Category Archives: Customer Relationships

The 150 Millisecond Gap: The Timing of Brand Love

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a meeting room at Simon Fraser University, looking at two squiggly lines on a graph in a Powerpoint slide. In fact, five of us in the room were all looking at it intently. Among the five of us, there was a PhD and a handful of Masters degrees in Neurology and Psychology. I contributed nothing to this impressive collection of academic achievement. Still, there was something on the chart that fascinated me.

SI140gapimage

The chart was the result of a neuroscanning experiment we conducted with SFU and Isabel Taake and Dr. Mario Liotti last year.  We were exploring how the brain responded to brands we like, brands we don’t like and brands we could care less about. The study was an ERP (Event Related Brain Potential) study. The idea of the study was to divide up the groups, based on brands they buy and brands they don’t buy and measure their brain waves as they’re presented with pictures of the brands with an EEG scanner. After, these waves were averaged and the averages of each group were compared with each other. What we were looking for were differences between the waves. We were looking for gaps.

It turned out we found two gaps. The brain waves are measured based on time, in millisecond increments. When we initially did the study, we were looking for something called the DM effect. This effect has been shown to represent a difference in how we encode memories and how effective we are in retrieving them later. We wanted to see if well liked brands showed different levels of brain activity when it came to memory encoding than neutral or disliked brands. The answer, as it turned out, was a qualified yes. What was most interesting, however, was the difference in the brain waves we saw when people were presented pictures of  brands they love and brands they either dislike or  feel ambivalent about. There was something going on here, and it was happening in two places. The first was happening very quickly, literally in the blink of an eye. We found our first gap right around 150 milliseconds – in just over 1/10th of a second. The second gap was a little later, at about 450 milliseconds, or about half a second.

Brands = Faces?

Previous ERP work often used faces as the visual stimuli that subjects were presented with. Researchers like working with faces because the human brain is so well attuned to responding to faces. As a stimuli, they provide plenty of signal with little noise. What researchers found is that there were significant differences in how our brains processes well known faces and unknown faces. They also found differences in how we processed smiling faces and scowling faces. And the differences in processing showed up in two places, one in the 150 millisecond range and the second at about 300 – 500 milliseconds. The first gap is what neurologists call the Vertex Positive Potential. The second is called the P300. I’ll explain what each of these means in more depth in a second.

What was interesting with this study is that we were seeing the same  thing play out when we substituted familiar brands for familiar faces. Respondents were responding to brands they liked the same way they would respond to a friendly face they recognized. So, what’s the big deal about that? And why two gaps? What was the significance of the 300 milliseconds that separate the two? Well, it’s the difference between gut instinct and rational thought. What we might have been seeing, as we stared at the projector screen, was two very different parts of the brain processing the same thought, with the first setting up the second.

The Quick Loop and the Slow Loop

Neurologists, including Joseph LeDoux and Antonio Damasio, have found that as we live our lives, our brains can respond to certain people, things and situations in two different ways.

The first is the quick and dirty loop. This expressway in our brain literally rips through the ancient, more primal part of our brain – what has popularly been called the Lizard brain (neurologists and psychologists hate this term, by the way). Why? Because if we hesitate in dangerous situations, we’re dead. So, we have a hair trigger response mechanism that alerts us to danger in a blink of an eye. How quick is this response? Well, coincidentally, it’s usually measured in the 100 to 200 millisecond range. This is the VPP, the Vertex Positive Potential. It’s an emotional processing of a stimulus, an immediate assessment of threat or reward.

Previous research (Jeffreys Takumachi 1992) found that the VPP is common when we see faces but could also be found when we looked at some objects.  Some, but not all objects. What we (and by we, I mean Isabel and Dr. Liotti) did was substitute preferred and non-preferred brands for faces. And we saw the same VPP gap. Typically, this early processing is done by the amygdala (our danger detection module) and other areas of the brain including the orbitofrontal cortex.  If you look at the map of neural activity, you’ll find more frontal activity in the “Buy” group. The brain is responding emotionally to what it is seeing and it’s doing so almost instantaneously, in the blink of an eye.

Slide17

But then there’s a slower loop that feeds the signal up to our prefrontal cortex, where there’s a more deliberate processing of the signal. If the signal turns out to be non threatening, the brain damps down the alarms and returns the brain to it’s pre-alert status. Cooler heads prevail, quite literally. The time for this more circuitous path? About half a second, give or take a few milliseconds. This more deliberate evaluation represents the second gap, the P300 gap, we saw in our averaged brain waves. This is a more deliberate evaluation of the stimulus. It’s here where our reasoning brains kick in and either contradict or reinforce the early signals of the VPP gap. If it’s a smiling face, we go beyond instant recognition and start to retrieve (from memory) our concept of the person behind the face. The same is true, I suspect, for our favorite brands. The neural map here shows the difference in scalp potential activity between the “Buy” group and the “Non-Buy” group. The heat we see is the home of brand love.

