Category Archives: Corporate Strategy

Think You’re Strategic? Think Again.

First published April 17, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s one of the banes of this industry that we often use the words “strategies” and “tactics” interchangeably. Conferences that fly the strategy banner offer a deep dive into multiple tactical tracks. Sessions that promise cutting edge strategies in fact deliver tactics. Now, I have nothing against tactics. The right tactic can be a beautiful thing, when it’s used to execute on a strategy. But they’re not the same thing.

The Dingoes Ate My Strategy

I went off on this topic at the recent SMX in Sydney. I was asked to present at a session that offered out-of-the-box PPC tactics. I hijacked the session and said that it’s hard to know what out-of-the-box is until you’ve defined the box. Strategy defines the box. If you’re building a house, strategy is the blueprint; tactics are the tools you use to put the house together. Apparently I scared a few Aussies by my impassioned plea not to confuse the two.

The reason for my rant? Because all too often in search we get enamored with a brand new tool and forget to look at the blueprint. This is not a new message for me. Check the byline blurb at the bottom of this column. It’s been the same message since I started writing this column, almost 4 years ago now.

I don’t think anyone disagrees with me that strategy is a good thing. But why does our focus so often slip from the strategic to the tactical? Why do we keep losing sight of the forest for the trees? Rick Tobin, our director of research, came up with one possible reason. Tactics are easy to own and even easier to delegate. They’re a “tick off” item on our to-do list. Strategy requires more thought. It’s a lot slipperier to get hold off.

The First Step is Admitting You Might be Making a Mistake

I tend to take a strategic slant when I present at conferences and shows. And because of that, I think I ask more from my audience. I’m asking them to question what it is they might be doing right now, because it might be the wrong thing. Strategy demands that you ask tough questions of yourself. It challenges your beliefs. And that’s a hard thing to ask of humans. We’re wired to ignore anything that might cause us to change our mind.

I know firsthand how tough it can be to keep focused on your strategy and to execute effectively against it. It’s a constant challenge in my company, and the same is true for every company I know that values strategy. You have to think your way through this stuff. You can’t do it on autopilot.

Tactical Mastery or Strategic Stumbling

It’s a lot easier to focus on a tactic. We like to master things, and you can do this at a tactical level. You can be a great link builder, or PPC manager. You can become the wizard of analytics, or the master multivariate tester. And these are the things you’ll find on the typical search conference agenda. I think it would scare the hell out of most attendees to go to a session titled “Strategic Soul Searching: Are All Your Marketing Efforts in Vain?” To be fair to the show organizers, most attendees come looking for tactics. Almost no one comes looking for strategy. They may think they’re looking for strategy, but they’ve mixed up the terms.

Books like “Good to Great” and “Built to Last,” as well as almost anything by Peter Drucker or Tom Peters, ask you to look at things from a strategic vantage point. Even Covey’s “The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People” provides you with the strategic building blocks for a more effective personal life. In his books, Jim Collins warns that this is not a quick process. Companies can take a decade of dedicated persistent effort to really discover their soul and define their strategic direction. You can pick up a tactic in a 15-minute presentation, but a strategy takes a lot more time.

The Strategic Common Denominator

Personally, I’ve felt that by providing glimpses into user behavior, I can help provide a lens to help see things from the outside in, an essential perspective for strategic evaluation. Part of any strategy in marketing always depends on gaining a deeper understanding of the common denominator, humans. The more years I add to my CV, the more I realize we need to spend some time understanding the weird quirks and traits that make us all too imperfectly and irrationally human. And it’s from that understanding that your strategy will eventually spring forth.

To wrap up for this week, I leave you with a quote from Sun Tzu, the military strategist:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

He Who Hesitates is Forgotten

It took Charles Darwin over 20 years to go public with his theory on evolution. His voyages on the HMS Beagle that lead him to his Theory of Natural Selection were over a five year period from 1831 to 1836. But it wasn’t until 1859 that his On the Origin of Species was finally published.

Did it take a quarter century for Darwin to finalize the theory? Well, yes and no. The theory was largely defined much earlier, but there were a few vexing exceptions to the elegant concept that Darwin wanted to explain to his own satisfaction first. So he continued to pick away at the theory, and often put the work on the shelf for long periods of time, while he worked on other areas, including a rather intensive study of barnacles, or dealt with his recurring health issues.

But further insight is gained when one examines Darwin’s character and the social environment he was in. Darwin was cursed with an extremely developed habit of self deprecation. He constantly questioned his own intellect and status in scientific circles. So, given that the theory he was working on was so potentially controversial, especially in tight laced Victorian England, it was natural (pun fully intentional) that Darwin would fret over its release. He carefully pondered the religious implications.

What made Darwin finally publish? In came down to a race with another biologist, Alfred Wallace, who was also pursuing ideas that were similar, or identical in many cases, to Darwin’s long developing theory. Ironically, Wallace choose Darwin as a channel to forward some of his thoughts to a common friend, and Darwin, upon reading Wallace’s notes and realizing that 20 plus years of work could be for naught, quickly took a much larger manuscript he had been working on and pared it down to a publishable abstract. Darwin published first. And that made the difference. Chances are, you never heard of Alfred Wallace before this blog post.

The point of this is that the speed of society in Victorian England was much slower than it is today. Publishing can be instantaneous. The need to do something, anything, is greater than ever. If you have something important to say, say it. Don’t worry too much about being wrong. There has been an explosion of scientific discovery in many areas in the last few decades, including many areas of psychology and neorology. Some of this acceleration is due to new diagnostic technologies, but I believe a large part of it is due to the compressed timelines of publication. We’re putting ideas out there faster than ever, and peer review as well as public review is happening quickly and organically. Darwin’s own environment of natural selection has taken an online bent in the form of idealogical evolution.

What this means, in the words of my friend Mike Moran, is that you have to “Do It Wrong Quickly“. You have to be prepared to go out on a limb, take chances and be willing to be shot down. But, on the other hand, you just might come up with the next Google, Facebook or Theory of Natural Selection. Ironically, it’s a world that Charles Darwin probably wouldn’t function very well in.

You Just Had to Open Your Mouth, Didn’t You?

