Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

More on Why Google is Habit-Forming

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

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

Cognitive Lock-In

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

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

Will Differentiation Increase the Power of Lock-In?

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

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

It’s Not Just a Tool, It’s a Badge

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

There Will Never Be Another Google in Search

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

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

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

Interview: Branton Kenton-Dau of VortexDNA

In this week’s Just Behave Column, I had the opportunity to interview Branton Kenton-Dau from Vortex DNA. I’ve posted the complete transcript here for those that are interested:

Gord: 
So I think what we’ll do in this interview is cover off on a basic level what VortexDNA does, and then we’ll get into a little bit more about the potential I think it has for users.  So, it’s obviously an interesting idea using core values to try to determine intent. Maybe I’ll let you just walk through a little bit about how VortexDNA works, and why your approach is unique.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Yeah, thanks Gordon. I think that is a great place for us to start, and I think for us, it probably would go back to the human genome project itself, where we initiated as a society this project to map our human DNA.  And the great vision around that was that once we knew what our physical DNA was like we would be able to define the characteristics of your world and in particular help prevent  serious illnesses.  And one the outcomes of that project, was actually we found that there weren’t enough genes.  We found too few genes to map the 100,000 chemical pathways of our body; and that since then, where science is taken us is that it’s demonstrated that our physical DNA actually doesn’t determine who we are, but the whole science of epigenetics is saying actually it’s our environment, you know what we eat and particularly what we believe about ourselves which determines our propensity to be ill, to be healthy, to be successful or not.  So, actually our belief system is a major impact in determining who we are, and what is exciting about that is basically it represents a shift for us as a society from the very deterministic view of ourselves; that we are basically physical machines. Either we’re broken or not, depending on what our parents gave us, to the idea that we are actually beings that are creating our own lives with much more build out of what we  believe about ourselves at any moment and any time. That’s exciting because what we believe about ourselves can obviously be changed.  And basically what VortexDNA is is a technology that came out of the insight that the way we structure our beliefs is governed by the mathematics of complex systems.  What that means is that we know the structure our beliefs, and because of that we can then map out the structure of our intentional DNA, the intentions behind the world we create, and that’s basically the breakthrough, the technology. It provides a map of the way people organize who they are, literally who they are, through their belief systems.  And out of that, then comes the opportunity to create a better world for yourself whether that’s finding your best life partner or finding better research results or finding better car insurance rates because your particular belief system has a low propensity for accidents. It actually touches every part of your life, because we are actually mapping human characteristics.  The true genome, if you like, based upon the new science.

Gord: 
Okay, this is an interesting approach and undoubtedly a unique approach. I don’t know anyone else who is doing this. But you know, I approach this with a fair degree of cynicism saying, okay, obviously if you learn more about my belief system you can try to map that against the content of the internet. But how well does that actually work because my beliefs are the foundation, but on top of that, there are a lot of layers of intent for a lot of different things. How granular can your belief system be in disambiguating intent?  In some searches, I would see it working very well where it points to sites that you know resonates with my belief frame work, but in others where it is a much more practical “looking for information”, will trying to anticipate with my beliefs might indicate would be a good site, will that really be a good indicator of relevance?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
That’s a really good question Gordon; I think that the answer to that is that we don’t know yet.  I think that we are at very early stages of really what is the science of human intention, I mean, that’s really what’s it about.  And what I can share with you is that we validated the technology last year against Google search results, and that’s where we were able to show that we can improve Google’s page rank by up to 14% which would improve it by a 3% improvement in click rates.  And, what that seems to be saying to us is (it does help), and that’s across the board, people obviously searching for anything and everything that’s possible on the web, we were analyzing that data.  We haven’t been able break that down to say whether or not if you’re hunting for a job, we are able to provide better recommendations than when you are looking for your recipe for custard or something; we just don’t know yet enough about it.  One of the things is interesting is that when we had our expert review done on that data by a Rhode Island consultancy firm, they said that they the way that the technology works, because it’s iterative, i.e. it learns as it goes.  He said that we probably have no idea yet of how efficient the system is, we don’t know because we are dealing with a very small sample and as more and more users and more DNA is selected on links of the net, then there is no reason that it can’t actually be more effective than we’ve demonstrated, but we just don’t know yet.  It’s just early days yet.

Gord: 
You made the comment that this is iterative and it learns as it goes, and from going through your site I see you answer an initial questionnaire; and I’ll get to the whole privacy question, or the perception of privacy question is probably more accurate, I’ll get to that in a minute. But you answer the questionnaire that creates an ideological or a value-based profile of you which then gets mapped against different sites.  But then, at anytime you can go back and answer more surveys to further refine what that profile looks like.  How much of this refinement process or this learning process is incumbent on the user as opposed to transparent in the background just by VortexDNA watching what are you doing and how you are interacting with different sites?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
The answer is this system actually learns that every time you click on something, because every time you click on something, if you have downloaded the extension, the MyWebDNA extension, basically every time you click somewhere it’s a statement of your intentionality, so if other people have also clicked on it, it helps build up a map for that link of the intentionality that has been focused on the link.  So, we can feedback that intentionality into your own profile and therefore you don’t have to do anything.  Actually this year we will probably do away with the survey, so then you will won’t even need the survey to get started, that was just like a pre-heat process.  So, all we have to do is just surf as normal and you will be monitoring the state of your intentionality moment by moment with each click you make.

