Category Archives: Habits

Brand Labeling: Building Our Beliefs

First published August 14, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Up to now in this series on search and branding, I’ve been looking exclusively at how and why we use search engines. But the idea of the series is to show how branding and search can work together. So in this column, I’d like to start from the opposite end of the spectrum: our brand relationships, from a memory retrieval perspective.

Storing Complex Concepts

In the computational theory of mind, the prevailing theory that seems to best explain how our minds work (although it’s not without its detractors), the elegance with which the brain processes complex patterns of information is remarkable. These are called constructs, and brands are no exception.

For any complex concept, the components of the concept are individual and scattered memory patterns, called engrams. Engrams are groups of activated neurons that fire together. But the more complex the concept, the greater the network of engrams. For a person we know well, like our mother, we could have a huge number of scattered components that make up our concept. Snatches of memories, what her voice sounds like, what she looks like, what her banana loaf tastes like. All these, and many more, individual memory components make up our concept of “mother.” And these fragments are stored in various parts of the brain. When we remember what our mother looks like, it’s an engram in our visual cortex that fires, the same part of the brain that fires when we’re actually looking at her. We’re actually picturing her in our mind. When we hear her voice, it comes from our auditory warehouse.

Our Neuronal Warehouse

The concept of a vast neuronal warehouse is actually a good analogy. When we call up our concept of “mother,” it’s assembled on the fly from the individual sections of the warehouse. The retrieval call goes out, depending on the need, to the various parts of the brain, and the required components are brought together in our working memory and assembled in the conscious part of our brain. Each memory is custom made from available parts. If we were looking at a model of the brain, we’d see maps of neurons “lighting up” across the cortex, almost like a lightning storm seen from above the clouds.

But with a construct as complex and extensive in scope as our mother, there needs to be a shorthand version. We can’t retrieve every single piece of “mother” every time we think of her.  So, the parts retrieved are restricted to the context we do the retrieval in. If we’re buying a dress for our mom, we retrieve components that include her body shape, her color preference and probably memories of other things she’s worn in the past. We don’t retrieve her banana loaf recipe because it’s not relevant.

Executive Summaries of Memories

But there’s also a labeling process that goes on. For complex constructs, like our mother or a familiar brand, we need a quick and accessible “label” that sums up our feelings about the entire construct. This is the top of mind impression of the construct, the first thing that comes to mind. It helps us keep the world straight by providing a shorthand reference for the many, many constructs stored in our memory warehouse. These labels have to be simple. In the case of people, the summing up usually determines whether we like or dislike the person. It’s a heuristic shortcut that is built up from the sum of our experience and exposure which determines whether we’re willing to invest more time in the person. The same is often true of brands.

The power of these labels for brands is absolutely essential, because they determine our attitudes to everything that makes up the construct. The brand label, or belief, is a gut feeling that impacts every feeling or attitude towards the brand.

Top-of-Mind Brand Beliefs

Often when I’m speaking, I’ll do a little exercise where I’ll show well-known brand labels and ask people to write down the first thing that comes to mind when they see it. What I’m capturing is the brand label, the top-of-mind belief about the brand. Apple generally brings out labels like “cool,” “cutting edge” or “design.” Starbucks is labeled “indulgence,” “great smell,” “delicious” or, less positively, “overpriced.” The entire scope of our experience with the brand is labeled with a few words. Obviously, our entire concept of Starbucks is usually much greater than just the way it smells or tastes, but for the people that have assigned it this label, that’s the best overall descriptor and the easiest access point. The rest of the details that make up our concept of Starbucks can be unpacked at will, but for these people, they’re all packed in a box that is labeled with “great smell” or “delicious.” If the label is “overpriced,” this may be a box we seldom unpack.

Next week, we’ll continue to look at how we store our concepts of brands, what can make up our brand constructs and the role emotion plays.

Needs, Beliefs and Search

First published August 7, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the last few weeks, I’ve looked at how we gather information, depending on how complete the information is we already have. But it’s not just information that colors the search interaction. Like all human interactions, we are governed by our desires, our objectives and our beliefs, and this is certainly true in search.

Computing Concepts

Steven Pinker is one of the foremost proponents of a computational theory of mind. Following in the footsteps of Alan Newell, Alan Turing, Herbert Simon   and  Marvin Minsky,  Pinker argues that our “minds” lie within the patterns of information processing and functionality founds in the specialized modules of our brains. Like a software program being executed step by step, our minds break down the incredibly complex concepts we are faced with each day and feed them through these patterns. We create objectives that get us closer to our desires, and in order to get there in the most efficient way possible, we depend on a vast library of heuristic shortcuts that include our beliefs. We don’t think everything to death. We make quick decisions and create short cuts based on existing beliefs. Simon called this  bounded rationality.