Slide19

Where Brand Love Lives

In neurological research, different methods deliver different insights. The ERP methodology we used provides accurate timing, thus the discovery of the 150 and 450 ms gaps. But fMRI scanning provides accurate tracking of the exact locations of neural activity. Another study, conducted in 2004, starts to give us some clues as to exactly where brand love lives. Dr. Read Montague and a team at Baylor University staged a rather elaborate repeat of the Coke-Pepsi Challenge, but this time, people took the challenge while they were in a fMRI scanner. I’ve written before about the study if you’re interested in more detail about how they pulled it off.  Today, what I want to talk about is where in the brain brand love lives.

Coke is one of the most beloved brands in the world. It elicits strong loyalty amongst its fans, to the point where they swear it tastes much better than it’s rival – Pepsi. Well, as Montague found, if they didn’t know what they’re drinking, this isn’t really true. Even the most fervent Coke fan often choose Pepsi as their preferred drink when they didn’t know what they were drinking. But when they knew the brand they were tasting, something very interesting happened. Suddenly, other parts of the Coke fan’s brain started lighting up.

cokestudy

The hippocampus, the left parahippocampal cortex, the midbrain and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex started lighting up. This is significant because it indicates that the brain was actually retrieving concepts and beliefs from memory (the hippocampal activity) and the retrieved concepts were being integrated into feelings of reward (the prefrontal cortical activity). The brain was enhancing the physical sensation of taste with the full strength of brand love.

So?

Perhaps we’re starting to see not only the home of brand love, but also the timing. This was why I fixated on that small gap between the squiggly lines at 150 milliseconds. It’s because this represented our immediate, visceral response to brands. Before the brain really kicks in at all, we are already passing judgement on brands. And this judgement will color everything that comes after it. It sets the stage for our subsequent brand evaluations, happening at the 450 ms gap. This is when the brain structures identified in the Baylor study start to kick in and reinforce that “blink of an eye” first impression. Brands appear to deliver a one-two punch.

We’re currently planning our follow up research for 2010. I’m not exactly sure what it will entail, but you can bet we’ll be looking much closer at those 150 and 450 ms gaps!

Everyone’s a Critic: The Splinters of our Discontent

First published January 14, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I had a bout of inbox convergence today. Just as I was speculating what this week’s Search Insider might cover, two separate emails surrounded a juicy little topic and delivered it to me on a platter. First, a post from Ad Age about how marketers are reluctant to use online conversations as a source of customer feedback: “‘Listening’ ostensibly has become the rage in consumer research, but the Advertising Research Foundation is finding that many marketers view what would seem one of the digital age’s biggest gifts to marketers — the torrent of unsolicited consumer opinion — as more of an added expense item than a blessing.”

And then, a small blog post on Echouser got me thinking: “It’s a concept for what an iPhone app designed to measure experiences (any experiences, from surfing a website to hopping on BART) could look like… Can you imagine if we were able to rate experiences on the fly, all day every day?”

Customers are Talking…

There’s been a lot of talk about the shift of control to the consumer and empowerment. As 2009 drew to a close, I talked about the shape of marketing to come. One of the key foundations I identified was participation — actively engaging in an ongoing conversation with customers. The two posts in my inbox start to get at the potential of this conversation.

In the first post, ARF laments advertisers’ reluctance to tap into ongoing online conversations as a source of customer feedback. Valid point, but I can understand their reluctance. This is unstructured content, making it qualitative, anecdotal and messy. Marketers balk at the heavy lifting required to mine and measure the collective mood. Some tools, such as Collective Intellect, are starting to take on the hard task of migrating online sentiment into a dashboard for marketers. The easier it gets, the more likely it will be for marketers to actually do it. Until then, we’re stuck with consumer surveys and comment cards.

…Anytime, Anywhere…

But it’s the second post that really got me thinking. Always-on connections have already given a voice to consumers, one that’s heard loud and clear. But what if we did indeed have a convenient and commonly structured way to provide feedback on every single interaction in our lives through mobile connections? What if marketers could know in real time what every single customer thought of them, based on the experience he or she just had? Some cringe at the thought. Others are eager for it. The second group will inevitably prevail.

Given the level of investment required on the part of the user, I suspect this channel would only be used in extremely negative and extremely positive circumstances. We don’t tend to take the time to comment on things that come reasonably close to meeting our expectations. But even so, it’s a powerful feedback channel to contemplate, giving the truly user-centric company everything they could ever wish for.

…So Listen!

Last week, I talked about the mother lode of consumer intent that exists in search query logs and how we’ve been slow to leverage it. This week, we have an equally valuable asset rapidly coming down the pipe — a real-time view of our customers’ sentiment.  That’s a one-two punch that could knock the competition out cold.

What I Took Away from the Search Insider Summit

First published December 10, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve had a few days now to reflect on what came out of the Search Insider Summit in Park City. It was an interesting perspective: Avinash Kaushik telling us that the majority of search marketing “sucks”; Mark Mahaney prophesizing that search is poised for a big climb in 2010; Rob Griffin warning us the entire industry is going through the throes of change; Chris Copeland showing us that social media is inextricably linked with search activity; and Mike Moran cautioning us that CEOs and CFOs worship at one altar and one altar only: profit. If we want to sell search, we have to speak that language.

