Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

A Cognitive Walk Through of Searching

First published October 23, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Two weeks ago, I talked about the concept of selective perception, how subconsciously we pick and choose what we pay attention to. Then, last week, I explained how engagement with search is significantly different than engagement with other types of advertising. These two concepts set the stage for what I want to do today. In this column, I want to lay out a step-by-step hypothetical walk-through of our cognitive engagement with a search page.

Searching on Auto Pilot

First, I think it’s important to clear up a common misunderstanding. We don’t think our way through an entire search interaction. The brain only kicks into cognitive high gear (involving the cortex) when it absolutely needs to. When we’re engaged in a mental task, any mental task, our brain is constantly looking for cognitive shortcuts to lessen the workload required. Most of these shortcuts involve limbic structures at the sub-cortical level, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus, thalamus and nucleus accumbens. This is a good thing, as these structures have been honed through successful generations to simplify even the most complicated tasks. They’re the reason driving is much easier for you now than it was the first time you climbed behind the wheel. These structures and their efficiencies also play a vital role in our engagement with search.

So, to begin with, our mind identifies a need for information. Usually, this is a sub task that is part of a bigger goal. The goal is established in the prefrontal cortex and the neural train starts rolling toward it. We realize there’s a piece of information missing that prevents us from getting closer to our goal – and, based on our past successful experiences, we determine that a search engine offers the shortest route to gain the information. This is the first of our processing efficiencies. We don’t deliberate long hours about the best place to turn. We make a quick, heuristic decision based on what’s worked in the past. The majority of this process is handled at the sub-cortical level.

The Google Habit

Now we have the second subconscious decision. Although we have several options available for searching, the vast majority of us will turn to Google, because we’ve developed a Google habit. Why spend precious cognitive resources considering our options when Google has generally proved successful in the past? Our cortex has barely begun to warm up at this point. The journey thus far has been on autopilot.

The prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory, first sparked to life with the realization of the goal and the identification of the sub task, locating the missing piece of information. Now, the cortical mind is engaged once again as we translate that sub task into an appropriate query. This involves matching the concept in our minds with the right linguistic label. Again, we’re not going to spend a lot of cognitive effort on this, which is why query construction tends to start simply and become longer and more complex only if required. In this process, the label, the query we plugged into the search box, remains embedded in working memory.

Conditioned Scanning

At this point, the prefrontal cortex begins to idle down again. The next exercise is handled by the brain as a simple matching game. We have the label, or query, in our mind. We scan the page in the path we’ve been conditioned to believe will lead to the best results: starting in the upper left, and then moving down the page in an F-shaped scan pattern. All we want to do is find a match between the query in our prefrontal cortex and the results on the page.

Here the brain also conserves cognitive processing energy by breaking the page into chunks of three or four results. This is due to the channel capacity of our working memory and how many discrete chunks of information we can process in our prefrontal cortex at a time. We scan the results looking first for the query, usually in the title of the results. And it’s here where I believe a very important cognitive switch is thrown.

The “Pop Out” Effect

When we structure the query, we type it into a box. In the process, we remember the actual shape of the phrase. When we first scan results, we’re not reading words, we’re matching shapes. In cognitive psychology, this is called the “pop out” effect. We can recognize shapes much faster than we can read words. The shapes of our query literally “pop out” from the page as a first step toward matching relevance. The effect is enhanced by query (or hit) bolding. This matching game is done at the sub-cortical level.

If the match is positive (shape = query), then our eye lingers long enough to start picking up the detail around the word. We’ve seen in multiple eye tracking studies that foveal focus (the center of the field of vision) tends to hit the query in the title, but peripheral vision begins to pick up words surrounding the title. In our original eye tracking study, we called this semantic mapping. In Peter Pirolli’s book, “Information Foraging,” he referred to this activity as spreading activation. It’s after the “pop out” match that the prefrontal cortex again kicks into gear. As additional words are picked up, they are used to reinforce the original scent cue. Additional words from the result pull concepts into the prefrontal cortex (recognized URL, feature, supporting information, price, brand), which tend to engage different cortical regions as long-term memory labels are paged and brought back into the working memory. If enough matches with the original mental construct of the information sought are registered, the link is clicked.

Next week, we’ll look at the nature of this memory recall, including the elusive brand message.

The Elusive Goal of Ad Engagement

First published October 16, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about the nature of engagement and the neural mechanisms that underlie it. This week, I want to explore why those same mechanisms dictate that our search interactions are going to be completely different from engagement with a TV ad or a billboard.

