Category Archives: Consumer Psychology

Human Hardware Series on Search Engine Land

I’m kicking off another series in the Just Behave column on Search Engine Land. I’m calling it the Human Hardware series, and it it I’ll be exploring some of the inherent traits of humans and how they affect our online interactions. In the first installment, last Friday, I looked at working memory, channel capacity and satisficing, area I’ve explored in past posts. Here’s a brief excerpt:

As people start to dive into the human genome, it’s somewhat startling to find the lack of diversity in the human gene pool. As different as we all think we are, we actually are alike in many more ways. We share a remarkable similarity in our physiological and neurological make up. Added to this is the fact that there are several inherent traits we all share, the result of thousands of years of evolutionary tweaking. There are absolutely deviations from the norm, but as a quick glance at any bell curve will tell you, for any given trait or characteristic of humanity, including intelligence, loyalty, physical strength or the ability to juggle, most of us cluster around the center line, otherwise known as the norm. It’s the inherent limits of the vehicle we inhabit, our body.

And lest you start feeling too superior, we actually share 98.4% of our genetic material with chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relative. There is more genetic diversity between two breeds of dogs than there is between us and the average chimp. In fact, apes and chimpanzees are genetically more divergent than chimps and humans. Try wrapping your mind around that one on your next trip to the zoo.

As we start looking at our success in predicting behavior, the peak of the bell curve for our target population is where we have to start. It helps to understand the human hardware issues, which form the foundation of our understanding of predicted behavior. From here, we can tilt our strategies to accommodate diversions in either direction from the norm.

Why is the human gene pool so shallow? It’s because we all come from the same place, a relatively small population of modern humans in Africa, some 150,000 years ago. Recent research has shown that genetic diversity lessens as we get further and further from Africa. And one particularly interesting study speculates that all blue eyed people come from the same common ancestor. Our family tree has remarkably few branches if you go back far enough.

The rest of the column can be read over at Search Engine Land. Next week I’ll be running Part Two, looking at the differences of men and women.

Marketers Fall Victim to our own Disease: Spoon Sized Wisdom

spoonfeedingI have just sorted through over 3500 email newsletters and feed alerts, going back 6months. I throw them all in a folder called “Blog Fodder”.

How did I get 6 months behind? Good question.

A Diversion of Attention

As you probably know, my attention recently has been elsewhere, going through books on a number of diverse subjects, but all touching on some central themes: Why we buy, why advertising and our consumer culture seemed to veer wildly offtrack somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, why we recommend certain brands, even evangelically, over others, and why some companies are much more successful than others at recognizing this and taking advantage of it. It’s been a fascinating journey that’s taken me through about 30 books in the past 6 or 7 months, covering brand strategies, neurology, psychology, sociology, corporate ethics and a handful of other diverse topics.

 My promise to myself has been to average 40 pages read a day and so far I’ve managed to do it. Some days are harder than others. You can breeze through a Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell book. The pages almost turn themselves. But when you sit down with a book like Gerald Zaltman’s How Customers Think or Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error, you have to work pretty damn hard to get through your 40 pages a day. My TV watching has gone down the tube, but my timing was pretty good. Thanks to the writer’s strike, there’s nothing on anyway. Actually, my TV watching has switched to digging through several BBC series on the human body and human mind. It’s much better TV than Dancing with the Has Been, Washed Up Semi-Celebrities.

The In Box Shuffle

But back to my sorting through the e-box in-drawer. In those 3500 e-newsletters and alerts, most of which provide links to multiple columns and articles, I wanted to sort out the ones that talked strategically about marketing, including examples of good and bad brand strategies, attempts to really understand consumer behaviors and motivations, musings on the impact of the internet on our consumer society, etc. I was looking for those who were thinking about the big picture stuff. I ended up with about 450 that made the initial cut. Let me put that in perspective. 3500 emails, each with an average of 10 links to articles or features. That’s 35,000 potential sources for strategic thinking. And I ended up with about 450. That’s a hit ratio of 1.3%

Deep Thinkers

The writers that continually show up with these types of columns? Max Kalehoff, Pete Blackshaw, Joseph Carrabis, Bryan Eisenberg and a handful of others. I’ve had a chance to talk or share emails with most of these and I know they all share my curiosity of all things human. I think that’s the key factor here.

The other 98.7%? Bite size pieces of industry news, quick “7 Things You Must Do to Supercharge Your XXXX Strategy” and “6 Easy Steps to XXXXX” and assorted tidbits. Easily digestible, promising a quick reward and instant gratification. My email inbox was filled with predigested spoonfuls of marketing sugar.

Don’t Spoil Your Supper

Now, obviously, there’s an appetite for this. And I think that’s the problem. As marketers, we’re always looking for the quick fixes and the instant tweaks. We’ve fallen victim to our own messaging. We’ve retrained our brains to think in 30 second bites. Anything longer than that, and our attention starts to drift. We’ve become consumers for quick marketing strategies. We have a voracious appetite for what’s new, what’s hot, what’s sexy, forgetting that at the end of the day, people will be people and we still are largely motivated by things that haven’t changed much in centuries. Sure, technology has changed dramatically, but everything only works if it can be filtered through our thick skulls.

Why do we do this? Well, again, it comes down to evolution. The human genome has evolved to be inherently lazy. As a species we exert less energy, so we were selected as the winners in the genetic lottery of life. The well rested will survive.

Stop Consuming and Start Thinking

But when it comes to marketing, there’s something fundamental happening right now that needs a deeper look than just your typical 7 Steps to Surefire Success. We need to muse longer and ask why more. It was eye opening to me lately when I was in a room full of 400 marketers and I asked them if they had ever heard the word satisficing. One person put up their hand. Satisficing is a key element to understanding consumer decision making. It’s not a new concept. It’s been around for almost 60 years. Heaven forbid I ask marketers how they think Damasio’s somatic marker theory might influence satisficing in consumer decisions.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for the quick fixes and the 7 Step lists. There is. I just think it shouldn’t make up 99% of marketing thinking. As one person who bucked the genetic trend and dared to take a deeper dive, I’m here to tell you it’s not easy, it’s not quick (probably into the hundreds of hours invested in the last 6 months) but it’s worth it.

Ring. Ring. Why We Can’t Ignore the Phone

Back to blogging over the holidays. And to get back in the groove for 2008, an interesting “Whydunnit” that was bouncing around my head and the Enquiro office yesterday.

It started as an example I used in today’s “Just Behave” column on Search Engine Land about how the way we interact with our online world might actually be more native to us and how we evolved than reading a book. Online browsing is actually a return to behavior that we’re pretty familiar with. We were born to multi-task.

Driving and Selective Perception

The example was to show how we use selective perception to decide what needs the full attention of our conscious mind, and it was about driving, daydreaming and cell phone use. Here’s an excerpt:

Here’s another example. Ever drive home on a route you take all the time, either from work or your children’s school, and get home only to realize you didn’t really remember driving there? You’ve driven the route so often that it’s worn a path in your brain and you can do it on autopilot. Meanwhile, your mind wanders in a million different directions, thinking about work, what’s for supper, your next vacation and the marks on your daughter’s report card. But all the time, you’re scanning your environment. If a pedestrian steps in front of you, you slam on the brakes. And you did it faster than you could ever rationally think about it. It’s a hereditary hardwired shortcut, straight to your amygdala, the emergency response center of your brain, bypassing your conscious mind.

By the way, while we’re on the subject of driving, if we’re so good at multitasking, why is talking on a cell phone so dangerous when we’re behind the wheel? It’s not because one of our hands is tied up, as we previously thought. Studies have found that even with hands free devices, we’re four times more likely to be in a car accident when talking on a cell phone. This risk is the same as driving while drunk. And it’s all about reaction time. One study found that if you put a 20 year old behind the wheel talking on a cell phone, their reaction time is the same as a 70 year old not talking on a cell phone.

Here’s the reason. It’s one thing to daydream. That happens in a part of our brain that can be instantaneously turned off, when required, to focus on more urgent matters. Day dreaming is like the brain idling. It doesn’t put too much of a cognitive load on the brain. But a conversation puts a much higher load on the brain. You have to focus your attention on what the other person is saying, and the minute we focus one sense on one stimulus, we lose much of our ability to monitor our environment with that sense.