Adding to this, I climbed on my usual soapbox, arguing that we spend too much time with data and too little time with our customers. In the panel exploring how to balance qualitative and quantitative approaches, the panelists were asked how they differentiated the two. For me, the answer is this: Quantitative is watching the dashboard while you drive. Qualitative is looking out the windshield.

SEM’s Call to Arms

So, when you mash this up over 3 days and distill the essence, what do you end up with? I think SEMs heard a distinct call to “up their game” last week in Park City. Sure, there are tough problems to tackle. Marketers are demanding more from their budgets than ever before. As Avinash said, attribution causes many marketers to “cry like little girls.” Determining user intent and matching it in our ads is tough. Matching it on the landing page and beyond is even tougher. Trying to wrap our heads around the shifting tide of social media gives us all a migraine. And if our jobs weren’t tough enough, Google just gave SEO a slap upside the head last week with personalization of all search results. Thank God the bar was open after the sessions wrapped up.

But we search marketers are a resilient bunch. The people roaming the hallways of the Chateaux at Silver Lake didn’t look morose. In fact, they were almost giddily optimistic. There was a sense that as rough as the ride was in this boat we all chose to set sail in, at least it was heading in the right direction. Rob Griffin put it this way: “If you’re any good, you might not have the same job title or be doing the same thing in a few years, but you’ll be employed. That’s more than a lot of other people will be able to say.”

I’m Not Sure Where We’re Going, but Follow Me!

I look at it this way. The market has already shifted. And where the market goes, we marketers have to follow. Somebody has to figure this stuff out. And, as I remarked to someone over drinks after the sessions wound down, I’m constantly amazed by the number of people in marketing who have impressive titles on their business cards but simply don’t get the magnitude of the behavioral shift we’re in the middle of. Avinash is right. A lot of what I see in the digital marketing landscape “sucks.” We have to get better. We have to get smarter. We have to do a better job of listening to the people we’re trying to market to.

I know we will get better. Really, do we have a choice? And the advantage search marketers have is that we have chosen to work in the one area of online that has been an unqualified success. Everyone is looking to us as an example of digital marketing done right. And we’re looking at each other saying, “Okay, that worked. Now, what’s next?”

Marketers: Shift Your Paradigms

First published December 3, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I think I know what I want to do with the rest of my life. I want to shift paradigms.

Now that I’m older and arguably wiser, people sometimes ask me for that “one piece of advice.” Usually, it involves stepping into someone else’s perspective and seeing things from their viewpoint. With each year that passes, I find myself doing that more and more, leading me to dole out that piece of advice more frequently.

You see, there is no truth or ultimate reality. There is only our perception of it. We have a lens we see the world through.  And everyone else has his or her own lens.  Paradigm shifts happen when we suddenly see reality through another lens, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to try to understand what another person’s view of reality looks like.

In one of his books, Stephen Covey tells a story of a ride home in a New York subway. In the same car was a father with his two children. The children were running wild through the car, jumping on seats, jostling other passengers and fighting with each other. The father sat oblivious to the actions of his children, staring straight into space.

Suddenly, Covey could take it no longer. Someone had to rein these children in and the father didn’t seem to be doing anything. The reality through Covey’s lens was that the father’s obvious lack of parental discipline had resulted in two rude, ill-mannered children. Finally, he could take it no longer. He moved over to the father and said, “Your children seem a little rambunctious.” The father looked at the children, then, turned to Covey, “I guess they are. I’m sorry. We just came from the hospital. Their mother passed away this morning.”  Needless to say, Covey’s paradigm shifted in an instant.

The Paradigm of the Marketer

Most of the problems I see in marketing result from the fact that marketers see the world one way and their prospects see the world another way.  We have two different paradigms. And marketers have a difficult time putting their lens away long enough to try the view through their prospect’s lens.

About a year ago, at the Search Insider Summit (I’m actually at it again as I write this) I saw this clearly in a session on mobile advertising strategies. From the audience, which was made up entirely of marketers, there was frustration that the carriers wouldn’t allow targeting of mobile users through their account information. “You have all the information, why don’t you allow us to use it to target our messages?” was the cry from more than one frustrated marketer. I asked for a show of hands of all who thought, as marketers, that this would be a good move on the part of the mobile providers. Every hand shot up.

“Okay, as mobile users, who still wants to have ads targeted to you by your personal information.” Several hands suddenly wavered, hit by the force of shifting paradigms. Many went down. Others dipped noticeably as their owners realized their own hypocrisy. Suddenly, they were seeing the world as a customer, not as a marketer.

Analyzing campaign data and crunching numbers is not the way to shift a paradigm. Our personal lenses are stubborn things. It’s very difficult to swap them for another.  The best way carries the fancy title “ethnography” but it simply means “writing about people”. Ethnography, a branch of anthropology, seeks to understand people by observing them “where they live”, in the full context of their lives. In this setting, one gets further removed from your reality and more embedded in theirs, making paradigm shifts easier. I don’t think we, as marketers, spend enough time in the lives of our customers. And unfortunately, the Internet and the flood of data available is only making the problem worse.

