Category Archives: Search Marketing

Search Branding: A Problem of Metrics

First published November 13, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This whole question of branding in search came about because of a rather fuzzy definition: what exactly is brand lift? How do you measure it?

This was the problem we wrestled with when we did the first search brand lift study for Google and Honda. Failing anything better, we did the standard tests of aided and unaided message and brand recall. I’m not a huge fan of these metrics, because I don’t think they adequately capture the neural basis of brand. But given the nature of the study (which included a survey and some eye tracking) it was our only feasible alternative.

What is Brand Lift?

Before I talk more about the metrics, let’s talk more about the concept of brand lift, as it’s central to the argument. What is brand lift? As measured by brand recall metrics, it’s awareness of the brand. But actually, it’s to see if a concept of the brand is lodged in working memory immediately after exposure to the brand.

So, let’s walk through this a bit. We create different search results page scenarios with variations of exposure in our test brand, including a control with no exposure. We create scenarios that set up a reasonably natural interaction and scanning of the results page. And, at some point after this interaction (usually immediately following) we ask participants if they remember seeing a brand on the results page. We start with an open-ended question (unaided) and then provide a randomized list of brands to see if they choose the test brand (aided). We then measure variance against the control, correlated with the nature of the exposure.

Given this framework, we did find brand lift. Significant brand lift. And in one aspect, this is great news for marketers. The fact that a brand remained lodged in working memory is a very big win for search in capturing consumer attention. I’m going to be talking about why this is so in the next column. If we equate brand lift with engaged attention and carving a (temporary) niche in the prefrontal cortex, the study proves there’s a strong connection with search.

Brand Lift is in the Eyes of the Beholder

But this is where the metrics get fuzzy. Brand lift seems to be many things to many people. This is why ARF decided that we needed a new metric and started down the road of defining engagement. But the problems that soon plagued this endeavor highlighted the inherent challenge. Our engagement with brands is not a one-size-fits-all, measurable occurrence. Brand relationships, like all relationships, are complex and shifting. There are many degrees. In additional, there’s a question of modality, based on context and intent. My relationship with a brand, say Apple, can be significantly different if I’m shopping for a new laptop for work than if I’m helping my daughter with an iTunes download. Advertisers want a single, simple quantifiable number that defines our brand relationship. Such a beast doesn’t exist.

So, how do you measure lift? What is lift? Is it a temporary lodging in working memory? Is it a long-term strengthening of the synaptic connections in long-term memory? Is it firing up the limbic systems that are our emotional gatekeepers, getting a lump in our throat when we see a tearjerker ad? Is it digging out our deepest primal drives when we see attractive women hanging around guys on a golf course, implying the beer they’re carrying around (but, of course, not consuming) is the reason the women are volunteering for caddy duties (Yeah, like that takes place in the real world)?

We were asked to prove brand lift on the search page, and we did, by one metric. It’s an important metric — a vital one, in fact. But when advertisers hear brand lift, they all hear different things. The definition of brand lift seems to be in the mind of the beholder.  Ironically, I’ve been reading a book that’s taken on the impossible task of explaining quantum mechanics to me. The mind numbing problem with quantum mechanics is that the physical nature of something isn’t defined until it’s observed. Until then, it’s a probability wave. I’m suspecting the same thing might be happening with brand metrics. They don’t take shape until someone tries to define them. There are just too many variables.

A Call for Consilience

The problem with branding is that marketers don’t know what they don’t know. They have learned marketing and the art of pushing a message out, but very, very few marketers have taken the time to understand what happens on the receiving end. They know nothing about cognition, emotional tagging, the formation of memories or any other workings of the human brain. Only now, with the consilience that is beginning to happen in the academic world, are we applying neuroscience to marketing.  So, marketers are desperately trying to apply a universal metric to something that largely defies measurement, and the marketers don’t even know why it’s not working.  They’re getting numbers they can plug into the dashboards, but no one is sure if they’re indicative of what happens in the real world, or, more accurately, our neural representation of the real world.

Democracy Reborn Nov. 4, Thanks to Online Campaign

First published November 6, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Even as a Canadian, I was amazed by what happened the night of Nov. 4. History was made in many, many different ways. And for that reason, I’m interrupting my series on Search and Branding, just for this week.

