Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

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.

There’s More to Coke’s Brand than Taste

First published September 4, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I looked at the unprecedented backlash against the introduction of New Coke. The fervor of the protest took everyone by surprise, especially flabbergasted Coke executives (and truth be told, Pepsi brass as well). After all, New Coke was subjected to exhaustive consumer testing in the lab, and the results were clear: most people preferred the taste. So why did something that did so well in the lab fail so miserably in the real world? Why were people so passionate about brown, sugared water? Baylor University neuroscientist Read Montague set out to find out why in 2003.

More than a Blink

In his book “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell advanced his theory of why Coke drinkers are so loyal to their brand, yet failed to pick it in a blind taste test. The problem, Gladwell says, is in the nature of the test. Coke is meant to be drunk in big gulps, not metered little sips common in taste tests. It’s only when you down a whole can that you can truly appreciate the distinctive biting tang of Coke. But, as Montague would find out, the reason for the irrational devotion to Coke has little to do with taste at all and much more to do with beliefs, emotions and memories. It’s our brains that love Coke, not our taste buds.

Montague and his research partners started with a common blind taste test, where after stating their preferences, study participants were given sips of Pepsi and Coke without knowing what they were drinking and asked to pick the drink they preferred. The results were all over the place. Coke drinkers chose Pepsi. Pepsi drinkers chose Coke. Going into the study, the groups split evenly based on their stated cola preferences and in picking their favorite drink, Coke fared slightly better than Pepsi, but there was little correlation between what people said they preferred and what they actually chose. Their tastes buds were not that finely tuned.

Mind over Matter

It’s only in the last few years that we’ve discovered just how powerful our mind is in altering our physical perception of the world. The world is what we judge it to be, and judgment is largely passed by mechanisms beyond our conscious awareness. This explains the “placebo” effect, noticeable changes in our physical being due to the power of suggestion alone. If our minds believe, our bodies follow.

In Montague’s (along with his co-authors, McClure, Li, Tomlin, Cypert & Montague ) study, the truly interesting findings came when people were put inside the MRI scanners. Remember, fMRI scanners (functional magnetic resonance imaging) allows us to see which parts of the brain are activated during specific tasks, giving us some clue as to what’s happening inside our minds. After devising a rather elaborate method to feed participants sips of Coke or Pepsi, preceded by visual cues of what they were drinking (the methodology description took up a good portion of the published paper and is worth reading just to see the lengths one has to go to if you’re intent on conducting fMRI research) the researchers analyzed differences in brain activity.

The Brain on Coke

In one group, they provided two sips, one of Pepsi, the other also of Pepsi, but in an anonymous presentation with participants being told that the second sip could be either Coke or Pepsi. In the second group, the same thing was done, but this time it was Coke that was both the identified and anonymous drink. Then participants were asked to state their preference. In the Pepsi group, about half the group chose Pepsi and there was no strong preference over the anonymous drink (also Pepsi). But in the Coke group, the respondents overwhelmingly chose Coke over the mystery cola (also Coke).

When Montague examined the difference in brain activity, the difference between the two groups was fascinating. When the identity of the cola wasn’t known, the only brain activity registering was in the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex, an area associated with feelings of reward. When participants were told they were drinking Pepsi, the brain activity didn’t change significantly. But when the third group was informed they were drinking Coke, suddenly other areas of the brain started lighting up, including the hippocampus, parahippocampus, midbrain, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, thalamus and the left visual cortex. What was happening? Well, Coke was obviously eliciting a much strong mental response than Pepsi. People were experiencing Coke at two levels: first, the sensory reward, and secondly, by tapping into people’s beliefs and feeling of self-identify. The parts of the brain that lit up under the conscious awareness of Coke are suspected to control access to emotion and act as gatekeepers to working memory. The brand belief structure of Coke was being mentally loaded up and altering the perception of Coke’s taste. The effect was so strong yet so far below the level of consciousness, brand loyalists swore they could identify Coke’s taste and preferred it, even though blind taste tests consistently proved them wrong.

Coke’s Brain Branding

Somehow, Coke has created a brand that its fans believe in and identify with. The brand unlocks a treasure trove of brand reinforcements that have little to do with the taste or quality of the product. And it was this effect that Coke turned its back on in the introduction of New Coke in 1985. It’s this untapping of brand beliefs we have to keep in mind when we talk about branding and search. With search interactions, the appearance of a brand can unlock belief structures just as strong as Coke’s. In the next column, I’ll explore some of the many elements that go into the building of these beliefs.

