Category Archives: Corporate Strategy

Feed Up with Feedback Requests

Sorry Google. I realize this is my last chance to tell you about my experience. But you see, you’re in a long line of companies that are also desperate for the juicy details of my various consumer escapades. Best Western, Ford, Kia, Home Depot, Apple, Samsung – my in box is completely clogged with pleas for the “dets” of my transactional interactions with them. I’ve never been more popular – or frustrated.

I appreciate the idea of customer follow up. I really do. But as company after company jumps on the customer feedback bandwagon, poor ordinary mortals like myself don’t have a hope in hell of keeping up. It could be a full time job just filling out surveys and rating every aspect of my life on a scale that runs from “abysmal” to “awesome” The irony is, these customer feedback requests are actually having the opposite effect. Even if my interactions with the brand are satisfactory, the incessant nagging to find out if I “like them, I really like them” are beginning to piss me off. In the quest to quantify brand affinity, these companies are actually eroding it. Ooops! Talk about unintended consequences.

So, if we accept the fact that knowing what our customers think about us is a good thing, and we also accept the fact that our customers have better things to do with their lives than fill out post-purchase surveys, we have to find a more elegant way to get the job done.

First of all, customer feedback should be part of a full customer relationship continuum. It should be just one customer touch point, not the customer touch point. You have to earn the credibility that gives you the right to ask for my feedback. Too many companies don’t worry about gauging satisfaction “in the moment.” If you don’t care enough to ask if I’m happy when I’m right in front of you, why should I believe that you’ll pay any attention to my survey. But too many companies jam this request for feedback on their customers without doing the spadework required to build a relationship first.

Worse, because compensation is increasingly being tied to feedback results, you get the “please say you’ll love me” pleading on the sales floor. See if this sounds familiar: “You’ll be receiving a survey from head office asking me how I’ve done. I don’t get a bonus unless you give me top marks in each category. So if there’s anything I can do better, please tell me now.” There are so many things that are just plain wrong with this that I don’t know where to start. It’s smarmy and disingenuous. It also puts the customer in a very awkward position. When it’s happened to me, I just murmur something like, “No, you’ve been great,” and run with all speed to the nearest exit.

The next thing we have to realize is that not all purchases are created equal. Remember the Risk/Reward matrix I talked about in last week’s column about how our brains process pricing information? While this applies to our motivational balance going into a purchase, it also provides some clues to the emotion landscape that exists post-purchase. If the purchase was in the low risk/low reward quadrant, like the home improvement supplies I picked up at Home Depot this weekend, it’s a task that has been crossed off my to-do list. It’s done. It’s over. The last thing I want to do is prolong that task by filling out a survey about said task. But, if it’s something that falls into the high risk/high reward quadrant, such as a major vacation, then I am probably more apt to invest some time to give you some feedback. The Rule of Thumb is: the higher the degree of risk or reward, the more likely I am to fill out a survey.

The final thing to remember about customer surveys is that you’re capturing extremes. The people who fill out surveys are usually the ones that either hate you or love you. So you get a very skewed perspective on how you’re doing. What you’re missing is the vast middle of your market that may not be sufficiently motivated to toss you either a brick or a bouquet.

I’m all for getting to know your customers better. But it has to be part of a total approach. It begins with simple things, like actually listening to them when you’re engaging with them.

How Our Brains Process Price Information

On-Off-Switch-For-Human-BrainWe have a complex psychological relationship with pricing. A new brain scanning study out of Harvard and Stanford starts to pick apart the dynamics of that relationship.

Uma R. Karmarkar, Baba Shiv, and Brian Knutson wanted to see how we evaluate a potential purchase when the price is the first piece of information we get as opposed to the last piece of information. They used both fMRI scanning and behavioral tracking to see how the study participants responded. Participants were given $40 dollars to spend and then were presented with a number of sample offers. In all cases, the price represented an attractive bargain on the product featured. But one group was given the price first, and the second group was given the price last.

There was another critical difference in the evaluation process as well. In the first phase of the study, participants were shown products that they would like to buy, and in the second phase, they were shown products that they would have to buy. The difference between the two was how they activated the reward center of our brain – the nucleus accumbens. I’ve been talking for years about the importance of understanding the balance of risk and reward in our purchase decisions. This study provides a little more understanding about how our brain processes those two factors.