 

Obviously, every journalist and pundit will be falling over themselves talking about the historic implications of this election. Democrats and Republicans alike were gushing and seemed a little speechless about the implications of Barack Obama in the White House. I have my own feelings but that’s not what this column is about. For me, this election was fundamentally historic for another reason. It changed forever the fabric of democracy in America.

Three years ago, I sat in a hotel conference room somewhere (it might even have been Chicago) and heard Dana Todd, then the President of SEMPO, say that search would be a very important factor in the next election. I smiled to myself, because I had been watching the somewhat ham-fisted use of online tactics in the election that had just ended. I thought to myself, “Why do these candidates fail to understand the fundamental importance of online? Don’t they understand that this provides an amazing new platform for democracy? How could they be so clueless?” The one candidate that did seem to grasp it was Howard Dean, but unfortunately, Dean’s campaign had other challenges that eventually overcame his online momentum.

I mused further: “What would happen if you took the lessons learned from the Dean campaign and fielded a candidate with a campaign that fully ‘got’ the power of virtual connection?” My guess would be that it would be incredibly effective. Yet I had no idea how earthshakingly important online strategies would prove to be.

Unknown to me, two people — Jascha Franklin-Hodge and Joe Rospars, the architects of the Dean online machine and co-founders of Blue State Digital — were already making plans for 2008. The candidate? A junior senator from Illinois who had just rocked the Democratic National Convention with a stirring speech: Barack Obama.

I watched the entire process unfold, and at each step, I was impressed with the grasp of online momentum, its nuances and social connections. With Franklin-Hodge and Rospars as architects, and with the help of a very Net-savvy staff, Obama’s campaign built an online momentum that shocked Clinton’s handlers in the primaries and eventually rolled over McCain as well.

Yes, there were many factors that led to success, not the least of which is the candidate himself, but I can’t help thinking that this campaign managed to crystallize it in a brilliant way online. Obama navigated the currents and eddies of online buzz masterfully, creating mini-campaigns of intense interest and passion, mobilizing votes and raising money — lots and lots and lots of money. He (with his campaign architects) understood the fundamental connection of online: reaching many, hearing from many, one at a time. It was a campaign launched and won by we, the people.

On November 19th, 1863, another politician from Illinois gave what was intended to be a few impromptu remarks at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa. Lincoln finished that speech with these words: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

On Tuesday night, there was a new birth of democracy, the culmination of an election that used a new technology to bridge millions of gaps between Washington and the people, to erase decades of division, estrangement and alienation. Yes, it was a brilliant campaign tactic, but it was more than that. It was an understanding that people needed to reconnect with their President and to have their voices heard. It was true democracy. No matter what your political affiliation and your feelings about Obama the man, you have to feel hopeful that somebody in the White House finally “gets” the Internet and its awesome power to connect and effect change.

The Brand Effect on the Search Results Page

First published October 30, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I walked through an interaction with the search page step by step and looked cognitive engagement with the page. To understand the nature of branding on the search page, you first have to understand how we interact with brand messaging on the page.

Quick to Click

We left off last week as we picked up enough information scent on the page to encourage us to click on the listing. It’s important to understand that this is not a rigorous appraisal of relevance. The amount of deliberation is directly related to the amount of risk involved in a click through, determined by as much time will we have to invest should we click through. The amount of time we invest in deliberation on the search page is telling. In most search interactions we’ve recorded in our lab, average time to first click is around 10 to 12 seconds, during which most people scan 4 to 5 listings. That amounts to 2 to 3 seconds per listing. Once the click-through happens, deliberation is almost as limited on the landing page; 10 to 14 seconds is spent determining if information scent is sufficiently present to stick with the page. If not, we’re clicking the back button and heading back to the results page.

I tally up these times to make a point: we don’t spend a lot of time interacting with search messages. This is spot scanning at best, not a thorough assessment. We don’t read listings, we glance at words. When enough hits register to establish relevancy matches with the goal of our search, based on the words we used in the query and those that remain locked up in our prefrontal cortex, we click.

Fruit Foraging

Let’s go back to the foraging analogy, because it helps establish the mindset we’re dealing with. You’re looking for oranges and walk into a mall with 20 different storefronts opening off the main entrance. Each storefront has signage in front with a brief description of the items they carry. Most appear to offer oranges. However, you don’t want to spend the rest of your day going from store to store looking for the perfect bag of oranges. So, you’re going to use the clues you pick up on the store signs to pick your best bet. A produce store is a better match than a convenience store, which is a better match than a clothing store which for some reason says oranges on their sign (perhaps it’s the color of their Fall line). Your goal is to pick up the best oranges in the least amount of time. The process you would use to narrow your store selection is similar to the one you use every day with a search engine.