The Survey Says…

Here’s my last analogy. I’m a huge “West Wing fan,” and I recently watched an episode from season two where President Bartlet’s staff was polling five red states on their attitudes towards gun control.  Not surprisingly, the percentage approving came up short of expectations. Josh Lyman, a White House staffer, was disappointed and frustrated.  “That’s it!” he said, “We have to dial down our gun control rhetoric.”

The pollster, played by Marlee Matlin, responded, “I think you have to dial it up.”

“That’s not what the data says,” Josh said.

“How do you know what the data says?” said the pollster. “The data says whatever you want it to. It depends on how you ask the question, what they had for breakfast and whether a gun control lobbyist pissed them off yesterday.”

Data tends to reinforce paradigms, not shift them. It’s the understanding that comes from personal contact that shifts paradigm. It’s sitting beside an apparently delinquent father and learning that he just lost his spouse.

A Great Question: Why Don’t Big Companies “Get It?”

At our event in the Bay area last week, Marketo Marketing Director Jon Miller gave a very compelling presentation about how they’ve put a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy together that not only blows away performance benchmarks in his category, but outstrips what would be considered “Best of Breed” campaigns. At the same event, someone from a huge company asked who were the companies that were “doing it right” in B2B. A panel of very smart B2B marketers looked at each other, struggling to come up with a single name. Finally, Jon said “Well, I think we’re doing it pretty well.” It might have sounded boastful, but Jon had the numbers to back up his claim.

I’ve thought about that a lot in the few days since. Why can a small company like Marketo put together a digital campaign that integrates all the right pieces and gets them to click while a Fortune 500, with all their resources available, can’t?  Why are smaller companies much more likely to “Get It”, with a big G?

“Getting it with a Big G”

First, I should explain what I mean by Big G “Getting It.” When I look at the most successful marketers in the digital ecosystem, they have a unique ability to position themselves at exactly the right place on the digital adoption curve. They can read where their markets are going and seem to be there at the right time with the right offering. They offer something so compelling that adoption is a no brainer. These companies have a magical ability to combine the promise and advantages of game changing technology with a intuitive sense of what the market wants. Think Amazon, eBags, NetFlix & Zappos.

Hmmm..you say. No B2B companies in that mix? I would put Salesforce there, but after that, it gets difficult to think of B2B marketers who have found the sweet spot of the adoption curve. That’s why our panel was stumped when asked for examples of B2B companies that “Get It.”

I think the answer lies in the inherent nature of the companies that “Get It”. I suspect there are things that are natural here that it’s almost impossible for bigger companies to emulate. This follows up an earlier post about companies that seem to naturally benefit from SEO. As I thought more about it, I realized it comes down to a few common things:

Top Down, Bottom Up Buy In – Getting a company aligned and on the same page is just a whole lot easier when an executive meeting consists of leaning back in your chair and yelling across the hallway. There’s immediacy of communication and, through this, agreement, that’s intoxicating in a smaller company. If you get executive commitment to an initiative, the entire company can know about it and start executing in minutes if required.

Nimbleness –  With quicker communication comes nimbleness. Smaller companies move faster than big companies, and in the digital marketplace, that’s a vital advantage. If you get that rarest of animals, a small company with seasoned executives who have “been there, done that”, you get a tremendously effective execution machine: a company who knows what to do and can actually do it without dealing with energy sucking inertia.

Growing Up Digital – The handful of companies that I see have almost all grew up in a natively digital market. The online marketplace is baked right into their DNA. Another important point: they get technology, but they’re not star struck by it. If they’re chasing a social media strategy, it’s because they understand that it’s because conversations are happening and they need to be part of them, not because they’ve been caught up in the buzz and hyperbole of it.

It’s Not Marketing, It’s How We Roll – The idea of marketing as a separate department or discipline seems to belong to a past generation. In the successful new breed of companies that “Get It”, marketing best practices are so deeply woven into the fabric of the company that it’s impossible to separate them from all the other stuff the company does. They just do the things that are right for the customer, and everything good seems to naturally flow from that. If you want to call it marketing, fine, but it’s not the first label they’d put on it. They tend to use words like “culture” and “core values.”

Living Closer to the Customer – This ingrained ability to anticipate customer needs comes from living closer to the customer.  There is very little distance between everyone in the company and all their customers in smaller businesses. The CEO knows and understands at a gut level what the customer wants from them. And, if you have an executive that knows how to execute (rarer than you might think) you’ve got consistently happier customers.

Those are my observations after a few days thought, but this question of why smaller, newer companies seem better positioned to evolve in the new marketplace is one that needs more thought. If you could take a few minutes to share any examples of companies that you think embody these characteristics, I’d be grateful. Just add a comment to the blog and I’ll start compiling a list of examples to both share and to take a closer look at.

The Cult of Technology

We held our B2B Expert Face-to-Face event yesterday in Redwood Shores, CA. Yes, we asked people to drive to the west side of the bay the same day the Bay Bridge was closed. Needless to say, it impacted our attendance somewhat. But it was also a smaller, more intimate opportunity to really talk about the challenges common in B2B digital marketing. The common themes that emerged what a tendency to “peg” search as direct response marketing, the realization that B2B is slower to adopt digital than B2C, the difficulties presented by the fragmentation of the B2B marketplace and why we’ve tended to silo off our digital strategies from the rest of our marketing. Most of the discussion came from the findings of the BuyerSphere Project, the extensive research we conducting into B2B buying behaviors.