In the first phase, participants were shown a variety of products that they would consider rewarding. These would fall into the first quadrant of the risk/reward matrix I introduced in my column from 5 years ago. The researchers were paying particular attention to two different parts of the brain – the nucleus accumbens and the medial prefrontal cortex. For a layman’s analogy, think of you and a five year old walking down the toy aisle in a department store. The nucleus accumbens is the five year old who starts chanting, “I want it. I want it. I want it.” The medial prefrontal cortex is the adult who decides if they’re actually going to buy it. In the study, the researchers found that the sequence in which these two parts of the brain “lit up” depended on whether or not you saw the price first. If you saw the product first, the nucleus accumbens started its chant – “I want it.” If you saw the price first, the prefrontal medial cortex kicked into action and started evaluating whether the offer represented a good bargain. In the case of the reward products, although the sequence varied, the actually purchase process didn’t. In most cases, participants still ended up making the purchase, whether price was presented first or last.

But things changed when the researchers tried a variety of products that fell into the second quadrant of the risk reward matrix – low risk and low reward. These are the everyday items we have to buy. In the study, they included things like a water filtration pitcher, a pack of AA batteries, a USB drive, and a flashlight. There was nothing here that was likely to get the nucleus accumbens starting to chant.

Now, it should be noted that this follow-up study did not include the fMRI scanning, but by tracking purchasing behaviors we can make some pretty educated guesses as to what’s happening in the respective brains of our participants. Here, presenting prices first resulted in a significant increase in actual purchases over instances when price was presented last. If price comes first, we can imagine that the prefrontal cortex is indicating that it’s a good bargain on a needed product. But if a relatively boring product is presented first for evaluation to the nucleus accumbens, there’s little to excite the reward center.

An important caveat to this part of the study comes with knowing that the prices presented represented significant savings on the products. After the simulated purchases, participants were asked to indicate a price they would be willing to pay for the product. When the price was the lead, the named prices tended to be a little lower, indicating that if you are going to lead with price, especially for quadrant two products, you’d better make sure you’re offering a true bargain.

If anything, this study provides further proof of the value of knowing a prospect’s mental landscape. What are the risk and reward factors that will be motivating them? Will the media prefrontal cortex or the nucleus accumbens be calling the shots? What priming effects might an early introduction of price introduce into the process?

When I wrote about the risk/reward matrix five years ago, one commenter said “a simple low-high risk/low-high reward graph is not very useful for driving just in time and location based offers, discounts, etc.” I respectfully disagree. While more sophisticated models are certainly possible, I think even a simple 2X2 matrix that helps map out the decision factors that are in play with purchases would be a significant step forward. And this isn’t about driving real time variations on offers. It’s about understanding the fundamentals of the buyer’s decision process. There’s nothing wrong with simplicity, especially if it drives greater usage.

The Coming Data Marketplace

The stakes are currently being placed in the ground. The next great commodity will be data and you can already sense the battle beginning the heat up.

Consumer data will be generated by connections. Those connections will fall into two categories: broad and deep. Both will generate data points that will become critical to businesses looking to augment their own internal data.

First, broad data is the domain of Google, Apple, Amazon, eBay and Facebook. Their play is it to stretch their online landscape as broadly as possible, generating thousands of new potential connections with the world at large. Google’s new “Buy” button is a perfect example of this. Adding to the reams of conversion data Google already collects, the “Buy” button means that Google will control even more transactional landscape. They’re packaging it with the promise of an improved mobile buying experience, but the truth is that purchases will be consummated on Google controlled territory, allowing them to harvest the rich data that will be generated from millions of individual transactions across every conceivable industry category. If Google can control a critical mass of connected touch points across the online landscape, they can get an end-to-end view of purchase behavior. The potential of that data is staggering.

In this market, data will be stripped of identity and aggregated to provide a macro but anonymous view of market behaviors. As the market evolves, we’ll be able to subscribe to data services that will provide real time views of emerging trends and broad market intelligence that can be sliced and diced in thousands of ways. Of course, Google (and their competitors) will have a free hand to use all this data to offer advertisers new ways to target ever more precisely.

This particular market is an online territory grab. It relies on a broad set of touch points with as many people across as many devices as possible. The more territory that is covered, the more comprehensive the data set.