The key thing to understand here is how we’re driven by goals. In a drastic oversimplification, goals are the objectives that drive our information processing modules, more commonly known as our brain. Our “mind” and all that we know about ourselves are shifting patterns of information being processed in these modules. At multiple levels, we sift through data, make decisions and initiate actions to get us closer to our goals.

Goal Interrupted

Most advertising is interruptive. It’s a detour on the road to our goals. The holy grail of direct marketing is to time delivery of the message so that it coincides with our pursuit of a goal. If you can get a realtor brochure to my doorstep at exactly the time I’m thinking of putting my house up for sale, you’ve substantially increased the odds of active engagement with your advertising message. But despite the advances in targeting methods, the odds of perfect coincidence are frustratingly slim. So advertising has to depend on other methods, like emotion, to trigger primal reactions and force suspension of current goal pursuit to engage with the message.

One of the comments on last week’s column, by fellow Search Insider Kaila Colbin, provides a perfect example of this. Kaila provided a link to a particularly powerful use of emotion in a TV ad from New Zealand Post. Now, despite the powerful emotional appeal, in a typical stream of ads inserted in a commercial block in network programming, the ad would still need to batter our way into our consciousness. With Kaila it succeeded once, hitting all the right emotional cues, and so her subconscious has been primed to respond to this ad should it appear on the radar screen of her constant scanning of her environment. In Kaila’s case, she would rush to the TV to change the channel, preventing her from dissolving into a messy puddle of tears.

Active Engagement

But by drawing our attention to the link, Kaila set up a totally different nature of engagement. She embedded the concept in our working memory by allowing us to create a goal around the viewing of the ad. We were engaged with the concept on a totally different level. Watching the ad was the goal, so no diversion of attention was required. We were primed to pay attention by Kaila’s recommendation. This is the power of ads that go viral in social networks, like Dove’s Evolution.

This concept of attention is at the center of two targeting tactics that have proven effective in the online environment: behavioral and contextual targeting.

Engaging Tactics

With behavioral targeting, we track behavioral cues through clickstreams, hoping that it will improve our odds of presenting our advertising message at exactly the right time to coincide with our target’s pursuit of a goal. The well-timed presentation of an ad for Chinese hotel rooms at almost the same time I was planning a trip to China was an example I’ve talked about before. Because planning for the trip had recently occupied my working memory and presumably I hadn’t yet reached my goal (the trip wasn’t completely planned yet), this message stood a pretty good chance of being engaged with (despite the fact that it creeped me out a little).

Contextual targeting employs a different but related strategy. If advertising messages are about the same topics as the content that I’m engaging with, transference of that engagement should be easier than with unrelated topics. Indeed, at Enquiro we’ve found that engagement with these ads actually occurs at two levels. There’s the initial awareness of the ad and the subsequent decision to engage with the ad. We’ve found that awareness is often higher with non-contextually targeted ads, but engagement and recall is higher with contextual ads. I have my theories about why this is so (having to do with the nature of the creative and the interplay of active consciousness and selective perception) but that could fill up an entire column in itself.

Engaging Search

Finally, we have search. In my previous examples of online targeting, we’re still using our best guess about optimum timing based on some pretty broad assumptions: click streams provide an accurate measure of intent, and interest in content means interest in related advertising messages. These targeting methods simply improve the odds in what is still essentially an interruption in the pursuit of a goal. But use of search is inherently aligned with goal pursuit. Information gathering is a key subtask in the pursuit of many goals, and search is an important tool in our information foraging arsenal. The goal is firmly embedded in our working memory and we’re on high alert for cues relevant to our end goal. This is why information scent in search results is so critical. No diversion of attention is required. Our attention is firmly focused on the results presented on the search page (both paid and algorithmic), because we believe that one of those results will take us one step closer to the goal.

This concept of active engagement is key to understanding search’s role in branding. Next week, I’ll look at how our cognitive mechanisms digest the results on a search page.

Picking and Choosing What We Pay Attention To

First published October 9, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In a single day, you will be assaulted by hundreds of thousands of discrete bits of information. I’m writing this from a hotel room on the corner of 43rd and 8th in New York. Just a simple three-block walk down 8th Avenue will present me with hundreds bits of information: signs, posters, flyers, labels, brochures. By the time I go to sleep this evening, I will be exposed to over 3,000 advertising messages. Every second of our lives, we are immersed in a world of detail and distraction, all vying for our attention. Even the metaphors we use, such as “paying attention,” show that we consider attention a valuable commodity to be allocated wisely.

