Category Archives: Online User Experience

High Risk & High Reward: Fully Engaged Buying

First published January 13, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I talked about High Risk/Low Reward purchases and said that when you’re in this quadrant, your “buying brain is driving the brake pedal through the floorboards.” True, but at least there is some consistency in the behaviors: risk trumps all.

When you’re navigating through a High Risk/High Reward purchase, you can be forgiven for appearing schizophrenic in your decision-making process. We swing back and forth from logic to what can only be described as love, with the volatility of a pendulum. If ever we were fully engaged in a buying process, this is the time. It’s all hands on deck for this purchase.

High Risk/High Reward purchases include new homes, vehicles, expensive toys and extravagant vacations. We spend a lot — but we also expect a lot. Game theorists and economists use a term called expected utility to describe our envisioned probable outcome from a decision.  It’s a pretty colorless term, and in theoretical terms, the lack of color in the label reflects the lack of emotion in the decision. Here, we weigh risk against logical outcomes — for example, the expected payoff from a wager.

Expected utility plays a major role in high reward purchases, but here, utility is dramatically colored with emotion. A car is not just about solving your transportation challenges (the expected utility). It’s about mid-life crises, keeping ahead of your brother-in-law, and the image of airing out your thinning hair on a cruise down the California coast. This, in many cases, is high-octane fantasizing, and there’s little logic to it.

Anywhere you find emotional rewards, you’ll find brands. And in these types of purchases of manufactured goods, you’ll inevitably find a brand turf war. Our complex relationships with the brands that define us are born in high-emotional-reward purchase scenarios. And in these types of purchases, the increased role of risk creates a delicious ambiguity in our rationalization of brand love.  We buy brands because of an emotional connection that comes straight from our limbic core (really, in this world of “pretty good” products, there is little to differentiate one brand from another), but our thinking brain kicks into overdrive to explain the logic behind our choice. We can’t seem to grasp the reality that logic had little to do with it.

These highly engaged purchases leave a vast and deep online footprint. We spend hours online, theoretically researching a purchase, but in many cases, we’re pre-rewarding ourselves through envisioning the acquisition of the reward. We use vehicle configurators and agonize over option packages and interior color schemes. We do endless virtual walk-throughs of homes. And we plan our dream vacation in minute detail, balancing recommendations from TripAdvisor and other sites against the limits of our budget and itinerary. Fantasizing begins online, and we have to allow for this in our marketing strategy.

When your product falls into this category, you want to support the fantasy as much as possible, utilizing digital media that encourages an emotional connection. Video and interactivity are a key part of the mix. We reach out on social media sites not just to manage risk by getting the opinions of others, but also to live vicariously through capturing the experiences of those who have bought before us.

As one would imagine, giving the depth and complexity of this online engagement, the search paths taken are equally convoluted. Search will be used repeatedly through the purchase process and for differing intents. There is no “one size fits all” approach here. In these purchase scenarios, a deep qualitative understanding of prospect behaviors will separate the great marketers from the herd.

High Risk & Low Reward: Buying with the Brakes On

First published January 6, 2011 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

After a brief detour last week (thanks for the many heartfelt messages for my Uncle Jim) I want to return to my exploration of the role of risk and reward in our online consumer behaviors.  We looked at the low risk/low reward and low risk/high reward quadrants. Today, we’ll continue by exploring the High Risk/Low Reward quadrant.

As a brief recap, our brains tend to apply brakes or step on the gas when steering through a buying decision based on the degree of risk and the promise of reward inherent in the decision. This dictates the nature of the consumer journey we take – both in terms of paths chosen and duration. I’ve talked before about the concept of bounded rationality, or the threshold of logical consideration we give to any decision. As behavioral economists have found, in almost every human decision, ration is modified by gut instinct. We call this “satisficing.” The only question, it seems, is the balance between the two. Risk and reward are hugely influential in determining our “satisficing” threshold for any purchase decision.