Now, let’s look at the part brand plays in this same analogy. You’re looking for oranges, but you’re using related concepts to help you narrow down your choice. A store that appears to offer a variety of fruits has stronger scent. A store that has a sale on oranges today might offer even stronger scent. And a store that offers Sunkist oranges might offer even stronger scent, if you happen to like the Sunkist brand.

Brand Connections, Not Emotions

That’s the role brand plays on the search results page. It’s a critical role, but it’s significantly different than the brand-building role many are trying to carve out for search. Search doesn’t build brand, search connects people to brands at just the right time.

Brands work because they represent something. In fact, studies show that successful brands actually act as a proxy for reward in the brain. They fire the same dopamine-producing neurons in the reward center that the actual product would, if you possessed it. The brain transfers the pleasure of the product to the brand, where it acts as a convenient label. If you have a favorable opinion of a brand and you see that brand in the search results, your working memory pulls that brand belief out of storage and brings it into focus in the prefrontal cortex.

But, as we’ve learned, brands become powerful influencers if they’re tagged with the power of emotion. That’s classic brand-building. As I’ve gone over at length in this series, there are a number of ways those brand beliefs can be built, including personal experience, the opinions of others and yes, even advertising. But I stand by my belief that emotional brand-building doesn’t happen on the search page. The nature of the interaction simply isn’t conducive to it. This does nothing to negate the importance of brand on the search page, as I’ll talk about in future columns. In fact, the appearance of brand on the results page is critical. But an emotional brand bonding moment it’s not.

So, with my own company responsible for a number of search brand lift studies, am I refuting my own evidence? Not at all. It just requires a clearer definition of brand lift and a little knowledge of the ways we measure it. I’ll deal with both next week.

Branding, The Mind and Search

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately exploring the area of branding on the search page. This was one of the columns that started it all.  Check out the comments on the original. – G.

In my last column, I opened up the search “branding” can of worms regarding unclicked search ads and generated a fascinating discussion with Gian Fulgoni and James Lamberti from comScore, as well as Aaron Goldman from Resolution Media, who has unpublished research that sheds new light on the subject and counters my argument. I think it’s fair to say that the value of an unclicked search ad still needs further research to resolve the question.

If it proves that there is brand lift created, then the question of pricing models currently used comes back into play. As Lamberti mentioned, perhaps the problem is not the pricing model but the measurement methods. And, as Jonathon Mendez from Ramp Digital added, “Is Google leaving lots of money on the table? They’re the most insanely profitable company of our time — I think they know what they’re doing.”

How Much Value is There in Search?

Could it be that we’re all right? Could it be that there’s so much value in the search interaction that Google can be leaving money on the table and still be insanely profitable? I do believe that in the case of branding impact, there is a distinct difference in the nature of the impact of the search ad from almost any other form of advertising, which is the topic of this column.

As I said a few columns back, search is more than a channel. It’s a fundamental human activity, and the same things that may be working against search in an implicit engagement way are very much working for search in an explicit way. The nature of our engagement with search is much different from other advertising.

Daring to Define Engagement

The Advertising Research Foundation has been struggling with defining engagement as a cross-channel effectiveness metric for years now, without making much headway. The problem is that engagement with a TV ad is a totally different proposition than engagement with a search ad.

Let’s look first at TV. In the 1980’s, the ARF conducted a major research study called the Copy Research Validation Project (as referenced in “The Advertised Mind,” by Erik Du Plessis). The purpose of the study was to isolate the factors that were common in successful ads. What was the one factor most predictive of success, which was actually thrown in as an after-thought? Whether people liked the ad.

Before most ads can work, they have to get our attention. And we pay more attention to things we like. This led to a hyper-creative explosion in the advertising biz, as agencies churned out ads designed first and foremost to make us like them. Unfortunately, most ads forgot that once you get someone’s attention, you also have to sell something. And that can be a difficult balance to maintain. Our cues to switch selective perception to something that captures our attention and our natural defenses against unsolicited persuasion usually work counter to each other. And it’s in that dynamic abyss that 250 billion dollars of advertising — in the U.S alone — gets poured every year,.