 

Lining Up for the Prefrontal Cortex

Couple this with the single-mindedness of the prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory. There, we work on one task at a time. We are creatures driven by a constant stack of goals and objectives. We pull our big goals out, one and a time, often break it into sub goals and tasks, and then pursue these with the selective engagement of the prefrontal cortex. The more demanding the task, the more we have to shut out the deluge of detail screaming for our attention.

Our minds have an amazingly effective filter that continually scans our environment, subconsciously monitoring all this detail, and then moving it into our attentive focus if our sub cortical alarm system determines we should give it conscious attention. So, as we daydream our way through our lives, we don’t unconsciously plow through pedestrians as they step in front of us. We’re jolted into conscious awareness until the crisis is dealt with, working memory is called into emergency duty, and then, post crisis, we have to try to pick up the thread of what we were doing before. This example shows that working memory is not a multi-tasker. It’s impossible to continue to mentally balance your check book while you’re trying to avoid smashing into the skateboarding teen who just careened off the side walk. Only one task at a time, thank you.

You Looked, but Did You See?

The power of our ability to focus and filter out extraneous detail is a constant source of amazement for me. We’ve done several engagement studies where we have captured physical interactions with an ad (tracked through an eye tracker) on a web page of several seconds in duration, then have participants swear there was no ad there. They looked at the ad, but their mind was somewhere else, quite literally. The extreme example of this can be found in an amusing experiment done by University of Illinois  cognitive psychologist  Daniel J. Simons and now enjoying viral fame through YouTube. Go ahead and check it out  before you read any further if you haven’t already seen it. (Count the number of times the white team passes the ball)

This selective perception is the door through which we choose to let the world into our conscious (did you see the Gorilla in the video? If not, go back and try again). And its door that advertisers have been trying to pry through for the past 200 years at least. We are almost never focused on advertising, so, in order for it to be effective, it has to convince us to divert our attention from what we’re currently doing. The strategies behind this diversion have become increasingly sophisticated. Advertising can play to our primal cues. A sexy woman is almost always guaranteed to divert a man’s attention. Advertising can throw a road block in front of our conscious objectives, forcing us to pass through them. TV ads work this way, literally bringing our stream of thought to a screeching halt and promising to pick it up again “right after these messages”. The hope is that there is enough engagement momentum for us to keep focused on the 30 second blurb for some product guaranteed to get our floors/teeth/shirts whiter.

Advertising’s Attempted Break-In

The point is, almost all advertising never enjoys the advantage of having working memory actively engaged in trying to understand its message. Every variation has to use subterfuge, emotion or sheer force to try to hammer its way into our consciousness. This need has led to the industry searching for a metric that attempts to measure the degree to which our working memory is on the job. In the industry, we call it engagement. The ARF defined engagement as “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding media context.” Really, engagement is better described as smashing through the selective perception filter.

In a recent study, ARF acknowledged the importance of emotion as a powerful way to sneak past the guardhouse and into working memory. Perhaps more importantly, the study shows the power of emotion to ensure memories make it from short term to long term memory: “Emotion underlies engagement which affects memory of experience, thinking about the experience, and subsequent behavior.  Emotion is not a peripheral phenomenon but involves people completely.  Emotions have motivational properties, to the extent that people seek to maximize the experience of positive emotions and to minimize the experience of negative emotions.  Emotion is fundamental to engagement.  Emotion directs attention to the causally significant aspects of the experience, serves to encode and classify the ‘unusual’ (unexpected or novel) in memory, and promotes persisting rehearsal of the event-memory. In this way, thinking/feeling/memory articulates the experience to guide future behaviors.”

With this insight into the marketing mindset, honed by decades of hammering away at our prefrontal cortex, it’s little wonder why the marketing community has struggled with where search fits in the mix. Search plays by totally different neural rules. And that means its value as a branding tool also has to play by those same rules.  I’ll look at that next week.

Questioning the Power of the Influencer

First published October 2, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Word of mouth is powerful in marketing. In the last two weeks, we’ve seen how the opinions of others can cause us to change our own beliefs to match. We’ve also seen how the speed at which the word spreads is a function not only of the structure of the network itself, but also the value of the message and its impact on the people in the network, as well as how much they stand to gain (or lose) by spreading the word.

Influencers: Our Connection to Opinion?