High Risk/Low Reward

In the last column, I described Low Risk/High Reward indulgences as “all gas and little brake.” The chocolate bar temptingly placed at the grocery store checkout aisle is just one example. High Risk/Low Reward purchases live at the opposite end of buyer behavior spectrum. Here your buying brain is driving the brake pedal through the floorboards. Consider this the consumer equivalent of teaching your teenager to drive.

In our personal lives, it includes such joyless purchases as insurance (all kinds, and the higher the premiums, the greater the perceived risk), financial planning, big-ticket home maintenance (not fun stuff like renovations, but replacing a roof, fixing a sagging foundation or getting a new furnace), car repairs and professional services such as lawyers or accountants.

Ironically, each of these types of purchases is usually triggered by either legislation  (car insurance), a non-negotiable need (a leaking roof) or the greater perceived risk of doing nothing (not having a lawyer in a divorce). If there wasn’t some impending reason to buy, we never would. There are no positive emotions at play here, only negative ones.

There is another type of purchase that falls into this quadrant that impacts many of our clients – bigger ticket B2B purchases. Indeed, I wrote an entire book on the subject : “The BuyerSphere Project.”

The lack of positive reward means our consumer research is all aimed at one thing and one thing only: the elimination of risk. In this scenario, risk has several dimensions: price, reliability and, because many of these purchases are predicated on avoiding future risk, balancing current risk against future risk. There is another aspect of risk, which is not commonly identified in these types of purchases: the risk of change. Often, big-ticket purchases require you to make changes in your routine, which involves change management.

When we look at what online behaviors might be for a High Risk/Low Reward purchase, we see risk mitigation as the key factor. Sites that allow buyers to compare several alternatives tend to be very popular, especially if they offer some type of rating. Online aggregators and directories tend to thrive in this quadrant, as they focus on quantifying pricing-based risk.

Because there is little or no emotional reward in these purchases, there is little in the way of positive emotional engagement.  As somebody once told me, nobody ever threw a party to buy car insurance.  Social media engagement is restricted to verifying you don’t get burned in the purchase. Rich-media demonstrations will be passed over in favor of quick comparison charts. And if you are engaging the senses, you’ll be capitalizing on fear of risk rather than a promise of reward.

Next week, we’ll make our way to the last quadrant of the matrix: High Risk/High Reward.

Risk, Reward and the Buying Matrix

First published December 23, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I explored how two parts of our brain, the nucleus accumbens and the anterior insula, are key in driving our buying behaviors. I compared them to the gas pedal and brake of our buying “engine.” The balance between the two is key to understanding how we are driven towards our ultimate decisions. The nucleus accumbens drives our anticipation of an emotional reward, and the anterior insula creates anxiety around areas of risk.

As it turns out, you can plot the two as the axes of a matrix on which, theoretically, you could plot any purchase. The four quadrants would be, starting in the lower left and going clockwise: low risk/low reward,  low risk/high reward, high risk/high reward and, finally, high risk/low reward. Let’s take a deeper dive in each quadrant to see what kind of purchases fall into each.

Low Risk/Low Reward

This is the stuff of everyday life. If you’re a “to-do” list kind of person, these types of purchases would probably be on that list. Think of household supplies like toilet paper and laundry detergent, or the milk, dry goods, etc. that make up a large percentage of your grocery list. This is the world of consumer packaged goods. The only real exceptions are those products that represent personal indulgences, like a steak or your favorite premium ice cream.

There is a huge piece of the B2B market that falls into this category as well: office  and industrial supplies, parts and other often-purchased items.

There is no gas pedal and no brake on these purchases. While the low prices remove any real risk, these are also not the types of shopping trips you look forward to all day. You simply have to get them done. This means the personal engagement with the actual act of purchasing will be minimal. Here, we are creatures of habit. We go to the same places to buy the same things because we really don’t want to invest any more time than is necessary to get the job done. If you compete in this space, you have one strategy and one strategy only: provide the fastest and easiest path to purchase.