The other data market will run deep. Consider the new health tracking devices like Fitbit, Garmin’s VivoActive and Apple’s iWatch. Focused purpose hardware and apps will rely on deep relationships with users. The more reliant you become on these devices, the more valuable the data collected will become. But this data comes with a caveat – unlike the broad data market, this data should not be striped of its identity. The value of the data comes from its connection with an individual. Therefore, that individual has to be an active participant in any potential data marketplaces. The data collector will act more as a data middleman – brokering matches between potential customers and vendors. If the customer agrees, they can choose to release the data to the vendor (or at least, a relevant subset of the data) in order to individualize the potential transaction.

As the data marketplace evolves, expect an extensive commercial eco-system to emerge. Soon, there will be a host of services that will take raw data and add value through interpretation, aggregation and filtering. Right now, the onus for data refinement falls on the company who is attempting to embrace Big Data marketing. As we move forward, expect an entire Big Data value chain to emerge. But it will all rely on players like Google, Amazon and Apple who have the front line access to the data itself. Just as natural resources provided the grist that drove the last industrial revolution, expect data to be the resource that fuels the next one.

An Eulogy for “Kathy” – The First Persona

My column last week on the death of the persona seemed to find a generally agreeable audience. But prior to tossing our cardboard cutouts of “Sally the Soccer Mom” in the trash bin, let’s just take a few minutes to remind ourselves why personas were created in the first place.

Alan Cooper – the father of usability personas – had no particular methodology in mind when he created “Kathy,” his first persona. Kathy was based on a real person that Cooper had talked to during his research for a new project management program. Cooper found himself with a few hours on his hands every day when his early 80’s computer chugged away, compiling the latest version of his program. He would use the time to walk around a golf course close to his office and run through the design in his head. One day, he engaged himself in an imaginary dialogue with “Kathy,” a potential customer who was requesting features based on her needs. Soon, he was deep in his internal discussion with Kathy. His first persona was a way to get away from the computer and cubicle and get into the skin of a customer.

There are a few points here that important to note. “Kathy” was based on input from a real person. The creation of “Kathy” had no particular goal, other than to give Cooper a way to imagine how a customer might use his program. It was a way to make the abstract real, and to imagine that reality through the eyes of another person. At the end we realize that the biggest goal of a persona is just that – to imagine the world through someone else’s eyes.

As we transition from personas to data modeling, it’s essential to keep that aspect alive. We have to learn how to live in someone else’s skin. We have to somehow take on the context of their world and be aware of their beliefs, biases and emotions. Until we do this, the holy grail of the “Market of One” is just more marketing hyperbole.

I think the persona started its long decline towards death when it transitioned from a usability tool to a marketing one. Personas were never intended to be a slide deck or a segmentation tool. They were just supposed to be a little mental trick to allow designers to become more empathetic – to slip out of their own reality and into that of a customer. But when marketers got their hands on personas, they do what marketers tend to do. They added the gloss and gutted the authenticity. At that moment, personas started to die.

So, for all the reasons I stated last week, I think personas should be allowed to slip away into oblivion. But if we do so, we have to find a way to understand the reality of our customers on a one to one basis. We have to find a better way to accomplish what personas were originally intended to do. We have to be more empathetic.

Because humans are humans, and not spreadsheets, I’m not sure we can get all the way there with data alone. Data analysis forces us to put on another set of lenses – ones that analyze – not empathize. Those lenses help us to see the “what” but not the “why.” It’s the view of the world that Alan Cooper would have had if he never left his cubicle to walk around the Old Del Monte golf course, waving his arms and carrying on his internal dialogue with “Kathy.” The way to empathize is to make connections with our customers – in the real world – where they live and play.  It’s using qualitative methods like ethnographic research to gain insights that can then be verified with data. Personas may be dead, but qualitative research is more important than ever.

The Persona is Dead, Long Live the Person

First, let me go on record as saying up to this point, I’ve been a fan of personas. In my past marketing and usability work, I used personas extensively as a tool. But I’m definitely aware that not everyone is equally enamored with personas. And I also understand why.

Personas, like any tool, can be used both correctly and incorrectly. When used correctly, they can help bridge the gap between the left brain and the right brain. They live in the middle ground between instinct and intellectualism. They provide a human face to raw data.

But it’s just this bridging quality that tends to lead to abuse. On the instinct side, personas are often used as a short cut to avoid quantitative rigor. Data driven people typically hate personas for this reason. Often, personas end up as fluffy documents and life sized cardboard cutouts with no real purpose. It seems like a sloppy way to run things.