But it’s more than just the act of listening. Carrying on a conversation requires us to process language, to translate what we’re hearing into concepts, and to take our concepts and translate them back into language. This is one of the most demanding tasks our brain has to do. While carrying on a conversation might not seem like much work, it’s moving our brain from slow idle to 5000 RPMs, firing on all cylinders. Which means there’s less capacity there to process emergency stimuli. In practical terms, we’re talking about a handful of milliseconds, as the brain switches tasks, but that difference can be several car lengths when slamming on the brakes. It’s the difference between a head on collision and a near miss.

Calling on the Phone: Much Worse than Being There

While talking about this with my partner, Bill Barnes, he asked an excellent question. Why does talking on a cell phone while driving seem to be more distracting than talking to someone sitting in the passenger seat? A little sleuthing found a study that seems to indicate this may not be the case. A study done in Spain seems to indicate that the cognitive load is the same. But I think there’s more to it than that. I haven’t been able to track down research proving my hypothesis yet, but I did find some interesting tidbits about our relationship with the phone, and how we’re conditioned to respond to it.

First of all, let’s talk about the “phone coma”. This is the state many of us go into when we’re talking on the phone. We become more oblivious to the outside world. The subconscious scanning of the environment that I was talking about in the Just Behave column seems to drop substantially. When you’re talking on the phone, you seem to gaze blindly into space. Think of the people with the Bluetooth headsets in airports, gazing out across the tarmac, lulled into a translike state by the conversation they’re engaged in. I think Bill’s right. I do think there’s a difference between our awareness when we’re talking on the phone versus talking in person.

You can Talk the Talk, But Can You Walk the Walk?

It even becomes more difficult to walk and talk on the phone at the same time. Again, take a few minutes to check this out the next time you go to the airport and see someone walking and talking on their headset. They’re fine as long as they’re going in a straight line and don’t have to look for directional cues, such as which gate they’re at. But the minute they have to think about where they’re going, they either stop and finish their conversation or ask the person on the phone to wait for a minute. We can’t navigate and talk at the same time. The cognitive load of both tasks is just too much. We have to pick one or the other.

Part of this has to do with how we convey information. Studies have found that in a face to face conversation, a surprisingly small amount of the meaning is derived from the actual words used. In fact, it’s less than 10%. The rest of the message is conveyed through body language and tone of voice. In the case of a phone conversation, at least one of these is missing completely, body language, and even tone of voice is less reliable, because the frequencies of the human voice have been processed and modulated in the transmission over the phone. We’re missing at least half of our communication “bandwidth” so we have to pay more attention to get the meaning.

The Difference between “Being” There and “Hearing” There

But even that wouldn’t completely explain the difference between an in person conversation in the car and talking on a cell phone. Here is where I think the difference comes, and again, it goes back to the difference between “being” there and “hearing” there. If you and I are sitting in the car and having a conversation, we’re both monitoring the same cues, because we’re in the same environment. If I’m in the passenger seat, I can immediately stop the conversation when I see your attention is needed elsewhere. Remember where language comes from. It’s an evolution of the grooming instinct, our need to relate to others of our species. Idle conversation between humans is the same to us as chimpanzees picking lice from each other’s heads. Chimpanzees won’t keep grooming if they’re being threatened by a lion. More important things are at hand. The same is true for humans. Idle chit chat stops immediately when there’s a risk of danger. And we pick up those cues in milliseconds.

But if you’re talking on the cell phone, the other person isn’t aware of your environmental cues. If a child runs in front of your car, the person on the other end of the phone just keeps talking. And you don’t have time to ask them to stop. You have a split second. So your brain is struggling, trying to process the conversation at the same time as your trying to get your brain to turn on the emergency response system. The person on the phone is “cueless”, so the distraction is far greater.

Our Pavlovian Response to Ring Tones

And this brings up another point. We have a conditioned response to phones. A phone ringing kicks in neural hardwiring and triggers a Pavlovian response. This explains a number of oddities about our relationship with the phone.

First of all, Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion, (a great book, by the way) talks about the fact that we can’t seem to ignore a phone ringing. The reason is association. We associate phone calls with news, either about something good or something bad. Either way, we need to know what it is. There is an unknown there that we’re programmed to need to solve. A phone ringing takes precedence in our mental queue. It goes to the front of the line by kicking in a number of subconscious neural triggers. Have you every tried to keep doing something while the phone is ringing? It’s almost impossible. Even if you manage to ignore the ringing (as when you forget to turn the cell phone off in a public event) the first thing you do is head out to the hall and check your voice mail. It’s not quite Pavlov’s dog’s salivating, but it’s pretty close. I’m not sure this understanding will help the next time you’re waiting at a counter for service and the person on is tied up on the phone, seemingly ignoring you, but give it a shot.

The persuasive nature of the phone gets even more insidious. Here’s an except from an article in the NY Times:

The ear gives unequal weights to certain frequencies, making it particularly sensitive to sounds in the range of 1,000 to 6,000 hertz, scientists say. Babies cry in this range, for example, and the familiar “brrring, brrring” ringtone hits this sweet spot, too. (Simple ringtones are more likely to produce phantom rings than popular music used as a ringtone.)

“Your brain is conditioned to respond to a phone ring just as it is to a baby crying,” Mr. Nokes said.

So, not only are we conditioned to respond. Phone manufacturers make it even more irrestible by tricking our brain into the same conditioned response we have when we hear our children crying. So, if we hear our cell phone ring in the car, the brain immediately starts anticipating something of import. The circuits that divert attention away from other activities kick into action, shifting it to the phone call. The physical act of answering the call is only one small part of it. It’s all the conditioned responses we have to the phone that are the real culprits in the increase of cell-related car accidents.

Everybody Hates a Telemarketer – even Jerry Seinfeld.

One last riff on the persuasive nature of the phone. One of my favorite moments on Seinfeld was when Jerry got a call from a telemarketer and responded:

““I’m sorry, I’m a little tied up now. Give me your home number and I’ll call you back later. Oh! You don’t like being called at home? Well, now you know how I feel.”

Why do we hate telemarketer’s so much? In fact, we so despise this form of marketing, we’ve actually legislated against it. Perhaps you’ve already guessed the answer, based on what I’ve already talked about. When the “Do Not Call” list was formed, the reasons put forward were, “a waste of our time”, “an invasion of our privacy” and “an interruption of family time”. While all valid, they’re not the real reasons. The same things could be said for almost any form of advertising, including TV ads, and we’re certainly not legislating them out of existence. In fact, the amount of time allowed for TV advertising in a typical half hour has increased dramatically over the last 2 decades. No, the reason we hate telemarketers has a much more human root: we feel duped by them.

Telemarketers take advantage of our conditioned responses. When we hear the phone ring, our brain kicks in to prepare us to pay attention, because we’ve been conditioned to expect it’s important. Then, we hear the subtle click of the telerouter and the scripted speech begins. Suddenly, realizing we’ve been tricked, we’re furious. Almost irrationally so. We treat telemarketers in a way we would never treat anyone else. I’m completely guilty of this. I’ll hang up on a telemarketer without a second thought, but I’ll put up with terrible service at a restaurant and usually not even mention it, even when asked. Why? Because we hate to be made fools of, and subconsciously, when we pick up the phone and hear a telemarketer, our brains are telling us that we’re a fool. Which makes us angry. Which causes us to lash out. Flight or fight has kicked in, and fight has won. Still considering a career as a telemarketer? It’s a toss of the dice with millions of years of evolution, and you’ll come up snake eyes every time.

Oh..and Happy New Year!

“What” is a Lot Easier to Ask than “Why”

In the last couple of sessions I’ve done, I’ve urged marketers in general, and search marketers in particular, to step away from the spreadsheet a little more often and start looking at why their customers do what they do. In Park City last week, at the Search Insider Summit, I urged those collected in the room to “spend less time thinking like marketers, and more time thinking like your customer”.