Low Risk/High Reward

Here, we have our little indulgences; the day-to-day treats that make life worth living. The entire premium consumer product industry lives squarely in this quadrant: premium desserts, pre-made meals, beauty care products, wines, craft beers and, moving into slightly greater degrees of risk, clothes, accessories, shoes, costume jewelry and electronic gadgets.  This is also where you’d find CDs, DVDs and books. It’s in this quadrant where Amazon rules.

These purchases are all gas and little brake.  If you ever make a purchase on impulse, it’s almost guaranteed to fall into this part of the behavioral matrix.  When women plan shopping trips, it’s to indulge their reward center with these types of purchases. But men are also vulnerable to the siren call of the indulgent purchase: gadgets, tools, sporting goods, electronic games — and, for the metro-men amongst us, clothes and accessories. By the way, manicures, pedicures and spa visits all qualify, along with movies, concerts and dining out.

This quadrant is particularly timely this time of year, because when you buy a gift for someone, you hope you’ve hit this quadrant. The tough part is knowing your recipients well enough to figure out what will kick their nucleus accumbens into high gear.

While the degree of risk doesn’t merit a lot of intensive research, here the buying can be as much fun as the owning, which generally means a higher degree of engagement on the part of the buyer. Shopping environments that enhance the reward part of the equation will be attractive. Buyers are susceptible to suggestion, especially if it comes through our social connections. And brand affinities are powerful here.

In my next column, I’ll provide some examples of the other two quadrants to see what kind of purchases fall into each. Then, we’ll see how each of these buying scenarios might map on the online consumer landscape.

The Insula and The Accumbens: Driving Online Behavior

First published December 16, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

One of the more controversial applications of new neurological scanning technologies has been a quest by marketers for the mythical “buy button” in our brains. So far, no magical nook or cranny in our cranium has given marketers the ability to foist whatever crap they want on it, but a couple of parts of the brain have emerged as leading contenders for influencing buying behavior.

The Nucleus Accumbens: The Gas Pedal

The nucleus accumbens has been identified as the reward center of the brain. Although this is an oversimplification, it definitely plays a central role in our reward circuit. Neuroscanning studies show that the nucleus accumbens “lights up” when people think about things that have a reward attached: investments with big returns, buying a sports car or participating in favorite activities. Dopamine is released and the brain benefits from a natural high. Emotions are the drivers of human behavior — they move us to action (the name comes from the Latin movere, meaning “to move”). The reward circuit of the brain uses emotions to drive us towards rewards, an evolutionary pathway that improves our odds for passing along our genes.

In consumer behaviors, there are certain purchase decisions that fire the nucleus accumbens. Anything that promises some sort of emotional reward can trigger our reward circuits. We start envisioning what possession would be like: the taste of a meal, the thrill of a new car, the joy of a new home, the indulgence of a new pair of shoes. There is strong positive emotional engagement in these types of purchases.

The Anterior Insula: The Brake

But if our brain was only driven by reward, we would never say no. There needs to be some governing factor on the nucleus accumbens. Again, neuroscanning has identified a small section of the brain called the anterior insula as one of the structures serving this role.

If the nucleus accumbens could be called the reward center, the anterior insula could be called the Angst Center of our brains. The insula is a key part of our emotional braking system.  Through the release of noradrenaline and other neurochemicals, it creates the gnawing anxiety that causes us to slow down and tread carefully. In extreme cases, it can even evoke disgust. If the nucleus accumbens drives impulse purchasing, it’s the anterior insula that triggers buyer’s remorse.