You might remember a post I did a while back, talking about an experience I had with Alaska Airlines and using it as an example of how to deal with angry customers.

Well, let me tell you what the fall out of the episode was. It’s an interesting example of the power of the web.

A week or so after, I had a call from Ray Prentice, the VP of Customer Service at Alaska. It took us awhile to connect, but when we did, we had a great discussion and almost none of it touched on that specific experience. Alaska’s regular customer service procedure had rectified the situation to my satisfaction by then and I told Ray that.

Rather, we had a discussion about customer service in general, including many of the points touched on in that blog post. Ray had read the post after someone had forwarded him the link. Then, Ray asked me if I wanted to serve on Alaska’s Customer Advisory Panel. After shooting off my mouth, how could I refuse? Besides, I really do like the airline and would love to help them become an even better airline.

The question is, would that have happened without the Internet? I think not.

Marketers Fall Victim to our own Disease: Spoon Sized Wisdom

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

How did I get 6 months behind? Good question.

A Diversion of Attention

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

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

The In Box Shuffle

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

Deep Thinkers

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

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

Don’t Spoil Your Supper

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

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

Stop Consuming and Start Thinking

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

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

“What” is a Lot Easier to Ask than “Why”

In the last couple of sessions I’ve done, I’ve urged marketers in general, and search marketers in particular, to step away from the spreadsheet a little more often and start looking at why their customers do what they do. In Park City last week, at the Search Insider Summit, I urged those collected in the room to “spend less time thinking like marketers, and more time thinking like your customer”.

Do Unto Customers as You Would Have Done Unto You

There was a moment that crystallized the issue for me. The session was talking about mobile search, and one person in the room asked the presenter when the mobile carriers would make subscriber information available to marketers for better targeting. For me, this sent off all types of alarms, but in looking around the room, I could see marketing heads nodding in agreement. “Yes,” they nodded, “that information would make our jobs so much easier. We could zero in on exactly the right segment, so we could deliver ads targeted right to them.”

I couldn’t hold back anymore. Commandeering the mic, I asked how many in the room thought this would be a good marketing idea. Many hands went up. Then I asked them, as mobile users, who thought this would be a good idea. You could feel the paradigm shift sweep across the room. They chuckled uncomfortably as they realized they would be inundanted with more disruptive, annoying advertising. Suddenly, the shoe was on the other foot, and it didn’t fit very well.

Too Much What, Not Enough Why

As marketers, we spend long hours puzzling over the what questions:

  • What channels reach my customers most effectively
  • What messages will convert the best
  • What will give me the highest return on advertising spend?
  • What landing pages will yield the highest conversion rates

We crunch truckloads of data, because it’s available. You’ve heard it over and over. One of the blessings of search is that it’s so measurable. Yes, it is measurable, if you’re looking for the answers to what. What link, what click through rate, what traffic source, what conversion action? It’s all laid out for us in a statistical smorgasbord, and search marketers love to dive in. We feast on KPI’s and Metrics, finally pushing away from the table like some over-sated visitor to an all you can eat Vegas buffet, stuffed beyond the point of comfort.

But in pouring through this data, we tend to become fixated on it and think the truth lies hidden in there somewhere. We don’t step back and wonder “why” all those “whats” are happening. I had a great chance to chat with James Lamberti from ComScore at the show, and we talked about this. There’s few sources of sheer quantitative data richer than the ComScore panel. And James and I have had the chance to talk about how Enquiro’s qualitative approach often dovetails nicely with ComScores “quant” perspective of the world. As James said, “the thing I love about your research is that it tells me why much of the stuff we see in our data is happening.” Amen.

Human Hardware

Here’s just one example. In a number of studies done both by ourselves and others (one Microsoft eye tracking study comes to mind) we found that users tend to move down the search page in groups of 3 or 4 listings at a time. This is the “what” that was happening. But it wasn’t until I started looking at concepts in cognitive psychology that were several decades old that I started to understand “why”. It’s because, like most things, it’s human nature. It’s what I’ve started calling a “human hardware” issue. Often, when you see a consistent behavior emerge for the “what” data, it means there’s a significant “why” to be uncovered in the workings of the human mind. In this case, it was rooted in the concepts of working memory and channel capacity, along with the behavior of satisficing, based on work done by George Miller and Herbert Simon over 50 years ago. And once we uncovered the “why”, it lead to a whole new understanding of search behavior.

In his book, “How Customers Think”, Gerald Zaltman talks about a company that did a conjoint analysis of three different package designs. Conjoint analysis is perhaps the perfect embodiment of “what” research; what combination of factors provides the greatest positive response from customers. It’s the basis for multivariate testing in the online world. At the end of the study, researchers were confident they had found the best possible design, but were puzzled when market acceptance was much less than forecast. It turns out that their conjoint analysis simply showed them the lesser of three evils. They failed to uncover the fundamental problems with the design, because they were focused on the “whats”, rather than the “whys”.

Look for the Whys in the Shadows

“Whys” are difficult to uncover. As I said in an earlier post, “whys” are often buried in our subconscious, emotional brain. “Whats” are right there, on the surface, easy to collect and combine in a zillion different ways.  In fact, in many research projects, when behaviors emerge that don’t fit into the hypothetical framework of the conductors, (when the “whats” we see are not the “whats” we expect to see) they are ignored because they’re labeled irrational. In many cases, they’re not irrational. They’re just not understood by the researchers, because the “why” has not been uncovered. As Zaltman says in his book, it’s like the story of the drunk looking for his lights under a streetlight. A passerby stops to help and asks the drunk where he lost his glasses. He points to a far off place in the darkness. The passerby asks why he’s not looking there. The drunk replies, “because the lights so much better here”.

Quantitative data is incredibly valuable. It can provide statistical confidence to see if behaviors are representative. And from the patterns that emerge, we can identify the “whys” we need to look at closer. But it should be part of a collective research approach, not the entire answer. “Whys” should lead to “whats”, which should lead back to more “whys”. It should be a self feeding cycle.