Do Unto Customers as You Would Have Done Unto You

There was a moment that crystallized the issue for me. The session was talking about mobile search, and one person in the room asked the presenter when the mobile carriers would make subscriber information available to marketers for better targeting. For me, this sent off all types of alarms, but in looking around the room, I could see marketing heads nodding in agreement. “Yes,” they nodded, “that information would make our jobs so much easier. We could zero in on exactly the right segment, so we could deliver ads targeted right to them.”

I couldn’t hold back anymore. Commandeering the mic, I asked how many in the room thought this would be a good marketing idea. Many hands went up. Then I asked them, as mobile users, who thought this would be a good idea. You could feel the paradigm shift sweep across the room. They chuckled uncomfortably as they realized they would be inundanted with more disruptive, annoying advertising. Suddenly, the shoe was on the other foot, and it didn’t fit very well.

Too Much What, Not Enough Why

As marketers, we spend long hours puzzling over the what questions:

  • What channels reach my customers most effectively
  • What messages will convert the best
  • What will give me the highest return on advertising spend?
  • What landing pages will yield the highest conversion rates

We crunch truckloads of data, because it’s available. You’ve heard it over and over. One of the blessings of search is that it’s so measurable. Yes, it is measurable, if you’re looking for the answers to what. What link, what click through rate, what traffic source, what conversion action? It’s all laid out for us in a statistical smorgasbord, and search marketers love to dive in. We feast on KPI’s and Metrics, finally pushing away from the table like some over-sated visitor to an all you can eat Vegas buffet, stuffed beyond the point of comfort.

But in pouring through this data, we tend to become fixated on it and think the truth lies hidden in there somewhere. We don’t step back and wonder “why” all those “whats” are happening. I had a great chance to chat with James Lamberti from ComScore at the show, and we talked about this. There’s few sources of sheer quantitative data richer than the ComScore panel. And James and I have had the chance to talk about how Enquiro’s qualitative approach often dovetails nicely with ComScores “quant” perspective of the world. As James said, “the thing I love about your research is that it tells me why much of the stuff we see in our data is happening.” Amen.

Human Hardware

Here’s just one example. In a number of studies done both by ourselves and others (one Microsoft eye tracking study comes to mind) we found that users tend to move down the search page in groups of 3 or 4 listings at a time. This is the “what” that was happening. But it wasn’t until I started looking at concepts in cognitive psychology that were several decades old that I started to understand “why”. It’s because, like most things, it’s human nature. It’s what I’ve started calling a “human hardware” issue. Often, when you see a consistent behavior emerge for the “what” data, it means there’s a significant “why” to be uncovered in the workings of the human mind. In this case, it was rooted in the concepts of working memory and channel capacity, along with the behavior of satisficing, based on work done by George Miller and Herbert Simon over 50 years ago. And once we uncovered the “why”, it lead to a whole new understanding of search behavior.

In his book, “How Customers Think”, Gerald Zaltman talks about a company that did a conjoint analysis of three different package designs. Conjoint analysis is perhaps the perfect embodiment of “what” research; what combination of factors provides the greatest positive response from customers. It’s the basis for multivariate testing in the online world. At the end of the study, researchers were confident they had found the best possible design, but were puzzled when market acceptance was much less than forecast. It turns out that their conjoint analysis simply showed them the lesser of three evils. They failed to uncover the fundamental problems with the design, because they were focused on the “whats”, rather than the “whys”.

Look for the Whys in the Shadows

“Whys” are difficult to uncover. As I said in an earlier post, “whys” are often buried in our subconscious, emotional brain. “Whats” are right there, on the surface, easy to collect and combine in a zillion different ways.  In fact, in many research projects, when behaviors emerge that don’t fit into the hypothetical framework of the conductors, (when the “whats” we see are not the “whats” we expect to see) they are ignored because they’re labeled irrational. In many cases, they’re not irrational. They’re just not understood by the researchers, because the “why” has not been uncovered. As Zaltman says in his book, it’s like the story of the drunk looking for his lights under a streetlight. A passerby stops to help and asks the drunk where he lost his glasses. He points to a far off place in the darkness. The passerby asks why he’s not looking there. The drunk replies, “because the lights so much better here”.

Quantitative data is incredibly valuable. It can provide statistical confidence to see if behaviors are representative. And from the patterns that emerge, we can identify the “whys” we need to look at closer. But it should be part of a collective research approach, not the entire answer. “Whys” should lead to “whats”, which should lead back to more “whys”. It should be a self feeding cycle.

Trust Your Gut

And for the marketers reading this, to ensure yourself a long and successful run as a marketer, become an astute observer of human behavior. Learn to embrace emotions and gut instinct, both in your self and in anyone you meet. As you go through each day, spend as much time as possible wondering why people do what they do. Develop a finely tuned ability to look at things from your customer’s point of view, and if it doesn’t pass the gut check test, don’t do it. Our emotions and instincts are a finely tuned, essential part of our intellect. Trust them more often.

The Why’s of Buy: Soothing the Angry Customer

angerAnger is one of the less noble of human emotions. We tend to beat ourselves up when we get angry. After the emotion dies down, we feel a little foolish for losing control. As Ben Franklin said,

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.

However, Aristotle probably took a more realistic view of human nature when he said:

Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.

Here, Aristotle touches on the fact that anger is part of the basic human emotional repertoire for good reason. If we didn’t get angry, we wouldn’t still be here. But rationalizing anger in a positive way is a very rare ability.

Air Rage

I’ve had lots of opportunities to contemplate the nature of anger this week. In what was supposed to be a quick 24 hour trip down to Las Vegas (which has never been on my list of favorite cities) and back, I had two flights cancelled for mysterious reasons, was bumped from a first class seat back to a jammed couch cabin next to someone who apparently thought no one would ever notice if he passed gas constantly on a 2 hour flight, had to spend an unexpected night in a dumpy hotel in Seattle with a bunch of religiously fervent believers who were up til 1 am every night speaking in tongues (which apparently needs to be done at very high volume) and was away from my family for 14 hours longer than expected. Yes, I got a little hot under the collar.

How We Get Angry

Let’s go back to the basics. Why do we get angry? First, let’s understand that anger, along with fear and physical attraction, are probably our oldest hardwired emotions. They’re an embedded part of our neural circuitry that have been hundreds of millions of years in the making. Anger makes up one half of the fight or flight mechanism.

I say this to reinforce the fact that we cannot chose whether or not we can get angry. All we can do is chose what to do with that anger. At the subconscious level, you will pick up cues and the core of your brain, the brain stem working together with the amygdala in the limbic system, will determine if anger is the right response. Remember, this is not the highly refined neocortical part of your brain. This is the part of your brain that is a legacy from our dark evolutionary past. The decision to become angry is not a delicate, deliberate and rational decision. The decision to get angry is throwing an emergency switch. Its purpose is to get you ready for a fight, literally. It happens in a few milliseconds. The reptilian brain doesn’t believe there’s time for a debate about appropriate response, so there’s no rationalization of the situation at this point. What the amygdala does is an instantaneous shuffling through of past experience to see if we’ve encountered anything similar in the past. It’s like a flash card deck of emotionally charged memories. And if we find a match, even a rudimentary one, it’s good enough for the amygdala. We use that as our plan of action.  And the rule of thumb is, the amygdala overreacts. Survival is the objective, so it calls in the big guns.

The amygdala sends out a signal that starts priming the body for a fight. A potent cocktail of chemicals are released, including adrenalin, to kick the body into gear. Blood pressure climbs, the heart starts beating faster, sending more blood to the large muscle groups to get them ready for action. Another chemical, norepineephrine, is also released. The purpose of this is to set the brain on edge, making it more alert for visual cues of danger. More about this in a bit.

Basically, our bodies operate of the premise of “shoot first, ask questions later”. This priming the body for fight happens literally in the blink of an eye. The alarm has been sounded and anger has been unleashed. For right now, at least, the reptile in us is in full control.