In the world of marketing, one of the most cherished concepts has been the idea of an influencer or opinion leader, the super-connected individual who acts as a hub in an information cascade, rapidly disseminating the idea to many. According to this theory, most of us (90%) play relatively passive roles in information cascades, meekly accepting the opinions of these influencers and following the herd. Katz and Lazarsfeld introduced the two-step influencer model in the middle of the last century, showing how media first influences these influencers, or opinion leaders, who then act as a conduit and “infection agent” for the greater population.

It’s Not the Influencer, It’s Our Willingness to be Influenced

For the past 6 decades, marketers have allocated a lot of effort in reaching these influencers, assuming that once you capture the influencers, you capture the entire market. The assumption was that information cascades depended on these influential hubs. Malcolm Gladwell’s “TheTipping Point” brought this phenomenon to popular attention.

In the past few years, a number of researchers, including Duncan Watts from Columbia University, have questioned the impact of influencers on information cascades. They’ve created several network models which have shown that in most cases, ordinary individuals are all that’s required to trigger a word-of-mouth cascade. We are not merely sheep following the herd. We are all influencers in our own right, but only when we feel strongly about something. The necessary ingredient is not a hyper-connected influencer or super trend-setter, but rather a group of people willing to be influenced.

Passion by Word of Mouth

Which brings us to Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” When promoting the film, Gibson knew the most receptive audience would be church-goers. So he arranged for private screenings and the distribution of free tickets in churches throughout North America. We had Watts’ ideal model, a low variance network (similar levels of influence) that shared a vulnerability to influence, given the nature of the message. Word spread quickly before the launch of the movie (which also resulted in a firestorm of controversy), making “The Passion of the Christ” one of the most successful movies of 2004.

This example also leads us to a possible error in analysis of information cascades that has perpetuated the “influencer” theory. It’s relatively easy, when looking in hindsight, to make the assumption that if a cascade happened, the individuals at the beginning of the cascade had to be unique in their ability to influence others. A proponent of the Influentials Theory could look at the example of “The Passion of the Christ” and say that it was the pastors and ministers of the selected screening churches that acted as the influencers, spreading the word to their congregations.

But Watts’ theory offers an alternate explanation. The everyday, commonly connected members of the audience were willing to be influenced, and once captured by the message, went and spread it within their other social groups. It was the willingness to be influenced that was the critical factor. To use the analogy provided by Watts in his paper, assuming some unique level of influence by the catalysts of a cascade is like assuming that the first trees to burn in a forest fire are somehow able to spread flames farther than other trees. Often, the fact that the tree was combustible in the first place is overlooked.

Starting a Brand Fire

So, when we talk about brand, what makes a tree ready to catch on fire? Here we have another important insight from Watts’ work. Too many marketers make the assumption that influencers are the critical component of success. Proctor and Gamble has made influencer marketing a cornerstone of its strategy. But the fact is, if “The Passion of the Christ” was an unremarkable movie that audiences couldn’t connect with, all the influencers in the world wouldn’t have caused the word to spread. It was a powerful message connecting with an audience primed to accept it.

Watts’ models show that the success of a cascade depends on the vulnerability to influence. If that is present, ordinary individuals can cause the word to spread as far and just as quickly as hyper-connected influencers. And the vulnerability to be influenced, the “combustibility” of the audience, depends on many factors, perhaps the most important of which is the back story of the brand.

The Combustible iPhone

Look at what has been one of the most successful cascades of recent times: the Apple iPhone. The iPhone is a tremendously combustible product. It’s not technology mavens causing the word to spread (although they do have influence. Watts is quick to point out that they have impact, but it may not as disproportionally large as everyone believes), it’s the person sitting next to you on the plane who says she loves it. And we’re receptive to that message because we have that magic connection of brand (Apple makes cool products) and a remarkable product. We’re ready to be set on fire.

I’ve spent the last few columns detailing the aspects of word of mouth because they have a tremendous impact on brand and how we create our own brand beliefs. And it’s these brand beliefs that are triggered when we interact with search results. Next week, we return to more familiar territory and see how this interaction plays out.

The Triumph of Human Rational Will

For regular readers, it should come as no surprise that I’m a Darwinist. Of course, labeling yourself as such immediately opens you up to backlash.

Darwinists are immediately grouped with genetic determinists. The mistake in doing so is significant. Darwinists, including Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and Stephen Pinker, believe that what we are is shaped by evolutionary forces, including natural and sexual selection. But that doesn’t necessarily determine who we are. Humans (and contrary to popular belief, it appears we’re not alone in this) have a conscious mind. The challenge is that the conscious mind is always working in close step with our unconscious drives, habits, rules and behaviors. It makes us human, infallible, sometimes irrational but, on the whole, fairly effective in our environments. The evolutionary mechanisms we have are remarkably flexible and adaptable.