Trust Your Gut

And for the marketers reading this, to ensure yourself a long and successful run as a marketer, become an astute observer of human behavior. Learn to embrace emotions and gut instinct, both in your self and in anyone you meet. As you go through each day, spend as much time as possible wondering why people do what they do. Develop a finely tuned ability to look at things from your customer’s point of view, and if it doesn’t pass the gut check test, don’t do it. Our emotions and instincts are a finely tuned, essential part of our intellect. Trust them more often.

The Why’s of Buy: Soothing the Angry Customer

angerAnger is one of the less noble of human emotions. We tend to beat ourselves up when we get angry. After the emotion dies down, we feel a little foolish for losing control. As Ben Franklin said,

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.

However, Aristotle probably took a more realistic view of human nature when he said:

Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.

Here, Aristotle touches on the fact that anger is part of the basic human emotional repertoire for good reason. If we didn’t get angry, we wouldn’t still be here. But rationalizing anger in a positive way is a very rare ability.

Air Rage

I’ve had lots of opportunities to contemplate the nature of anger this week. In what was supposed to be a quick 24 hour trip down to Las Vegas (which has never been on my list of favorite cities) and back, I had two flights cancelled for mysterious reasons, was bumped from a first class seat back to a jammed couch cabin next to someone who apparently thought no one would ever notice if he passed gas constantly on a 2 hour flight, had to spend an unexpected night in a dumpy hotel in Seattle with a bunch of religiously fervent believers who were up til 1 am every night speaking in tongues (which apparently needs to be done at very high volume) and was away from my family for 14 hours longer than expected. Yes, I got a little hot under the collar.

How We Get Angry

Let’s go back to the basics. Why do we get angry? First, let’s understand that anger, along with fear and physical attraction, are probably our oldest hardwired emotions. They’re an embedded part of our neural circuitry that have been hundreds of millions of years in the making. Anger makes up one half of the fight or flight mechanism.

I say this to reinforce the fact that we cannot chose whether or not we can get angry. All we can do is chose what to do with that anger. At the subconscious level, you will pick up cues and the core of your brain, the brain stem working together with the amygdala in the limbic system, will determine if anger is the right response. Remember, this is not the highly refined neocortical part of your brain. This is the part of your brain that is a legacy from our dark evolutionary past. The decision to become angry is not a delicate, deliberate and rational decision. The decision to get angry is throwing an emergency switch. Its purpose is to get you ready for a fight, literally. It happens in a few milliseconds. The reptilian brain doesn’t believe there’s time for a debate about appropriate response, so there’s no rationalization of the situation at this point. What the amygdala does is an instantaneous shuffling through of past experience to see if we’ve encountered anything similar in the past. It’s like a flash card deck of emotionally charged memories. And if we find a match, even a rudimentary one, it’s good enough for the amygdala. We use that as our plan of action.  And the rule of thumb is, the amygdala overreacts. Survival is the objective, so it calls in the big guns.

The amygdala sends out a signal that starts priming the body for a fight. A potent cocktail of chemicals are released, including adrenalin, to kick the body into gear. Blood pressure climbs, the heart starts beating faster, sending more blood to the large muscle groups to get them ready for action. Another chemical, norepineephrine, is also released. The purpose of this is to set the brain on edge, making it more alert for visual cues of danger. More about this in a bit.

Basically, our bodies operate of the premise of “shoot first, ask questions later”. This priming the body for fight happens literally in the blink of an eye. The alarm has been sounded and anger has been unleashed. For right now, at least, the reptile in us is in full control.

But at this point, the things that make us human start to kick in. Another part of the brain, the hippocampus, is the contextual yin to the amygdala’s yang. It picks up the detail to help us put things in the right context. The amygdala tells us that we see a jaguar and jaguars can kill us. The hippocampus determines whether the jaguar is in a zoo, or leaping at us from a tree. This is the first place where our anger becomes to be contextualized. The hippocampus is the brain’s Sgt. Joe Friday: “The facts ma’am, just the facts”.

The next part of the process is where the rational part of our brains steps in and starts taking control. The signals that set the amygdala into action are then passed to the prefrontal lobes in the neocortex. Here is where the appropriate response is determined. A cascade of neural triggers is set off, determining how we should respond, given a more careful consideration of the facts. Remember, this isn’t to determine if we should get angry. That horse has already left the starting gate. This is to determine how aggressively we should override our initial reaction. The prefrontal lobes are our emotional brakes.

When it comes to the effectiveness of these brakes, all people are not created equal. Some have tremendously effective braking mechanisms. Nothing seems to perturb them. These would be the people who were smiling and joking at 10:30 at night in the Horizon Air customer service line at SeaTac airport, after we had found that none of us were getting home that night.

Some of us have much less effective braking systems. In fact, in some of us, our amygdala’s and our prefrontal lobes seem the unfortunate habit of playing a game of one upmanship, escalating the anger to a point totally inappropriate for the situation. This would be the person who was storming from gate to gate, threatening the gate agents to put him on a flight that would get him somewhere closer to home.

When it comes to our braking systems, there’s a right/left balance mechanism. It’s the left prefrontal lobe that seems to be main governor on how angry we become. The right prefrontal lobe, on the other hand, is where we harbor our negative emotions, like fear and aggression. Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence, tells the story of the husband who lost part of his right prefrontal lobe in a brain surgery procedure, and, to the surprise of his wife, emerged as a totally different person, more considerate, more compassionate and more affectionate. Fellow husbands, let’s hope word of this surgical procedure doesn’t get out. We’ll all sleep more soundly.

Outdated Signals

Now, obviously, in today’s world, being threatened by a hungry jaguar is probably not that common an occurrence. The threats to us are more likely to be to our personal dignity, our sense of fairness or our self esteem. But at the limbic level, our brain doesn’t really make a distinction. Remember, this mechanism has been built by millions of years of evolution. The last few thousand years of civilization hasn’t made a dent in it. It’s at the neocortical level, the highly plastic and adaptable part of our brain, where we make these distinctions and by then, we’re already angry.

This is one reason why we can feel so sheepish after an emotional outburst. Basically, our amygdala got carried away, set us up in full fight mode, and the left prefrontal lobe was napping on the job. We responded at a level that was out of proportion to what was appropriate, and it wasn’t until we cooled down a little that we realized it. This is when our wife looks at us after we lose it with the service agent at the lost baggage counter and say, “why did you get so angry?” (the “idiot” that follows this statement is usually implied, but not always) And somehow, “I was ready to fight to the death to ensure our survival as a species” just doesn’t seem like the right thing to say.