On the intellectual side, because quant people distrust personas, they also leave themselves squarely on data side of the marketing divide. They can understand numbers – people not so much. This is where personas can shine. At their best, they give you a conceptual container with a human face to put data into. It provides a richer but less precise context that allows you to identify, understand and play out potential behaviors that data alone may not pinpoint.

As I said, because personas are intended as a bridging tool, they often remain stranded in no man’s land. To use them effectively, the practitioner should feel comfortable living in this gap between quant and qual. Too far one way or the other and it’s a pretty safe bet that personas will either be used incorrectly or be discarded entirely.

Because of this potential for abuse, maybe it’s time we threw personas in the trash bin. I suspect they may be doing more harm than good to the practice of marketing. Even at their best, personas were meant as a more empathetic tool to allow you to thing through interactions with a real live person in mind. But in order to make personas play nice with real data, you have to be very diligent about continually refining your personas based on that data. Personas were never intended to be placed on a shelf. But all too often, this is exactly what happens. Usually, personas are a poor and artificial proxy for real human behaviors. And this is why they typically do more harm than good.

The holy grail of marketing would be to somehow give real time data a human face. If we could find a way to bridge left brain logic and right brain empathy in real time to discover insights that were grounded in data but centered in the context of a real person’s behaviors, marketing would take a huge leap forward. The technology is getting tantalizingly close to this now. It’s certainly close enough that it’s preferable to the much abused persona. If – and this is a huge if – personas were used absolutely correctly they can still add value. But I suspect that too much effort is spent on personas that end up as documents on a shelf and pretty graphics. Perhaps that effort would be better spent trying to find the sweet spot between data and human insights.

Mad Men: 2065

So, Don Draper is now history. Well, actually, he’s always been history. He started and finished as a half-century look back at what advertising was. Part of the appeal of Mad Men was the anthropological quaintness of the whole thing – “Can you believe they used to do that?” We, smug in our political correctness, can watch an episode secure in the knowledge that the misogynistic, substance-abusive, racist world of Sterling Cooper and Partners is long gone. The world, and with it, advertising, have come a long way!

But, one wonders, what would happen if a similar premise was launched in 2065? What about advertising now would look similarly unacceptable to viewers then?

Draper’s world was the world of the creative spark igniting the big idea. It was the world of the catchy jingle and meme-worthy slogans. The Don Drapers of the world could do no wrong great enough to tarnish the glow of their ability to blow away a client in a pitch or snag a Clio. Creative gods stood firmly astride their kingdoms on Madison Avenue.

Now, of course, we know better. Those were simpler times. Clients, and consumers, are not nearly that naïve. Today, we demand quantitative data and testing to back up our creative inspirations. It’s not just about Big Ideas. Today, advertising is also about Big Data.

But, 50 years from now, will our current preoccupation with data look anachronistic or prescient to that future audience? Are we exhibiting some equally entertaining naiveté? Will the pendulum swing back to the big idea – or will some other alternative present itself? Will data profiling, targeting and programmatic buying look as quaint then as a corny jingle and a three-martini lunch look to us now?

Advertising in the era of Don Draper had gone through its own evolution. At the turn of the century, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, a flood of new products entered the market. Advertising’s first job was to make consumers aware of new offerings, opening new markets in the process. Its primary goal was to inform.

But, by the 50’s and 60’s, mass media had made consumers aware of most product categories. Advertising’s job became to persuade consumers to purchase products they already knew existed. Its primary goal was to persuade. Market share, rather than market expansion, became the end goal. Hence the era of the big idea. You don’t need a big idea to inform, but you do need one to persuade.

Today, however, with the expanding capabilities of technology and micro-manufacturing fueling a new revolution of innovation, we may be coming back to a time where awareness is the primary concern. Advertising’s job seems to be to navigate increasingly complex filters to create awareness in increasingly targeted audiences. The era of branding that found it’s legs in the era of Don Draper already seems to be morphing into something much different that what we’ve known previously. Who knows what that will look like in another 50 years?

The thing about history is that it gives you the intellectual distance required to recognize how silly we once were. The greater the distance, the safer we feel in laughing at ourselves. In the case of advertising, 50 years seems to be an adequate buffer to feel pretty smug with our historical hindsight. Of course, if somehow you could be transported back to 1965 and talk to the average creative director at a big agency, it’s doubtful they would appreciate being enlightened about their ignorance.

So, if we project that forward to today, it makes you wonder. What are the things we do now that our grandchildren will be laughing at in 50 years?