But at this point, the things that make us human start to kick in. Another part of the brain, the hippocampus, is the contextual yin to the amygdala’s yang. It picks up the detail to help us put things in the right context. The amygdala tells us that we see a jaguar and jaguars can kill us. The hippocampus determines whether the jaguar is in a zoo, or leaping at us from a tree. This is the first place where our anger becomes to be contextualized. The hippocampus is the brain’s Sgt. Joe Friday: “The facts ma’am, just the facts”.

The next part of the process is where the rational part of our brains steps in and starts taking control. The signals that set the amygdala into action are then passed to the prefrontal lobes in the neocortex. Here is where the appropriate response is determined. A cascade of neural triggers is set off, determining how we should respond, given a more careful consideration of the facts. Remember, this isn’t to determine if we should get angry. That horse has already left the starting gate. This is to determine how aggressively we should override our initial reaction. The prefrontal lobes are our emotional brakes.

When it comes to the effectiveness of these brakes, all people are not created equal. Some have tremendously effective braking mechanisms. Nothing seems to perturb them. These would be the people who were smiling and joking at 10:30 at night in the Horizon Air customer service line at SeaTac airport, after we had found that none of us were getting home that night.

Some of us have much less effective braking systems. In fact, in some of us, our amygdala’s and our prefrontal lobes seem the unfortunate habit of playing a game of one upmanship, escalating the anger to a point totally inappropriate for the situation. This would be the person who was storming from gate to gate, threatening the gate agents to put him on a flight that would get him somewhere closer to home.

When it comes to our braking systems, there’s a right/left balance mechanism. It’s the left prefrontal lobe that seems to be main governor on how angry we become. The right prefrontal lobe, on the other hand, is where we harbor our negative emotions, like fear and aggression. Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence, tells the story of the husband who lost part of his right prefrontal lobe in a brain surgery procedure, and, to the surprise of his wife, emerged as a totally different person, more considerate, more compassionate and more affectionate. Fellow husbands, let’s hope word of this surgical procedure doesn’t get out. We’ll all sleep more soundly.

Outdated Signals

Now, obviously, in today’s world, being threatened by a hungry jaguar is probably not that common an occurrence. The threats to us are more likely to be to our personal dignity, our sense of fairness or our self esteem. But at the limbic level, our brain doesn’t really make a distinction. Remember, this mechanism has been built by millions of years of evolution. The last few thousand years of civilization hasn’t made a dent in it. It’s at the neocortical level, the highly plastic and adaptable part of our brain, where we make these distinctions and by then, we’re already angry.

This is one reason why we can feel so sheepish after an emotional outburst. Basically, our amygdala got carried away, set us up in full fight mode, and the left prefrontal lobe was napping on the job. We responded at a level that was out of proportion to what was appropriate, and it wasn’t until we cooled down a little that we realized it. This is when our wife looks at us after we lose it with the service agent at the lost baggage counter and say, “why did you get so angry?” (the “idiot” that follows this statement is usually implied, but not always) And somehow, “I was ready to fight to the death to ensure our survival as a species” just doesn’t seem like the right thing to say.

Confrontation is from Mars, Plotting is from Venus

By the way, there are gender differences in how we handle anger. Men basically have one response. We’re ready to fight. Confrontation seems to be our sole card to play. Women, on the other hand, have shown a much more varied repertoire of possible responses. They can be passively aggressive, vindictive or vengeful. They can employ much more sophisticated responses like social ostracism. Or, on the positive side, women are more likely to show compassion. But the key differentiator here is that men tend to respond to anger with a physical response, where as women tend to respond socially, either positively or negatively.

This difference makes sense when you look at our typical roles throughout evolution. Men were the physical providers and protectors. Women were the homemakers and the souls of the community. Through our history, men have been conditioned to respond in one way, and women in another. Women are equipped for their role with more empathy, the ability to better read others emotions, and a slower fuse when it comes to anger. Men are equipped for their role with a faster temper trigger, larger muscles and, it seems, a much more predictable response to threatening situations. Now, in making gender generalizations, I’m being incredibly sweeping here, but in aggregate, studies have shown this to be true. Again, I’ll come back to these differences.

The Speed of Anger

The speed of response of the amygdala is a two way street. It’s quick to be activated, but it’s also quick to shut down. The purpose of it is to get us prepared for a single burst of physical activity. Once it does its job, it moves on to the next thing. The information has been passed to the prefrontal lobe for further processing and the amygdala settles down to wait for the next threat. Total time elapsed? A few seconds.

But it’s what happens once anger is passed to the prefrontal lobe that can dictate whether this is a quickly dosed irritation or a long simmering feud. Remember, we have this chain of neural decisions that represent a balancing act between the left and right lobes. It’s the literal equivalent of the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. And all this time, we’re scanning our environment, consciously and subconsciously, for further cues about whether we should continue to be angry or to cool down. This is where anger gets much more complex. Every person has a different balance between these governing forces, and every situation is different. How you’re handled during this critical window will determine which emotional imprints you retain. And remember, it’s this emotional memory that will be recalled the next time you’re in a similar situation. This experiential, emotionally charged imprinting is a huge part of how we create attitudes and affinities towards a brand.

Anger in the Marketplace

So, after this long anatomical examination of anger, what’s the point? Well, if you look at how and why we get angry, you start to gain some insight in how to deal with angry customers.

First of all, anger is inevitable in negative customer situations. As much as we’d like to avoid dealing with angry people, let’s accept that as a given. It’s not as if they chose to be angry, they just are. And the degree of anger will be different in each person. What needs to be done is to maximize the chances for the left prefrontal lobe to douse the anger.

By the time you have your first contact with an angry customer, the amygdala has done its job and passed the ball to the prefrontal lobes. The alarm has been raised. Remember, the cause of anger in a customer is almost never going to be physical threat, unless you run the store from hell. Most often, the injury done will be to the customers self esteem, dignity or sense of fairness. And when the customer is in front of you, they’re looking to you to see if you represent a continued threat, or an ally. This will be conveyed through words, but to a much greater extent, through your body language and tone of your voice. The first few seconds of interaction with the customer will determine whether the right or left prefrontal lobe kicks in. If you’re perceived as a continuing threat, you’ll be dealing with the right lobe, and an escalating level of aggression. If you’re perceived as an ally, the left lobe kicks in and you’ll see the anger quickly dissipate. When we’re talking about person to person touch points, the first few seconds with an angry customer have no equal in importance.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening here. First of all, let’s remember our brains are being doused with norepineephrine. The purpose of this is to make the brain hypersensitive to possible threats. Again, think about the environment most companies choose to put angry customers in. In my case, after being bumped from my flight I was sent to Horizon Air’s customer service counter (and yes, I’m using the name purposely, and I’ll explain that in a second as well), which is smack in the middle of the busiest part of SeaTac airport. As you line up, waiting for a customer service agent, you’re subjected to the realities of a busy airport: tired, grumpy travelers, beeping carts, annoying gate announcements, reminding you that everyone except you is going somewhere tonight. None of this is going to make you a more pleasant person when you finally get to the head of the line. By now, you’re simmering on a slow boil. In my case, an obviously unhappy toddler decided to start screaming just a few feet from where we were waiting. Now, I’m a Dad and I normally have a lot of patience with unhappy kids, but this time, the screaming was like a jackhammer in my head. The norepineephrine was turning it into a huge warning signal.

Where else do angry customers go? The infamous customer service help line. Again, you’re put on hold, possibly the most irritating situation in the world. Look at this from the customer’s view point. You screwed up and inconvenienced me. You forced me to take valuable time out of my day to rectify the situation. And now you don’t even acknowledge the importance of my time by forcing me to wait on hold? What you’re telling me is your time is much more valuable than mine. Is this showing me that you’re an ally, rather than a threat?

Again, let me give you an example from my personal experience with Alaska and Horizon Airlines. On the trip out (before I got stuck in Seattle), the flight to Las Vegas was cancelled for some mysterious reason. We were never really told why. Now, being a frequent flyer on Alaska (and this is another area I’ll touch on, why we tend to continually anger our most important customers) I had been bumped up to first class. With the cancellation of the flight, I was put on standby for the next flight. The gate agent who checked me in apologized and said that although she couldn’t put me in first class, she’d note down my seat number and they’d try “to make it up to me”. This was the right response. She became my ally.