Confrontation is from Mars, Plotting is from Venus

By the way, there are gender differences in how we handle anger. Men basically have one response. We’re ready to fight. Confrontation seems to be our sole card to play. Women, on the other hand, have shown a much more varied repertoire of possible responses. They can be passively aggressive, vindictive or vengeful. They can employ much more sophisticated responses like social ostracism. Or, on the positive side, women are more likely to show compassion. But the key differentiator here is that men tend to respond to anger with a physical response, where as women tend to respond socially, either positively or negatively.

This difference makes sense when you look at our typical roles throughout evolution. Men were the physical providers and protectors. Women were the homemakers and the souls of the community. Through our history, men have been conditioned to respond in one way, and women in another. Women are equipped for their role with more empathy, the ability to better read others emotions, and a slower fuse when it comes to anger. Men are equipped for their role with a faster temper trigger, larger muscles and, it seems, a much more predictable response to threatening situations. Now, in making gender generalizations, I’m being incredibly sweeping here, but in aggregate, studies have shown this to be true. Again, I’ll come back to these differences.

The Speed of Anger

The speed of response of the amygdala is a two way street. It’s quick to be activated, but it’s also quick to shut down. The purpose of it is to get us prepared for a single burst of physical activity. Once it does its job, it moves on to the next thing. The information has been passed to the prefrontal lobe for further processing and the amygdala settles down to wait for the next threat. Total time elapsed? A few seconds.

But it’s what happens once anger is passed to the prefrontal lobe that can dictate whether this is a quickly dosed irritation or a long simmering feud. Remember, we have this chain of neural decisions that represent a balancing act between the left and right lobes. It’s the literal equivalent of the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. And all this time, we’re scanning our environment, consciously and subconsciously, for further cues about whether we should continue to be angry or to cool down. This is where anger gets much more complex. Every person has a different balance between these governing forces, and every situation is different. How you’re handled during this critical window will determine which emotional imprints you retain. And remember, it’s this emotional memory that will be recalled the next time you’re in a similar situation. This experiential, emotionally charged imprinting is a huge part of how we create attitudes and affinities towards a brand.

Anger in the Marketplace

So, after this long anatomical examination of anger, what’s the point? Well, if you look at how and why we get angry, you start to gain some insight in how to deal with angry customers.

First of all, anger is inevitable in negative customer situations. As much as we’d like to avoid dealing with angry people, let’s accept that as a given. It’s not as if they chose to be angry, they just are. And the degree of anger will be different in each person. What needs to be done is to maximize the chances for the left prefrontal lobe to douse the anger.

By the time you have your first contact with an angry customer, the amygdala has done its job and passed the ball to the prefrontal lobes. The alarm has been raised. Remember, the cause of anger in a customer is almost never going to be physical threat, unless you run the store from hell. Most often, the injury done will be to the customers self esteem, dignity or sense of fairness. And when the customer is in front of you, they’re looking to you to see if you represent a continued threat, or an ally. This will be conveyed through words, but to a much greater extent, through your body language and tone of your voice. The first few seconds of interaction with the customer will determine whether the right or left prefrontal lobe kicks in. If you’re perceived as a continuing threat, you’ll be dealing with the right lobe, and an escalating level of aggression. If you’re perceived as an ally, the left lobe kicks in and you’ll see the anger quickly dissipate. When we’re talking about person to person touch points, the first few seconds with an angry customer have no equal in importance.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening here. First of all, let’s remember our brains are being doused with norepineephrine. The purpose of this is to make the brain hypersensitive to possible threats. Again, think about the environment most companies choose to put angry customers in. In my case, after being bumped from my flight I was sent to Horizon Air’s customer service counter (and yes, I’m using the name purposely, and I’ll explain that in a second as well), which is smack in the middle of the busiest part of SeaTac airport. As you line up, waiting for a customer service agent, you’re subjected to the realities of a busy airport: tired, grumpy travelers, beeping carts, annoying gate announcements, reminding you that everyone except you is going somewhere tonight. None of this is going to make you a more pleasant person when you finally get to the head of the line. By now, you’re simmering on a slow boil. In my case, an obviously unhappy toddler decided to start screaming just a few feet from where we were waiting. Now, I’m a Dad and I normally have a lot of patience with unhappy kids, but this time, the screaming was like a jackhammer in my head. The norepineephrine was turning it into a huge warning signal.

Where else do angry customers go? The infamous customer service help line. Again, you’re put on hold, possibly the most irritating situation in the world. Look at this from the customer’s view point. You screwed up and inconvenienced me. You forced me to take valuable time out of my day to rectify the situation. And now you don’t even acknowledge the importance of my time by forcing me to wait on hold? What you’re telling me is your time is much more valuable than mine. Is this showing me that you’re an ally, rather than a threat?

Again, let me give you an example from my personal experience with Alaska and Horizon Airlines. On the trip out (before I got stuck in Seattle), the flight to Las Vegas was cancelled for some mysterious reason. We were never really told why. Now, being a frequent flyer on Alaska (and this is another area I’ll touch on, why we tend to continually anger our most important customers) I had been bumped up to first class. With the cancellation of the flight, I was put on standby for the next flight. The gate agent who checked me in apologized and said that although she couldn’t put me in first class, she’d note down my seat number and they’d try “to make it up to me”. This was the right response. She became my ally.

But on the flight, although I was directly behind the first class cabin (constantly reminding me that I had been bumped out) no flight attendant offered to make it up in any way. After waiting for most of the flight for the offer of a free drink or even an extra bag of peanuts, to no avail, the person behind me wanted to order a drink and caught the attention of the attendant in first class. She asked for the $5 dollars, and he said he was still waiting for the change from the first drink he ordered. She asked him if he was from the bumped flight and when he said he was, she said that they were supposed to offer everyone from that flight a free drink anyway, by way of apology, so not to worry about it. But no one offered anyone else from the flight a drink. There was no apology and no consideration.