Gord: 
Okay, so let’s deal with that a little bit.  If you are monitoring my activity, in some ways this overlaps with what Google is doing with their web history and their search history, where they are tracking your usage and trying to learn more about you as an individual, theoretically, and then altering the results on the fly based on the personal signals it’s picking up. What you are doing is you are layering this outline of core values and what our belief systems are over and above that to say, “Okay well, not only are we watching what you are doing; we are trying to understand what’s important to you as an individual.”  Now, if we take that and we say, Okay I am in a business where at any given time for any given hour I’m working, I may be doing research, I might be writing the column on hate literature in North America, so I am going to be going to the sites of Neo-Nazi groups, trying to find information..that’s just part of my job.  How do you know that that doesn’t reflect my belief system, how do you know that this is just something that I happen to need to find information on right now?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
There are two parts to that.  One is that I feel we are very respectful of what Google and Yahoo, and their analysis in the whole semantic web push are doing in terms of trying to make the web more relevant to people and we do believe our technology is complementary to those approaches.  We don’t believe we are competing with any of those and, as you say, it’s overlay, it’s additive to those.  Having said that, we are really completely different to that because, it’s actually the structure, the pattern, the way your beliefs are organized that we are interested in, and what that means is that we actually turn your answers to your questionnaire, what you click on, into just a set of numbers.  There are seven numbers that correspond to different aspects of that pattern of organization, that makes up your intentionality.  And so, really when you are going around, what we are doing is as you click on something, we will compare your number, it might be 7632416 say, with the numbers that are held against that link.  So, what we are doing is we are comparing numbers, we don’t know whether you’ve gone to a Nazi site or whether you are looking for apple pie recipes. We have absolutely no idea and maintain no record of where you’ve been, in all those sites. So when your genome is updated, because you’ve gone to this site,  we might update your genome because you’ve been to that site to change one of your digits in one way, by one point or so, then that digit could be changed from any site you ;  the news or Yahoo! or whatever.  So, what makes us really truly unique with this approach, which we think is really important, is that we absolutely protect your privacy because we do not track your searches in any shape or form because we are just adding or subtracting numbers from that seven digit identifier.  So it makes no difference to us, and I think that’s a really powerful thing, because you know there is concern with people for what information people hold on them and all we hold is a seven digit number, and you could be anywhere, it could have been Walt Disney Movies, it could have been finding out about the players in your favorite football team, it makes no difference to us.  So we can’t tell even if a law enforcement agencies came to us, and asked to us, “hey, where has Gord been”, we would have no idea, we could not tell them.

Gord: 
So what you do is in your identification of all the sites, you look at the sites and you assign each of those a profile and then your profile is altered on the fly based on the profiles you are matching up with against your content then, right?

Branton Kenton-Dau:  That’s correct and they’re all number, those profiles are numbers so…

Gordon: 
Right.  So there is no history retained, it’s just a constantly updated value which in turn, with every time you go out, is compared against all the values of the sites that come up in a search engine for instance, and the best possible matches are highlighted in the search results then.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Thank you, that’s absolutely perfect.

Gord: 
That’s interesting.  And now, obviously, that’s a totally different approach and one that should put some fears to rest on the privacy side, but I’ve got to tell you when I checked out VortexDNA and went through the process of the download, the whole idea of filling out a  questionnaire identifying my belief system, it gave me cause for concern. It was funny because as far as identifying me as an individual, the demographic information I fill out here and there across the web is potentially much more of a cause for concern for my privacy, because there is identifiable information in there.  I don’t usually have a second thought about but something about putting my beliefs down and sharing them with somebody else was very hard for me to do. Are you finding..and you said that you are probably going to drop the questionnaire…but are you finding that as a sticking point for people signing up for VortexDNA?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
I think some people never think about it.  We get up in the morning, brush our teeth and go to work and make our daily bread.  Sometimes we don’t have time to think at all, “why am I here?”, and when you ask the question, “what’s your purpose in life?” Well that’s a pretty profound question.  What we found is that some people don’t fill in (the questionnaire) correctly or too quickly or they just answer anything, they don’t really think about it deeply and therefore, because noise goes in, they just get noise out.  That’s where over the course of last year we actually developed what we call this idealized genome. We can just infer your genome by what you click on.  We think that’s a much better way, and we can do that for instance, by just playing a game.  We can show some images, pick some of your favorites, we can infer your genome that way.  So, lot’s of more, less mentally taxing and more fun ways that we can get you started in creating your genome, your profile, which we think would work a lot better.