But on the flight, although I was directly behind the first class cabin (constantly reminding me that I had been bumped out) no flight attendant offered to make it up in any way. After waiting for most of the flight for the offer of a free drink or even an extra bag of peanuts, to no avail, the person behind me wanted to order a drink and caught the attention of the attendant in first class. She asked for the $5 dollars, and he said he was still waiting for the change from the first drink he ordered. She asked him if he was from the bumped flight and when he said he was, she said that they were supposed to offer everyone from that flight a free drink anyway, by way of apology, so not to worry about it. But no one offered anyone else from the flight a drink. There was no apology and no consideration.

Now, let’s examine this from my perspective. First, although angry, I had been appropriately dealt with and my inconvenience had been acknowledged. My sense of self esteem (as one of Alaska’s most valuable customers) had been repaired to some extent. But then this was not followed up on while I was on the plane. Not only was my dignity and self esteem disregarded, my sense of fairness was outraged at the lack of follow through with the inconvenienced passengers.

Where’s the next place Alaska dropped the ball? I considered saying something to the attendant, but that’s not in my nature. What I did was fire off an email to Alaska’s “Customer Care” address. Again, this is a typical channel provided for angry customers. But does it hit any of the required actions to mollify an upset customer? After struggling through a complicated form, I submitted my complaint. I got an automated reply saying that my submission had been received, saying that it was important to Alaska, and that it would typically be as many as 30 days before I received any response. No personal acknowledgement of my anger and the sense that I had been dumped into a big bureaucratic bucket. Again, this is not the way to tell me you’re my ally and you want to make the situation better. This is telling me that your hope is that I’ll forget all about it in 30 days, shut up and go back to being a good, submissive customer. That’s not going to happen. Let me till you why.

The Probability of Angering Your Best Customers

Here’s the ironic thing. Odds are it will be your best customer that you cause to get angry. It’s a simple case of probability. They have more encounters with you, so the odds of something bad happening go up. If I’m going to have a bad experience on an airline, it’s likely going to be the airline I travel most often.

With these customers, it’s more important than ever to acknowledge their anger and inconvenience. First of all, they represent a much higher lifetime value than the average customer, so the loss of business is a bigger deal (I’ve probably spent over a $100,000 with Alaska Airlines in the past 3 years), but secondly, they’ve made a commitment to your business, and you have to acknowledge the importance of that commitment. In return for making that commitment, and spending a large percentage of my yearly travel budget with Alaska, I want to feel that they recognize my importance as a customer. We’re more emotionally invested with the business, so we’re more susceptible to strong feelings, including anger. It’s the difference between having a fight with a stranger and a friend. There are a lot deeper and more complex feelings at play when we fight with a friend. The residue of a fight with a stranger will fade away completely in a few hours. Chances all, we’ll barely remember it. But the consequences of a fight with a friend can last days, weeks or even years. The scars can be deep and permanent.

There’s another critical element to understand here. Because your best customers have an emotional stake in your brand, if you don’t treat them very carefully when they’re upset, they’re also the ones most likely to spread the word either in person or online. By not acknowledging their importance as a customer and the validity of their anger, you’ve kicked the right prefrontal lobe into high gear. Physical confrontation is not an option but the negative feelings need an outlet. The more emotion involved, because of the greater emotional investment, the more we need to express our disappointment and anger. All we want to be is heard. If the offending party won’t listen, I’ll find someone who will. Hence my deliberate use of the brands Alaska Air and Horizon Air in recounting my experience in this post. For what happens with negative word of mouth, see my post earlier this week.

How to Handle an Angry Customer

So, what could Alaska or Horizon Air have done better? What can any of us do better? Let’s first except the fact that bad things are going to happen to customers, that those customers are probably going to be our best customers, and that they’re going to get angry. If we start from there, we can start looking at some practical ways to diffuse anger.

Timing is Critical

Remember, the anger response is very quick. In under a second, the initial response goes from the amygdala to the prefrontal lobes. And the longer it sits there, the more it simmers. Companies need to take a triage approach to angry customers, providing an initial assessment (and acknowledgement, as below) and then routing the person to the appropriate response channel. Anger left without a response will simply lead to more anger. Long waits on a hold line or in a lineup is not what you want to do

Acknowledge the Anger

In this immediate response, it’s important to let the customer know their anger is heard and acknowledged. Make them feel you’re their ally in getting this resolved. This immediately engages the left prefrontal lobe, rather than the right, diffusing the anger rather than adding to it.

Apologize Quickly

If appropriate, apologize, but do it sincerely. Do it face to face, eye to eye. The typical “pilot apology” (this is the pilot coming on the intercom during a flight and offering the blanket, corporate apology for the delay) won’t do it. The flight attendants should be doing it with every single customer, face to face.

Remove Negative Stimuli

This is huge. All too often, the place where angry customers are dealt with represent the worst possible environment for avoiding confrontation. Waiting is the norm and there’s no thought given to how to make the slighted customer feel heard and appreciated. In fact, as we’ve seen, these environments (either physical or virtual) feed the norepineephrine doused brain more and more signals that indicate a hostile environment. Instead, deal with angry customers in a soothing and even distracting environment. If you must make somebody wait, try to do everything possible to introduce positive stimuli to lighten the mood.

Respond Appropriately

Of course, the biggest factor is the nature of the person you’re dealing with when you’re angry. When I say we’re only human, there are two sides to that. Just as we’re prone to all the hair triggers and emotional flooding that comes with anger, so are the people on the other side of the counter. This means that you need to recruit a very special type of person to deal with angry customers, and provide them with an understanding of what causes anger and how to respond appropriately. You’re looking for people who have a hyperactive left prefrontal lobe. They have to be able to convey, through their words, their body language and the tone of their voice, that they’re the customer’s friends, not their enemy and that they’re going to make it right.

By the way, you might think, given my previous observations about the emotional intelligence of men versus women, that women would be a better choice, and in some instances, you’d be right. If you are upset and have the opportunity to talk to a man or a woman at the service counter, most of us would choose the woman. But that can also be a dangerous assumption. Here’s why. Just as women are more adept at reading emotions, they also tend to be more apt to show emotion. This means that a woman who does tend to be prone to becoming upset, irritated or angry will convey this more through her body language and attitude. This is not the place for officiousness or easily rattled people. This is where you need to find the most empathetic people you have and deploy them where they can do the most good.

Unfortunately, for most businesses, dealing with angry customers is the worst of all assignments. It can often be outsourced (talk about not being heard and acknowledged), or grudgingly done by someone who’s not equipped for the task, emotionally or with adequate training. What is the most important encounter you can ever have with a customer, and one that requires a masterful level of interpersonal skills, is done with a negative mental framework already in place (an angry person going to deal with other angry people) or, even worse, ignored, hoping the problem will go away.

Little Things Mean a Lot

The good news is, we all have very low expectations as customers when we’ve been slighted by a company. We’re used to being ignored, marginalized and put through the meat grinder. So it doesn’t take a lot for a company to really provide a positive and remarkable experience. If you can deal with the anger quickly, acknowledge it and make them feel they’ve been heard, become their ally and work towards a resolution that feels fair, then it doesn’t take much more to turn a fair response into a remarkable response.

Let’s go back to my experience with Alaska Airlines. I understand that things happen with airline schedules, and I wasn’t even that upset that I was bumped back to coach. What really irritated me was the lack of follow through on the gate agent’s promise to “make it right”. I wanted Alaska to show that my business was important to them. What would it have cost them to give me a free drink, along with a personal apology from the flight attendant? Or a small coupon for a fare reduction on a future flight. If you want to make it remarkable, get the pilot to take 5 to 10 minutes to walk through the cabin and personally apologize to every one of the 18 or 20 people who were bumped from the previous flight.

Remember, emotions permanently imprint brand attitudes. And emotions come with experiences. Good experiences create good emotions. Bad experiences create bad emotions. But you have the opportunity to determine which emotions you leave your customers with when things go wrong.