The Balance Between the Two 

Again, at the risk of oversimplification, these two counteracting forces drive much of our consumer behavior. You can look at any purchase as the net result of the balance between them; a balancing of risk and reward, or in the academic jargon, prevention and promotion. High-reward and low-risk purchases will have a significantly different consumer behavior pattern than low-reward and high-risk purchases. Think about the difference between buying life insurance and a new pair of shoes. And because they have significantly different behavior profiles, the online interactions that result from these purchases will look quite different as well. In the next column, I’ll look at the four different purchase profiles (High Risk/High Reward, High Risk/Low Reward, Low Risk/High Reward and Low Risk, Low Reward) and look at how the online maps might look in each scenario.

Google: Caught in the Act of Balancing

First published November 18, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In last week’s column, I talked about the number of changes I was seeing on the Google results page, and, in particular, how they might maintain the delicate balance between driving revenue from the page and maintaining user trust. No sooner did the digital ink dry on the column than I received an email from an old friend, Chris Knoch, formerly of Omniture and now vice president of marketing at Ready Financial. In his email, Chris included a screen shot of a rather interesting beta that Google is running:

Google-Screen-ShotIt’s hard to say, given Google’s love for beta testing, how widely spread this test is and how indicative it might be of future ad presentations, but there are a number of fascinating implications to consider here. For today’s column, I’d like to focus on one of them: the elimination of the side ads.

Side ads generate a small percentage of the sponsored clicks from the page. For most results, the top two or three ads generate over 80% of the paid clicks on the page, with the seven or eight running down the right rail splitting the remaining 20%. That’s a lot of real estate to devote to underperforming ads. Will Google’s expandable alternative, with the user choosing to see eight more ads, generate more clicks? I suspect so. Here’s why.

We judge the relevance and quality of blocks of information as a group, rather than consider them individually. The first ad in any block will dictate the performance of the block as a whole. If it’s a high quality ad, it’s saying to the user, “I’m relevant. Chances are the rest of the ads in this group could be relevant too. At least, you should spend a few seconds deciding for yourself!” But if it’s a low quality ad, it sends the message, “Don’t waste your time here. I’m not relevant, and everything below me is even worse.”

For side ads, this means that the top ad determines the depth of scanning engagement with the entire block. The position and visual treatment of the ads reinforces that it’s a “sidebar”, of secondary importance to the main purpose of the page. We won’t invest a lot of time scanning here, and if the first ad sucks, the rest of the block is doomed.

Google’s treatment provides a compelling alternative to the user. It restricts the number of ads shown to only the highest quality ones (you’ll notice that this presentation appeared on a broad query, where there would be sufficient inventory to provide high quality ads). The ads should be just as relevant to the intent of the user as the organic results, and given the query, probably more relevant. The user should be hooked. The presentation of two ads (I’d bet big money on the fact that Google will be testing both two and three ad presentations above the “more ads” button) gives a ready-made consideration set for the user. We’ve known for some time now that users “chunk off” a result set in groups of two or three results (maximum four) and consider them as a group. There are natural visual barriers (the related search suggestions) that reinforce the visual presentation of the top ads as a group. What this means is that the user will judge relevancy, and if the first two (or three) ads pass the test, there’s a high likelihood that the set will be expanded.

When the set is expanded, the entire visual balance of the search results set is changed to the benefit of the advertisers, but the user initiates it. The user has given the ads an implicit vote of confidence, and by doing so, all organic results are pushed down out of visual scanning range. My guess is that this will result in much higher engagement with the ads, virtually eliminating the sidebar blindness that has typically plagued right-rail ads.

It’s a perfect example of maintaining user trust while driving more revenue. Based on this beta, I’d have to say, “Well done, Google!”

Is the Internet Making Us Stupid – or a New Kind of Smart?

First published September 9, 2010 inn Mediapost’s Search Insider

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I’m reading Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows.” His basic premise is that our current environment, with its deluge of available information typically broken into bite-sized pieces served up online, is “dumbing down” our brains.  We no longer read, we scan. We forego the intellectual heavy lifting of prolonged reading for the more immediate gratification of information foraging. We’re becoming a society of attention-deficit dolts.