Search: Likability is Not a Prerequisite

But search is different. You don’t need to like a search ad, because it doesn’t have to capture your attention. You’ve already volunteered that attention. Search is used to gather information about an upcoming purchase. You’re fully engaged. You’re focusing on it. There are no cognitive guards on duty, protecting you from unscrupulous persuasion.

There’s another difference. Other advertising interrupts you when you have no intention of considering purchasing the featured product or service. Search reaches you just at the time you’re most fully engaged in consideration. And there lies the tremendous value of search, as it opens the door to the most engaging interaction with a brand that there can be: the online visit.

The Most Effective Engagement Point

Once consumers have knocked on your door through search, you have a tremendous opportunity to engage them. They have expressed interest, they are actively and fully engaged, they’re looking for information and they are ready to be persuaded. In the universe of consumer motivation, all the planets are perfectly aligned. You simply cannot find a better touch point with a consumer than this.

But the key is, you have to let consumers drive that interaction. They may simply be looking for rational purchase validation information, they may be researching alternatives, or they may be looking to be emotionally persuaded. A Web site can do any and all of the above, but it has to be at the visitor’s imperative.

Do I think there’s tremendous brand value left on the table with search? Absolutely. And as James Lamberti from comScore said, uncovering that value lies first in better measurement. If we can prove the value, whether it’s implicit or explicit, that may indeed lead to a different pricing model. Let’s face it; we’re a long way from understanding online consumer behavior. As we gain more understanding, expect changes. Expect lots of them.

A Cognitive Walk Through of Searching

First published October 23, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Two weeks ago, I talked about the concept of selective perception, how subconsciously we pick and choose what we pay attention to. Then, last week, I explained how engagement with search is significantly different than engagement with other types of advertising. These two concepts set the stage for what I want to do today. In this column, I want to lay out a step-by-step hypothetical walk-through of our cognitive engagement with a search page.

Searching on Auto Pilot

First, I think it’s important to clear up a common misunderstanding. We don’t think our way through an entire search interaction. The brain only kicks into cognitive high gear (involving the cortex) when it absolutely needs to. When we’re engaged in a mental task, any mental task, our brain is constantly looking for cognitive shortcuts to lessen the workload required. Most of these shortcuts involve limbic structures at the sub-cortical level, including the basal ganglia, hippocampus, thalamus and nucleus accumbens. This is a good thing, as these structures have been honed through successful generations to simplify even the most complicated tasks. They’re the reason driving is much easier for you now than it was the first time you climbed behind the wheel. These structures and their efficiencies also play a vital role in our engagement with search.

So, to begin with, our mind identifies a need for information. Usually, this is a sub task that is part of a bigger goal. The goal is established in the prefrontal cortex and the neural train starts rolling toward it. We realize there’s a piece of information missing that prevents us from getting closer to our goal – and, based on our past successful experiences, we determine that a search engine offers the shortest route to gain the information. This is the first of our processing efficiencies. We don’t deliberate long hours about the best place to turn. We make a quick, heuristic decision based on what’s worked in the past. The majority of this process is handled at the sub-cortical level.

The Google Habit

Now we have the second subconscious decision. Although we have several options available for searching, the vast majority of us will turn to Google, because we’ve developed a Google habit. Why spend precious cognitive resources considering our options when Google has generally proved successful in the past? Our cortex has barely begun to warm up at this point. The journey thus far has been on autopilot.

The prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory, first sparked to life with the realization of the goal and the identification of the sub task, locating the missing piece of information. Now, the cortical mind is engaged once again as we translate that sub task into an appropriate query. This involves matching the concept in our minds with the right linguistic label. Again, we’re not going to spend a lot of cognitive effort on this, which is why query construction tends to start simply and become longer and more complex only if required. In this process, the label, the query we plugged into the search box, remains embedded in working memory.

Conditioned Scanning

At this point, the prefrontal cortex begins to idle down again. The next exercise is handled by the brain as a simple matching game. We have the label, or query, in our mind. We scan the page in the path we’ve been conditioned to believe will lead to the best results: starting in the upper left, and then moving down the page in an F-shaped scan pattern. All we want to do is find a match between the query in our prefrontal cortex and the results on the page.

Here the brain also conserves cognitive processing energy by breaking the page into chunks of three or four results. This is due to the channel capacity of our working memory and how many discrete chunks of information we can process in our prefrontal cortex at a time. We scan the results looking first for the query, usually in the title of the results. And it’s here where I believe a very important cognitive switch is thrown.

