Category Archives: User Behavior

The World in Bite Sized Pieces

It’s hard to see the big picture when your perspective is limited to 160 characters.

Or when we keep getting distracted from said big picture by that other picture that always seems to be lurking over there on the right side of our screen – the one of Kate Upton tilting forward wearing a wet bikini.

Two things are at work here obscuring our view of the whole: Our preoccupation with the attention economy and a frantic scrambling for a new revenue model. The net result is that we’re being spoon-fed stuff that’s way too easy to digest. We’re being pandered to in the worst possible way. The world is becoming a staircase of really small steps, each of which has a bright shiny object on it urging us to scale just a little bit higher. And we, like idiots, stumble our way up the stairs.

This cannot be good for us. We become better people when we have to chew through some gristle. Or when we’re forced to eat our broccoli. The world should not be the cognitive equivalent of Captain Crunch cereal.

It’s here where human nature gets the best of us. We’re wired to prefer scintillation to substance. Our intellectual laziness and willingness to follow whatever herd seems to be heading in our direction have conspired to create a world where Donald Trump can be a viable candidate for president of the United States – where our attention span is measured in fractions of a second – where the content we consume is dictated by a popularity contest.

Our news is increasingly coming to us in smaller and smaller chunks. The exploding complexity of our world, which begs to be understood in depth, is increasingly parceled out to us in pre-digested little tidbits, pushed to our smartphone. We spend scant seconds scanning headlines to stay “up to date.” And an algorithm that is trying to understand where our interests lie usually determines the stories we see.

This algorithmic curation creates both “Filter” and “Agreement” Bubbles. The homogeneity of our social network leads to a homogeneity of content. But if we spend our entire time with others that think like us, we end up with an intellectually polarized society in which the factions that sit at opposite ends of any given spectrum are openly hostile to each other. The gaps between our respective ideas of what is right are simply too big and no one has any interest in building a bridge across them. We’re losing our ideological interface areas, those opportunities to encounter ideas that force us to rethink and reframe, broadening our worldview in the process. We sacrifice empathy and we look for news that “sounds right” to us, not matter what “right” might be.

This is a crying shame, because there is more thought provoking, intellectually rich content than ever before being produced. But there is also more sugar coated crap who’s sole purpose is to get us to click.

I’ve often talked about the elimination of friction. Usually, I think this is a good thing. Bob Garfield, in a column a few months ago, called for a whoop-ass can of WD 40 to remove all transactional friction. But if we make things too easy to access, will we also remove those cognitive barriers that force us to slow down and think, giving our rationality a change to catch up with impulse? And it’s not just on the consumption side where a little bit of friction might bring benefits. The upside of production friction was that it did slow down streams of content just long enough to introduce an editorial voice. Someone somewhere had to give some thought as to what might actually be good for us.

In other words, it was someone’s job to make sure we ate our vegetables.

We’re Informed. But Are We Thoughtful?

I’m a bit of a jerk when I write. I lock myself behind closed doors in my home office. In the summer, I retreat to the most remote reaches of the back yard. The reason? I don’t want to be interrupted with human contact. If I am interrupted, I stare daggers through the interrupter and answer in short, clipped sentences. The house has to be silent. If conditions are less than ideal, my irritation is palpable. My family knows this. The warning signal is “Dad is writing.” This can be roughly translated as “Dad is currently an asshole.” The more I try to be thoughtful, the bigger the ass I am.

I suspect Henry David Thoreau was the same.  He went even further than my own backyard exile. He camped out alone for two years in Ralph Waldo Emersen’s cabin on Walden Pond. He said things like,

“I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

But Thoreau but was also a pretty thoughtful guy, who advised us that,

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

But, I ask, how can we be thoughtful when we are constantly distracted by information? Our mental lives are full of single footsteps. Even if we intend to cover the same path more than once, there are a thousand beeps, alerts, messages, prompts, pokes and flags that are beckoning us to start down a new path, in a different direction. We probably cover more ground, but I suspect we barely disturb the fallen leaves on the paths we take.