Irrational Short Cuts

The challenge with these short cuts, as  Amos Tversky,  Daniel Kahneman, and more recently,  Dan Ariely, have discovered, is that they’re often quite irrational. Our beliefs are often driven by inherent patterns that have evolved over thousands of years. While they may be triggered by information at hand, the beliefs lie within, formed from a strange brew of inherent drivers, cultural influences and personal experience. In this brew, it’s almost impossible to see where one belief shaper begins and another leaves off. Our beliefs are largely formed in our vast mental sub-cortical and subterranean basement, below the hard white light of rational thought. But, once formed, beliefs are incredibly stubborn. Because we rely on beliefs to save our cognitive horsepower, we have an evolutionary interest in keeping them rigidly in place. Heuristic shortcuts don’t work very well if they’re based on ever-changing rules.

And there you have the crux of marketing. Every time we’re presented with a symbol that represents a concept, whether it be a word, a picture, a sound or a logo, it unlocks a mental concept complete with corresponding beliefs. Unless it’s a brand we’ve never heard of before (in itself a significant marketing challenge), that brand comes with corresponding belief luggage, some of it undoubtedly highly irrational. We are built to quickly categorize every new presentation of information into existing belief filing cabinets or “schemas.” The contents of those filing cabinets are difficult to explore, because they exist at a subconscious level. Consultants such as  Gerald Zaltman and  Clotaire Rappaille have carved out lucrative careers by creating methods to unlock the subconscious codes that lie behind brands.

Search and Our Subconscious Baggage

So, when we interact with a search engine, it’s important to understand that this is not entering new information onto a blank canvas. Each word (or now, image) on a search page has the potential to trigger an existing concept. This is especially true for the appearance of brands on a page. Brands are neat little labels that can sum up huge bundles of beliefs.

It’s actually amazing to consider how quickly we can filter through the degree of information presented on a search page. We quickly slice away the irrelevant and the items that don’t fit within our existing belief schemas.

It’s not just the information on the page that we have to filter through. It’s all the corresponding baggage that it unlocks within us. Somehow, through the power of our subconscious mind, we can scan 4 or 5 listings, let the words we scan trigger corresponding concepts in our minds, quickly evaluate which listing is most likely to get us closer to our objective (based on beliefs, aligned with our desire) and click, all within a few seconds.

This simple act of using a search engine is actually a very impressive and intricate cognitive ballet using the power of our conscious and subconscious minds.

The Human Hardware Series on Search Engine Land

I must say I’m having fun writing the Human Hardware series on Search Engine Land. What I wanted to do is take some of the inherent behaviors and cognitive limits of humans and explore how this impacts our online interactions. And yes, to me, that’s fun!

If, like me, you’re interested in the “why” of things, I think you might enjoy this series. I’ve written 3 installments so far:

Human Hardware: Working Memory

How we use our working memory to make decisions, the capacity limits of working memory, and how working memory and long term memory work together. I take a look at Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality and satisficing as a shortcut to making decisions.  I also explore Daniel Wegner’s theory of transactive memory in this column. Finally, I look at how working memory dictates how we digest search results.

Human Hardware: Men and Women

Humans come in two models: men and women. Despite rampant political correctness, there are distinct differences between us (in case you hadn’t noticed). This column looks at some of the cognitive and neurological differences (I tried to keep my comparisons from the neck up) and how it impacts things like shopping, navigating and asking directions, understanding conversations and spending time online. I spend some time outlining gender research differences we’ve seen in past usability studies.

Human Hardware: Dunbar’s Number

In part One of this two part installment, I pose this question: Do we have limits on how many friends we can make? Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, believes the answer is yes, and that number is 150, give or take a few. I look at Dunbar’s research and reasoning, and how this limit has impacted human evolution and our creation of social networks. I touch on the evolution of language, the Great Leap in human evolution (why we went from throwing rocks to creating art in what was relatively the blink of an eye) and the importance of grooming as a social glue.

I’m pretty pumped about this series, as it ties directly into my book research, so this has been a way to work out a few of the ideas. To be honest, I have no idea how many installments there will be in the series. Along a similar vein, and in case you missed it, you might enjoy the Google Habit series that ran on MediaPost and earlier in this blog. Just check the archives.