Postscript

I have to let you know that Alaska/Horizon has responded admirably to my complaint. I did receive a discount voucher as well as a very frankly written and apologetic email. They’re doing most things right, but unfortunately, timing is everything. Again, this is common in today’s world. Once you’ve discovered that you’ve upset a valuable customer, damage control is set in motion. But what I tried to outline is that the damage can be minimized dramatically if you respond promptly to become the customer’s ally and diffuse the anger before it has a chance to mount.

This has to do with more front line training and some standard procedures built on a greater awareness of the nature of anger itself.

But, the response shows that Alaska’s heart is in the right place and their intentions are good. They just have to brush up on execution at the initial point of contact.

The Evolving Whiff of Authenticity

I have a theory. Actually, I have several theories, but one in particular at the top of my mind today. I believe we are getting much better at sniffing out BS online.

In face to face encounters, we’re remarkably good at determining if someone’s authentic or not. We pick up cues, consciously and subconsciously, that allow us to make pretty accurate judgements as to the integrity and honesty of an individual. This “gut feel” that seems so vague is actually a sophisticated interplay of activity in various parts of our brain. Although we may not believe it, we’re all pretty good judges of character most of the time. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

But what if we’re not face to face with someone? That is one of the challenges of the Internet. Often, we have to make judgements about information and the validity of opinions when we can’t see the person eye to eye. There is no editor on the internet, making sure everything we read is accurate and verified. It’s up to us to make the call. We have to act as our own editorial filters, reading between the billions of lines of HTML that are available to us.

Which leads us to something that was a little troubling to me that I heard this week. Every morning here at Enquiro, we have a “huddle” where we each share any news that we have heard that may be of interest to the team. Yesterday morning, Kyle Grant, who just returned from PubCon in Vegas, said he met a representative from a company that fakes blog posts. Basically, you feed the story you want spread about your product or service, and they hire a army of bloggers to post about it. It’s manufactured “buzz”.

Now, it’s not really surprising. As another team member mentioned, you can do the same thing with review comments, forum posts and other forms of commercial consumer generated comments. The door is open, so it’s natural that someone will figure out a way to squeeze through it and game the system. That too is part of human nature.

So, that really puts the onus on each of us to judge how authentic the content is we’re relying on online. And that get’s us back to my theory. I think we’re pretty good. I believe, in the relatively short time we’ve been online, we can pick up the “whiff of authenticity” or, conversely, the “whiff of BS” on most sites. We can tell what’s real and what’s manufactured. We can sort out the meat from the Spam. Like our face to face filters, they’re probably not perfect, but they work most of the time. We will be taken (as Lonelygirl15 showed) but sooner or later, we’ll get to the heart of what’s real.

The other thing that’s unique about the web is that we don’t have to rely just on ourselves to do this. For some reason, there’s still an unspoken law online that we will be diligent (in fact, virulent) about uncovering bogus garbage online. We revel in exposing the seedy underbelly of our culture. The internet has let a breath of fresh air into the previously stiffled world of media control. Before, we were expected to believe anything that came to us through the supposedly pre filtered channels that feed us our view of the outside world. The nightly news, the daily newspaper, the weekly news magazine. As was proven when Dan Rather’s journalistic integrity (or lack of same) was exposed online, we’re probably safer trusting the crazy patchwork quilt of information we get online than we are with the carefully spoon-fed news items we’re get every night through the networks.

Ultimately online, right will prevail, and it will do so much quicker than was true in the power controlled world of just one generation ago. We are less trusting and we are developing a much healthier cynical streak. Every time a door is open for all of us to have a voice, we will see parasitic companies scrambling to push through it, trying to capitalize on our collective gullability. And they’ll thrive, for awhile. But it’s a short term game, because I believe strongly that most times, we’re not as stupid as we look.

The Whys of Buy: Visualizing the Buy

Human brainVisualization risked becoming another one of those clichéd words through the 90’s, because it was used by every self improvement guru as a path to success. Visual success and it will be yours. But the fundamental principles of visualization bear up, in some very practical and surprising examples. And the neurological science behind visualization is sound.

Visualization allows us to sense a scene in our minds when we read a passage. Actually, the word visualization is a little misleading, because it only refers to the sense of sight. Visualizations can engage all the senses. For example, we took our two daughters to Manhattan last summer, landed at 11 pm, and because we weren’t tired, walked through Times Square at midnight. New York was in the middle of a heat wave and the temperature was still 98. The combination of heat and humidity added a particular edge to the smell of garbage in the streets, that sickly sweet/sour odor that punctuates the more appetizing smells wafting from restaurants and street vendors. Times Square was still going at full tilt (this was a Saturday) so the din of taxi horns was deafening. At every corner, we still had to elbow past street vendors and crowds jaywalking through the intersections. For my daughters, it was a rude sensory awakening to the Big Apple.

As I was writing that, feelings, sights, sounds and smells were being activated in my mind. I was recalling the images, and could, in my mind, feel the humid heat, smell the odors, hear the horns and see the crowds. If any of you reading this had been to Times Square on a hot summer night, you probably have your own scenes, from your own experiences, replaying in your mind. But the amazing thing is, if I say falafel stand, you can see, smell and perhaps even hear it. That’s because the same parts of your brain are firing that would actually be activated if you were physically there. Imagination is the next best thing to being there.

Athletes have long known this. Visualization starts building the same neural pathways that actual physical action does. A golfer struggling with his swing can visualize it and improve it, without a club in his hands, because he’s giving his brain a trial run. The same is true with a gymnast learning a new move. Studies have shown that imagining a 5 finger piano exercise results in a significant improvement in performance.

But perhaps the most startling evidence comes from a study done by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio. Here, from About.com, is the summary of the study:

They split 30 healthy young adults into 3 groups.

For 15 minutes a day, five days a week for 12 week, Group #1 imagined exercising their little finger muscle. Group #2 imagined exercising their biceps muscle and Group #3 acted as a control group and did no imaginary exercise. Those in the first two groups were asked to think as strongly as they could about moving the muscle being tested, to make the imaginary movement as real as possible. The researchers measured muscle strength before, during and after the training sessions.

Group #1 (the finger exercisers) increased their strength 53 percent, and Group #2 (the biceps group) increased strength by 13.4 percent.

These results are somewhat unbelievable. Simply imagining exercise can make you stronger! Literally without lifting a finger. That’s the power of visualization.

So what does this mean for marketing? Visualization plays a part here as well. We often visualize our way through a purchase. If we’re looking at buying a car, we visualize ourselves driving it. If my wife is determined to buy a dress, she visualizes herself wearing it. Even if you are suddenly craving something from Starbucks, you can see, smell and taste the coffee before you ever get it in your hands. Visualization is a powerful part of purchasing, and once we build these neural pathways, it takes us much closer to the actual purchase. Smart marketers start building the pathways before you ever set foot in the store. That’s why personalized products can be so powerful. Personalization forces visualization.

Of course, visualization of product usage is nothing cutting edge. Most marketers do this instinctively. But what about visualization of the actual purchase itself? How can you start building the neural pathway required to ensure the transaction is completed? This is particularly important in more involved purchases, such as trips, cars, houses or more involved B2B purchases. In each of these cases, the very act of buying can act as an obstacle to a sale. It requires time, commitment and knowledge. For all these reasons, a little mental practice could improve the odds for success. Let me share another example.

In the 1960’s, social psychologist Howard Leventhal wanted to persuade a group of college seniors at Yale to get a tetanus shot. What he wanted to test was whether fear would be a more powerful influencer. So several information booklets were produced. Some were “high fear” with graphic pictures and descriptions. Some were “low fear”, with a more toned down, informational approach. The booklets were distributed and, somewhat predictably, the high fear booklets seemed to be more persuasive. The groups that received these booklets were more convinced about the importance of shots and more of them indicated that they intended to get inoculated. But one month later, almost none of the participants from any of the groups, high fear or low fear, had actually gone for an inoculation. A mere 3 percent had actually been inoculated. This was an unforeseen glitch in the experiment.