I happen to do all my reading on a tablet. I do this for three reasons; first, I always have my entire library with me and I usually have four books on the go at the same time (currently 1491, Reclaiming Conversation, Flash Boys and 50 Places to Bike Before You Die) – secondly, I like to read before I go to sleep and I don’t need to keep a light on that keeps my wife awake – and thirdly, I like to highlight passages and make notes. But there’s a trade-off I’ve had to make. I don’t read as thoughtfully as I used to. I can’t “escape” with a book anymore. I am often tempted to check email, play a quick game of 2048 or search for something on Google. Maybe the fact that my attention is always divided amongst four books is part of the problem. Or maybe it’s that I’m more attention deficit than I used to be.

There is a big difference between being informed and being thoughtful. And our connected world definitely puts the bias on the importance of information. Being connected is all about being informed. But being thoughtful requires us to remove distraction. It’s the deep paths that Thoreau was referring too. And it requires a very different mindset. Our brains are a single-purpose engine. We can either be informed or be thoughtful. We can’t be both at the same time.

090313-RatMaze

At the University of California, San Francisco, Mattiass Karlsson and Loren Frank found that rats need two very different types of cognitive activity when mastering a maze. First, when they explore a maze, certain parts of their brain are active as they’re being “informed” about their new environment. But they don’t master the maze unless they’re allowed downtime to consolidate the information into new persistent memories. Different parts of the brain are engaged, including the hippocampus. They need time to be thoughtful and create a “deep path.”

In this instance, we’re not all that different than rats. In his research, MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland found that effective teams tend to cycle through two very different phases: First, they explore, gathering new information. Then, just like the thoughtful rats, they engage as a group, taking that information, digesting it and synthesizing it for future execution. Pentland found that while both are necessary, they don’t exist at the same time,

“Exploration and engagement, while both good, don’t easily coexist, because they require that the energy of team members be put to two different uses. Energy is a finite resource.”

Ironically, research is increasingly showing that are previous definitions of cognitive activity may have been off-the mark. We always assumed that “mind-wandering” or “day-dreaming” was a non-productive activity. But we’re finding out that it’s an essential part of being thoughtful. We’re actually not “wandering.” It’s just the brain’s way of synthesizing and consolidating information. We’re wearing deeper paths in the by-ways of our mind. But a constant flow of new information, delivered through digital channels, keeps us from synthesizing the information we already have. Our brain is too busy being informed to be able to make the switch to thoughtfulness. We don’t have enough cognitive energy to do both.

What price might we pay for being “informed” at the expense of being “thoughtful?” It appears that it might be significant. Technology distraction in the classroom could lower grades by close to 20 percent. And you don’t even have to be the one using the device. Just having an open screen in the vicinity might distract you enough to drop your report card from a “B” to a “C.”

Having read this, you now have two choices. You could click off to the next bit of information. Or, you could stare into space for a few minutes and be lost in your thoughts.

Chose wisely.

Are Atheists More Innovative?

A few columns back, I talked about the most innovative countries in the world, according to INSEAD, Johnson School of Management and WIPO. Switzerland, of all places, topped the list. At the time, I mentioned diversity as possibly being one of the factors. But for some reason, I just couldn’t let it lie there.

Last Friday afternoon, it being pretty miserable outside, I dusted off my Stats 101 prowess and decided to look for correlations. The next thing I knew, 3 hours had passed and I was earlobe deep in data tables and spreadsheets.

Yeah..that’s how I roll. That’s wassup.

But I digress. What initially sent me down this path was a new study out of the University of Kansas by Tien-Tsung lee and co-authors Masahiro Yamamoto and Weina Ran. Working with data from Japan, they found that the amount of trust you have in media depends on the diversity of the community you live in. The more diverse the population, the lower the degree of trust in media.

This caught my attention – a negative correlation between trust and diversity. I wondered how those two things might triangulate with innovation. Was there a three-way link here?