The “Pop Out” Effect

When we structure the query, we type it into a box. In the process, we remember the actual shape of the phrase. When we first scan results, we’re not reading words, we’re matching shapes. In cognitive psychology, this is called the “pop out” effect. We can recognize shapes much faster than we can read words. The shapes of our query literally “pop out” from the page as a first step toward matching relevance. The effect is enhanced by query (or hit) bolding. This matching game is done at the sub-cortical level.

If the match is positive (shape = query), then our eye lingers long enough to start picking up the detail around the word. We’ve seen in multiple eye tracking studies that foveal focus (the center of the field of vision) tends to hit the query in the title, but peripheral vision begins to pick up words surrounding the title. In our original eye tracking study, we called this semantic mapping. In Peter Pirolli’s book, “Information Foraging,” he referred to this activity as spreading activation. It’s after the “pop out” match that the prefrontal cortex again kicks into gear. As additional words are picked up, they are used to reinforce the original scent cue. Additional words from the result pull concepts into the prefrontal cortex (recognized URL, feature, supporting information, price, brand), which tend to engage different cortical regions as long-term memory labels are paged and brought back into the working memory. If enough matches with the original mental construct of the information sought are registered, the link is clicked.

Next week, we’ll look at the nature of this memory recall, including the elusive brand message.

The Elusive Goal of Ad Engagement

First published October 16, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about the nature of engagement and the neural mechanisms that underlie it. This week, I want to explore why those same mechanisms dictate that our search interactions are going to be completely different from engagement with a TV ad or a billboard.

The key thing to understand here is how we’re driven by goals. In a drastic oversimplification, goals are the objectives that drive our information processing modules, more commonly known as our brain. Our “mind” and all that we know about ourselves are shifting patterns of information being processed in these modules. At multiple levels, we sift through data, make decisions and initiate actions to get us closer to our goals.

Goal Interrupted

Most advertising is interruptive. It’s a detour on the road to our goals. The holy grail of direct marketing is to time delivery of the message so that it coincides with our pursuit of a goal. If you can get a realtor brochure to my doorstep at exactly the time I’m thinking of putting my house up for sale, you’ve substantially increased the odds of active engagement with your advertising message. But despite the advances in targeting methods, the odds of perfect coincidence are frustratingly slim. So advertising has to depend on other methods, like emotion, to trigger primal reactions and force suspension of current goal pursuit to engage with the message.

One of the comments on last week’s column, by fellow Search Insider Kaila Colbin, provides a perfect example of this. Kaila provided a link to a particularly powerful use of emotion in a TV ad from New Zealand Post. Now, despite the powerful emotional appeal, in a typical stream of ads inserted in a commercial block in network programming, the ad would still need to batter our way into our consciousness. With Kaila it succeeded once, hitting all the right emotional cues, and so her subconscious has been primed to respond to this ad should it appear on the radar screen of her constant scanning of her environment. In Kaila’s case, she would rush to the TV to change the channel, preventing her from dissolving into a messy puddle of tears.

Active Engagement

But by drawing our attention to the link, Kaila set up a totally different nature of engagement. She embedded the concept in our working memory by allowing us to create a goal around the viewing of the ad. We were engaged with the concept on a totally different level. Watching the ad was the goal, so no diversion of attention was required. We were primed to pay attention by Kaila’s recommendation. This is the power of ads that go viral in social networks, like Dove’s Evolution.

This concept of attention is at the center of two targeting tactics that have proven effective in the online environment: behavioral and contextual targeting.

Engaging Tactics

With behavioral targeting, we track behavioral cues through clickstreams, hoping that it will improve our odds of presenting our advertising message at exactly the right time to coincide with our target’s pursuit of a goal. The well-timed presentation of an ad for Chinese hotel rooms at almost the same time I was planning a trip to China was an example I’ve talked about before. Because planning for the trip had recently occupied my working memory and presumably I hadn’t yet reached my goal (the trip wasn’t completely planned yet), this message stood a pretty good chance of being engaged with (despite the fact that it creeped me out a little).