The Mother of All Disruption

Once again fellow Online Spin author Tom Goodwin has piqued my interest. He starts to unwrap a tremendously thorny problem in his column of last Thursday – Time to Think about Regulation for Disruption. Today, I’d like to take this question up one level – do we have to rethink government entirely?

Government is almost entirely a reactionary business. Even far sighted, historic documents such as the Constitution of the United States and the Magna Carta were reactions to the untenable circumstances that preceded them. And these are the exceptions. The vast majority of governing involves a highly bureaucratic and excruciatingly slow process that attempts to respond to emerging breaches in the unspoken code of fairness that our society tries to live by. Realistically, from the time the need for a new law is recognized to the time a bill is passed, months or even years can pass.

Months or years were, practically speaking, adequate in the world we once knew. But today, that is no longer the case. In that time, complex ecosystems can establish around the breach in question, and, as Tom points out, entire industries may have been decimated in the process. This is the reality of disruption.

In a world that seeks order and governance, this is a bad thing. But, now that we have unleashed the technological Kraken, is that a world we can reasonably expect? Slowly but surely we are dismantling every aspect of our hierarchical society and replacing it with a horizontal network. Hierarchies can’t work horizontally. Something has to give.

Disruptions are a characteristic of networked structures. In order for networks to work, each component of that network has to be given the freedom to act. If the action of an individual resonates with other parts of the network, the actions are picked up and amplified. Each individual act has the potential to become a disruption – with corresponding consequences. Everything becomes accelerated in a network.

Government is built on the ideological foundation of a hierarchy. The word “government” means “to steer.” The assumption is that our society is capable of being steered. This, in turn, assumes that our society all wants to go in the same direction. But if we enforce these restrictions on a network, networks cease to work. Yes, we quell the negative disruptions, but we also eliminate the positive ones.

The United States of America is one of the least restrictive societies on the planet. The founding fathers drafted their articles to enshrine that freedom. You (as a Canadian, I have to say “you”) have managed to balance the practical necessities of government with the lack of restrictions typical of a market economy. Markets naturally emerge from networks. Because the U.S. treasures freedom and innovation, it was inevitable that it would emerge as the testing ground for the impacts of technological advances. You are the canary in the coalmine of massive disruption.

Tom urges lawmakers to become more proactive. But historically speaking, that’s just not the way government works. It’s like riding a cow in the Kentucky Derby and wondering why you can’t keep up. I just don’t think that our current hierarchical system of government is up to the job. It’s a great system, with a ton of democratic checks and balances, but it was built for a different era – one built along vertical lines.

The final issue is one of enforcement. Even if laws are passed to deal with emerging disruptions, it’s becoming almost impossible to enforce them. If lawmakers are scrambling to keep up with society, law enforcers have capitulated entirely. We just can’t afford to enforce the laws we already have on the books.

So, if this is the problem, what is the answer? I think, perhaps, it lies in the very same properties of networks. Government and laws became necessary to avoid abuses of power. Power comes from hierarchies. As societies level out the old dictates of fairness become increasingly relevant. We all have universal concepts of fairness. Abuses of what we consider to be fair are generally dealt with quickly and effectively at the network level. Networks tend to police themselves, as long as there is a common understanding of what is acceptable and what is not. In short, we have to think of regulation in terms of market and network dynamics, not hierarchical governance.

I admit this is tough to wrap your head around. In a world of disruptions, this is the Mother of all Disruption. But symptomatically speaking, it appears that our historic notion of government is ailing. As frightening as it may be to contemplate, we should start thinking about what may replace it.

Deconstructing the Market of One

“So, what are you doing now?” My old college friend asked, right after he finished swearing at me because of my early retirement. He assumed I’d be doing something related to marketing.

“I’m starting a cycling tourism business.”

“A what…?”

“Cycling tours.”

“Do you know anything about cycling tours?”

“Not really.”

“Hmmm. Okay. Well, that’s good. It is good, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. We’ll see.”

Truth be told, I’m probably getting too much pleasure from these little flashes of cognitive dissonance that happen when I tell people about my current project. I like watching as they struggle to connect the dots. Maybe it’s because it gives me some comic relief from my own struggles to connect the dots. But I’m beginning to suspect there may by a silver lining in my ignorance. Because I know so little about this business, I’m also taking a different approach to the one aspect I should know something about – the marketing of it.