For Coke, Brand Love is Blind

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

In 2003, Read Montague had a “why” question that was nagging at him. If Pepsi was chosen by the  majority of people in a blind taste test, why did Coke have the lion’s share of the cola market? It didn’t make sense. If Pepsi tasted better, why wasn’t it the market leader?

Fortunately, Read wasn’t just any cola consumer idly pondering the mysteries of brown sugared water. He had at his disposal a rather innovative methodology to explore his “why” question. Dr. Read Montague was the director of Baylor University’s Neuroimaging Lab and he just happened to have a spare multi-million dollar MRI machine kicking around. MRI machines allow us to see which parts of the brain “light up” when we undertake certain activities. Although fMRI scanning’s roots are in medicine, lately the technology has been applied with much fanfare to the world of market research.  Montague is one of the pioneer’s of this area, due in part to the 2003 Coke /Pepsi study, which went but the deceptively uninteresting title, “Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks” (Note: Montague has since picked up a knack for catchier titles. His recent book is  “Why Choose this Book? How We Make Decisions” ).

Believing in Brands

In my last two columns, I talked about how our emotions and beliefs are inseparably wrapped up in many brand relationships. The strongest brands evoke a visceral response, beyond the reach of reason, coloring our entire engagement and relationship with them. It doesn’t matter if these brands are better than their competitors. The important thing is that we believe they are better, and these beliefs are reinforced by emotional cues.

This certainly seemed to be the case with Coke and Pepsi. The market split was beyond reason. In fact, the irrationality of the market split caused Coca Cola to make the biggest marketing blunder in history in 1985. A brief recap of marketing history is in order here, because it highlights one of the challenges with market research: namely, that there’s a huge gulf of difference between what we say and what we do, thanks to the mysterious depths of our sub-cortical mind. It also sheds light on the strength of our brand beliefs.

Coke’s Crisis

Through the ’70s and ’80s, Coke’s market share lead over Pepsi was eroding to the point when, in the mid ’80s, Coke’s lead was only a few points over their rivals. This was due in no small part to the success of the Pepsi Challenge advertising campaign, where the majority of cola drinkers indicated they preferred the taste of Pepsi in blind taste tests. This wasn’t just a marketing ploy. Coke did their own blind taste tests and the results were the same. If people didn’t know what they were drinking, they preferred Pepsi. It was panic time in Atlanta.

Enter new Coke. It was a lighter, sweeter drink that was possibly the most thoroughly tested consumer product in history. Coke was preparing to kill the golden goose, and it wasn’t a decision they were taking lightly. If they were changing the secret recipe, they were making damned sure they were right before they rolled it out to market. So they tested, and tested, and tested again Coke meticulously did their home work, according to all the standard market research metrics. The results were consistent and overwhelming. In the tests, people loved New Coke. Not only did it blow the original Coke formulation away, it also trounced Pepsi. They asked people if they liked New Coke. Yes! Would you buy New Coke. Yes! Would this become your new favorite soft drink? Yes, Yes and Yes! Feeling exceptionally confident, Coke bit the bullet and rolled out New Coke. And the results, as they say, are now history.

Classic Coke’s Comeback

On April 23, 1985, Coke shocked the world by announcing the new formulation and ceasing production on the original formula. And, at first, it appeared the move was a success. In many markets, people bought new Coke at the same levels they had bought original Coke. They kept saying they preferred the taste. But there was one critical market that new Coke had to win over, and that wasn’t going to be easy. In the Southeast, the home of Coke, people weren’t so easy to convince. There, ardent Coke fans were mounting a counteroffensive. By May, the “Old Coke” backlash had spread to other parts of the U.S. and was picking up steam. Soon, a “black Coke” market emerged when deprived Coke drinkers started bring in the original Coke from overseas markets where the old formulation was still being bottled. By July, the Old Coke counteroffensive was so strong, the company capitulated and reintroduced the original formulation as Coke Classic. Within months, Coke Classic was outselling both New Coke and Pepsi and began racking up the highest sales increases for Coke in decades, rebuilding Coke’s lead in the market.