So Leventhal redid the experiment, but this time with one small change. This time, in all the booklets, he included a map showing where the clinic was and the hours it was open. This time, the inoculation rate went up to 28%.

If we look at the power of visualization, the thing that surprised Leventhal really isn’t that surprising at all. The first round of the experiment did a good job of inducing the visualization of consequences, in this case, negative consequences. The high fear booklet let the students visualize what might happen if they didn’t get a tetanus shot, and so it was persuasive. But it didn’t close the loop. It wasn’t that the message wasn’t persuasive. It was just that it left the door open for life to get in the way.

But the second version allowed the student to visualize the path required to actually get the inoculation. I’m sure most of them probably knew where the clinic was, but the inclusion of the map prompted them to visualize actually going there, and the hours allowed them to visualize where in their schedule they could fit in the visit. Once the students went through the mental process of visualizing action, there was a much higher probability that the action would take place.

What are the takeaways? If your purchase process requires a commitment on the part of the buyer, let them visualize the path required to get to the end. Use your website to build the path required to navigate through things like financing, negotiation, customer service, delivery and selection of products and options. Don’t just stop at visualization of ownership. Think about the visualization of the act of buying as well.

The Whys of Buy: Impulse Buying

chickenebayThe other day, we were talking about what makes us buy (an appropriate topic for today, the biggest shopping day in the US) and Barb Newman, our General Manager, wondered what made us impulse buy? She was trying to figure out why she had dropped way more money than she intended on a purse. Being intrigued by the buying mechanism that seems to be locked in our skulls, I decided to do a little digging to find out what’s going on when we just seem to pick up something off the shelf on sheer whim.

Spool’s Impulse Buying Study

On doing some digging, I found a study done by Jared Spool, a usability consultant I have a tremendous amount of respect for. And Jared found that market research, as I posted about a few days ago, has its limits. As Jared’s starting point, he looked at survey’s conducted by The Yankee Group and Ernst and Young. Both surveys asked why respondents would make impulse purchases on the web. With the Yankee Group survey, 75% indicated because of price. Ernst and Young’s survey said that 88% of purchases were made due to price. Again, these were surveys where buyers were asked to rationalize their behavior. And saving money seems like a pretty rational reason.

But Jared wanted to see what real people shopping for real products did. As most usability people do, he wanted to observe real world behavior. So his group got 30 people, who had real things they wanted to buy, gave them some money and sent them on an online shopping trip to a few preselected sites that had what they were looking for.

What they found was significantly different that what the Yankee Group and Ernst and Young surveys showed. While many of the participants bought what they were looking for, a significant number, 34%, also added other items into their shopping cart that weren’t on their original lists. Was it because the prices were irrestible? No, in fact, only 8% of the impulse purchases were because of price.

Jared and his group purposely picked out shopping sites that had promotional offers and seasonal sales in prominent display positions, especially on the home pages. But very few of the purchases were of these sale items. The impulse buys were spread across 41% of the sites in the study, including everything from pet shops to computer accessory stores. Almost none of the items were on sale. They were just things that suddenly tweaked the shopper’s interest.

Here’s the other interesting thing about the study. Most of the impulse items were chosen while browsing through the category pages. They had chosen a category based on what they were shopping for and had found related items that struck their interest and were subsequently added to their cart.

The Nucleus Accumbens Made Me Do It

So, why do we impulse buy? I’m still not sure, but here are some hunches, based on some of the other research I’m doing in the mental mechanics of buying.

A study earlier this year by Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and the MIT Sloan School of Management might be able to shed a little light on Spool’s findings. Using fMRI imaging, they also gave participants money to go shopping. They then monitored activity in various parts of the brain.

They found that when we anticipate buying something, the pleasure center, the nucleus accumbens, is activated. We begin picturing ourselves in possession of a product and visualizing ourselves using it. We start to build neural pathways that reinforce what it would be like to have the product. But, if the price is excessive, the study found that the brain has a shut off mechanism.  A part of the brain known as the insula is activated and the part of the brain we use to balance gains versus losses, in other words, is the product worth the price, the medial prefrontal cortex, begins shutting down. We literally put the purchase out of our mind because the price is more than we’re willing to pay.

So, let’s go back to Jared Spool’s study. I suspect we get into shopping “modes” where the parts of the brain associated with acquisition of a product sustain some activity. We’re prepared to buy, so the nucleus accumbens kicks into gear and keeps firing. We’re in “buy” mode. And we’ve accepted that we have budget available. We start out looking for the product we intended to buy, but, on the way, if we see something we also decide we need, especially in a related category, our “buying” mechanism is already activated. We’re already primed to consider purchase. We’re not looking for a bargain (although finding one certainly wouldn’t hurt), but by the same token, an outrageous price would probably shut down the process by kicking in the insula. Think of the insula as the brain’s sprinkler system, snuffing out any impulsive sparks before we burn ourselves. As long as the price is reasonable, and doesn’t introduce significant “pain” we’re more likely to purchase.

The fMRI study also showed that once we flip into buy mode, we tend to stay in this groove. This is why it’s much more dangerous to shop with credit cards than cash. Credit cards allow us to put off the “pain” that might kick in the insula, letting the nucleus accumbens have its way. When cash runs out, it runs out. It forces us to pay more attention to the “pain”.

In Spool’s study, the pain had been effectively removed by giving the participants money to spend. And by browsing through categories where they already had interest, there was a greater likelihood to pick related products and purchase them through impulse. Bargain basement prices really had nothing to do with the process. It’s just that most of us don’t understand the mechanics of buying that happen at the subconscious level.

Back to Barb’s Purse

So let’s get back to Barb’s purse. Was it really a impulse buy? Well, not really. As I chatted more with Barb, she indicated that she had seen the purse earlier in a magazine, fallen in love with it, but the price was much higher than she wanted to pay. So Barb’s nucleus accumbens had gone into overdrive, but Barb, being a practical shopper, had quickly doused the flames when her insula kicked in. The pain was too great to make a purchase.

But, a few months later, she’s in the mall and sees that the store that carries the purse was having a 25% off everything in the store appreciation sale. Suddenly, the nucleus accumbens is reactivated, primed by all the visualization that Barb had done since first seeing the purse, thinking how great it would be to own it. The 25% off sale lowered the pain threshold enough to keep the insula from kicking in, and the next thing Barb knew, she had put down a deposit and put the purse on layaway. She didn’t know what hit her. Now, she knows it was a little bit of gray matter hiding deep in subcortal brain called the nucleus accumbens that’s to blame. But this wasn’t a true impulse buy. It was more like a delayed buy.

So, if you overspend today, remember, it was the nucleus accumbens that made you do it. Try explaining that one to your significant other.

Why We Have to Keep Doing Market Research

Following up on my previous post about the problems with most market research, here’s a plea why we should keep trying to get it right.

At the recent London SMX show, I presented on the Ad Testing and Research panel. Like other times I’ve done this panel (this is probably the 3rd or 4th time) I hear about skillful practitioners employing various A/B and multivariate testing methodologies. Ad testing is a definite must do, but before my presentation, which came at the end of the session, I took a few minutes to provide an alternative point of view.

I asked the small crowd how many of them were doing regular campaign management, checking click through rates, conversion rates and optimizing their campaigns based on what they saw. Almost everyone put up their hand. Then I asked how many did A/B testing. This time, a little more than half put up their hands. Next, I asked how many were doing multivariate testing. This time, about one third of the crowd. Finally, I asked how many had actually sat, watched a customer interact with their site and then asked them questions. We dropped down to about 10% of the group, and most of these were in a fairly structured usability test, with limited or no opportunity for interaction with the user.

Now, campaign optimization, A/B and multivariate testing are all best practices and should be done religiously. But I urged the marketers in the room to step back from their data heavy, spreadsheet  bound view of the world and pick up a book on cognitive psychology, social science or simple usability. Better yet, spend some time just watching how real people interact with your site. Try, for a moment, to look at the world through your customer’s eyes.