Connected People in NetworkI could have jumped in and started lining up search campaigns, digging into social media targeting and setting up email campaigns. But instead, I took a step back and looked at the most successful cycling tourism operation I know – the Hotel Belvedere in Riccione, Italy. It’s become a mecca for road cyclists. This year, TripAdvisor rated it as one of the top 20 hotels in the world, based on the rave reviews of it’s cycling clientele. If you’re a road cyclist, chances are pretty good that you’ve heard of the Hotel Belvedere. And if you have heard of it, chances are extremely good that you heard about it from a friend who also cycles. The Belvedere has built its substantial business largely on word of mouth.

We all know word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising. But why is it so effective? We typically assume it’s because the message is coming from an objective source that we trust. But I suspect there’s more to it than that. I think it’s because word of mouth is almost always delivered from one person to another. Word of mouth is messaging to a market of one.

There are some fundamental aspects of this that bear closer examination. Word of mouth usually occurs between friends, or, at the least, acquaintances. That means both parties have at least a passing understanding of each other. They know of common interests and personal likes and dislikes. This allows the message to be tailored for optimal reception. The most effective points of persuasion can be embellished and the least effective ones can be skimmed over. Messages are pre-filtered based on an implicit understanding of the audience.

Secondly, word of mouth advertising is based on a two-way conversation. The message evolves according to that conversation. Questions can be asked. Areas of interest can be explored more deeply. Concerns can be addressed. And, all along the way, both parties learn more about what a future engagement between the prospect and the product in question would look like.

I suspect the power of Word of Mouth comes not just in the objectivity of the sender of the message, but also in the medium in which the message is delivered (thank you Mr. McLuhan). And, if this is the case, then we should see how the strengths of that medium could be extended to other marketing efforts. We should deconstruct the advantages of targeting a Market of One.

The biggest hurdle seems to be the lack of mass normally associated with marketing. In my case, I’m actually planning for a slower approach to marketing, building allowances into the business plan for a marketing plan based on building engagements one at a time. If you’ve ever read Eric Ries’s excellent book, The Lean Start Up, you already know such things are possible. The advantage of the Market of One approach is that each encounter also provides invaluable market feedback, allowing to you to continually evolve your offering. You focus on going deep, rather than going wide. Each encounter gives you the opportunity to create a friendship.

The Messy Part of Marketing

messymarketingMarketing is hard. It’s hard because marketing reflects real life. And real life is hard. But here’s the thing – it’s just going to get harder. It’s messy and squishy and filled with nasty little organic things like emotions and human beings.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been filing things away as possible topics for this column. For instance, I’ve got a pretty big file of contradicting research on what works in B2B marketing. Videos work. They don’t work. Referrals are the bomb. No, it’s content. Okay, maybe it’s both. Hmmm..pretty sure it’s not Facebook though.

The integration of marketing technology was another promising avenue. Companies are struggling with data. They’re drowning in data. They have no idea what to do with all the data that’s pouring in from smart watches and smart phones and smart bracelets and smart bangles and smart suppositories and – okay, maybe not suppositories, but that’s just because no one thought of it till I just mentioned it.

Then there’s the new Google tool that predicts the path to purchase. That sounds pretty cool. Marketers love things that predict things. That would make life easier. But life isn’t easy. So marketing isn’t easy. Marketing is all about trying to decipher the mangled mess of living just long enough to shoehorn in a message that maybe, just maybe that will catch the right person at the right time. And that mangled mess is just getting messier.

Personally, the thing that attracted me to marketing was its messiness. I love organic, gritty problems with no clear-cut solutions. Scientists call these ill-defined problems. And that’s why marketing is hard. It’s an ill-defined problem. It defies programmatic solutions. You can’t write an algorithm that will spit out perfect marketing. You can attack little slivers of marketing that lend themselves to clearer solutions, which is why you have the current explosion of ad-tech tools. But the challenge is trying to bring all these solutions together into some type of cohesive package that actually helps you relate to a living, breathing human.

One of the things that has always amazed me is how blissfully ignorant most marketers are about concepts that I think should be fundamental to understanding customer behaviors: things like bounded rationality, cognitive biases, decision theory and sense-making. Mention any of these things in a conference room full of marketers and watch eyes glaze over as fingers nervously thumb through the conference program, looking for any session that has “Top Ten” or “Surefire” in it’s title.