Every timeI talk to a group of assembled search marketers, I can’t help but feel the palpable frustration in the air. The gulf between those that understand digital (particularly search) and those that don’t can seem impossible to bridge. We feel tied down by those within our organization that seem mired in the old way of doing things. Why the hell can’t everyone see the world as clearly as we can. Also, I mentioned that as marketers, we tend to focus too much on technology and not enough on the people that interact with that technology. Few companies invest in qualitative research As we chatted at the Hotel Sofitel In Redwood Shores, a thought struck me. One on the problems may be that we’re all too much alike. We’re suffering from cultural homogeneity.

If you look at most elements of human nature, there it a typical normal distribution curve, otherwise known as the Bell Curve. The majority of the population clusters around the mean, at the center of the curve. As you move further out, you have more deviation from the mean. The diversity of us humans: whether it be intelligence, wealth, behaviors, physical abilities or size, tends to spread out on this curve.

bell_curve

The same is true, as Everett Rogers discovered, about how quickly we adopt technology or (one supposes) adapts to change. His technology diffusion curve followed the typical Bell Curve model. A few of us adopt technology almost as soon as it becomes available. A few of us avoid adopting technology until it becomes common place for everyone else. The vast majority of us fall somewhere in the middle.

technology diffusion
But what happens when you’re constantly surrounded by people at one spot on the curve? What if everyone you knew had an IQ of 123, or you lived in a town where everyone was 6 feet 3 inches tall? Soon, you’d fall into the trap of thinking this represented the norm. If you never saw diversity, you’d start to forget that it exists.

This is almost never a healthy state of an affairs. A common ideology amongst the heads of Nazi Germany lead to a drive for cultural homogeneity. The unbelievable wealth that surrounded the French aristocracy (or the Russian, for that matter) led to revolts of the masses. History has not proved to be kind to groups that are too much alike in one aspect. At best, this homogeneity gives you a skewed view of the world that may cause you to make decisions that don’t map well to the general population.

And that, I realized on Wednesday morning, may be exactly what is happening to us digital marketers. We are in this business because we all love technology. We are all classic early adopters, lying at least one (and I suspect closer to two) standard deviations from the norm, here at the thin leading edge of the Bell curve. And because we are surrounded by others like us, we start to lose sight of what the large bulge in the middle is doing. We chase technology with an obsession worth of sex starved teenagers. Every digital marketer I know has a smart phone. More than half the digital marketers I know have iPhones. If you travel in the same circles as I, you would soon think that everyone has an iPhone. Yet the iPhone market share in the US is  still only 11% (although it’s growing quickly). Like I said, we live on thin edge of the curve.

I think this skewed view of the world makes us exactly the wrong people to be planning digital marketing strategies aimed at the general public. We live in a cult of technology. We’ve forgotten how the common person lives with their hopelessly antiquated mobile phone and without a Linked In profile that includes at least 500 connections. There are many, many people out there who have never Tweeted, don’t have a blog and are unsure what RSS means. They include almost all my relatives. Yet we never seem to take them into account where we’re salivating over the latest strategy for generating buzz on social networks.

So, how does a digital marketer keep their perspective when they’re so far removed from normality? They have to become digital anthropologists. They have to live with their prospects, watching them in their daily routines. They have to discover the way we were meant to discover, by watching other people, helping us to understand and empathasize with them. Evolution has equipped us with some very subtle tools for understanding other people when we’re face-to-face with them. To my knowledge, however, it hasn’t given us an inherent ability to generate pivot tables in Excel. Maybe we should spend more time doing what we were meant to do: hang around with real humans instead of technology.

The Persuasive Power of Face to Face

First published April 30, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Think of the most persuasive person you know. The salesperson you can’t say no to, your mother (guilt always works), your spouse or your six-year-old child.  Now, imagine if you had never met the person in person and they were trying to persuade you over the phone, or by email. Would they be as persuasive? No. Persuasion just don’t work as well if you’re not face to face

Hardwired for Face to Face

Robert Cialdini wrote an entire book on the “Psychology of Persuasion.” He explains the hot buttons that get pushed, moving us toward doing something we might not otherwise have done. But if you look through all the persuasion buttons, one thing is true: they all work much better when you’re face to face.

Let’s take just one: reciprocity. Reciprocity, you scratching my back and me scratching yours, is a gut instinct for us. In fact, many of our treasured social institutions, including economic markets and the justice system, are based on our emotional connection to the concepts of reciprocity and fairness. Every single major faith has its own variation of the Golden Rule, which is reciprocity enshrined. But reciprocity is far more potent if the social conditions are set up in person. Political scientist Robert Putnam calls this “thick trust” as opposed to the “thin trust” represented by anonymous rules, law and mores. Study after study shows that even a simple act of giving makes the recipient feel indebted. Something as basic as asking how someone’s day is going makes one feel indebted and more likely to give something back. It’s one of the most powerful persuasion buttons you can push.