It’s a grim picture, and Carr does a good job of backing up his premise. I’ve written about many of these issues in the past. And I don’t dispute the trends that Carr chronicles (at length). But is Carr correct is saying that online is dulling our intellectual capabilities, or is it just creating a different type of intelligence?

While I’m at it, I suspect this new type of intelligence is much more aligned with our native abilities than the “book smarts” that have ruled the day for the last five centuries. I’m an avid reader (ironically, I’ve been reading Carr’s book on an iPad) and I’m the first to say that I would be devastated if reading goes the way of the dodo.  But are we projecting our view of what’s “right” on a future where the environment (and rules) have changed?

A Timeline of Intellect

If you expand your perspective of human intellectualism to the entire history of man, you find that the past 500 years have been an anomaly. Prior to the invention of the printing press (and the subsequent blossoming of intellectualism) our brains were there for one purpose: to keep us alive. The brain accomplished this critical objective through one of three ways:

Responding to Danger in Our Environments

Reading is an artificial human activity. We have to train our brains to do it. But scanning our surroundings to notice things that don’t fit is as natural to us as sleeping and eating. We have sophisticated, multi-layered mechanisms to help us recognize anomalies in our environment (which often signal potential danger).  I believe we have “exapted” these same mechanisms and use them every day to digest information presented online.

This idea goes back to something I have said repeatedly: Technology doesn’t change behavior, it enables behavior to change. Change comes from us pursuing the most efficient route for our brains. When technology opens up an option that wasn’t previously available, and the brain finds this a more natural path to take, it will take it. It may seem that the brain is changing, but in actuality it’s returning to its evolutionary “baseline.”

If the brain has the option of scanning, using highly efficient inherent mechanisms that have been created through evolution over thousands of generations, or reading, using jury-rigged, inefficient neural pathways that we’ve been forced to build from scratch through our lives, the brain will take the easiest path. The fact was, we couldn’t scan a book. But we can scan a Web site.

Making The Right Choices

Another highly honed ability of the brain is to make advantageous choices. We can consider alternatives using a combination of gut instincts (more than you know) and rational deliberation (less than you think) and more often than not, make the right choice. This ability goes in lock step with the previous one, scanning our environment.

Reading a book offers no choices. It’s a linear experience, forced to go in one direction. It’s an experience dictated by the writer, not the reader. But browsing a Web site is an experience littered with choices.  Every link is a new choice, made by the visitor. This is why we (at my company) have continually found that a linear presentation of information (for example, a Flash movie) is a far less successful user experience than a Web site where the user can choose from logical and intuitive navigation options.

Carr is right when he says this is distracting, taking away from the focused intellectual effort that typifies reading. But I counter with the view that scanning and making choices is more naturally human than focused reading.

Establishing Beneficial Social Networks

Finally, humans are herders. We naturally create intricate social networks and hierarchies, because it’s the best way of ensuring that our DNA gets passed along from generation to generation. When it comes to gene propagation, there is definitely safety in numbers.

Reading is a solitary pursuit. Frankly, that’s one of the things avid readers treasure most about a good book, the “me” time that it brings with it. That’s all well and good, but bonding and communication are key drivers of human behavior. Unlike a book, online experiences offer you the option of solitary entertainment or engaged social connection. Again, it’s a closer fit with our human nature.

From a personal perspective, I tend to agree with most of Carr’s arguments. They are a closer fit with what I value in terms of intellectual “worth.” But I wonder if we fall into a trap of narrowed perspective when we pass judgment on what’s right and what’s not based on what we’ve known, rather than on what’s likely to be.

At the end of the day, humans will always be human.

Wired for Information: A Brain Built to Google

First published August 26, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In my last Search Insider, I took you on a neurological tour that gave us a glimpse into how our brains are built to read. Today, let’s dig deeper into how our brains guide us through an online hunt for information.