But every Darwinist I know says that we have the ability to reach beyond the tyranny of our genes. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it is possible. We aren’t simply robots playing out our scripts. We can determine our own destiny, based on the ideals that govern us and our society.

In various books, authors have offered examples that refute simple genetic determinism. The use of birth control and the chastity of religious orders are just two. These run counter to the single mindedness of the Selfish Gene.

One of the most remarkable examples was brought forcefully to me this week when I watched a documentary on Gandhi. Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolent resistance and his ability to get an entire nation to join him is an amazing show of the force of rational free will. It runs counter to every inherent defense mechanism evolution has endowed us with. In fact, Gandhi’s ability to steel the will of India to transcend their instincts, while the British allowed their scripts of aggression, fear, greed and violence to play out, is perhaps the greatest triumph of will over base instincts I can think of. It’s a rather random thought, but a refreshing example of the magnificence of human will when we put our rational minds to something.

Chrome’s Shiny, but is it enough to Break a Habit?

How ironic!

After going on at length about how Google’s competition is the victim of the search juggernaut’s ability to make searching Google a habit, now they’re running up against the same brick wall with the introduction of Chrome.

With the introduction of a new product that’s vital to future strategies, one has to account for cognitive lock in and habitual behavior. Let’s do a walk through of two examples.

Searching by habit

First of all, my Google analogy. Using Google as a search engine isn’t a conscious choice, it’s habit. We don’t think about it, we just do it. And because we don’t think about it, you can’t take a rational approach to convincing us to do otherwise. You have to disrupt the playing out of the habitual script. And you can’t just disrupt it once. You have to destroy the script completely and permanently.

So Microsoft’s Cashback scheme was doomed to failure from the beginning. It was a rational appeal based on Microsoft’s offering to pay you an incentive for using their search engine. It’s a fundamental human appeal and, on paper, appears to make sense. The problem is, sense isn’t really enough to change habits. Here’s what will happen. Someone will hear about the Cashback offer and may actually rationally suspend habitual behavior in order to try Live Search. Their autopilot will be switched off and they’ll consciously take over the controls. But we’re programmed to revert to autopilot in order to save energy. So unless the experience offered such a tremendous benefit that it’s worth our while to continue to rationally keep our hand on the controls, we’ll turn our attention (remember, attention is a one task at a time proposition, so we have to be very judicious about where we choose to spend it) to other things and go back to autopilot behavior. Cashback would have to blow away our previous search experiences, giving us a benefit worthy of investing the time to create a new habit. Cashback simply didn’t raise the bar enough.

What Goes Up will probably Come Down

So, with that psychological foundation, one could predict with a fair degree of confidence what would happen with the introduction of Cashback. There would be a temporary blip upwards in marketshare as the least loyal of Google’s habitual users consciously decided to give it a try, and then because the experience wasn’t a revolution in search, habitual behavior would take over and they would go back to Google. Marketshare would quickly return to previous levels. In fact, because there are a number of subtle psychological scripts built to help us maintain our habits (habits are a evolutionary advantage because they allow us to function with less cognitive effort) we might even become more frequent Google users and less frequent Live users. The bounceback could actually cause Live to lose marketshare.

Now, let’s look at what actually happened. The early summer introduction of Cashback seemed to be the answer to Live’s woes, as Compete’s Jeremy Crane was quick to point out.  Marketshare took a quick jump upwards. But two months later, Cashback’s initial glow is quickly fading. Search users are switching their auto pilots back on, and the default setting is Google.

Chrome Plated Strategies

Now, with the introduction of Chrome, Google is facing exactly the same challenge. They’re calculating that Chrome will have what it takes to break the Explorer or Firefox habit. And exactly the same pattern is emerging, as people take Chrome for a spin to decide whether it’s breaking-habit-worthy. And at this point, the answer seems to be no.

There’s one potential difference here. Chrome is much more than a browser. Google has a shiny future planned for the web app interface. If they raise the bar enough, people may make the investment required to break their existing habit and reform a new one around Google’s browser. But don’t expect any big marketshare shifts until that bar is raised.

Traveling at the Speed of Buzz

First published September 25, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What makes up buzz? And what determines how fast it travels? Last week, I talked about how important the opinions of others are in shaping our brand beliefs. Today, I want to look at one category of word of mouth, the juicy tidbit, recently christened “buzz,” and see what makes it leap from person to person.