Another inherent human trait is empathy. We have an amazing ability to pick up on the emotions of others. We have a special type of neuron, called mirror neurons, that seem to be the seat of empathy. Mirror neurons explain why emotions can be contagious, why monkeys that see tend to be monkeys that do — and why, when you’re talking with someone, you find yourself subconsciously mimicking their actions or even their accent. Mirror neurons aren’t found in every animal. So far, they’ve been discovered in just a few primates, including us humans. Mirror neurons may be why the more you like someone, the more empathetic you are, leaving you more open to persuasion

What This Means for Selling Online

Somewhere along the line, face-to-face contact seemed to be considered superfluous in our new online world. We moved to virtual sales, commerce transacted at a distance, electronically, with nary a handshake, a wink, a smile or an eye roll to be seen. In theory, it should work, but in practice, it leaves a lot to be desired. We were not designed to communicate electronically. We can and do adapt to it, but like any instrument designed for a specific purpose, things just work better when we do what we were made to do. And we were made to connect with others in person.

We’re in the middle of an extensive research project exploring B2B buying and decision-making, and this lack of human contact in online sales strategies proved to be a huge obstacle to success. B2B buying is all about building trust and eliminating risk. It’s pretty difficult to build trust with someone you’ve never met. That’s not to say that electronic communication isn’t effective, but the social foundations have to be built in person. Research has shown that on Facebook, the vast majority of close “friends” that people keep are all people they know and have met face to face. You can find ideological common ground with someone over the Net, but the bonding happens when you can look in their eye and read their body language.

Face to Face in Florida

This is particularly timely with the Search Insider Summit coming up next week. I’ve found in my 13 years in this industry that my enduring friendships are always forged face to face. I knew of David Berkowitz or Aaron Goldman prior to meeting them, even admired their points of view, but I didn’t create a relationship with them until we spent some time together at a Summit. Many of the industry relationships that remain important to me were first forged at an event. Many of the most positive comments we consistently hear from the Summits are about the opportunities provided to bond and network.

Last week, I said one of the most important things we as search marketers could do was to focus on what happens after the click and improve the onsite experience. This week, I add to that. Also remember that trust is built face to face. Look at online as a way to extend and leverage those face to face encounters, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking a cold mouse is a substitute for a warm handshake.

Looking for the Future? Look for Chaos, not Stability

First published March 19, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week, someone asked me about sustainable business models in the Internet.  Earlier the same day, another person asked me about defensible models. Both questions left me perplexed. I wasn’t trying to avoid them. I just didn’t know how to answer. So, some 48 hours later, I offer this column as a somewhat belated response. It isn’t an answer, as I’m still just as perplexed. But now at least I know why.

So why are people asking about defensible and sustainable business models on the Internet? Well, if there’s one thing the Internet has done, it’s brought sky-high valuations back to earth. So, investors doing what investors do, they’re suddenly looking for “bargain” companies that have mature business models and trial-tested management.  Hence the quest for sustainability and defensibility. Reasonable, right? It certainly makes sense if you’re going shopping for a private equity fund. But in the last two days, I’ve decided it’s almost exactly the wrong question to ask. It’s like looking for dry ground in a tsunami: it may give you some temporary peace of mind, but don’t count on it to last long.

The Quarter Century Electric Switch

Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Big Switch,”  ties the development of the Internet to a previous discontinuous innovation, the electrification of America. In it, he provides a fascinating recount of the unsung visionary who laid the foundations of the power grid we take for granted today, Samuel Insull.  Insull started as Thomas Edison’s clerk, but soon split with his mentor in his vision of the future of electricity. Edison, for all his brilliance, was thinking too small. He was concentrated on building individual DC generators for industrial applications. Insull saw the promise of a ubiquitous power supply, centrally generated and then distributed. It is Insull, not Edison, who is responsible for the power receptacle that probably sits no more than 10 feet away from you right now.

In the very earliest days of electricity, one would have been a fool not to choose Edison as the forerunner, the candidate most likely to carve a business out of the new frontier. His innovations harnessed electricity and made it usable.

But if you had bet on Edison to provide a sustainable model, you would have lost. It was Tesla’s AC standard, not Edison’s DC, that proved to be the one adopted. And it was Insull’s vision of electricity as a utility that changed our world.

The idea was simply too big for one man. And it was bringing all the implications of that idea together that proved to be the true agent of change. It launched a shift in American (and global) lifestyles that Edison never envisioned.  But from the initial stages in the final years of the 19th century, that shift took three decades to be fully realized. It took the building of new infrastructure, the development of new industries and the adoption of certain ways of doing things. It took thousands of visionaries, not one, to realize the significance of harnessing electricity.  Imagine then the impossible task of finding a defensible, sustainable business model for electricity in 1895. In hindsight, it’s clearly laughable to even attempt such a thing. But today, we’re trying to do exactly that with the Internet.

Fragmented Functionality

There is one big difference between the Internet and electricity. An electrical appliance is an electrical appliance. Its functionality is usually independent. A blender doesn’t become more useful if you also plug in a toaster. But the Internet lives on mashups and APIs. Apps can become exponentially more powerful if they plug into other apps.