Gord: 
Well, you mentioned this whole approach may limit your potential market just because a lot of people haven’t thought about what their core values are or what their beliefs are, so the whole appeal of VortexDNA might be lost on them.  Unless you are a fan of Stephen Covey or you’ve read Built to Last, or Good to Great, you may not get it.  What are your thoughts about that?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
I think you are right, and I think that the technology is broad enough, so it can serve anyone, whatever their focus is in life, and that it’s our responsibility to make sure that it’s that easy to use. We like to be able to do it (transparently), say, if you want to play Pacman, this way you are building up your profiles, and we can enable you to do that.  And we should be able to that shortly.  At the same time, I think one of the really key things about the technology, and certainly from my point of view of what, you know, gets me up in morning is the fact that I think it really is empowering for people to understand that the lives that they create, they literally do create it, it’s not given to them. Who you are is not determined by your upbringing, or your life experiences, or by the genes your parents gave you; but it is actually created by you moment by moment.  And, it’s my hope that the technology would help. It’s really a very American thing, in the sense that there is all about human freedom ultimately, and it gives people more freedom as they realize, “well, I am the creator of my life and if I am going to keep stuck in this rut then it is what I believe about myself that is keeping me there.”  That’s what I find exciting about the technology, so I hope that may dawn on some people faster than others and that’s okay, there is no problem with that.  But I believe the technology has the ability to make a contribution to human freedom ultimately.

Gord: 
So, you are climbing up Maslow’s hierarchy to the top level?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Yes, I absolutely believe that and I think that  we as human beings are always trying to really understand our true ability to create reality, and that our intentionality is, if you like, part of ourselves that we probably put less effort into training than anything else.  We spend a lot of time on the fitness machines or jogging to keep our bodies in shape, but we haven’t spent a lot of time in what actually seems to be a real key factor in determining the success of our life, which is our intentionality; and so I am hoping the technology will help focus us on that.

Gord: 
We’ve talked about some pretty lofty ideals for a technology here. About  helping people with self-actualization, and become better people, and become more aware of both what’s important to them internally and externally.  All of which is great for any fans of Collins or Covey who might be reading this or listening to this. We are getting to the hedgehog concept here; you are obviously passionate about this, you’ve got something different that you can be unique in, possibly best in the world at.  Now, comes the money question. How does this drive your economic engine? What’s the business model for VortexDNA, and how do you see that playing out over the 2 years to 3 years?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
We have given a lot of thought about that and made a lot of mistakes as well and I think U-turns on it.  But basically, the company I represent, we basically have a technology which we issue licenses to other organizations and participate with them as strategic partners. For instance, in rolling out the technology.  And there are two kind of key parts for that, two key aspects of the technology, one is that the technology can be used by any ecommerce sites, whether that’s an e-tail or social site, in order to provide better recommendations, using their algorithms.  So, that’s a pure B2B solution, and we have the company incorporated in United States at the moment in order to do that. We would be interested in anyone who would like to partner with us to roll that out.  And then, the other side is that we feel we can create a better web by harnessing the power of mass collaboration, just like Wikipedia, to map the genome of the web and out of that, will come better search engines, will come a better ability to find people like you anywhere you are, enhance your blog, pretty much a holistic upgrade if you like, of the web itself. And that, we believe, like search engines themselves, is a pure advertising based free service to users.  So, we see there is an application there and in fact within next 30 days, we will be launching the Web Genome Project with its own website, and that would be an advertising based play again.  We believe that that has potential in every country in the world and we are open to issue licenses to partners that would like to take up the opportunity.

Gord: 
This territory has been somewhat explored in the past, you know the one example I am thinking of with the Music Genome Project where Pandora tried to use your past songs you like to recommend more songs you might like.  So, is this somewhat similar to that except obviously a much broader scope. Anything that could be on the web, right?
Branton Kenton-Dau:  That’s correct, I guess the difference would be that what’s great about the Web Genome Project is that while you sleep, millions of other people will be clicking on things that will make the web better for you in the morning.

Gord: 
Right.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
That’s what’s so cool about mass collaboration. You do your clicking, you click on whatever, a thousand links in your day, but while you are sleeping well there are millions of links that have been updated and have better DNA against them, so that you can find what you want better when you wake up in the morning, and that’s really exciting.
Gord:  It’s definitely one of those big idea things.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Yes.

Gord: 
To flip this on its side, as a community we are all clicking away, and this DNA matching is going, so it’s making the web a better place, as you say, collaboratively, but on the flip side of that, once you’ve identified or a profile has been built that’s been refined over time based on the sites you found interesting or you’ve spent time with.  That’s a unique identifier that says something about you so, theoretically, down the road, if somebody comes to a site, if the owner of that site can identify what’s important to that person based on the profile, it could on the fly serve up content matching those beliefs, is that another possible application for this?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Thank you, that’s what I was attempting to describe in the first application, that’s the B2B solution.   So an e-tailer or search engine can now take out a license to run the application, the user would visit the site, you won’t see anything different through your Google search or through your Amazon book recommendations, but that’s all being added to the recommendation engine behind, so you are just going to say “hey, for some reason, I just feel that I am getting better recommendations now”.  So, it’s our way of making the web more efficient and that technology is available right now. We’ve got three installations in United States currently progressing, and that’s the other, that’s the business-to-business model, and we believe that has applications around the world as well.