Brain Scans and Searching

First, a recap. In Nicholas Carr’s Book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains,” I focused on one passage — and one concept — in particular. It’s likely that our brains have built a short cut for reading. The normal translation from a printed word to a concept usually requires multiple mental steps. But because we read so much, and run across some words frequently, it’s probable that our brains have built short cuts to help us recognize those words simply by their shape in mere milliseconds, instantly connecting us with the relevant concept. So, let’s hold that thought for a moment

The Semel Institute at UCLA recently did a neuroscanning study that monitored what parts of the brain lit up during the act of using a search engine online. What the institute found was that when we become comfortable with the act of searching, our brains become more active. Specifically, the prefrontal cortex, the language centers and the visual cortex all “light up” during the act of searching, as well as some sub-cortical areas.

It’s the latter of these that indicates the brain may be using “pre-wired” short cuts to directly connect words and concepts. It’s these sub-cortical areas, including the basal ganglia and the hippocampus, where we keep our neural “short cuts.”  They form the auto-pilot of the brain.

Our Brain’s “Waldo” Search Party

Now, let’s look at another study that may give us another piece of the puzzle in helping us understand how our brain orchestrates the act of searching online.

Dr. Robert Desimone at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT found that when we look for something specific, we “picture” it in our mind’s eye. This internal visualization in effect “wakes up” our brain and creates a synchronized alarm circuit: a group of neurons that hold the image so that we can instantly recognize it, even in complex surroundings. Think of a “Where’s Waldo” puzzle. Our brain creates a mental image of Waldo, activating a “search party” of Waldo neurons that synchronize their activities, sharpening our ability to pick out Waldo in the picture. The synchronization of neural activity allows these neurons to zero in on one aspect of the picture, in effect making it stand out from the surrounding detail

Pirolli’s Information Foraging

One last academic reference, and then we’ll bring the pieces together. Peter Pirolli, from Xerox’s PARC, believes we “forage” for information, using the same inherent mechanisms we would use to search for food. So, we hunt for the “scent” of our quarry, but in this case, rather than the smell of food, it’s more likely that we lodge the concept of our objective in our heads. And depending on what that concept is, our brains recruit the relevant neurons to help us pick out the right “scent” quickly from its surroundings.  If our quarry is something visual, like a person or thing, we probably picture it. But if our brain believes we’ll be hunting in a text-heavy environment, we would probably picture the word instead. This is the way the brain primes us for information foraging.

The Googling Brain

This starts to paint a fascinating and complex picture of what our brain might be doing as we use a search engine. First, our brain determines our quarry and starts sending “top down” directives so we can very quickly identify it.  Our visual cortex helps us by literally painting a picture of what we might be looking for. If it’s a word, our brain becomes sensitized to the shape of the word, helping us recognize it instantly without the heavy lifting of lingual interpretation.

Thus primed, we start to scan the search results. This is not reading, this is scanning our environment in mere milliseconds, looking for scent that may lead the way to our prey. If you’ve ever looked at a real-time eye-tracking session with a search engine, this is exactly the behavior you’d be seeing.

When we bring all the pieces together, we realize how instantaneous, primal and intuitive this online foraging is. The slow and rational brain only enters the picture as an afterthought.

Googling is done by instinct. Our eyes and brain are connected by a short cut in which decisions are made subconsciously and within milliseconds. This is the forum in which online success is made or missed.

How Our Brains are Wired to Read

First published August 19, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

How do we read? How do we take the arbitrary, human-made code that is the written word and translate it into thoughts and images that mean something to our brain, an organ that had its basic wiring designed thousands of generations before the appearance of the first written word? What is going on in your skull right now as your eyes scan the black squiggly lines that make up this column?

The Reading Short Cut

I’m currently reading Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” a follow-up to Carr’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The concept Carr explores is fascinating to me: the impact of constant online usage on how the neural circuits of our brain are wired.