Today, the Internet is a fragmented place. Functionality lies across the grid in a million different shards and chunks. Some of these are larger than others. Search is a particularly large one. And today, we’re just beginning to explore how all this functionality can come together.  The infrastructure has been laid. The grid has been built. Now it’s time to start plugging in apps and see how they can work together. If you think the last decade brought discontinuous change, wait til you see what the next decade has in store. We’re just getting ready to take the Net for a spin and see what it can do.

I’ve come to realize that there’s no such thing as revolutionary change. It only appears so when you look at it in a historical perspective. Instead, there  are tipping points of incremental change. Every supposedly revolutionary development was built on the back of hundreds of other developments. Cumulatively, they indeed change everything, but each development could never have happened without its supporting cast. It wasn’t Edison’s development of the incandescent light bulb that lit up America. It was a thousand developments, by Faraday, Golvani, Ohm, Volta and many others. Each one pushed us closer to the tipping point. When we reach it, we step forward, never to look back.

Back to the Original Question

To return to the beginning: What is a sustainable, defensible business strategy online? I have no idea. I don’t think such a thing exists. For all the excitement, for all the promise, there are no sure bets. The two concepts are incompatible. You’ll have to pay your money and take your chances. To cause investors even more discomfort, almost all innovation comes from small start-ups. They far outpace the level of innovation coming out of corporate America. So if you’re looking to capitalize on the growth of the Internet, don’t look for stability. It’s the wrong place to look.

Brand Religion: A Reading from the Book of Skittles

First published March 5, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There’s something about Tuesdays. Just when I’m starting to think about what my Thursday column is going to be about, something hits my inbox that seems freakishly timely. This time, it was David Berkowitz’s ode to Skittles.com. My intention was to write about brand religions playing out online, and here, in all its gory, real-time splendor, was a parable made to order. It would be unseemly, not to mention unfaithful, not to read the signs from above and pick up this story thread so graciously thrown in front of me.

Now, let’s get the Skittle Scuttlebutt out of the way, as more has transpired since the last time David spoke. As David said, Skittles.com is no longer a site, but a Flash navigation bar that hovers over live feeds from other Skittles-oriented online destinations. Originally, the home page was a live Twitter Feed, but the ignoble masses had the temerity to use the Skittles name in vain, so that idea was scuttled and the TweetFest was moved back to a section called “Chatter.” Now the home page is a feed of the Wikipedia entry (which has been updated to include the story, so it’s like a never-ending feedback loop). You can also visit the brand’s Facebook “Friends” page. There are some massive usability issues, but that aside, nobody can scoff at Skittles for a lack of courage.  It remains to be seen how successful this is, but the fact is, almost 600,000 fans have signed up on Facebook, and the brand has generated huge buzz.
So, what is a parable for, if not to learn from? And here are 10 commandments for every brand who fancies themselves a religion, if they have the courage to go where Skittles has gone:

1.    Thou Shalt Not Expect Everyone to Believe. As was shown in the Skittles case, if you choose to live by the Social Media Sword, understand you can also die by the Social Media Sword. Opening up the conversation to your believers also means you open the doors to the non-faithful, who will take every opportunity to express themselves.

2.    Thou Shalt Not Build Your Own Churches. Believers like to build their own churches and not have the brand build it for them. This is almost never successful. Skittles is trying to find middle ground by using their site as a shortcut to a few online destinations that help define the online image of Skittles. It’s an interesting move, but I believe it will ultimately be a short-lived one. For one thing, it’s confusing as hell.

3.    Thou Shalt Have No Illusions of Control. If a brand goes down this path, they have to accept (everyone, repeat after me — and that means you, Mr/Ms CEO) that by opening the door to the masses, they abdicate all control. If Skittles.com turns sour, all Skittles can do is pull the plug on their official endorsement. The buzz will outlive the campaign and take on a life of its own.

4.    Thou Shalt Understand the Web is a Fragmented Place. What is interesting about the Skittles experiment is that it’s a tentative acknowledgement that the sum total of a brand lives in many places online. The idea of defining the boundary within one Web site is long dead.

5.    Thou Shalt Honor Thy Product. You have to have a pretty damn popular product to take this step. There’s probably nothing more innocuous than Skittles (who could hate a little fruit candy?) and yet some still managed to spout bile all over this little social media stunt. The more beloved the product (and the company behind it), the more secure you can be in letting your fans be your spokesperson.

6.    Thou Shalt Accept What One is Given. If your brand builds a devout following, your customers will take it upon themselves to generously share more than you ever expected about what the brand is, what it isn’t and what it should be. You have opened up more than a dialogue; you have embarked on a weird and wonderful partnership with your customers. Embrace this or lose it. Consider the story of Timberland, who had no idea that they’d become the chosen footwear of hip-hop. At first they disbelieved it, then they ignored it, then they fought it — and finally, they embraced it. Today, you can customize your Timberlands in pink and purple with your own monogrammed tag and customized embroidery: a fully pimped pump.