Gord: 
So, for any business applications the big question is critical mass, how many people will be downloading the plug in and using it?  This is fairly new, how long has the Firefox plug-in been available?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
About a year now.

Gord: 
What has the adoption been like to this point?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
At this point, it’s been slow because what we’ve actually done is that plug-in was actually built initially to validate the technology.  That’s what we had to do last year, and then we spent the rest of last year really building enterprise-grade technology that enabled to be used by clients. So we really start the year, as I said, the next 30 days will see the Web Genome Project being launched, so we are only just at the start of the technology coming online.

Gordon: 
Are there any plans to accelerate the adoption either through partnerships or bundling or other ways to actually get people to download the plug in and start using it?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
There are, I mean for each of the people, partners, e-tailors that would like to use the technology, we’ll be producing custom versions with extensions for their users, so that, they will encourage their uses to download the extension, because that will help map the DNA of their links quicker.  So, that will speed the application and we have also got plans to provide custom versions of the extension also to people of different social networks, so that they can enhance the experience within social networks as well.  And then, also if you’re logged in to any service, if you have an account with Amazon or some other e-tailer, you actually don’t need to use the plug in because when you login they already know who you are, so you already will be able to get better recommendations from that person without using the plug-in at all. You won’t see it. It would be completely seamless and invisible to you, and you just get a better web experience.

Gord: 
So, if you log into Amazon for instance, I guess it just keeps the profile so that profile would not be portable then.  It would stay with Amazon, and I think to get to the broader context of what you are talking about, the portability of that profile, the fact that it goes with you from site to site, would be an important part of that, right?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
That’s why we see the extension would be great if people did use it or it just became embedded in web browsers generally.  Because it will give you a more universal better experience. 

Gord: 
Okay so looking forward, you’ve done a lot of development on the backend to build the infrastructure, and the theory is there.  Now, it’s just a matter of having it proven out in real world situations, right?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
That’s exactly what we are about to see. That’s why these installations are taking place at the moment in the United States to validate that, and we are getting started with the Web Genome Project, it is all about delivery this year.

Gord: 
Well, it’s fascinating, like I said it’s one of those big idea things that is fascinating to contemplate.  Is there anything else you wanted to add before we wrapped up the interview?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
We’ve worked on this  pretty much, well, it’s been an 8-year project, so it’s not been a fast thing for us, but I just thought I might share  a couple of books that have been really important to me which you probably know about anyway. One of them that I just finished reading is The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart who is also the author of The Field. What is nice about that is she just documents all the rigorous science that is basically saying that we are shifting our paradigm, to understand we are more like any energy fields, if you like, than physical bodies, that’s the definition of us.  And just the science has come out of Stanford and other places that validates that, is just awe inspiring.  And then, the other one is The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton, which gives that whole transition process from us believing we are physical genes to the whole science of extra genetics, if it’s actually our environment including our beliefs which is a key factor in determining who we are; and I just wanted to share those because I found those two books very inspiring.  They happened after the fact. We didn’t build the technologies because we read the books, but with the books now, we say “oh yeah, that’s why our technology works.

Gord: 
Well, it’s interesting you mentioned that because it seems like anytime I ‘m talking to people about really interesting things there has been this almost renaissance of understanding about what makes us as humans tick, starting in areas like psychology, neurology, and evolutionary psychology and a whole bunch of different areas.  And it all started to happen in the early 90’s, and just for the last 10 years to 15 years, it seems like so many paradigms have shifted.  We’re just looking at things in a whole new way and I agree with you, it’s very inspiring and exciting to know that everything seems to be in such flux right now.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
I absolutely agree with that, and that’s been our sense as well.  It’s just such a privilege to be part of that process.  I know your comments and what you are doing is aligned with that as well.  You know, we are all doing it, but when we are creating together, we are creating something which is new and exciting, I think, and we all have our parts to play in it.  I find it a privilege to participate in this, really, it’s human movement in taking us forward at such a rapid pace as well, so we are now absolutely aligned with what you were saying there.

Why Google is Habit Forming

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

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

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

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

Why We Have Habits

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

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

The Hand is Quicker Than the Brain

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

Why Incumbents Usually Win

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

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

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

More on Search, Transactive Memory and the Elastic Mind

First published January 31, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Thomas Young was the last person who knew everything. Or, at least, that’s Andrew Robinson’s claim in his book of the same title. Whether you agree or not, the accomplishments of this 19th century Quaker were certainly impressive. In contradiction to Newton, he proposed the wave theory of light, furthered our understanding of the mechanics of the eye, helped invent Egyptology and decipher the Rosetta stone, created a measure of elasticity in engineering, was an accomplished physician, created a technique for tuning keyboard instruments, compared 400 languages, coined the term Indo-European and still had time to pioneer developments in carpentry and life insurance. Thomas Young was the human Google of his age.