Take Information Foraging Theory, for instance. Anytime I speak about a topic that touches on how humans find information (which is almost always), I ask my audience of marketers if they’ve ever heard of I.F.T. Generally, not one hand goes up. Sometimes I think Jakob Nielsen and I are the only two people in the world that recognize I.F.T. for what it is: “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993.” (Jakob’s words). If you take the time to understand this one concept I promise it will fundamentally and forever change how you look at web design, search marketing, creative and ad placement. Web marketers should be building a shrine to Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card. Their names should be on the tips of every marketer’s tongue. But I venture to guess that most of you reading this column never heard of them until today.

None of these fundamental concepts about human behavior are easy to grasp. Like all great ideas, they are simple to state but difficult to understand. They cover a lot of territory – much of it ill defined. I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to spread awareness of things like Information Foraging Theory. Can I always predict human behavior? Not by a long shot. But I hope that by taking the time to learn more about the classic theories of how we humans tick, I have also learned a little more about marketing. It’s not easy. It’s not perfect. It’s a lot like being human. But I’ve always believed that to be an effective marketer, you first need to understand humans.

Are We Guilty of “Numbed” Marketing?

BombsightA few years ago, I was moderating a panel on mobile advertising. The room was full of marketers. After much discussion about targeting and the ability to track consumers both geographically and behaviorally, one audience member lamented, “Why don’t the carriers just share the subscriber information? They know who they are. They know addresses, family status, credit history, demographics – they have all that information. Then we could really pinpoint our market.”

I had to jump in. I asked this room full of marketers to indicate who would like to have access to that information by raising their hand. The entire room answered in the affirmative. Then I added a twist…

“Okay. Everyone in this room has a mobile phone. Who, as subscribers, would want your carrier sharing that information with anyone who wanted to target you? Keep your hands up.”

Hands wavered. You could almost hear the switch clicking in their brains. Every hand slowly went down.

That story came to mind last week when I read the following passage in a book by Arthur J. Dyck called “Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities: The Moral Bonds of Community,”

“In his study, (Robert Jay) Lifton takes note of a phenomenon he calls “numbed warfare,” a mode of combat in which participants have psychological contacts only with their military cohorts and their own equipment…. Lifton describes research that found a striking correlation between altitude and potential for guilt:

‘B-52 pilots and crews bombing at high altitudes saw nothing of their victims and spoke exclusively of professional skill and performance…’

Lifton calls these B-52 pilots “numbed warriors.” What have been numbed are their empathic emotions: ‘lacking emotional relations with his victims, the numbed warrior receives from them very little of the kind of feedback that could permit at least one layer of his mind to perceive them as human.’”

That may seem like a horrific parallel to draw with marketing, but the similarities are striking. One of the ways warriors have always desensitized themselves is by thinking of the enemy in non-human terms, either as a faceless, monolithic group, or by assigning a dehumanizing (and usually derogatory) label to them. We marketers have been doing this for years. What is more dehumanizing than taking a thinking, feeling person and calling them a “consumer?” Someone once described consumers as “mindless wallets eating shit and crapping cash.”

Warriors have to clearly delineate the concepts of “us” and “them” in order to do what they have to do. But as my room full of marketers realized, when it comes to marketing – “them” is “us.” In a recent PEW study, 80% of social network users were worried that their data would be accessed by advertisers. That means 4 out of 5 people don’t trust you, Ms. or Mr. Marker. They’d rather you didn’t know who they were. If you knocked on their door, they wouldn’t answer. Maybe it’s because you keep calling them a consumer or a target market. I’m also betting that if you were asked that question, you’d answer the same way. Because even though you’re a marketer, you don’t trust other marketers.

In a recent interview, I was asked what one piece of advice I would pass on to other marketers. I said, “Be an empathic marketer.” Or, in plainer terms, don’t numb yourself to your market. I’m not alone in saying we can be better. Fellow Spinner Cory Treffileti talked about the importance of emotion in ad messages. And Katie Meier recently asked the question, “What if data wasn’t about numbers, but instead we made it about the people the numbers represent?”

Technology has put us at a crossroads. We could use it to further distance and dehumanize our market, turning real people into digital data points. We could become “high-altitude” marketers, never coming face to face with the humans we’re trying to connect with.

Or, we could use it to create, as my friend Scott Brinker likes to say, “markets of one.” But before we do that, we have to make them want to listen to us. They have to answer their door if we knock. And that will take some work. We have to start treating them the way we want to be treated, when we’re not wearing our “marketing” hats.