The Last Word on Breaking the Google Habit

First published March 13, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

When I started this series of columns, I had no intention of making it a series. But now, with the fifth (and final) installment, it looks like I may finally break this particular habit. It’s been fascinating for me. Hopefully it’s been equally interesting for you.

We Develop Strings of Habits

In last week’s column, I talked about environmental cueing and reinforcement. Here, cues in our environment (the ubiquitous toolbar search box, for example) trigger a habit, and the expected outcome (the delivery of relevant results) reinforces the habit. This creates a sustaining cycle.

But there’s one other aspect of habits that we should look at. We tend to develop habits as strings of events. One environment cue might trigger a series of actions. The classic example is those who need a cigarette when they have a drink. Some recent research paints a fairly bleak picture of North American society and shows how obsessed we are with habit-inducing cues. The “why” question poised was why French people were less obese than Americans, despite a diet high in fat. It turns out one major reason why is that Americans let external cues, such as which TV show is on, drive their eating patterns. We always have a bowl of Chunky Chocolate ice cream while we watch “Desperate Housewives.” The French tend to eat when they’re hungry, and stop eating when they’re full. For the French, eating is a joy. For Americans, it’s a habit.

Swimming Upstream

As I mentioned before, to break a habit, you have to intercept before the habitual behavior, rather than try to educate and modify after the fact. And the less thought required to execute the behavior, the harder the habit will be to break. If your habit takes a few seconds to do, the opportunities to intercept and kick in the rational brain are minimal. This provides a distinct challenge to anyone looking to usurp Google’s search crown. Searching is becoming easier than ever.

The competitors have to look at that split second that exists between the awareness of the need for more information and the instinctive move to the nearest search box to launch the query. It’s in that tiny sliver of time that the opportunity to break the Google habit exists.

Searchis Interruptis

So, given the fleeting nature of this opportunity, how do you grab it? One way is to anticipate the need of search before it happens. This is the implicit query work that Microsoft was experimenting with sometime ago. As you work on a task, potential search queries are monitored in the background and are presented to the user. But a constantly shifting window of potential searches would probably drive us all batty.

Another way is to integrate search at an application or OS level, making search even easier and inserting a habit-breaking context switch into that tiny sliver of indecision that exists between awareness and Google.

Attack the Weakest Links

But even integration of search at this level won’t be enough. Remember, we tend to give the advantage to the incumbent. We actively look for reasons to maintain the habit, and we ignore information that runs counter to our habitual choice. Even if a search alternative is one click less to get to, that alternative still has to provide a significant reason to switch. They not only have to beat Google at the game of search, they have to do it in a decisive way. For this reason, a competitor has to attack Google’s user base at the weakest point, the ones that are using Google because it’s handy, not the Google loyalists.

True User-Centricity

This brings us to my last strategy for breaking the Google habit: a truly user-centric search tool.

Up to this point, verticalization in search has taken one of two forms. Either engines have attacked a topic category (i.e. Business.com and B2B, Lawyers.com and legal services, Expedia.com and travel) or a type of content (i.e. Blinkx and Youtube for video, Technorati for blog posts). These approaches tend to be vulnerable because we are creatures of habit. Generally, we prefer to use one place to launch our searches. We’re already using Google for most of our searches, so if it can provide an equivalent experience to these vertical engines, it can quickly assimilate the traffic and squeeze the verticals out.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Google has yet to provide an equivalent experience in most of its verticals, but now that it appears that the default design of the search results page is no longer a sacred cow, I would expect the functionality gap to close quickly.

But what if we took a different approach? What if rather than verticalizing around a topic or content bucket, we verticalized around a type of user? What if we maximized the search experience for millennial males or female baby boomers? The verdict on personalized search seems to be that a one-size-fits-all solution is a long way off on the horizon, but an intermediate step might be to tailor an engine for a segment that shares similar needs and expectations. By focusing on a niche strategy, you might be able to break the Google habit, one segment at a time. In this way, you might be able to provide the discontinuous innovation needed to catch people upstream, before they get swept away with the Google tide.