Contextual targeting employs a different but related strategy. If advertising messages are about the same topics as the content that I’m engaging with, transference of that engagement should be easier than with unrelated topics. Indeed, at Enquiro we’ve found that engagement with these ads actually occurs at two levels. There’s the initial awareness of the ad and the subsequent decision to engage with the ad. We’ve found that awareness is often higher with non-contextually targeted ads, but engagement and recall is higher with contextual ads. I have my theories about why this is so (having to do with the nature of the creative and the interplay of active consciousness and selective perception) but that could fill up an entire column in itself.

Engaging Search

Finally, we have search. In my previous examples of online targeting, we’re still using our best guess about optimum timing based on some pretty broad assumptions: click streams provide an accurate measure of intent, and interest in content means interest in related advertising messages. These targeting methods simply improve the odds in what is still essentially an interruption in the pursuit of a goal. But use of search is inherently aligned with goal pursuit. Information gathering is a key subtask in the pursuit of many goals, and search is an important tool in our information foraging arsenal. The goal is firmly embedded in our working memory and we’re on high alert for cues relevant to our end goal. This is why information scent in search results is so critical. No diversion of attention is required. Our attention is firmly focused on the results presented on the search page (both paid and algorithmic), because we believe that one of those results will take us one step closer to the goal.

This concept of active engagement is key to understanding search’s role in branding. Next week, I’ll look at how our cognitive mechanisms digest the results on a search page.

Picking and Choosing What We Pay Attention To

First published October 9, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In a single day, you will be assaulted by hundreds of thousands of discrete bits of information. I’m writing this from a hotel room on the corner of 43rd and 8th in New York. Just a simple three-block walk down 8th Avenue will present me with hundreds bits of information: signs, posters, flyers, labels, brochures. By the time I go to sleep this evening, I will be exposed to over 3,000 advertising messages. Every second of our lives, we are immersed in a world of detail and distraction, all vying for our attention. Even the metaphors we use, such as “paying attention,” show that we consider attention a valuable commodity to be allocated wisely.

 

Lining Up for the Prefrontal Cortex

Couple this with the single-mindedness of the prefrontal cortex, home of our working memory. There, we work on one task at a time. We are creatures driven by a constant stack of goals and objectives. We pull our big goals out, one and a time, often break it into sub goals and tasks, and then pursue these with the selective engagement of the prefrontal cortex. The more demanding the task, the more we have to shut out the deluge of detail screaming for our attention.

Our minds have an amazingly effective filter that continually scans our environment, subconsciously monitoring all this detail, and then moving it into our attentive focus if our sub cortical alarm system determines we should give it conscious attention. So, as we daydream our way through our lives, we don’t unconsciously plow through pedestrians as they step in front of us. We’re jolted into conscious awareness until the crisis is dealt with, working memory is called into emergency duty, and then, post crisis, we have to try to pick up the thread of what we were doing before. This example shows that working memory is not a multi-tasker. It’s impossible to continue to mentally balance your check book while you’re trying to avoid smashing into the skateboarding teen who just careened off the side walk. Only one task at a time, thank you.

You Looked, but Did You See?

The power of our ability to focus and filter out extraneous detail is a constant source of amazement for me. We’ve done several engagement studies where we have captured physical interactions with an ad (tracked through an eye tracker) on a web page of several seconds in duration, then have participants swear there was no ad there. They looked at the ad, but their mind was somewhere else, quite literally. The extreme example of this can be found in an amusing experiment done by University of Illinois  cognitive psychologist  Daniel J. Simons and now enjoying viral fame through YouTube. Go ahead and check it out  before you read any further if you haven’t already seen it. (Count the number of times the white team passes the ball)

This selective perception is the door through which we choose to let the world into our conscious (did you see the Gorilla in the video? If not, go back and try again). And its door that advertisers have been trying to pry through for the past 200 years at least. We are almost never focused on advertising, so, in order for it to be effective, it has to convince us to divert our attention from what we’re currently doing. The strategies behind this diversion have become increasingly sophisticated. Advertising can play to our primal cues. A sexy woman is almost always guaranteed to divert a man’s attention. Advertising can throw a road block in front of our conscious objectives, forcing us to pass through them. TV ads work this way, literally bringing our stream of thought to a screeching halt and promising to pick it up again “right after these messages”. The hope is that there is enough engagement momentum for us to keep focused on the 30 second blurb for some product guaranteed to get our floors/teeth/shirts whiter.