So, I started compiling the data. First, I wanted to broaden the definition of innovation. Originally, I had cited the INSEAD Global Innovation Index. Bloomberg also has a ranking of innovation by country that uses a few different criteria. I decided to take an average, normalized score of the two together. In case you’re wondering, Switzerland scored much lower in the Bloomberg ranking, which had South Korea, Japan and Germany in the top three spots.

With my new innovation ranking, I then started to look for correlations. What part, for example, did trust play? According to Edelman, the global marketing giant, who publishes an annual trust barometer, it plays a massive role: “Building trust is essential to successfully bringing new products and services to market.” Their trust barometer measures trust in the infrastructural institutions of the respective countries. So I added Edelman’s indexed trust scores to my spreadsheet and used a quick and dirty Pearson r-value test to look for significant correlations. For those as rusty as I when it comes to stats, a perfect correlation would be 1.0. Strong relationships show up in the 0.6 and above range. Moderate relationships are in the 0.3 to 0.6 range. Weak relationships are 0.3 and below. Zero values indicate no relationship. Inverse relationships follow the same scale but with negative values.

The result? Not only was there no positive correlation, there was actually a moderately significant negative correlation! For those interested, the r-value was -0.4224. Based on this admittedly amateur analysis, trust in national institutions and innovation do not seem to go hand-in-hand. Some of the most innovative countries are the least trusting and vice-versa. It certainly wasn’t the neat supposed linear relationship that Edelman referred to in their press releases for their barometer.

Next, I turned to the obvious – the wealth of the respective nations. I added GDP per capita as a data point. Predictably, there was a strong positive correlation here – I came up with an r-value of .793. Rich countries are more innovative. Duh.

Now comes the really interesting part. What was the relationship between cultural diversity and innovation? If my original hypothesis was correct, there should be at least a moderate correlation here. The problem was trying to find an accurate measure of cultural diversity. I ended up using three measures from Alesina et al: Ethnic Fractionalization, Linguistic Fractionalization and Religious Fractionalization. I averaged these out and indexed them to give me a single score of cultural diversity. To my surprise, my hypothesis appeared to be significantly flawed – my r value was -0.2488.

But then I started analyzing the individual measures of diversity. Ethnic Diversity and Innovation showed a moderate negative correlation: -0.5738. Linguistic Diversity and Innovation showed a less significant negative correlation: -0.3886. But Religious Diversity and Innovation came up as a moderate positive correlation: 0.4129! Of the three, religion is the only measure of diversity that’s directly ideological, at least to some extent.

This seemed to be promising, so I pushed it to the extreme. If religious diversity shows to be correlated with innovation, I wonder how the prevalence of atheists would relate? After all, this should be the ultimate measure of religious ideological freedom. So, using a combination of results from a worldwide Gallup survey and a study from Phil Zuckerman, I added an indexed “atheism” score. Sure enough, the r-value was 0.7461! This was almost as significant as the correlation between national wealth and innovation! Based on my combined innovation scores, some of the least religious countries in the world (Japan, Sweden and Switzerland) are the most innovative.

So – ignoring for a moment the barn-door sized holes in my impromptu methodology and a whack of confounding factors – what might this hypothetically mean? I’ll come back to this intriguing question in next week’s Online Spin.

Consumers in the Wild

Once a Forager, Always a Forager

Your world is a much different place than the African Savanna. But over 100,000 generations of evolution that started on those plains still dictates a remarkable degree of our modern behavior.

Take foraging, for example. We evolved as hunters and gatherers. It was our primary survival instinct. And even though the first hominids are relatively recent additions to the biological family tree, strategies for foraging have been developing for millions and millions of years. It’s hardwired into the deepest and most inflexible parts of our brain. It makes sense, then, that foraging instincts that were once reserved for food gathering should be applied to a wide range of our activities.

That is, in fact, what Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card discovered two decades ago. When they looked at how we navigated online sources of information, they found that humans used the very same strategy we would have used for berry picking or gathering cassava roots. And one of the critical elements of this was something called Marginal Value.