Buzz is Nothing New

For some reason, we think buzz is a new thing that lives online. In fact, it’s as old as human behavior and has its roots in our very social fabric. We need to pass on information. We’re driven to do so. We gossip because it’s inherently satisfying, both to ourselves and to the recipient. But the spread of gossip through a social network is neither uniform nor consistent.  In the ’70s, Mark Granovetter discovered that, like many things, social networks are patchy, made up of tightly linked clusters of people who spend a lot of time together (families, friends, co-workers) which are loosely connected to each other through “weak ties,” more distant social relationships. The survival potential of a viral piece of information (Richard Dawkins first coined the term “meme” as a cultural equivalent of a gene in his book, “The Selfish Gene”) lies in its ability to jump Granovetter’s weak ties.   If the meme doesn’t jump out of a cluster, it ceases to propagate itself and can die an isolated death.

It’s Not Just the Network

In 1993 Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto launched an interesting study showing that the ability of a “meme” to spread through a social network depended not only on the structure of the network (the main point of Granovetter’s work) but also on the impact of the meme’s message on the carrier (akin to the idea of a phenotype in genetics) and the value of the meme itself.

Frenzen and Nakamoto worked with three different variables: First of all, they altered the value of the message. In the first variation, it was news of a 20%-off sale, in the other variation; it was the more valuable news of 50% to 70% off. Secondly, they varied the amount of product available at the sale price. In one case, there was unlimited inventory. In another, the supply was very limited. Finally, they varied the structure of the network itself, in one case having a network of strong ties, and in another, strong tie clusters linked by Granovetter’s weak ties.

What they found was that the value of the message (20% off vs. 50% to 70% off) has a significant impact on the rate in which the word spread, as did the availability of items at the sale price. The second factor introduced a moral hazard aspect. It made spreading the news a zero-sum game: if I tell you, I might lose out.

Frenzen and Nakamoto also found that in strong tie clusters, word seemed to spread relatively quickly regardless of the nature of the news. There were variations, but in all cases, the majority of the strongly linked network came to know of the news fairly quickly.

Social Speed Traps

If the discount was fairly low, the news tended to get stuck within clusters and had difficulty jumping the weak ties. If the news was valuable (50% to 70% off) and supply was virtually unlimited, the news was much quicker to jump the weak ties, spreading through the network very quickly. But, if the discount was large and the supplies were limited, suddenly the news tended to get trapped within the strongly tied clusters. People were reluctant to spread the news because the more people that knew, the more it was likely that they and their close family and friends (the people within their strong tie clusters) would lose out on a great deal.

Weak Ties on the Web

In both the online and offline worlds, the speed with which buzz will spread depends on the value of the message (is the gossip juicy? Is the price unbelievable?) and how much we stand to gain or lose (does sharing reduce the chances of me and my close circle getting ahead?). Gossip’s primary purpose is to create social bonds, and the sharing of intensely interesting information is something we’re programmed to do. Similarly, we’re programmed to share opportunity with those closest to us, either through kin selection (we want those with whom we share the most genes to get ahead first – W.D. Hamilton did the foundational work on this) or reciprocal altruism (doing a favor for a friend knowing that at some point, we’ll benefit from the payback — Robert Trivers is the name to search for if you’re interested). In most cases of online buzz, there is no moral hazard. In fact, unless a meme has what it takes to jump the weak ties in a real-world social network, it will never make it onto an online forum. Posting on the Internet is, by its very nature, a weak tie, a reaching out from ourselves to everyone.  We don’t publically post memes if it costs our strong ties the opportunity to capitalize on them. Similarly, we’re less likely to post unremarkable news, although I’m still trying to reconcile Twitter and Facebook status updates with this theory.

So, in the world of social networks, some people have more influence than others, right? Some are mavens, or super connected hubs, or natural salespeople (borrowing from Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”). Not so fast, says Columbia University’s Duncan Watts.  But more on that next week.

Branding by Word of Mouth

First published September 18, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the past few weeks, I’ve looked at where our feelings towards brands come from and how they get stored in our brains for future recall. I’ve looked at how powerful brand beliefs can be, even to the point of altering our physical sensations (the Coke blind taste test), how advertising can mix with our own personal experiences to create false memories, how emotions can build a powerful subconscious reaction to a brand and how we label complex concepts, including brands, with a summary label that reduces all we know about a brand to an easily accessible impression. Today, I’ll round out the building of brand belief with perhaps the most powerful influence of all: the opinion of others.