But there was one quote in particular, from Maryanne Wolf’s book, “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” that literally leapt off the page for me: ‘The accomplished reader, Maryanne Wolf explains, develops specialized brain regions geared to the rapid deciphering of text. The areas are wired ‘to represent the important visual, phonological and semantic information and to retrieve this information at lightning speed.’ The visual cortex, for example, develops ‘a veritable collage’ of neuron assemblies dedicated to recognizing, in a matter of milliseconds, ‘visual images of letters, letter patterns and words.'”

For everyone reading this column today, that is one of the most relevant passages you may ever scan your eyes across. It’s vitally important to digital marketers and designers of online experiences. Humans that read a lot develop the ability to recognize word patterns instantly, without going through the tedious neural heavy lifting of translating the pattern through the language centers of the brain. A quick neurological tour is in order here.

How the Brain Reads

The brain has a habit of developing multiple paths to the same end goal. Many functions that our brain controls tend to have dual routes: a quick and dirty one that rips through the brain at lightning speed and a slower, more rational one. It’s the neural reality behind Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink.” This dual speed processing is a tremendously efficient way of coping with our environment. The same mechanism, according to Wolf, has been adapted to our interpretation of the written word.

Humans have an evolved capacity for language. Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker and others have shown convincingly that we come out of the box with inherent capabilities to communicate with each other. But those abilities, housed in the language centers of the brain (Wernicke’s and Broca’s Areas, if you’re interested) are limited to oral language. Written language hasn’t been around nearly long enough for evolution’s relatively slow timeline to have had much of an impact. That’s why we learn to speak naturally just by hanging around other humans, but only those with a formalized and structured education learn to read and write. We have to take the native machinery of the brain and force it to adapt to the required task by creating new neural paths.

Instantly Recognizable…

So, when we read a page of text, there’s a fairly complex and laborious process going on in our noggins. Our visual cortex scans the abstract code that is written language, feeds it to the language centers for translation, and then sends it to our prefrontal cortex and our long-term memory to be rendered into concepts that mean something to us. The word “horse” doesn’t really mean the large, hairy, four-legged mammal that we’re familiar with until it goes through this mental processing.

But, like anything that humans do often, we tend to create short cuts through repetition. It’s important to note that this isn’t evolution at work, it’s neuroplasticity. The ability to read and write is built in each human from scratch. The brain naturally tries to achieve maximum efficiency by taking things we do repeatedly and building little synaptic short cuts. Humans who read a lot become wired to recognize certain words just by their shape and appearance, without needing to run the full processing cycle. Your name is a good example. How often have you been reading a newspaper or book and run across your last name? Does it seem to “leap off the page?” That was your brain triggering one of its little short cuts.

So, what does this mean for online interactions, particularly with a search engine? In next week’s column, I’ll revisit a fascinating brain scanning study that was done by UCLA and take a peek at what might be happening under the hood when we launch a Web search.

 

The Jill Hotchkiss Inflection Point

First published July 29, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Technology has reached a critical point in the adoption curve. My wife, who is imminently practical and intolerant of anything that smacks of gadgetry, is becoming intrigued by my iPhone. I can’t overstate the importance of this in terms of watershed moments. Steve Jobs, if you can get my wife to buy into your vision, you have crossed the chasm.

There’s something important to note here in attitudes towards technology that we digerati, gathered together on the leading edge of the bell curve, often forget. Technology only becomes important to most people when it lets them do something they care about. For my wife, my gleeful demonstrations of the wonder that is Shazam gained nothing but a prolonged rolling of the eyes. Twitter clients and Facebook apps? Puh-leeze! Redlaser elicited a brief spark of interest, but this quickly passed when she saw the steps she had to take to do any virtual shopping. Even the wonders of the cosmos, conveniently mapped by pUniverse, did not pass the Jill acid test. As long as my app inventory didn’t improve her life in any appreciable way, she remained resolutely unimpressed.