7.    Thou Shalt Know Thy Flock. If you’re going to intersect your faithful where they live, you have to know something about them. David wondered if Twitter was really the best social media choice for the Skittles target market. If your brand has already established online places of worship, spend some time in stealth mode and get the lay of the land before you go public.

8.    Thou Shalt Listen. Online gives you thousands of listening posts to get the pulse of your brand. One example I saw this week: the iPhone app Dial Zero. It’s a nifty little assistant that gives you tips to avoid the dreaded voicemail dead zones for over 600 companies. A quick look up and you have tips to connect with an actual live person. But what’s even more interesting is that it shows real-time comments from people who’ve recently called.

9.    Thou Shalt Live Up to Your Flock’s Beliefs. With devotion comes responsibility. In return for their brand loyalty, they will hold you to a higher standard. They have emotionally invested in your brand, so if you disappoint them, it will leave a bigger scar than just a passing frustration. Hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.

10.    Thou Shalt Count Thy Blessings Every Day. Brand evangelism. Brand loyalty. The willingness to pay a premium. An unwavering devotion untouched by the millions in advertising spent by your competitors. A much lower cost of acquisition. And millions of pages of customer-generated content. All brands should be so lucky.

Can Brands Keep Their Promise in a Digital World?

First published February 26, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

To speculate on the future of brand advertising is certainly beyond the scope of this column, but I got myself into this mess. I opened the can of worms two weeks ago in the Search Insider by warning that we could be running the search funnel dry. Ryan DeShazer, from HSR, called me on it and asked me what will replace traditional brand building in our new digital environment. Last week, I began the journey by talking about two different types of brands: Brand Promises and Brand Religions. Today, I’d like to paint a hypothetical scenario of where awareness marketing might go for those brands  that are implicit promises. Next week I’ll tackle religions.

Timing is everything

One of the challenges of brand advertising has always been the disconnect between the times in our lives when we’re thinking about a product and the opportunity for a brand exposure. How do you deliver a brand message at just the right time?  The goal of situational targeting became advertising’s Holy Grail. A few channels, such as in-store promotions and well-placed coupons, at least got marketers closer to being in the right place at the right time, but did little to build brand at this critical time. A significant discount might prompt a consumer to try an unfamiliar brand, but the new brand was always fighting the well worn groove of consumer habits. Trying a new product once doesn’t guarantee you’ll ever try it again (reading list suggestion: “Habit, the 95% of Behavior that Marketers Ignore.” )

The disconnect between the purchasing situation and the need to establish brands mentally (literally burn them into our brains) meant marketers played both ends against the middle. They used TV and other branding mediums to build awareness. Then they used direct-response tactics to tip the balance toward purchase when the situation was right. But in between was a huge gap that has swallowed billions of advertising dollars. The challenge facing digital marketing is how to bridge the gap.

Don’t Take Our Word for It
The answer to bridging the gap for a brand that promises quality lies in a few converging areas: the online social graph and mobile computing. Both areas are in their infancy, but they hold the promise of solving the Brand Promise marketer’s dilemma.

If a brand is a promise of quality, we want to hear confirmation of that by someone other than the brand. A brand’s advertising might make us willing to consider them, but we want confirmation of the promise of quality from an objective third party. The Web has made it much easier to access the opinions of others. And, through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we are now able to “crowdsource” — reach out to our trusted circle of family, friends and acquaintances and quickly poll them for their opinions. But this is still a fragmented, multi-step process that requires a lot of time and cognitive effort on our part. What happens when we weave the pieces together into a smooth continuum?

Keeping Marketing in Hand
Mobile has the ability to do that, because it provides us with a constant online connection. Consider the implications. As we store more of our “LifeBits”  (check out Aaron Goldman’s columns  on this fascinating project) online and rely more and more on digital assistance to make our lives easier, the odds of determining our intent by  where we are and what we’re interacting with in our own “Web” improve dramatically. Our online persona becomes an accurate reflection of our mental one.  With mobile devices, our digital and physical locations merge and through technologies like MOBVIS, we can even parse our surrounding visually. All this combines to give the marketer very clear signals of what we might be thinking about at any given time.

Now, advertising can be delivered with pinpoint accuracy: think of it as behavioral targeting on steroids. Not only that, it can be the first step in a continuum: we get a targeted and relevant messaging, with the ability to seamlessly pull back objective reviews and opinions on any given product, location or service. Going one step further with just one click, we can reach out through multiple social networks to see if any of our circle of acquaintances has an opinion on the purchase we’re considering. If brands are a promise, this allows us to vet the promise instantly. If all checks out, we quickly check for best prices and possible alternatives within the geographic (or online) parameters we set.

In this scenario, the nature of brand-building for the brand promise product changes dramatically. We rely less on manufacturer’s messaging and more on how the brand resonates through the digital landscape. Brand preference becomes more of a spur-of-the-moment decision. Of course, the brands will still try to stake the high ground in our mental terrain through traditional awareness-building, but I suspect it will become increasingly more difficult to do so. Ultimately, brands will try to move their position from one of a promise of quality (a promise easily checked online) to a religion, where faith can play the spoiler.