More Steps to Breaking the Google Habit

First published March 6, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Let’s imagine that my ongoing series about the forming of habits (installment 1, installment 2 and installment 3) has so captured your curiosity that you want to find out more. You’re reading this column from your computer. You make the decision to find more information about breaking a habit. Now, let’s slow down time and look at the steps. There, in the upper left of your browser, is the Google toolbar. Or maybe you have the Google sidebar in the lower right of your window. Perhaps you’ve got Google’s homepage bookmarked. Whatever the shortcut, you don’t suddenly stop and think, “Gee, for this search what would be the optimal search engine to use?” No, without thinking, you go right up to the handiest search box and key in “breaking habits.”

It’s All About the Cues….

In psychological terms, what we’ve just described is a stable environment. The layout of your window is something you’re familiar with. You don’t have to think about it, you just do it. And the vast majority of times, this works for you. You have created an expectation of success. The cues remind you, below the level of rational consciousness, that this course of behavior generally produces the desired outcome. And each successful search reinforces that.

This cueing and reinforcement cycle is a powerful factor. Several academic studies (see Verplanken & Wood for a review of the literature in this area) have shown that habitual use has two important lock-in mechanisms that perpetuate the behavior. First of all, expectations of success curb our desire to search for alternatives. All those millions of advertising dollars from Ask or Microsoft, and the ads they bought are falling on deaf ears.

Secondly, the one type of information we do pay attention to is information that confirms our habitual bias. Because we have an expectation of success, our ears perk up when we hear things that confirm and reinforce that expectation. We are looking to remain consistent with the habit, rather than break it. This is true even with something as insidious as smoking. Imagine how powerful this would be with a benign behavior like using a search engine. Millions of dollars of TV ads can be trumped by one person telling us that Google is also their favorite engine because it always delivers what they’re looking for.

The Forgiving Habitual User

Further, even when we have a less-than-ideal experience, our expectation framework tends to “cut it some slack,” mentally averaging out the experiences and rounding it up in the incumbent’s favor. We become pretty forgiving of our habitual choice and hyper-critical of the alternatives.

So, given the formidable odds against breaking a habit (remember, in most cases, habits are good things that reduce our need to think through everything, so evolution has a vested interest in keeping them in place) there are still circumstances when it can happen.

Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes…

One of these is when there’s a disruption to the stable environment. When we have to adjust to a new circumstance, we’re also open to new cues that go into the new environment. In the non-virtual world, this would be moving to a new home, especially in a new city or starting a new job. In the virtual world confined to our 21-inch monitor, it would be buying a new computer, upgrading our operating system or switching to a new browser. Any of these events, or a combination of them, offers an opportunity to search providers to make themselves one of the new environment cues. There’s been a disruption in the typical flow that used to lead to acting without thinking, so there’s an opportunity to cause people to think about the alternatives.

One tremendous opportunity to get in on the ground floor of our adaption of a new environment is presented by our increasing use of mobile. The even smaller real estate on the mobile screen represents a tremendous opportunity to put a stake in the ground and start the habit-forming cycle. Google already has a head start in this area, but it’s far less than what they’ve established on the desktop.

Next week, more ways for competitors to disrupt the Google habit, including what it might take to overcome the incumbent’s advantage.

Breaking the Google Habit

First published February 28, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What will it take to beat the Google habit? There’s billions of dollars that hang on the answer to that question. My last two columns looked at the nature of habits and how they can lead to an advantage for incumbents by “locking in” customers or users.

Before we look at some possible answers, it’s important to understand how and why previous attempts at breaking habits have fallen short in an area where far more academic work has been done: health care (Verplanken & Wood, 2006).

Educational campaigns have proven to have little effect on changing habitual behavior. In fact, studies have shown that these campaigns can actually trigger an increase in the unwanted behaviors! Oops, that wasn’t supposed to happen.

The frustration of physicians who are battling unhealthy lifestyle choices in their patients was perfectly summed up in an address given by John McKinley to the American Heart Association over 30 years ago.

“You know,” McKinley said, “sometimes it feels like this. There I am standing by the shore of a swiftly flowing river, and I hear the cry of a drowning man. So I jump into the river, put my arms around him, pull him to shore and apply artificial respiration. Just when he begins to breathe, there is another cry for help. So I jump into the river, reach him, pull him to shore, apply artificial respiration, and then just as he begins to breathe, another cry
for help. So back in the river again, reaching, pulling, applying, breathing and then another yell. Again and again, without end, goes the sequence. You know, I am so busy jumping in, pulling them to shore, applying artificial respiration, that I have no time
to see who the hell is upstream pushing them all in.”

This has led to a reexamination of the “downstream” method of altering behavior; trying to rationally convince people to change their behavior after it’s already become a habit, for example, with education campaigns. The fundamental problem here is, you’re trying to apply a rational solution to an irrational problem. We don’t think about habits, we just do them. That’s the very definition of a habit.