Advertising’s Attempted Break-In

The point is, almost all advertising never enjoys the advantage of having working memory actively engaged in trying to understand its message. Every variation has to use subterfuge, emotion or sheer force to try to hammer its way into our consciousness. This need has led to the industry searching for a metric that attempts to measure the degree to which our working memory is on the job. In the industry, we call it engagement. The ARF defined engagement as “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding media context.” Really, engagement is better described as smashing through the selective perception filter.

In a recent study, ARF acknowledged the importance of emotion as a powerful way to sneak past the guardhouse and into working memory. Perhaps more importantly, the study shows the power of emotion to ensure memories make it from short term to long term memory: “Emotion underlies engagement which affects memory of experience, thinking about the experience, and subsequent behavior.  Emotion is not a peripheral phenomenon but involves people completely.  Emotions have motivational properties, to the extent that people seek to maximize the experience of positive emotions and to minimize the experience of negative emotions.  Emotion is fundamental to engagement.  Emotion directs attention to the causally significant aspects of the experience, serves to encode and classify the ‘unusual’ (unexpected or novel) in memory, and promotes persisting rehearsal of the event-memory. In this way, thinking/feeling/memory articulates the experience to guide future behaviors.”

With this insight into the marketing mindset, honed by decades of hammering away at our prefrontal cortex, it’s little wonder why the marketing community has struggled with where search fits in the mix. Search plays by totally different neural rules. And that means its value as a branding tool also has to play by those same rules.  I’ll look at that next week.

Emotion and the Formation of Brand Memories

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

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

Why “Selfish Genes” Remember

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

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

Driven by Emotions

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

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

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

Brand + Emotion = Power

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

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

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

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

Needs, Beliefs and Search

First published August 7, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the last few weeks, I’ve looked at how we gather information, depending on how complete the information is we already have. But it’s not just information that colors the search interaction. Like all human interactions, we are governed by our desires, our objectives and our beliefs, and this is certainly true in search.

Computing Concepts

Steven Pinker is one of the foremost proponents of a computational theory of mind. Following in the footsteps of Alan Newell, Alan Turing, Herbert Simon   and  Marvin Minsky,  Pinker argues that our “minds” lie within the patterns of information processing and functionality founds in the specialized modules of our brains. Like a software program being executed step by step, our minds break down the incredibly complex concepts we are faced with each day and feed them through these patterns. We create objectives that get us closer to our desires, and in order to get there in the most efficient way possible, we depend on a vast library of heuristic shortcuts that include our beliefs. We don’t think everything to death. We make quick decisions and create short cuts based on existing beliefs. Simon called this  bounded rationality.

Irrational Short Cuts

The challenge with these short cuts, as  Amos Tversky,  Daniel Kahneman, and more recently,  Dan Ariely, have discovered, is that they’re often quite irrational. Our beliefs are often driven by inherent patterns that have evolved over thousands of years. While they may be triggered by information at hand, the beliefs lie within, formed from a strange brew of inherent drivers, cultural influences and personal experience. In this brew, it’s almost impossible to see where one belief shaper begins and another leaves off. Our beliefs are largely formed in our vast mental sub-cortical and subterranean basement, below the hard white light of rational thought. But, once formed, beliefs are incredibly stubborn. Because we rely on beliefs to save our cognitive horsepower, we have an evolutionary interest in keeping them rigidly in place. Heuristic shortcuts don’t work very well if they’re based on ever-changing rules.

And there you have the crux of marketing. Every time we’re presented with a symbol that represents a concept, whether it be a word, a picture, a sound or a logo, it unlocks a mental concept complete with corresponding beliefs. Unless it’s a brand we’ve never heard of before (in itself a significant marketing challenge), that brand comes with corresponding belief luggage, some of it undoubtedly highly irrational. We are built to quickly categorize every new presentation of information into existing belief filing cabinets or “schemas.” The contents of those filing cabinets are difficult to explore, because they exist at a subconscious level. Consultants such as  Gerald Zaltman and  Clotaire Rappaille have carved out lucrative careers by creating methods to unlock the subconscious codes that lie behind brands.

Search and Our Subconscious Baggage

So, when we interact with a search engine, it’s important to understand that this is not entering new information onto a blank canvas. Each word (or now, image) on a search page has the potential to trigger an existing concept. This is especially true for the appearance of brands on a page. Brands are neat little labels that can sum up huge bundles of beliefs.

It’s actually amazing to consider how quickly we can filter through the degree of information presented on a search page. We quickly slice away the irrelevant and the items that don’t fit within our existing belief schemas.