Today, our world is much more complex. There’s too much knowledge to store in just one mind. So, we tend to find other places to keep it for when we need it. Hence the concept of transactive memory, which I touched on last week.

Misty, Watercolored Memories

We have different methods for storing different types of memories. The way we remember our 21st birthday (if we still remember it at all) is different than the way we remember our phone number. Then there’s the way we remember how to ride a bike, or what Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” sounds like.

And some people are better at remembering certain types of things than others. That’s why we’ve adapted to extend our memory capabilities by using transactive memory. We rely on others to store memories that we might need at some point. Our wives remember birthdays. Our kids remember how to program our smart phone. Our co-worker remembers how to run the virus scan on our computer. We don’t have to remember all these things; all we have to remember is who does.

The Transactive Web

But what about computers, and, by extension, the Internet? What about search? Doesn’t this take transactive memory to a level never thought of before? Even the reduced work load of remembering who remembers what is significantly more trouble than just being able to instantly recall information with a well-placed query. We dump the details of our life on a hard drive somewhere, and search for it when we need it. Even if we’re looking for something we didn’t know we needed, like the recipe for haggis (how many of you celebrated Robbie Burns Day last Friday?) we can find it when we needed it. And we don’t have to remember it, because we know it will be there come next Jan. 25.

The Adaptive Brain

And that brings us to the second point I raised last week, that of neurological plasticity. Our brain prunes itself, getting rid of capacities we really don’t need anymore, and strengthening those that we do. This happens to the greatest extent in the first few decades of our lives, but it is a lifelong process. I am forcibly reminded of this when my 14-year-old daughter asks me for help with her algebra homework. At one point in my life, I knew this stuff. But most of those neurons have long since disappeared. To offer any help at all, I have to relearn what I once knew, building new neural pathways.

So, as we have to worry less about remembering certain things, like facts, dates, phone numbers and addresses, will our semantic memory capabilities, the place we store these things, become less exercised and therefore, pruned out of the way? And in its place, will we develop greater skills in navigating online spaces?

It’s really not a question, it’s already happening. We can see the difference in the generational abilities in the online space, or when our kids kick our virtual butts in a Wii showdown. But we’re still in a place where we’re balanced on the cusp between the pre- and post-digital world. We still have a foot in each realm. Let’s fast-forward a generation or two and see which capabilities that seem so essential to us today have disappeared. And which new talents, unfathomable to us today, have taken their place.

Exponential Technological Advances

Now, obviously, this is nothing new. We don’t need to remember how to shoe a horse, and our great-grandfather would be amazed (and possibly aghast) at a trip on a California freeway. Change has always happened, and humans have always adapted. But there’s something different now. Raymond Kurzweil calls it The Law of Accelerating Returns. The need to adapt to leaping technological advance is getting more and more demanding. Technological growth is exponential. At today’s rate, we experience 20,000 years of progress in a century. In the year 2045, Kurzweil believes we’ll hit a point where machines become smarter than humans. Could the human mind, which is amazing in its adaptability, simply be outstripped by technology?

One last thought. If you believe in evolution (as I do) humans have evolved as the preeminent species through a long line of trial and error, with our environment as the ultimate judge of genetic worthiness. The problem is that evolution is a long, slow process. Our evolutionary environment, the one we’ve adapted to excel in, is a hunter-gatherer society several thousand years past. Evolution never equipped us to function in the world we live in, except in one regard. It equipped us with an adaptable mind that allows self-awareness. And even that is inextricably tied to our human nature. The human mind is a wonderful thing, but unfortunately, it doesn’t benefit from Moore’s Law.

Search, Transactive Memory and the Plastic Mind

First published January 24, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In 1986, University of Virginia Psychologist Daniel Wegner came up with an interesting theory. He realized that we depend on others to remember some of the things we need to know. This is especially true in couples and families. Some of us are better at remembering phone numbers and birth dates. Some of us are better at remembering how 401Ks and computers work. In couples, the longer we spend together, the more we divvy up the memory workload, depending on our spouse to prop up our spotty memories.

Wegner called this transactive memory. With it, we don’t have to remember everything. We just have to remember who knows what. Wegner found this to be true in any small group who spends a lot of time together. The bigger the group, the larger the extended memory capacity.

That’s the first concept I want you to think about. Now, let me give you another.

It’s the Second Chimp on the Left, the One with the Scar

Babies are born with a capability that you and I don’t have. They can recognize and distinguish between faces of different species. For example, if you introduce a 6-month-old baby to six different chimpanzees, then show them pictures of the chimp faces, they’ll be able to recognize them and tell them apart. But to us, they will all look like chimpanzees. The same is true of sheep, or lemurs. To us, a sheep is a sheep is a sheep. It seems we lose this ability around 9 months of age, according to Olivier Pascalis at the University of Sheffield.

Why can we no longer tell chimpanzees apart? We’re born with this ability because at one point in our evolution it was important. The ability to tell animals apart led to a greater chance of survival. But that’s not really true today. Today, in our complex social world, it’s much more important to be able to tell human faces apart. So at about 9 months of age, the brain starts to concentrate on that. And, in this case, something has to give. Sorry chimps, but after a while, you’ll all look the same to us.