But lately, there have been cracks in the wall of technology defense she has carefully constructed since marrying me. A nifty little app called Mousewait was the first chink. Knowing the wait times in the ride lines on a recent trip to Disneyland was something she cared about. Suddenly, she was asking me to take out the iPhone and check to see how many minutes we’d have to wait at Splash Mountain. Yelp helped us find a reasonable family restaurant in San Diego. And Taxi Magic allowed us to quickly hail a cab in San Francisco.

But the moment I knew the defenses were ready to crumble was when she recently turned to me and said: “So, you can do all that stuff on an iPhone? What other things can you do?”

Aahhh… the door was open, but only a crack. If I’ve learned one thing in 21 years of marriage, I’ve learned to tread slowly when these opportunities present themselves. I had to carefully craft my response. Too much enthusiasm shown at this point could be fatal…

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“On the iPhone… what could you do with it?”

“What could I do with it, or what could you do with it?

“Me… let’s say.”

And here we come to the crux of the matter. I’m extremely tolerant of technology. I’ll struggle my way through an interface and put up with crappy design simply so I can emerge victorious on the top of the early adopter heap, holding my iPhone proudly aloft. At the first inkling of frustration, my wife will turf the thing into the nearest trashcan. If you functionality is what you’re looking for, app designers have to provide the shortest possible path from A to B.

If you really want to scale the opportunity that lies at the Jill Hotchkiss inflection point, what you have to do is start providing seamless functionality for app to app. The new iPhone OS is edging down this path by supporting multitasking, but there is still a long way to go before you’ll make my wife truly happy. And that, believe me, is a goal worthy of pursuit.

The Two Meanings of Engagement

Engagement: a betrothal. An exclusive commitment to another preceding marriage

Engagement: as in an engaging conversation.  Being highly involved in an interaction with something or someone.

The theme of the Business Marketing Association conference I talked about in last week’s column was “Engage.”  At the conference, the word engagement was tossed around more freely than wine and bomboniere at an Italian wedding. Unfortunately, engagement is one those buzzwords that has ceased to hold much meaning in marketing. The Advertising Research Foundation has gone as far as to try to put engagement forward as the one metric to unite all metrics in marketing, a cross-channel Holy Grail.

But what does engagement really mean? What does it mean to be “engaged?” The problem is that engagement itself is an ambiguous term. It has multiple meanings. As I pondered this and discussed with others, I realized the problem is that marketers and customers have two very different definitions of engagement. And therein lies the problem.

The Marketer’s Definition of Engagement

Marketers, whether they want to admit it or not, look at engagement in the traditional matrimonial sense. They want customers to make an exclusive commitment to them, forgoing all others. It’s a pledge of loyalty, a repulsion of other suitors, a bond of fidelity. To marketers, engagement is just another word for ownership and control.

When marketers talk about engagement, they envision prospects enthralled with their brands, hanging on every word, eager for every commercial message. They strive for a love that is blind.  Engagement ties up the customer’s intent and “share of wallet.”  Marketers talk about getting closer to the customer, but in all too many cases, it’s to keep tabs on them. For all the talk of engagement, the benefits are largely for the marketer, not the customer.

The Customer’s Definition of Engagement

Customers, on the other hand, define engagement as giving them a reason to care. They define engagement as it would relate to a conversation. Do you give me a reason to keep listening? And are you, in turn, listening to what I have to say? Is there a compelling reason for me to continue the conversation? I will be engaged with you only as long as it suits my needs to do so.  I will give you nothing you haven’t earned.

The engagement of a conversation is directly tied to how personally relevant it is. The topic has to mean something to me. If it’s mildly interesting, my attention will soon drift. But if you’re touching something that is deeply important to me, you will have my undivided attention for as long as you need it. That is engagement from the other side of the table.

So, as we talk about engagement at a marketing conference, let’s first agree on a definition of engagement. And let’s be honest about what our expectations are. Because I suspect marketers and customers are looking at different pages of the dictionary.