The Strength and Cost of Habits

There are two other components in habitual behavior that have to be understood: the strength of the habit and the cost of executing the habit. Both factor into how hard the habit will be to change. The strength is how closely habits are tied to our personal beliefs, good or bad. If we stop at Starbucks every day because we absolutely love everything about Starbucks, that’s going to be a very hard habit to break. Smoking ups the ante with an actual physical addiction.

Also, how much does it cost us to continue the habit? It I have to go four blocks out of my way to go to Starbucks, that has a personal cost to me. If it’s right on my way to work, that’s different.

Habitual Use of Search

So, let’s wrap up this week’s column with a summary of what we’ve learned about habits, and apply it to search:

·    You typically can’t change habits by a rational appeal after a habit is formed. This explains the failure of every television campaign for search engines looking to grow market share.

·    The strength of habit is a big factor in how likely the habit is to stay in place. So, if you’re looking to steal users from Google by breaking their Google habit, you’re going to be looking to the those folks that use Google because it’s handy, not the ones that have six Google T-shirts hanging in their closet.

·    And finally, you’re going to have to look for a way to catch users before they use Google by intercepting them upstream. The reason Yahoo has been able to maintain its market share over the past few years has a lot more to do with the scope of its presence and the fact that the company can put a Yahoo search box in front of more people before they can get to Google, and a lot less to do with the quality of the search experience. And that’s also why Microsoft’s share has eroded, as more and more default home pages are being switched from MSN.

Next week, in the series that may never end (talk about habit-forming), we look at how challengers to the Google search crown can hope to break the habit. Hint: All the clues point in one direction — upstream!

 

More on Why Google is Habit-Forming

First published February 21, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s Search Insider, I introduced the idea of habits, and why they can be hard things to break. This week, I want to explore how search engines can be habit-forming as well.

Cognitive Lock-In

Habits form and stay formed because there is usually a cost associated with discontinuing the habit. In a commercial interaction, this is referred to as the “cost of switching.” These are the lock-in mechanisms that companies hope will keep you from walking across the street to their competitors. In theory, the cost of switching on the Internet should be negligible, creating a frictionless, “perfect” market. There’s no financial penalty. The Internet erases geographic boundaries. And this should be especially true in search. After all, other search engines are only a click away. But researchers (Johnson, Bellman and Lohse, 2003; Brynjolfsson and Smith, 2000) actually found the opposite to be true. It seemed that customer stickiness can actually be greater online. So, if it’s so easy to switch, why aren’t more people doing it?

It appears, based on research (Zauberman, 2003), that there’s another cost of switching, the cost of learning new interfaces. This has been called “cognitive lock-in.”. As you become comfortable navigating through a site, the cognitive cost of learning new interfaces tends to build your loyalty and keep you “locked in” to the site. This happens in the real world as well, and could explain my wife’s seemingly irrational loyalty to the bad grocery store I described last week. She knows where everything is. She knows where to park. And she knows who to argue with when products don’t meet her standards (as well as how to get her point across — it’s an Italian thing). It may not be great, but it’s familiar!

Will Differentiation Increase the Power of Lock-In?

A recent study (Murray and Haubl, 2007) found that cognitive lock-in comes from habits of use as well as habitual choice. Both are relevant in the search space, but let’s put habitual choice aside for a moment. Habits of use form when we become familiar with using a product, the actual mechanics of how it fits us in realizing our goals. We know how to use Google, for example, and how to refine it to get the results we’re looking for. We know which links take us where, which tabs to hit and even through we never use it, the “Feeling Lucky?” button reminds us we’re on Google. When Google tried to remove it, based on lack of usage, there was a huge user backlash.

This sense of familiarity meant that until recently, all search engines looked the same. The same ten blue links, the same treatment of sponsored ads, the same basic layout. But in a recent set of interviews with all the major engines’ design and usability teams, it was made clear that we can expect more differentiation among the engines. Ask’s departure was just the first step in this movement.

It’s Not Just a Tool, It’s a Badge

But it’s not just the utility of an engine that increases lock-in. There’s also habitual choice. This comes from our lock-in to a brand. We always drink Coke, we always drive a Honda, we always fly Southwest, we always search on Google. Yes, even something as utilitarian as a search engine engenders brand allegiance. We identify with brands because they help define us as individuals. And this has happened to varying extents in the search space.