Although it eventually worked out in their favor, Coke executives were puzzled by the whole episode. President Don Keough admitted in a press conference, “There is a twist to this story which will please every humanist and will probably keep Harvard professors puzzled for years, The simple fact is that all the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people.”

Keough was amazingly prescient in this statement, although he had the university wrong. Almost two decades later, it would be a professor at Baylor, not Harvard, that would dig further into the puzzle. Next column, we’ll see what one of the very first neuromarketing studies uncovered when Montague replicated the Pepsi Challenge in an fMRI machine.

Emotion and the Formation of Brand Memories

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

In my last column, I looked at how beliefs can affix labels to brands, which forever after form our first brand impression. Beliefs are a heuristic shortcut we use to reduce the amount of sheer thinking we have to do to come to quick and efficient decisions. Today, I’d like to focus on emotions and their part in the forming of memories.

Why “Selfish Genes” Remember

First, from an evolutionary perspective, it might be helpful to cover off why humans are able to form memories in the first place. To borrow Richard Dawkins’ wording, memories are here to ensure that our “selfish genes” are passed on to future generations. While memories are incredibly complex and wonderful things, their reason for being is mindlessly simple. Memories are here to ensure that we survive long enough to procreate. This is why emotion plays such a huge role in how memories are formed and retrieved.

Researchers have long known that emotions “tag” memories, making their retrieval easier and the resulting effect more powerful. In fact, very strong emotions, such as fear or anger, get stored not just in our cortical areas but also get an “emergency” version stored in the limbic system to allow us to respond quickly and viscerally to threatening situations. When this goes wrong, it can lead to phobic behavior. Emotions add power and urgency to memories, moving them up the priority queue and causing us to act on them both subconsciously and consciously. The very meaning of the word emotion comes from the latin “emovere” — to move.

Driven by Emotions

Emotional tagging works equally well for positive memories. Our positive emotions are generally affixed to three of the four human drives identified by Nohria and Lawrence: the drive to bond, the drive to acquire and the drive to learn. For the selfish gene, each of these drives has its evolutionary purpose. We have the strongest positive emotions around the things that further these drives the most. We reserve our strongest “bonding” emotions for those that play the biggest part in ensuring our genetic survival: partners, parents, children and siblings. In some cases we share a significant portion of our genetic material; at other times, the complex sexual wiring we come with kicks into gear.

If we look at the drives to acquire or to learn, millions of pages have been written trying to decode human behavior in pursuit of these goals. For the purpose of this column, it will have to suffice to say that markets have long known about the power of these drives in shaping human behavior and have tried every way possible to tap into their ability to move us to action, usually through consumption of a product.

In summary, we reserve our strongest emotions for those things that are most aligned with the mindless purpose of the selfish gene, passing along our DNA. These emotions tag relevant memories, giving them the power to move us to immediate action. Perceived threats trigger negative memories and avoidance or confrontation, while positive memories drive us to pursue pleasurable ends.

Brand + Emotion = Power

This emotional tagging of memories can have a huge impact on our brand relationships, in both positive and negative ways. While I’ve painted a very simplistic picture of the primary objective of emotions and memories (and the heart of it is simple), the culture we have created is anything but. Memories and emotions play out in complex and surprising ways, especially when we interact with brands.

Brand advertisers have become quite adept at pushing our evolutionary hot buttons, trying to tag the right emotions to their respective memories. Their goal is to affix a particularly strong emotion (either negative, referred to in marketing parlance as prevention, or positive, which we’ve labeled promotion) to their particular brand construct so that when the memories that make up that construct are retrieved (along with the attached beliefs and brand label) they are powered with the turbo-charge that comes with emotion. If the marketer is successful in doing this, they have unleashed a powerful force.

When emotions play a role, our motivation comes not just from rational decisions, but a much more primal and powerful force that sits at the core of our subconscious brain. The most successful brands have managed to forge these emotional connections. And when the emotions remain consistent for a particular brand, there are coalesced into a strong brand belief that is almost unshakable once formed. This is why your father buys nothing but Fords, Mac fans wouldn’t be caught dead with a plain grey laptop ,or coffee connoisseurs swear that Starbucks is worth the price.

Next week, I’ll give you one particularly interesting example of how one brand belief and its corresponding emotions developed, in a fascinating study from the emerging world of neuromarketing.