There’s one more point I want to share here. Dr. Pascalis found that if parents continued to develop their babies’ ability to distinguish between non-human faces by repeating the exercise, the babies retained that skill.

The Pruning of the Young Mind

It’s not so much this lost ability I find interesting. It’s the underlying reason, the ability for the brain to change itself from birth to maturity. Humans received another gift in the evolutionary lottery, an adaptable mind. The brain you get at birth is not the brain you’ll end up with. A 2007 study at Oxford University found that newborn brains have almost 50% more neurons than adult brains. Babies have more raw “brain material” to work with. They get shipped with the full menu of evolutionary options, including the ability to tell monkeys apart.

But over time, in a process known as “pruning,” the brain starts to discard options it doesn’t use very often. Weak, underutilized neurons, forming neural pathways we never use, get pruned and, in some cases, reconfigured, to make way for pathways that are more commonly used. To go back to our facial recognition example, being able to keep track of all the faces in one’s ever increasing circle of friends and family is a huge task. And it’s right around 9 months that we start venturing out in the world, meeting more and more people. The timing of this is not coincidental.

Fertilized Neurons

But our brains not only get rid of unused functions. They also nurture commonly used functions. The same Oxford study found that although our neuron inventory decreases, we actually gain significantly in another type of cell — glials. Glials are the most important brain cell you’ve probably never heard of. They act as a support system for our neurons, nurturing them and making them more effective. And adults apparently have three times the number of glial cells found in infants.

So, for the next seven days, until my next column, I want you to think about those two concepts: we rely on external sources to extend our memory, and our brains are adaptable, able to rewire themselves to discard capabilities that are no longer important to us, and build capabilities that are more important.

See where I’m going with this? Until next week…

Marketers Fall Victim to our own Disease: Spoon Sized Wisdom

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

How did I get 6 months behind? Good question.

A Diversion of Attention

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

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

The In Box Shuffle

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

Deep Thinkers

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

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

Don’t Spoil Your Supper

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

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

Stop Consuming and Start Thinking

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

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

SpaceTime: Another Dimension to Search

The quote on the home page of SpaceTime is intriguing:

“I think I’ve found a product that makes the Google interface look like it was designed by Apple.”
Rob Enderle, Enderle Group.

Now, those are two pretty big names to throw around. But you know what? Based on an initial test drive, SpaceTime just might be up to the challenge. This is a paradigm shift in browsing behavior. When I interviewed Jakob Nielsen last summer, he took Ask to task for calling their interface 3D.

Gord: Like Ask is experimenting with right now with their 3D search. They’re actually breaking it up into 3 columns, and using the right rail and the left rail to show non-web based results.
Jakob: Exactly, except I really want to say that it’s 2 dimensional, it’s not 3 dimensional.
Gord: But that’s what they’re calling it.
Jakob: Yes I know, but that’s a stupid word. I don’t want to give them any credit for that. It’s 2 dimensional. It’s evolutionary in the sense that search results have been 1 dimensional, which is linear, just scroll down the page, and so potentially 2 dimensional (they can call it three but it is two) that is the big step.
Well, SpaceTime attempts to jump the gap to the 3rd dimension by giving web browsing depth as well as heighth and width. Is it successful? Yes and no. But there’s enough “yes” here to significantly change your browsing experience, especially when it comes to searching, and to entice you with what the possibilities might be.