Social by Nature

We are social creatures. One of the reasons humans have flourished on earth is because we take advantage of the power of groups. We have built extremely sophisticated heuristic rules to help us know when to trust and when to be wary. In our past, human survival depended on the passing of information from those we trusted and ignoring information from less trustworthy sources. While the survival value of word of mouth might not be as critical to us now (unless knowing a good Chinese restaurant or mechanic is a matter of life and death) those evolutionary mechanisms are still in place, and every piece of information we receive has to be filtered through them.

Remember, heuristic rules, which we know as our gut instincts, tend to form when the same circumstances produce the same results in the majority of cases. Given this stable pattern, we create a subconscious mechanism that allows us to act without thinking. A huge percentage of human behavior falls into this category (I explored one example, habits, previously in this column). The same is true for how we treat word of mouth information. Let me give you two examples.

Whom Can You Trust?

First, the closer someone is to us, the more we tend to trust their opinion. The word of family or close friends tends to carry a lot more weight than that of a stranger. That’s because friends and family have proven their worth in the past and gained our trust. They haven’t steered us wrong before, so why should they now? Secondly, the more enthusiastic the endorsement, the more value we give it. If we get a wishy-washy recommendation, we probably won’t run right out and take action. But if someone close to us is ecstatically recommending a Thai restaurant, the odds are we’ll try it ourselves in the near future. Enthusiastic endorsement shows that the initial impression was strong and memorable because it was emotionally tagged, making it more believable to us. Incidentally, it probably isn’t coincidence that many personal recommendations tend to revolve around eating. Sharing information about promising food patches would have been a key survival strategy for our ancestors.

Gut-Level Judgments

When we get presented with information from others, it’s not as though we pass the information through a number of rational filters. Calculations like the two examples are done below the surface. At a gut level, we instantaneously affix credibility to word of mouth and decide whether to pay attention or not. But if we do pay attention, this becomes a tremendously powerful consumer motivator. It’s no coincidence that word of mouth typically tops the list as the key influencer in every marketing study ever done. Word of mouth fits our inherent survival strategies. We are programmed to prioritize information from trusted others as being important.

Your Word Over Mine

In fact, in many cases the opinion of others may trump even our own experience with brands. Studies have shown that we alter our own memories of a consumer experience depending on the opinion of others. If we’re recalling a less than positive experience but at the time of recall we’re surrounded by others who have more positive opinions, we’ll alter our own opinions to better match the collective one. The same is true in reverse. A great brand experience suddenly loses some of its shine if others are vocal about their bad experiences.

In this altering of our own opinion, one has to remember an interesting principle about memory formation. Memories are not unalterable snapshots. They get reformed every time they get retrieved and then laid down again. So, if we retrieve a personal experience with a brand from our memory, then alter it to fit the opinions of others, it’s the altered memory that gets recoded. We don’t suddenly revert to our previous opinion when others aren’t around anymore. Our perception of the brand has been altered by others from this point forward. This helps explain why others have such a powerful influence on our brand loyalties.

Next week, I’ll look at an interesting study that explored how word of mouth spreads in a network, whether it’s online or in the real world.

Note to Cuil: Read My Columns!

Cuil was introduced when I had other things on my mind, namely trying to jam 2 months of work into 2 weeks so I could take my family on a long vacation to Europe. So I didn’t get a chance to caste my jaundiced eye on the much touted Google killer that has so resoundingly flopped since it’s introduction. That’s too bad, because I could have saved everyone a lot of time. I don’t care how “cuil” the technology is in the background, from a search user perspective, Cuil is a disaster!

For the past several months, I’ve been writing on MediaPost and Search Engine Land about inherent human behaviors and how they play out on search. I’ve talked about the limits of working memory, information foraging theory, how we pick up scent, how we navigate the results page, how we respond to images versus text, how we’ve been conditioned to search by habit and how what we read on the results page connects with our unexpressed intent in our minds. Cuil fails miserably on all counts. It frustrates the hell out of me that people don’t pay attention to the basic rules of human behavior. If the founders of Cuil had read our eye tracking reports, read Pirolli and Card’s information foraging theory, read any of my posts or blogs or read any post by Bryan or Jeffrey Eisenberg or Jakob Nielsen, millions of dollars of VC funding, thousands of hours of development time and a lot of actual and virtual ink could have been saved. Unless Cuil completely revamps their interface, they’re doomed to failure.