The problem with the typical, quantitative methods are that they’re all lagging indicators. You don’t get an idea of what’s happening until after customers have interacted with your ads and your site. You generally get a good sense of what they did, but it’s very difficult to determine why they did it. To do that, you have to dig beyond the numbers. You have to try to get into that subconscious mind. And that’s not easy. Typical market research methodologies won’t cut it. To get some idea of what’s required, read Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code, or Gerald Zaltman’s How Customer’s Think. Do some digging into the work of Herbert Simon.  It takes a deft combination of psychiatric know how and detective skills. But here’s why it’s worth it.

For the past Century, we’ve largely refined our marketing practices based on trial and error. Pretty much everything has been done through seeing what’s worked, changing something, and seeing if it worked better. That’s been okay, as long as the channels we used to reach customer’s were relatively limited. With limited channels and a certain amount of control inherent in the process, we could do this. But those days are over.

Now, rather than a few controlled channels that run pretty much straight from the advertiser to the customer, we have an explosion of information that turns the typical buying process into a Gordian knot of unbelievable complexity. We can’t control the variables anymore. When there are so many channels, so many interdependent factors and so much of it affects customers below the conscious level, trial and error is just not an effective testing methodology anymore. In fact, it was never an effective methodology, for all the reasons I stated in my previous post. It’s just the best we had.

Let me use another example. The way we did marketing was pretty much like jumping in a car, randomly making decisions whether to turn right or left, keeping track of our success rate in getting nearer to our destination, and using this method to eventually pick the right route. This method might eventually work okay in a town of a few thousand people, but try doing that to navigate through New York or Los Angeles. We don’t have enough time in our lives to leave this much to chance. A map (or better yet, a GPS) is a much better alternative.

But we’re just starting to put that map together. And it won’t come from market research. Market research, at least in it’s current incarnation, is hopelessly flawed. It will come from diving deep into the workings of our brains. And once we begin putting the map together, it will allow us to begin to measure leading indicators. It will keep us from the trap of relying on self reported rationalizations and dig deeper into all the activity that’s happening below the conscious surface of our minds. That’s where the answers will be found.

Here’s another reason. Our brains are not only complex, but they’re also highly adaptive. As we do new mental activities more often, and abandon previous ones, new routes are established through the neurons and old ones become overgrown and eventually, unused neurons are cut away. It’s called “pruning” and “neuroplasticity”. It’s probably why you’re much better at using a search engine now than you are doing the geometry you learned in grade 9. We’ve worn new paths in our brain.

This is also true of how we’re buying. The way we buy now is bearing little resemblance to the way we bought in 1975. As time goes on and we rely on the Internet more and more, the paths that we used to use for our consumer decisions will become overgrown and we’ll clear new ones. This will happen not only at the conscious level, but also the sub conscious level. We will literally rewire how our brains decide what to buy. So the body of market research that has laboriously been gathered over the past several decades will become obsolete. And to discover those again through trial and error will be an long and potentially impossibly task.

So, a word of advice. Step back from the spread sheet now and again. Take a break from looking at “what” and start to explore “why”. Dig into things like the triune brain, selective perception, bounded rationality, working memory and some other basic cognitive concepts. It will be time well spent.

Satisficing, Bounded Rationality and Search

150px-HerbertSimonHerbert Simon came up with some pretty interesting concepts, among them satisficing, bounded rationality and chunking.

Before Simon, we commonly believed that humans came to optimal decisions in a rational manner, based on the information provided. We took all the data that was accessible, weighed pros and cons and used our cortexes to come to the best possible outcome.

Simon, in effect, said that this placed to high a load on us cognitively. In many cases, there was simply too much information available, so we had to make choices based more on heuristics, cutting the available information down to a more manageable level. He called this “satisficing”, a blend of satisfy and suffice. And Simon started saying this a half century ago. Imagine how this translates to the present time.

We have never had more information available. At the click of a mouse, we can access huge amounts of information. There’s simply no way we can process it all and come to rational decisions. And this brings us to another concept, that of bounded rationality. We’re more rational about some decisions than others. It depends on a number of factors, including risk, emotional enjoyment and brand self identification. Think of it as a chart with three axes. One axis is risk. We put more rational thought into decisions that expose us to greater risk. In consumer decisions, risk usually equates with cost, but in B to B decisions, it could also include professional reputation (related to but not always directly tied to cost). We’re going to put a lot more thought into the purchase of a car or house than that of a candy bar. Another axis is emotional enjoyment. This is a risk/reward mechanism to most decisions, and if the reward is one that is particularly appealing to us, we tend to be swayed more by emotion than rational decision. If we’re planning a holiday, we may make some irrational decisions (or at least, they might appear that way to an outsider) based on a sense of rewarding ourselves. We’ll treat ourselves to a few nights in a 5 star resort, when the 3 star resort would offer greater overall value. The final factor, and one that is usually buried somewhere in our subconscious, is how we use brands or products to define who we are. Now, no one usually admits to being defined by a brand, but we all are, to some extent. This touches on the cult-like devotees that some brands develop. Harley Davidson, Rolex, BMW, Apple and Nike all come to mind. Is a Rolex a rational choice? No. But a Rolex defines, to some extent, the person wearing it. It says something about the person.

Bounded rationality says that there are boundaries to the amount of rational thought that we can and we want to put into decisions. The amount we decide is sufficient depends on the three facts discussed.

Now, the use of Search tends to plot somewhere along this 3 dimensional chart. If risk is high and brand identification is low (buying software for the company), there is a high likelihood that search will be used extensively. If risk is low and brand identification is high (i.e. buying a soft drink or a beer) there is almost no likelihood that search will be used. In this case, the two factors usually work inversely to each other. Emotional enjoyment isn’t as directly tied to search activity. We will do as much (or as little) searching for a purchase that will give us great enjoyment as for those that won’t.

It’s interesting to watch how these factors impact search intent and behavior. Satisficing leads to a classic sort of search behavior, what I call I category search, where we use fairly generic, non branded queries that broadly define the category we’re looking at. Let me give you an example. Tomorrow my wife and I are headed to Europe for a week. We’re going to spend a few days in Portugal, then fly up to London for SMX (where I’ll be talking more about these ideas in some of my sessions). We’re flying into Lisbon, then renting a car and driving down to the Algarve region. I have GPS navigation software for my PDA, but only for North America. I wanted to get European software, but because of the limited use of it, I didn’t want to spend too much. The developer of my North American software didn’t make a EU version, so I turned to search to find a suitable candidate. Here there was no brand identification, some degree of risk (if it didn’t work in Europe, I’d be lost, literally) and no emotional enjoyment factor. My first search was what I call a “landmark” search. I wanted to find some sites to plot the landscape. Sites that listed and compared my alternatives would be ideal matches to my intent.

I searched for “pocket pc gps software”, knowing that “gps software” would be too broad. I soon found the sites were pretty much all about North American versions. Few of them offered or reviewed European versions. I spent several minutes on the TomTom site trying to order a European version from Canada but to no avail. Apparently TomTom doesn’t believe people in North America would ever choose to drive in Europe.

In classic “satisficing” behavior, I wanted to cut my research workload by setting some basic eligibility criteria: it had to work on a Pocket PC, it had to be reasonably priced (under $100 preferably) and it had to offer coverage for all of Europe (we’re going back to France and Italy next year and I’d like to use it then as well). My next search was for “pocket pc gps software europe”. This gave me what I needed to begin to create my satisficed list. Ideally, we want 3 or 4 alternatives to compare. I did find the TomTom choice, but I was already frustrated with this, and the price was over my threshold. Destinator also offered an alternative that seemed to be a little better match. It matched all the criteria, appeared to have some decent reviews and was available on eBay for about $75, including shipping. Sold! Was it the optimal choice? Maybe not. If I had spent hours more doing research, I could have probably found a better package or a better value. But it was good enough.

Chunking has to do with cognitive channel capacity, and the amount of information we can store in our heads, accessible for use. Again, we tend to maximize the available slots by creating chunks of information, grouping similar types of information together.

When you look at Simon’s work, even though the majority of it far preceded search engines, it sheds a lot of light on how we use search in a number of cases. If you want to tap into user intent, I would recommend finding out more about bounded rationality and satisficing. Chunking is probably worth a look as well.