Now, let’s examine this from my perspective. First, although angry, I had been appropriately dealt with and my inconvenience had been acknowledged. My sense of self esteem (as one of Alaska’s most valuable customers) had been repaired to some extent. But then this was not followed up on while I was on the plane. Not only was my dignity and self esteem disregarded, my sense of fairness was outraged at the lack of follow through with the inconvenienced passengers.

Where’s the next place Alaska dropped the ball? I considered saying something to the attendant, but that’s not in my nature. What I did was fire off an email to Alaska’s “Customer Care” address. Again, this is a typical channel provided for angry customers. But does it hit any of the required actions to mollify an upset customer? After struggling through a complicated form, I submitted my complaint. I got an automated reply saying that my submission had been received, saying that it was important to Alaska, and that it would typically be as many as 30 days before I received any response. No personal acknowledgement of my anger and the sense that I had been dumped into a big bureaucratic bucket. Again, this is not the way to tell me you’re my ally and you want to make the situation better. This is telling me that your hope is that I’ll forget all about it in 30 days, shut up and go back to being a good, submissive customer. That’s not going to happen. Let me till you why.

The Probability of Angering Your Best Customers

Here’s the ironic thing. Odds are it will be your best customer that you cause to get angry. It’s a simple case of probability. They have more encounters with you, so the odds of something bad happening go up. If I’m going to have a bad experience on an airline, it’s likely going to be the airline I travel most often.

With these customers, it’s more important than ever to acknowledge their anger and inconvenience. First of all, they represent a much higher lifetime value than the average customer, so the loss of business is a bigger deal (I’ve probably spent over a $100,000 with Alaska Airlines in the past 3 years), but secondly, they’ve made a commitment to your business, and you have to acknowledge the importance of that commitment. In return for making that commitment, and spending a large percentage of my yearly travel budget with Alaska, I want to feel that they recognize my importance as a customer. We’re more emotionally invested with the business, so we’re more susceptible to strong feelings, including anger. It’s the difference between having a fight with a stranger and a friend. There are a lot deeper and more complex feelings at play when we fight with a friend. The residue of a fight with a stranger will fade away completely in a few hours. Chances all, we’ll barely remember it. But the consequences of a fight with a friend can last days, weeks or even years. The scars can be deep and permanent.

There’s another critical element to understand here. Because your best customers have an emotional stake in your brand, if you don’t treat them very carefully when they’re upset, they’re also the ones most likely to spread the word either in person or online. By not acknowledging their importance as a customer and the validity of their anger, you’ve kicked the right prefrontal lobe into high gear. Physical confrontation is not an option but the negative feelings need an outlet. The more emotion involved, because of the greater emotional investment, the more we need to express our disappointment and anger. All we want to be is heard. If the offending party won’t listen, I’ll find someone who will. Hence my deliberate use of the brands Alaska Air and Horizon Air in recounting my experience in this post. For what happens with negative word of mouth, see my post earlier this week.

How to Handle an Angry Customer

So, what could Alaska or Horizon Air have done better? What can any of us do better? Let’s first except the fact that bad things are going to happen to customers, that those customers are probably going to be our best customers, and that they’re going to get angry. If we start from there, we can start looking at some practical ways to diffuse anger.

Timing is Critical

Remember, the anger response is very quick. In under a second, the initial response goes from the amygdala to the prefrontal lobes. And the longer it sits there, the more it simmers. Companies need to take a triage approach to angry customers, providing an initial assessment (and acknowledgement, as below) and then routing the person to the appropriate response channel. Anger left without a response will simply lead to more anger. Long waits on a hold line or in a lineup is not what you want to do

Acknowledge the Anger

In this immediate response, it’s important to let the customer know their anger is heard and acknowledged. Make them feel you’re their ally in getting this resolved. This immediately engages the left prefrontal lobe, rather than the right, diffusing the anger rather than adding to it.

Apologize Quickly

If appropriate, apologize, but do it sincerely. Do it face to face, eye to eye. The typical “pilot apology” (this is the pilot coming on the intercom during a flight and offering the blanket, corporate apology for the delay) won’t do it. The flight attendants should be doing it with every single customer, face to face.

Remove Negative Stimuli

This is huge. All too often, the place where angry customers are dealt with represent the worst possible environment for avoiding confrontation. Waiting is the norm and there’s no thought given to how to make the slighted customer feel heard and appreciated. In fact, as we’ve seen, these environments (either physical or virtual) feed the norepineephrine doused brain more and more signals that indicate a hostile environment. Instead, deal with angry customers in a soothing and even distracting environment. If you must make somebody wait, try to do everything possible to introduce positive stimuli to lighten the mood.

Respond Appropriately

Of course, the biggest factor is the nature of the person you’re dealing with when you’re angry. When I say we’re only human, there are two sides to that. Just as we’re prone to all the hair triggers and emotional flooding that comes with anger, so are the people on the other side of the counter. This means that you need to recruit a very special type of person to deal with angry customers, and provide them with an understanding of what causes anger and how to respond appropriately. You’re looking for people who have a hyperactive left prefrontal lobe. They have to be able to convey, through their words, their body language and the tone of their voice, that they’re the customer’s friends, not their enemy and that they’re going to make it right.

By the way, you might think, given my previous observations about the emotional intelligence of men versus women, that women would be a better choice, and in some instances, you’d be right. If you are upset and have the opportunity to talk to a man or a woman at the service counter, most of us would choose the woman. But that can also be a dangerous assumption. Here’s why. Just as women are more adept at reading emotions, they also tend to be more apt to show emotion. This means that a woman who does tend to be prone to becoming upset, irritated or angry will convey this more through her body language and attitude. This is not the place for officiousness or easily rattled people. This is where you need to find the most empathetic people you have and deploy them where they can do the most good.

Unfortunately, for most businesses, dealing with angry customers is the worst of all assignments. It can often be outsourced (talk about not being heard and acknowledged), or grudgingly done by someone who’s not equipped for the task, emotionally or with adequate training. What is the most important encounter you can ever have with a customer, and one that requires a masterful level of interpersonal skills, is done with a negative mental framework already in place (an angry person going to deal with other angry people) or, even worse, ignored, hoping the problem will go away.