There Will Never Be Another Google in Search

You might ask, if Google became a habit, what’s to stop another engine from also becoming a habit? Well, first of all, it won’t be nearly as easy for a new player as it was for Google. Think back to when you first used Google. No one engine had established itself as the user’s choice, creating the “lock-in” effect. I used to hop back and forth between four or five engines, depending on my objective and the closest engine at hand. I’d perhaps start at Infoseek or AltaVista, and if I didn’t get a great result (which was pretty much always true) I’d try Excite or HotBot. Then, finally, in desperation, I’d sort through the hierarchal jungle that was Yahoo. No engine had become a habit.

Google’s genius was in providing pretty good results for a wide variety of searchers. Suddenly, I didn’t have to hop from engine to engine, because nine out of 10 times Google provided better results. By the time the rest of the engines had closed the gap, I was already locked in. Now, arguably, other engines provide better results for certain types of searches. But Google is habitual. It’s going to be an uphill battle for the competition. In fact, Google is such a habit; its name has even replaced the word “search.” We now “Google” it.

So, where does that leave the competition? I have some ideas, but they’ll have to wait till next week.

Why Google is Habit Forming

First published February 14, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

My wife Jill was the victim of another drive-by “why-ing” — and I, of course, was the perpetrator.

There’s a small specialty grocery store where we live that Jill visits every week or two. And almost every time, she complains about the experience. Outdated stock is repackaged. Food is rancid. The staff is surly. But she keeps buying there. After listening to another long-winded vent, I dared to go where no man should go. I asked her “why?”

There were a number of reasons that she gave. It’s on the way on her daily route. Parking is convenient. Prices are low. But the biggest reason was one she didn’t express, because she didn’t know it. It had become a habit. And habits are tough things to break.

Why We Have Habits

Like almost everything else, habits are a way we cope with the world. They’re cognitive shortcuts so we can save our brains for more appropriate work. And most times, they work pretty well. When things work the same way the majority of times, we don’t have to think about them every single time. We relegate them to habits. It’s why we have such difficult times with doorknobs, even when we’re given instructions (“push” or “pull” –and thanks to SI reader Peter Simmons for the example). Our brain is in short-cut mode, so it’s not taking the time to read signs. Based on the shape of the door handle, the presence or absence of push plates, whether we’re entering or exiting and other cues, the brain makes a decision to push or pull without really consulting our conscious mind. We won’t even see the sign (which would engage our consciousness) unless we don’t get the result we expect.

Habits are grooves worn in the brain, and they tend to be relatively durable because of that. The rule of thumb seems to be about three weeks. So, if you moved a light switch from the right side of the door to the left side, it would take about 21 days before your brain stopped telling your right hand to turn on the switch.

The Hand is Quicker Than the Brain

Here’s the important part of that circuit (the one in the brain, not the one that turns on the light). The loop between the brain and the right hand is an unconscious one. It’s made of synapses firing on autopilot. At a conscious level, you know the switch is on the left side, but the conscious loop is slower than the unconscious one. It’s the laziness of the brain at work. If we don’t have to think about everything, why should we? So your right hand is already patting the wall looking for the switch before your rational, thinking brain catches up and says, “It’s on the other side, idiot.” This has to happen a couple dozen times before the new groove in your brain is established and you can go back to not thinking about turning on the light switch.

Why Incumbents Usually Win

Now, in my typical, roundabout way, I am getting to why this is important in search. If we think about habits, it starts to become clear why Google has such a huge market share advantage. I’d like to introduce another idea called the “incumbency effect.”   When it refers to politics, the incumbency effect means that once you win an election, you have a greater chance of winning subsequent elections for the same office. This is due to several factors that give you the edge in the eyes of voters: familiarity, experience in the role, access to funding and the ability to call in favors racked up during the previous term. All things being equal, incumbents are tough to beat.

But in other arenas outside politics, the incumbency effect can also be driven by the fact that habits are formed. It’s not just the rational reasons why an incumbent can be tough to dethrone; it’s also the irrational ones. The incumbent has worn a groove in our brain. And to knock off an incumbent, with all these things in their favor, you can’t just be a slightly better alternative. You have to be significantly more attractive. Either the incumbent has to screw up badly, or you have to offer a dramatic improvement over them.

As per usual, my weekly allotment of words has run out before my idea, so I’ll pick this up next week, when we look at the incumbency effect and a parallel concept, cognitive lock in, and how they’re playing out in the world of search.

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!