spacetimeopensm

(I tried to get more screenshots, but SpaceTime is a bit of a memory hog, and I didn’t have enough to run SnagIt and SpaceTime as the same time without them both crashing)
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time writing and talking about how search helps us make decisions where we have to gather and compare alternatives, as in researching an upcoming purchase. This is called satisficing, and search is built to be a natural extension of our working memory. But one of the drawbacks is searches fairly rigid interface. We can usually only see one page at a time. Even the introduction of tabbed browsing, while a step in the right direction, still feels rigid and linear. We pogostick back and forth between pages and the search results. And as I’ve said before, linear is not how humans operate. We’re used to dealing in random ways in 3 dimensional environments. The 20th century squeezed us into a linear, 2 dimension, sequential mode, just because we didn’t have any choice, but the 21st century will be one of navigating within 3 dimensions (and probably 4, as technology allows us the shift timelines to suit our purposes more often) and picking our own random paths through them, berry picking our content. SpaceTime (notice the inclusion of the 4 dimensions in the name) is an interface built to allow this to happen.
Don’t Worry, Be Crappy
Guy Kawasaki always says, when you have something revolutionary, don’t worry, ship it even if it’s crappy. It worked for the Mac. Let’s hope it works for SpaceTime.
Now, to be fair, the SpaceTime interface is far from crappy, it’s a prettty polished piece of work. But if we’re moving into a 3d environment, I want to be able to interact with it in an intuitive way. SpaceTime doesn’t quite allow me to do this yet. I can’t grab and manipulate items in the 3d space. I have to use the buttons and controls SpaceTime provides to go from page to page. But the advantages SpaceTime offers, allowing me to quickly flip from page to page, all the time keeping a visual history of my browsing in a bottom timeline, more than makes up for the pain. This turns pogo sticking into an experience more like spreading options on a table in front of you, allowing you to spot the things that appear to be what you’re looking for. And that’s a big shift from what we’re used to.
In the test drive, I also found that auto loading videos and other rich streaming media seemed to give the SpaceTime interface some hiccups (interrupting the SpaceTime continuum — sorry, couldn’t resist) but I’m sure that’s being worked on. This is version 1.0, after all. Generally, it performed pretty well. In fact, one of my favorite uses was browsing through videos in SpaceTime.
But if we look forward into where things are going, with multitouch displays and surface computing, SpaceTime is the step that’s needed into a much more natural user experience. I’m sure the grab and manipulate options I’m looking for are just a version or two away, waiting for more access to the underlying OS to integrate these features in. But Microsoft or Apple has to let this happen. In fact, once you get used to operating in SpaceTime, going back to 2 dimensions just seems clunky. I’d be amazed if one of the two doesn’t snap SpaceTime up soon. Of course, it could also be that SpaceTime just got out first and there’s something in the Apple or MS labs very similar. I’d love to see a mobile version of SpaceTime on the iPhone!
And this is the cloud on SpaceTime’s horizon. While it’s revolutionary, it can’t survive as a stand alone app. This is something screaming to be incorporated into our online experience, and much as I like it, I probably won’t use it again. It’s great for searching, but rather pointless for standard browsing. Where it shines is when you need to consider a number of alternatives, as in search. It’ll linger at the bottom of my programs list, out of sight and out of mind.  I’m too used to my current browsing experience, and the paradigm shift required to use it as my new browser is too great. Without being adopted by a major player, the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, TimeSpace may die on the far side of the Chasm. And that would be too bad, because SpaceTime is all kinds of cool. Let’s hope either it shows up on a MS or Mac interface, or finds a niche it can survive in. Perhaps it’s the next Google acquisition.
Check out SpaceTime. Just one word of advice for them. Dump the autoplay video. It irritates the hell out of me. And is it just me, or does CEO Eddie Bakhash look like Danny Bonaduce?
But I digress.

Human Hardware and Our Operating System: Why Ask Why?

First published January 10, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Probability is a consistent master. In many, many things, given a big enough population, you’ll find a bell curve rising from the center, showing how closely we adhere to the norm. As much as we think we’re unique and distinctive, when you start to look at why we do things, more often than not we find ourselves bound by what I call human hardware and operating system issues. These are products of how we’ve evolved as a species, our physical shells, the mechanisms of our brain (all hardware constraints) or how our society has conditioned us to act in a given circumstance (operating system constraints).

The Tyranny of the Bell Curve

Bell curves exist because we share these common characteristics. They keep most of us close to the norm, just through the things we all have in common. That’s why 50% of the human population has an IQ that falls within a 20 point range, and 80% have an IQ between 80 and 120. That’s why humans will never run (unaided) at 60 mph. It’s even why the vast majority of us use search engines the way we do. These things are all dictated by our anatomy, our neural wiring and the society we live in: human hardware and operating systems. But to get here, you have to ask why.

Why is a question I’ve been asking a lot lately. In fact, I’m driving everyone within 5 miles of me crazy with this recently acquired habit. Because you don’t just ask why once. You have to ask it over and over again. And the novelty of this wears off in a hurry if you’re on the receiving end.

Why We Hate Telemarketers

Let me give you just one example of a conversation I had last week:

Chris: I hate telemarketers!
Gord: Why?
Chris (somewhat surprised at the question): Well, because it’s an invasion of privacy.
Gord: So is junk mail. Do you hate that as much?
Chris: No…
Gord: Then why do you hate telemarketers so much?
Chris: They’re a waste of my time.
Gord: So are TV commercials. Do you yell at the TV?
Chris: No.
Gord: So why do you hate telemarketers more?
Chris: Because I feel I have to answer the phone. I can ignore the TV.
Gord: Why do you feel you have to answer the phone?
Chris: Because it might be something important.

And there you have the real reason we hate telemarketers. We have a Pavlovian response they use to fool us into paying attention. We’ve been conditioned to expect important news when the phone rings. And all we get is a poorly scripted and delivered sales pitch for credit cards or a new long-distance plan. We instantly get angry because we feel foolish. It’s not rational, but we all do it. See? Human hardware and, in this case, the HOS, or human operating system.

Why We Stop Asking Why

When we’re young, we ask why a lot more than when we get older; i.e. why is the sky blue? I even asked why about that. It turns out there’s a good reason why we stop asking why. Why questions are a lot tougher to answer, because, as I’ve shown, you have to keep asking why. And often, the answers, when we find them, cause us to have to shift our belief frameworks. The older we get, the harder that becomes. We ask why when we’re young because we’re building our view of the world. When we get older, that view is largely formed. So we start asking questions that allow us to slot information into those existing views. More often than not, those questions start with “what” or “who” or “when.” They seldom start with “why.” That’s too bad. Why? For precisely the reason we stop asking why. Once our beliefs and paradigms shift, we can see things we couldn’t see before.