Little Things Mean a Lot

The good news is, we all have very low expectations as customers when we’ve been slighted by a company. We’re used to being ignored, marginalized and put through the meat grinder. So it doesn’t take a lot for a company to really provide a positive and remarkable experience. If you can deal with the anger quickly, acknowledge it and make them feel they’ve been heard, become their ally and work towards a resolution that feels fair, then it doesn’t take much more to turn a fair response into a remarkable response.

Let’s go back to my experience with Alaska Airlines. I understand that things happen with airline schedules, and I wasn’t even that upset that I was bumped back to coach. What really irritated me was the lack of follow through on the gate agent’s promise to “make it right”. I wanted Alaska to show that my business was important to them. What would it have cost them to give me a free drink, along with a personal apology from the flight attendant? Or a small coupon for a fare reduction on a future flight. If you want to make it remarkable, get the pilot to take 5 to 10 minutes to walk through the cabin and personally apologize to every one of the 18 or 20 people who were bumped from the previous flight.

Remember, emotions permanently imprint brand attitudes. And emotions come with experiences. Good experiences create good emotions. Bad experiences create bad emotions. But you have the opportunity to determine which emotions you leave your customers with when things go wrong.

Postscript

I have to let you know that Alaska/Horizon has responded admirably to my complaint. I did receive a discount voucher as well as a very frankly written and apologetic email. They’re doing most things right, but unfortunately, timing is everything. Again, this is common in today’s world. Once you’ve discovered that you’ve upset a valuable customer, damage control is set in motion. But what I tried to outline is that the damage can be minimized dramatically if you respond promptly to become the customer’s ally and diffuse the anger before it has a chance to mount.

This has to do with more front line training and some standard procedures built on a greater awareness of the nature of anger itself.

But, the response shows that Alaska’s heart is in the right place and their intentions are good. They just have to brush up on execution at the initial point of contact.

Still Live (But Slightly Bruised) from Park City, Utah

First published December 14, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Yesterday at the Search Insider Summit in Park City, I was precariously perched out on a limb. I kicked off the summit by defending my position that big agencies won’t “get” search. Given that the Summit attracts a fair number of attendees from the world of big agencies, I’m wondering if the organizers of the show (thanks, Nick… thanks, Ken) were setting me up for an unfortunate ski jump accident.

My opponent in the debate was Mike Margolin. If you’ll check the comments on the blog from the previous column, you’ll see that Mike and I started the debate there, and have now brought it to the ski hills of Utah.

“Doing” and “Getting” Are Two Different Things

My position is that search is something big agencies will “do” because they have to, but they’ll do so reluctantly. Search is not aligned to the cultural or creative DNA that defines a big agency. So, they’ll never “get” search.

Mike’s position is that big agencies will absolutely “get” search, because they have no choice. The big agency table is where the brand strategies are determined, and search will play an integral role in that. In fact, if you’re not at the table, you’ll be shut out.

What Does History Teach Us?

The argument is a good one. It’s logical and seeming inevitable. But if you look at history, it’s also without much precedent.

When discontinuous innovation happens (and search is definitely a discontinuous innovation) it’s almost never the established power players that adopt it and capitalize on it. I previously used the example of the adoption of electricity by corporate America, another discontinuous innovation. Then, the big, established companies had invested heavily in steam power. It took them 50 years to adopt electricity, even though the advantages of electrical power were obvious. By the time they made the move, younger, smaller, faster-moving and more nimble companies had passed them by. Many of the industrial dinosaurs never recovered and died away.

That’s how evolution works. The succeeding species replaces the previously entrenched one because of a change in DNA — but also because the existing power species underestimates the importance of that change.Why would the dinosaurs change? From their vantage point, towering over the mammals, they were invulnerable. It was inevitable that they would prevail. Or so it seemed at the time.

How’s the View Up There?

From the big agencies’ perspective, high atop their vast media-buying empires, the agency monoliths seem invulnerable. It’s only if you’re scurrying around down here at ground level that you see the cracks in the ground underneath them.

Finally, let’s touch on the fact of just how important search is. Search is just the thin edge of the wedge that’s forever changing the nature of marketing. Mass marketing is gone. Micro marketing is here, but the thing that makes search so fundamentally important is pull versus push. It’s about people (as fellow columnist Kaila Colbin pointed out in Tuesday’s column ), but more than that, it’s about knowing them and meeting them halfway, one person at a time. That’s what search does, and what it will do with increasing effectiveness over the next decade. This market doesn’t lend itself to mass campaigns. Instead, it means millions of micro campaigns.

But here’s the fundamental reason why agencies won’t embrace search and its pull versus push paradigm. Agencies persuade. It’s why they exist. Their jobs are to use everything at their disposal — creativity, cleverness, research, targeting, emotional appeals — whatever it takes to get us to buy something. That fits well with their push mentality. That’s why agencies love TV. At this point, TV is still the most persuasive medium out there.

But you can’t persuade someone in search. Advertisers have tried, and it’s failed miserably. Search is, at best, multiple-choice. Pick from A, B, C or D, based on which you think is the best match for your intent. There’s no room for persuasion. There’s only what’s present, and picking, and the last of these, the fundamental outcome of search, is totally in the user’s control. We spend a few seconds making our decision. We don’t even read the text. We don’t need to be persuaded to learn more. We’ve already made that choice. So we’re immune to persuasion when we’re on a search engine. In fact, we’ll purposely ignore it. By trying to do search, agencies are going against their most fundamental nature.

The Evolving Whiff of Authenticity

I have a theory. Actually, I have several theories, but one in particular at the top of my mind today. I believe we are getting much better at sniffing out BS online.

In face to face encounters, we’re remarkably good at determining if someone’s authentic or not. We pick up cues, consciously and subconsciously, that allow us to make pretty accurate judgements as to the integrity and honesty of an individual. This “gut feel” that seems so vague is actually a sophisticated interplay of activity in various parts of our brain. Although we may not believe it, we’re all pretty good judges of character most of the time. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

But what if we’re not face to face with someone? That is one of the challenges of the Internet. Often, we have to make judgements about information and the validity of opinions when we can’t see the person eye to eye. There is no editor on the internet, making sure everything we read is accurate and verified. It’s up to us to make the call. We have to act as our own editorial filters, reading between the billions of lines of HTML that are available to us.

