trust in a physical world. What we don’t realize is that we’re missing the warning signs our brains have evolved to intuitively look for.

We also drag this evolved luggage with us when we’re dealing with our favorite brands. One of the reasons you trust your closest friends is that they know you inside and out. This intimacy is a product of a physical world. It comes from sharing the same space with people.

In the virtual world, we expect the brands we know and love to have this same knowledge of us. It frustrates us when we are treated like a stranger. Think of how you would react if the people you love the most gave you the same treatment.

This jury-rigging of our personal relationship machinery to do double duty for the way we deal with brands may sound far-fetched, but marketing brands have only been around for a few hundred years. That is just not enough time for us to evolve new mechanisms to deal with them.

Yes, the rational, “slow loop” part of our brains can understand brands, but the “fast loop” has no “brand” or “data privacy” modules. It has no choice but to use the functional parts it does have.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are multiple studies that indicate that it’s these parts of our brain that fire instantly, setting the stage for all the rationalization that will follow. And, as our own neuro-imaging study showed, it seems that the brain treats brands the same way it treats people.

I’ve been watching this intersection between technology and human behaviour for a long time now. More often than not, I see this tendency of the brain to make split-section decisions in environments where it just doesn’t have the proper equipment to make those decisions. When we stop to think about these things, we believe we understand them. And we do, but we had to stop to think. In the vast majority of cases, that’s just not how the brain works.

The Problem With Woke Capitalism

I’ve been talking a lot over the last month or two about the concept of corporate trust. Last week I mentioned that we as consumers have a role to play in this: It’s our job to demand trustworthy behavior from the companies we do business with.

The more I thought about that idea, I couldn’t help but put it in the current context of cancel culture and woke capitalism. In this world of social media hyperbole, is this how we can flex our consumer muscles?

I think not. When I think of cancel culture and woke capitalism, I think of signal-to-noise ratio. And when I look at how most corporations signal their virtue, I see a lot of noise but very little signal.

Take Nike, for example. There is probably no corporation in the world that practises more virtue signaling than Nike. It is the master of woke capitalism. But if you start typing Nike into Google, the first suggested search you’ll see is “Nike scandal.” And if you launch that search, you’ll get a laundry list of black eyes in Nike’s day-to-day business practices, including sweatshops, doping, and counterfeit Nike product rings.

The corporate watchdog site ethicalconsumer.org has an extensive entry on Nike’s corporate faux pas. Perhaps Nike needs to spend a little less time preaching and a little more time practicing.

Then there’s 3M. There is absolutely nothing flashy about the 3M brand. 3M is about as sexy as Mr. Wood, my high school Social Studies teacher. Mr. Wood wore polyester suits (granted, it was the ‘70s) and had a look that was more Elvis Costello than Elvis Presley. But he was by far my favorite teacher. And you could trust him with anything.

I think 3M might be the Mr. Wood of the corporate world.

I had the pleasure of working with 3M as a consultant for the last three or four years of my professional life. I still have friends who were and are 3Mers. I have never, in one professional setting, met a more pleasant group of people.

When I started writing this and thought about an example of a trustworthy corporation, 3M was the first that came to mind. The corporate ethos at 3M is, as was told me to me by one vice president, “Minnesota nice.”

Go ahead. Try Googling “3M corporate scandal.” Do you know what comes up? 3M investigating other companies that are selling knockoff N95 facemasks. The company is the one investigating the scandal, not causing it. (Just in case you’re wondering, I tried searching on ethicalconsumer.org for 3M. Nothing came up.)

That’s probably why 3M has been chosen as one of the most ethical companies in the world by the Ethisphere Institute for the last eight consecutive years.

Real trust comes from many places, but a social media campaign is never one of them. It comes from the people you hire and how you treat those people. It comes from how you handle HR complaints, especially when they’re about someone near the top of the corporate ladder. It comes from how you set your product research goals, where you make those products, who you sell those products to, and how you price those products. It comes from how you conduct business meetings, and the language that’s tolerated in the lunchroom.

Real trust is baked in. It’s never painted on.

Social media has armed consumers with a voice, as this lengthy essay in The Atlantic magazine shows. But if we go back to our signal versus noise comparison, everything on social media tends to be a lot of “noise,” and very little signal. Protesting through online channels tends to create hyper-virtuous bubbles that are far removed from the context of day-to-day reality. And — unfortunately — companies are getting very good at responding in kind. Corrupt internal power structures and business practices are preserved, while scapegoats are publicly sacrificed and marketing departments spin endlessly.

As Helen Lewis, the author of The Atlantic piece, said,

“That leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival.”