Cuil completely disregards the conditioned patterns we use to navigate results pages. This is a risk, but an acceptable one. You can change things up, but you better damn well deliver when you do. All Cuil delivers is confusion. It’s almost impossible to pick up scent. The eye is dragged all over the page because there’s no logical presentation. Functionality is ambiguous, not intuitive. The mix of images and text does nothing to establish relevance. Perceived relevance of the SERP is nil. If I would have looked at this a few months ago, I would have predicted that users would try it once because of the hype, been mildly intrigued by the look but found it almost unusable, quickly beating a path back to Google. I didn’t need to do eye tracking. A quick glance at the results page was all I needed. Unfortunately, because my mind was on the French Alps rather than the latest Google killer, my first glance was 3 months delayed and my would-be brilliant prediction just sounds like “me-too” hindsight.

Ah well..

For others that have Google in their sights, a word of advice. Mix up the search business..shake the hell out of it. It’s time. Come up with a better algorithm, blow up the results page and see where it lands, jolt the user out of their conditioned behavior. By all means, take millions in eager VC capital and reinvent the game. It’s way past time. But please, don’t ignore the fact that humans are humans and there will always be certain rules of thumb and strategies we operate by. You can destroy the paradigm, but you can’t change generations of inherent behavior. Cuil never bothered to learn the rules. That’s going to cost them.

False Memories: Was that Bugs Bunny or Just My Imagination?

First published September 11, 2008 inn Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve talked about how powerful our mental brand beliefs can be, even to the point of altering the physical taste of Coke. But where do these brand beliefs come from? How do they get embedded in the first place?

A Place for Every Memory, and Every Memory in its Place

Some of the most interesting studies that have been done recently have been done in the area of false memories. It appears that we have different memory “modules,” optimized for certain kinds of memory. We have declarative memory, where we store facts. We can call these memories back under conscious will and discuss them. Then we have implicit memory, or procedural memory, that helps us with our day-to-day tasks without conscious intervention. Remembering how to tie your shoes or which keys to hit on a keyboard are procedural memories

Declarative memory is further divided into semantic and episodic memory. In theory, semantic memory is where we store meaning, understandings and concept-based knowledge. It’s our database of tags and relationships that help us make sense of the real world. Episodic memory is our storehouse of personal experiences. But the division between the two is not always so clear or water-tight.

The Making of a Brand Memory

Let’s look at our building of a brand belief. We have personal experiences with a brand, either good or bad, that should be stored in episodic memory. Then we have our understandings of the brand, based on information provided, that should build a representation of that brand in semantic memory. This is where advertising’s influence should be stored.

But the divisions are not perfect. Some things slip from one bucket to the other. Many of our inherent evolutionary mechanisms were not built to handle some of the complexities of modern life. For instance, the emotional onslaught of modern advertising might slip over from semantic to episodic memory. There will also be impacts that reside at the implicit rather than the explicit level. Memory is not a neatly divided storage container. Rather, it’s like grabbing a bunch of ingredients out of various cupboards and throwing them together into a soup pot. It can be difficult knowing what came from where when it’s all mixed together.

This is what happens with false memories. Often, they’re external stories or information that we internalize, creating an imaginary happening that we mistakenly believe is an episode from our lives. Advertising has the power to plant images in our mind that get mixed up with our personal experiences, becoming part of our brand belief. These memories are all the more powerful because we swear they actually happened to us.

That Wascally Wabbit!

University of Washington researcher Elizabeth Loftus and her research partner Jacquie Pickrell have done hundreds of studies on the creation of false memories. In one, under the guise of evaluating a bogus advertising campaign, they showed participants a picture of Bugs Bunny in front of Disneyland, and then had them do other tasks. Later in the study, the participants were asked to remember a trip to Disneyland. Thirty percent of them remembered shaking Bugs Bunny’s hand when they visited the Magic Kingdom, which would be a neat trick, considering that Bugs is a Warner’s character and would not be welcome on Disney turf.

We all tend to elaborate on our personal experiences to make them more interesting. We “sharpen” our stories, downplaying the trivial and embellishing (and sometimes completely fabricating) the key points to impress others. When we do this, we will draw from any sources handy, including things we’ve seen or heard in the past that we’ve never personally experienced. To go back to last week’s Coke example, our fond memories of Coke might just as likely come from a Madison Avenue copywriter as from our own childhood. We idealize and color in the details so our conversations can be more interesting. It goes back to the human need to curry social favor by gossiping. When you have this natural human tendency fueled by billions of dollars of advertising, it’s often difficult to know where our lives end and our fantasies take over.

This mix of personal experience and implanted images explains part of where our brand beliefs come from. Next week, I’ll look at the power of word of mouth and the opinions of others.