Which leads us to something that was a little troubling to me that I heard this week. Every morning here at Enquiro, we have a “huddle” where we each share any news that we have heard that may be of interest to the team. Yesterday morning, Kyle Grant, who just returned from PubCon in Vegas, said he met a representative from a company that fakes blog posts. Basically, you feed the story you want spread about your product or service, and they hire a army of bloggers to post about it. It’s manufactured “buzz”.

Now, it’s not really surprising. As another team member mentioned, you can do the same thing with review comments, forum posts and other forms of commercial consumer generated comments. The door is open, so it’s natural that someone will figure out a way to squeeze through it and game the system. That too is part of human nature.

So, that really puts the onus on each of us to judge how authentic the content is we’re relying on online. And that get’s us back to my theory. I think we’re pretty good. I believe, in the relatively short time we’ve been online, we can pick up the “whiff of authenticity” or, conversely, the “whiff of BS” on most sites. We can tell what’s real and what’s manufactured. We can sort out the meat from the Spam. Like our face to face filters, they’re probably not perfect, but they work most of the time. We will be taken (as Lonelygirl15 showed) but sooner or later, we’ll get to the heart of what’s real.

The other thing that’s unique about the web is that we don’t have to rely just on ourselves to do this. For some reason, there’s still an unspoken law online that we will be diligent (in fact, virulent) about uncovering bogus garbage online. We revel in exposing the seedy underbelly of our culture. The internet has let a breath of fresh air into the previously stiffled world of media control. Before, we were expected to believe anything that came to us through the supposedly pre filtered channels that feed us our view of the outside world. The nightly news, the daily newspaper, the weekly news magazine. As was proven when Dan Rather’s journalistic integrity (or lack of same) was exposed online, we’re probably safer trusting the crazy patchwork quilt of information we get online than we are with the carefully spoon-fed news items we’re get every night through the networks.

Ultimately online, right will prevail, and it will do so much quicker than was true in the power controlled world of just one generation ago. We are less trusting and we are developing a much healthier cynical streak. Every time a door is open for all of us to have a voice, we will see parasitic companies scrambling to push through it, trying to capitalize on our collective gullability. And they’ll thrive, for awhile. But it’s a short term game, because I believe strongly that most times, we’re not as stupid as we look.

Brand Live and Die Face to Face

iStock_000004520845XSmallThe more I dig, the more I’m convinced that a big part of a brand’s success is the quality of its customer touch points, specifically, the face to face ones. Consider this overwhelming evidence:

The more emotion there is in an experience, the more vividly we remember it. It’s known as imprinting. So if we have very positive or very negative experiences, we remember them longer and more completely. Let’s say we visit a restaurant. If we have a terrible experience, we’ll remember it forever. If it was an amazing experience, again, we’ll remember it forever. If it’s mediocre and falls in the middle, it will tend to fade away.

Our memories are altered by the context in which we remember them. Let’s go back to our restaurant example. Whatever our experience, we will tend to alter it if we’re talking to a person who also had an experience with the same restaurant. If they had a great experience, but ours was negative, we’ll tend to alter our memory to make it more positive. Alternatively, if we had a positive experience, but someone else’s was terrible, suddenly we’ll alter our memory to make it less positive. This doesn’t tend to swing memories all the way from good to bad, but it alters and reshapes memories to better fit the context of recall. And over time, it can erode a once very good memory, or build up a rather negative one. Memory is not an accurate snapshot of an event, it’s a malleable story. So consistency of experience is important.

We get a much richer channel of communication when we’re face to face with a person. Studies have shown that receive only 7% of our communication from the words that are used. The other 93% is a combination of body language and tone of voice. So no matter how carefully you script your frontline customer encounters, the success will depend on the person delivering the message. We have very finely attuned credibility detectors.

The quality of the face to face interaction is the biggest factor in how satisfied we are in a product experience. Malcolm Gladwell used the example of doctors being sued for malpractice.

“Believe it or not, the risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes…. Patients don’t file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care. Patients file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care and something else happens to them.

“What is that something else? It’s how they were treated, on a personal level, by their doctor. What comes up again and again in malpractice cases is that patients say they were rushed or ignored or treated poorly. ‘People just don’t sue doctors they like,’ is how Alice Burkin, a leading medical malpractice lawyer, puts it. ‘In all the years I’ve been in business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, “I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.”

Medical researcher Wendy Levinson found that doctors that weren’t sued spent 3 minutes more with patients than those that were (18.3 minutes versus 15). But it wasn’t just time, it was the quality of time. More simply, it was the tone of the doctor’s voice. Recordings of interactions with doctors were recorded and then were played back for study participants, who then put the doctors into two groups, those that would be sued and those that wouldn’t be. The recordings were altered so participants couldn’t hear what was said, all they could judge was the tone of the voice. And even with this, they were able to judge with amazing accuracy which doctors would be sued. It wasn’t what was said, it was how it was said.

When you look at corporate examples, the power of person to person connections are clear in cases like JetBlue and Saturn. In both cases, the extraordinarily high level of customer satisfaction was due primarily to the quality of the face to face encounters. JD Powers rated the Saturn among the highest vehicles in terms of satisfaction not because it was a better car. It was because their dealer network didn’t follow the typical industry model, which was more like a school of piranhas. JetBlue’s employees had a mandate: make flying coach suck less.

Why is this important to remember? Because of the coming workforce crisis. The baby boom is shifting the majority of our workforce to the end of their working lives, and there’s a severe shortage at the entry level, typically the recruitment bed for service based businesses. This means good people are going to get tougher and tougher to find.

Also, there’s a move to cut costs by streamlining and outsourcing those vital customer touch points. Self serve customer service models are becoming more common, and in many cases, they’re backed up by a customer help line that’s been outsourced to an overseas call center. The call center has been provided the appropriate scripts, and, in most cases, adequate training on how to field a complaint. But, as we’ve seen, that’s really only 7% of the problem. The other 93% is connecting with a person who really cares about your problem and is trying to help you. That’s something you can’t script.