Empty “mea culpas” and making hyperbolic noise just for the sake of looking good is not how you build trust. Trust is built on consistency and reliability. It is built on a culture that is committed to doing the right thing, even when that may not be the most profitable thing. Trust is built on being “Minnesota nice.”

Thank you, 3M, for that lesson. And thank you, Mr. Wood.

The Profitability Of Trust

Some weeks ago, I wrote about the crisis of trust identified by the Edelman Trust Barometer study and its impact on brands. In that post, I said that the trust in all institutions had been blown apart, hoisted on the petard of our political divides.

We don’t trust our government. We definitely don’t trust the media – especially the media that sits on the other side of the divide. Weirdly, our trust in NGOs has also slipped, perhaps because we suspect them to be politically motivated.

So whom — or what — do we trust? Well, apparently, we still trust corporations. We trust the brands we know. They, alone, seem to have been able to stand astride the chasm that is splitting our culture.

As I said before, I’m worried about that.

Now, I don’t doubt there are well-intentioned companies out there. I know there are several of them. But there is something inherent in the DNA of a for-profit company that I feel makes it difficult to trust them. And that something was summed up years ago by economist Milton Friedman, in what is now known as the Friedman Doctrine. 

In his eponymously named doctrine, Friedman says that a corporation should only have one purpose: “An entity’s greatest responsibility lies in the satisfaction of the shareholders.” The corporation should, therefore, always endeavor to maximize its revenues to increase returns for the shareholders.

So, a business will be trustworthy as long as fits its financial interest to be trustworthy. But what happens when those two things come into conflict, as they inevitably will?

Why is it inevitable, you ask? Why can’t a company be profitable and worthy of our trust? Ah, that’s where, sooner or later, the inevitable conflict will come.

Let’s strip this down to the basics with a thought experiment.

In a 2017 article in the Harvard Business Review, neuroscientist Paul J. Zak talks about the neuroscience of trust. He explains how he discovered that oxytocin is the neurochemical basis of trust — what he has since called The Trust Molecule.

To do this, he set up a classic trust task borrowed from Nobel laureate economist Vernon Smith:

“In our experiment, a participant chooses an amount of money to send to a stranger via computer, knowing that the money will triple in amount and understanding that the recipient may or may not share the spoils. Therein lies the conflict: The recipient can either keep all the cash or be trustworthy and share it with the sender.”

The choice of this task speaks volumes. It also lays bare the inherent conflict that sooner or later will face all corporations: money or trust? This is especially true of companies that have shareholders. Our entire capitalist ethos is built on the foundation of the Friedman Doctrine. Imagine what those shareholders will say when given the choice outlined in Zak’s experiment: “Keep the money, screw the trust.” Sometimes, you can’t have both. Especially when you have a quarterly earnings target to hit.

For humans, trust is our default position. It has been shown through game theory research using the Prisoner’s Dilemma that the best strategy for evolutionary success is one called “Tit for Tat.” In Tit for Tat, our opening position is typically one of trust and cooperation. But if we’re taken advantage of, then we raise our defences and respond in kind.

So, when we look at the neurological basis of trust, consistency is another requirement. We will be willing to trust a brand until it gives a reason not to. The more reliable the brand is in earning that trust, the more embedded that trust will become. As I said in the previous post, consistency builds beliefs and once beliefs are formed, it’s difficult to shake them loose.

Trying to thread this needle between trust and profitability can become an exercise in marketing “spin”: telling your customers you’re trustworthy, while you’re are doing everything possible to maximize your profits. A case in point — which we’ve seen repeatedly — is Facebook and its increasingly transparent efforts to maximize advertising revenue while gently whispering in our ear that we should trust it with our most private information.

Given the potential conflict between trust and profit, is trusting a corporation a lost cause? No, but it does put a huge amount of responsibility on the customer. The Edelman study has made abundantly clear that if there is such a thing as a “market” for trust, then trust is in dangerously short supply. This is why we’re turning to brands and for-profit corporations as a place to put our trust. We have built a society where we believe that’s the only thing we can trust.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England and the former governor of the Bank of Canada, puts this idea forward in his new book, “Value(s).” In it, he shows how “market economies” have evolved into “market societies” where price determines the value of everything. And corporations will follow profit, wherever it leads.

If we understand that fundamental characteristic of corporations, it does bring an odd kind of power that rests in the hands of consumers.

Markets are not unilateral beasts. They rely on the balance between supply and demand. We form half that equation. It is our willingness to buy that determine how prices are determined in Carney’s “market societies.” So, if we are willing to place our trust in a brand, we can also demand that the brand proves that our trust has not been misplaced, through the rewards and penalties built into the market. 

Essentially, we have to make trust profitable.