It’s not just the information on the page that we have to filter through. It’s all the corresponding baggage that it unlocks within us. Somehow, through the power of our subconscious mind, we can scan 4 or 5 listings, let the words we scan trigger corresponding concepts in our minds, quickly evaluate which listing is most likely to get us closer to our objective (based on beliefs, aligned with our desire) and click, all within a few seconds.

This simple act of using a search engine is actually a very impressive and intricate cognitive ballet using the power of our conscious and subconscious minds.

Search Behavior: I Know What I Want, But Not Where to Find It

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

Last week I looked at search behaviors when we knew what we were looking for and where to find it (http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/search_insider/?p=832). This week we’ll look at what happens when you know what you’re looking for — but you’re not sure where to find it.

Judging a Patch By its Scent

In the first instance, when you know what you’re looking for and where to find it, you have defined your patch and you have a pretty good idea what route to take to find your specific piece of information. In the second instance, you don’t know in which patch you’ll find the piece of information. This is where classic way-finding behaviors and information scent can play a critical role in seeking information.

When you’re not sure which information patch contains the right information, you have to judge each patch by its relative “scent.” This pretty much guarantees you’ll visit more than one patch, which for our purposes translates to Web sites. You’ll try to do a preliminary assessment of scent based on what you see on the results page, but you’ll reserve most of your judgment for when you click through to the site.

Looking for Greener Grass

One of the interesting aspects of optimal foraging for food is that there are costs to move from patch to patch. You have to literally assess whether the grass is truly greener on the other side of the fence, or whether it would just be a senseless waste of effort. Most animals have a highly developed heuristic instinct about when the time is right to move on to the next patch. Biologist Eric Charnov, who reached out to me (I’m still following up with Eric to get a follow-up interview for a future column) after my original information-foraging column, called it the  Marginal Value Theorem. In a nutshell, Charnov’s Theorem says that we decide how long to stay in a patch based on how rich the current patch is and how distant the next patch is.

One of the challenges of the Marginal Value Theorem is that we often have no way of knowing what the “richness” of the next patch might be until we commit to expending the energy to go see it. We risk the effort based on our assessment of the current patch and the hope that better patches lie ahead. And the risk lies in the fact that it takes energy to move from patch to patch. The degree of risk lies in the distance to the next patch, our expectation of the richness of that patch and the value of the patch we’re currently in.

Patch Hopping with Search

But online, the Internet is non-dimensional in the traditional sense. There is no distance; the only dimension is time. How much time are we willing to expend to find the next patch? And search gives us the ability to greatly reduce the time needed to navigate from patch to patch. We structure queries to define the “diet” we hope to find in each patch. We then can click through to see if the scent matches our definition of diet.

Remember, time is the resource we hope to conserve, so these explorations from the search page are very quick. We can visit a number of patches in seconds. We define the diet (what we’re looking for) and start down the page visiting the most promising patches. Based on user research we’ve done at Enquiro, searchers typically take 10 to 12 seconds for the first click from the search results page, and spend about 15 seconds assessing the scent on the pages they visit.

Because we are programmed to save effort, if we visit a few patches and come up short, we’ll use a new query to define a new collection of patches. Because we have no defined notion of which patch will be the right one, we have to use shortcuts to judge each patch quickly and efficiently. We have little patience for unpromising patches.

Of course, our level of patience is also determined by how rare the prey is we’re pursuing. If we believe it should be rather plentiful, we also believe the scent should be easy to pick up. But if our prey is elusive, we’ll be more patient in our quest to pick up its scent. Those are the searches that will drive us to the second or third page of results.

We Don’t Consume Information

If we find a rich patch, we file it away for future consideration. This is another area where information foraging diverges from biological foraging. Looking for food is a zero-sum game. If we don’t eat the food we find, someone else will. So when we find a rich patch, we stay put until we eat as much as we can (or until a richer patch beckons).

But online, information is not really consumed. Even if we use it, it’s still there for the next visitor. There’s no risk to move on and find other information patches. This is where traditional way-finding strategies come in. As we explore for information, we define the landscape based on the richest information patches. These become landmarks which we return to again and again. So we quickly use search to define the best patches and tag them for future reference. Then, we return to them at our leisure, knowing the information will still be there, waiting for us.

Next week, we’ll looking at the third state of information-seeking — where we don’t know what we’re looking for or where to find it — and how this impacts our search behavior.