Let me give you an example. My wife and I recently flew to Lisbon on British Airways. We had to connect through Heathrow. I booked my flight directly through BA, but my wife flew on points, so that flight was booked through a partner airline. Both flights had less than an hour layover in Heathrow, and we had to change terminals. I didn’t really notice this at the time of booking, but soon, my partner airline notified us that they had moved my wife back to a later flight to allow her to make the connection. As anyone who has connected through Heathrow will tell you, the odds of making a connection with less than one hour is slim to nil.

I called British Airways to get my flight pushed back and was connected to what was obviously an overseas call center. The person on the other end, if they were considering a medical career, would be a sure bet to be nailed with a malpractice suit. The manner was brusque and indifferent. He informed me that they could change the flight, but there would be a $200 change fee, about 1/3 of the total cost of the flight. Plus, I would have to pay any difference in fares. I tried to explain to the person that the layover time wasn’t adequate and that BA screwed up with the initial booking, but to no avail. Finally, I hung up in frustration, to allow myself to cool down a little.

I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to cough up the extra $200, and phoned back a week later to make the change. This time, I got a much friendlier person who looked up my reservation and informed me that my flight had automatically been pushed back because an hour wasn’t an adequate connection time. I asked when this had happened and what had triggered the change. They said it was a flag that was automatically put up in the system so many days prior to a flight and had nothing to do with my previous call. It was the system correcting itself.

Everything worked out okay with BA, and the flight was actually one of the best transatlantic flights I had. But the poor quality of one encounter left an overall negative impression rather than a positive one. And, as reinforcement of it, when I was talking to a friend who had recently flown to Spain on British Airways, they had had exactly the same problem. Our respective memory retrievals quickly turned into a BA-bashing spree.

Realize the importance of person to person, and if you have to short cut anywhere, don’t short cut here. It’s the most important part of your business.

Why We Have to Keep Doing Market Research

Following up on my previous post about the problems with most market research, here’s a plea why we should keep trying to get it right.

At the recent London SMX show, I presented on the Ad Testing and Research panel. Like other times I’ve done this panel (this is probably the 3rd or 4th time) I hear about skillful practitioners employing various A/B and multivariate testing methodologies. Ad testing is a definite must do, but before my presentation, which came at the end of the session, I took a few minutes to provide an alternative point of view.

I asked the small crowd how many of them were doing regular campaign management, checking click through rates, conversion rates and optimizing their campaigns based on what they saw. Almost everyone put up their hand. Then I asked how many did A/B testing. This time, a little more than half put up their hands. Next, I asked how many were doing multivariate testing. This time, about one third of the crowd. Finally, I asked how many had actually sat, watched a customer interact with their site and then asked them questions. We dropped down to about 10% of the group, and most of these were in a fairly structured usability test, with limited or no opportunity for interaction with the user.

Now, campaign optimization, A/B and multivariate testing are all best practices and should be done religiously. But I urged the marketers in the room to step back from their data heavy, spreadsheet  bound view of the world and pick up a book on cognitive psychology, social science or simple usability. Better yet, spend some time just watching how real people interact with your site. Try, for a moment, to look at the world through your customer’s eyes.

The problem with the typical, quantitative methods are that they’re all lagging indicators. You don’t get an idea of what’s happening until after customers have interacted with your ads and your site. You generally get a good sense of what they did, but it’s very difficult to determine why they did it. To do that, you have to dig beyond the numbers. You have to try to get into that subconscious mind. And that’s not easy. Typical market research methodologies won’t cut it. To get some idea of what’s required, read Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code, or Gerald Zaltman’s How Customer’s Think. Do some digging into the work of Herbert Simon.  It takes a deft combination of psychiatric know how and detective skills. But here’s why it’s worth it.

For the past Century, we’ve largely refined our marketing practices based on trial and error. Pretty much everything has been done through seeing what’s worked, changing something, and seeing if it worked better. That’s been okay, as long as the channels we used to reach customer’s were relatively limited. With limited channels and a certain amount of control inherent in the process, we could do this. But those days are over.

Now, rather than a few controlled channels that run pretty much straight from the advertiser to the customer, we have an explosion of information that turns the typical buying process into a Gordian knot of unbelievable complexity. We can’t control the variables anymore. When there are so many channels, so many interdependent factors and so much of it affects customers below the conscious level, trial and error is just not an effective testing methodology anymore. In fact, it was never an effective methodology, for all the reasons I stated in my previous post. It’s just the best we had.

Let me use another example. The way we did marketing was pretty much like jumping in a car, randomly making decisions whether to turn right or left, keeping track of our success rate in getting nearer to our destination, and using this method to eventually pick the right route. This method might eventually work okay in a town of a few thousand people, but try doing that to navigate through New York or Los Angeles. We don’t have enough time in our lives to leave this much to chance. A map (or better yet, a GPS) is a much better alternative.

But we’re just starting to put that map together. And it won’t come from market research. Market research, at least in it’s current incarnation, is hopelessly flawed. It will come from diving deep into the workings of our brains. And once we begin putting the map together, it will allow us to begin to measure leading indicators. It will keep us from the trap of relying on self reported rationalizations and dig deeper into all the activity that’s happening below the conscious surface of our minds. That’s where the answers will be found.

Here’s another reason. Our brains are not only complex, but they’re also highly adaptive. As we do new mental activities more often, and abandon previous ones, new routes are established through the neurons and old ones become overgrown and eventually, unused neurons are cut away. It’s called “pruning” and “neuroplasticity”. It’s probably why you’re much better at using a search engine now than you are doing the geometry you learned in grade 9. We’ve worn new paths in our brain.

This is also true of how we’re buying. The way we buy now is bearing little resemblance to the way we bought in 1975. As time goes on and we rely on the Internet more and more, the paths that we used to use for our consumer decisions will become overgrown and we’ll clear new ones. This will happen not only at the conscious level, but also the sub conscious level. We will literally rewire how our brains decide what to buy. So the body of market research that has laboriously been gathered over the past several decades will become obsolete. And to discover those again through trial and error will be an long and potentially impossibly task.

So, a word of advice. Step back from the spread sheet now and again. Take a break from looking at “what” and start to explore “why”. Dig into things like the triune brain, selective perception, bounded rationality, working memory and some other basic cognitive concepts. It will be time well spent.