Why “Why” Should be the First Question You Ask

For instance, let’s return to the telemarketer question. Let’s imagine I asked you to rewrite the telemarketing scripts for Sprint. Once you understand why we hate telemarketers, you’d probably take a totally different approach than you would have before you had this knowledge. I’ve shifted your paradigm, so you’re seeing the problem in a totally new light (if this example caught your interest, I explored more aspects of our relationship with the phone in this blog post ).

My understanding of how people use search started with a string of why questions. Why do people click on top listings more? Why is the No. 1 organic listing almost always the most popular link? Why do we use search so often as we move from awareness into consideration in purchase decisions? Why is there a significant drop-off of scanning activity below the fourth or fifth result? Why was Google more successful in monetizing its search traffic? It turns out all these questions had answers that were buried into our skulls. And in many cases, the reasons had been hardwired into us eons ago. Believe me, there’s a lot more to learn here.

My New Year’s resolution is to ask why a lot more often. I encourage all of you to do the same. And to get the ball rolling, next week I’ll share the name of some books that started to answer some of the great marketing whys.

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

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

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

Driving and Selective Perception

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

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

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

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

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

Calling on the Phone: Much Worse than Being There

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Pavlovian Response to Ring Tones

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody Hates a Telemarketer – even Jerry Seinfeld.

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

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

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

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

Oh..and Happy New Year!

Persuasion on the Search Results Page

First published January 3, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Chris Copeland took out 2007 with one last jab at the whole “agencies getting it” thing. Much as I’m tempted to ring in the New Year by continuing to flog this particular horse, I’m going to bow to my more rational side. As Chris and Mike Margolin both rightly pointed out in their responses to my columns, we all have vested interests and biases that will inevitably cause us to see things from our own perspectives. Frankly, the perspective I’m most interested at this point in this debate is the client’s, as this will ultimately be a question the marketplace decides. So, for now, I’ll leave it there.

But Chris did take exception to one particular point that I did want to spill a little more virtual ink over; the idea of whether persuasion happens in search. Probably the cause for the confusion was my original choice of words. Rather than saying we don’t persuade people “in search” I should have said “on the search page.” Let me explain further with a quick reference to the dictionary, in this case, http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/persuadeMerriam-Webster:

Persuade: to move by argument, entreaty, or expostulation to a belief, position, or course of action.

In the definition of persuade, the idea is to move someone from their current belief, position or course of action to a new one. The search results page is not the place to do this. And the reasons why are important to understand for the search marketer.

For quick reference, here’s Chris’s counterargument: Persuasion is at the heart of everything that we do in search — from where we place an ad on a page (Hotchkiss’ golden triangle study) to how we message. The experience we drive to every step of the process is about understanding behavior and how to better optimize for the purpose of connecting consumer intent with advertiser content.
I don’t disagree with Chris in the importance of search in the decision-making process, but I do want to clarify where persuasion happens. What we’re doing on the search results page is not persuading. We’re confirming. We’re validating. In some cases, we’re introducing. But we’re not persuading.

As Chris mentioned, at Enquiro we’ve spent a lot of time mapping out what search interactions look like. And they’re quick. Very quick. About 10 seconds, looking at 4 to 5 results. That’s 2 seconds per listing. In that time, all searchers can do is scan the title and pick up a few words. From that, they make a decision to click or not to click. They’re not reading an argument, entreaty or expostulation. They’re not waiting to be persuaded. They’re making a split-second decision based on the stuff that’s already knocking around in their cortex.

Part of the problem is that we all want to think we’re rational decision-making creatures. When asked in a market research survey, we usually indicate that we think before we click (or buy). This leads to the false assumption that we can be persuaded on the search page, because our rational minds (the part that can be persuaded) are engaged. But it’s just not true. It’s similar to people looking at a shelf of options in the grocery store. In a study (Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think, p. 124) shoppers exiting a supermarket were asked if they looked at competing brands and compared prices before making their decision. Most said yes. But observation proved differently. They spent only 5 seconds at the category location and 90% only handled their chosen product. This is very similar to responses and actual behavior we’ve seen on search pages.

Now, if someone is in satisficing mode (looking for candidates for a consideration set for further research) you can certainly introduce alternatives for consideration. But the persuasion will happen well downstream from the search results page, not on it.

Am I splitting semantic hairs here? Probably. But if we’re going to get better at search marketing, we have to be obsessed with understanding search behavior and intent. Chris and I are in agreement on that. And that demands a certain precision with the language we use. I was at fault with my original statement, but similarly, I think it’s important to clear up where we can and can’t persuade prospects.

Of course, you may disagree and if so, go ahead, persuade me I’m wrong. I’ll give you 2 seconds and 6 or 7 words. Go!