Bounded Rationality & Foraging

It’s hard work being a forager. Most of your day – and energy – is spent looking for something to eat. The sparser the food sources in your environment, the more time you spend looking for them. It’s not surprising; therefore, that we should have some fairly well honed calculations for assessing the quality of our food sources. This is what biologist Eric Charnov called Marginal Value in 1976. It’s an instinctual (and therefore, largely subconscious) evaluation of food “patches” by most types of foragers, humans included . It’s how our brain decides whether we should stay where we are or find another patch. It would have been a very big deal 2 million – or even 100,000 – years ago.

Today, for most of us, food sources are decidedly less “patchy.” But old instincts die hard. So we did what humans do. We borrowed an old instinct and applied it to new situations. We exapted our foraging strategies and started using them for a wide range of activities where we had to have a rough and ready estimation of our return on our energy investment. Increasingly, more and more of these activities asked for an investment of cognitive processing power. And we did all this without knowing we were even doing it.

This brings us to Herbert Simon’s concept of Bounded Rationality. I believe this is tied directly to Charnov’s theorem of Marginal Value. When we calculate how much mental energy we’re going to expend on an information-gathering task, we subconsciously determine the promise of the information “patches” available to us. Then we decided to invest accordingly based on our own “bounded” rationality.

Brands as Proxies for Foraging

It’s just this subconscious calculation that has turned the world of consumerism on its ear in the last two decades. As Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen explain in their book Absolute Value, the explosion of information available has meant that we are making different marginal value calculations than we would have thirty or forty years ago. We have much richer patches available, so we’re more likely to invest the time to explore them. And, once we do, the way we evaluate our consumer choices changes completely. Our modern concept of branding was a direct result of both bounded rationality and sparse information patches. If a patch of objective and reliable information wasn’t apparent, we would rely on brands as a cognitive shortcut, saving our bounded rationality for more promising tasks.

Google, The Ultimate “Patch”

In understanding modern consumer behavior, I think we have to pay much more attention to this idea of marginal value. What is the nature of the subconscious algorithm that decides whether we’re going to forage for more information or rely on our brand beliefs? We evolved foraging strategies that play a huge part in how we behave today.

For example, the way we navigate our physical environment appears to owe much to how we used to search for food. Women determine where they’re going differently than men because women used to search for food differently. Men tend to do this by orientation, mentally maintaining a spatial grid in their minds against which they plot their own location. Women do it by remembering routes. In my own research, I found split-second differences in how men and women navigated websites that seem to go back to those same foundations.

Whether you’re a man or a woman, however, you need to have some type of mental inventory of information patches available to you to in order to assess the marginal value of those patches. This is the mental landscape Google plays in. For more and more decisions, our marginal value calculation starts with a quick search on Google to see if any promising patches show up in the results. Our need to keep a mental inventory of patches can be subjugated to Google.

It seems ironic that in our current environment, more and more of our behavior can be traced back millions of years to behaviors that evolved in a world where high-tech meant a sharper rock.

Do We Really Want Virtual Reality?

Facebook bought Oculus. Their goal is to control the world you experience while wearing a pair of modified ski goggles. Mark Zuckerberg is stoked. Netflix is stoked. Marketers the world over are salivating. But, how should you feel about this?

Personally, I’m scared. I may even be terrified.

First of all, I don’t want anyone, especially not Mark Zuckerberg, controlling my sensory world.

Secondly, I’m pretty sure we’re not built to be virtually real.

I understand the human desire to control our environment. It’s part of the human hubris. We think we can do a better job than nature. We believe introducing control and predictability into our world is infinitely better than depending on the caprices of nature. We’ve thought so for many thousands of years. And – Oh Mighty Humans Who Dare to be Gods – just how is that working out for us?

Now that we’ve completely screwed up our physical world, we’re building an artificial version. Actually, it’s not really “we” – it’s “they.” And “they” are for profit organizations that see an opportunity. “They” are only doing it so “they” control our interface to consciousness.

Personally, I’m totally comfortable giving a profit driven corporation control over my senses. I mean, what could possibly happen? I’m sure anything they may introduce to my virtual world will be entirely for my benefit. I’m sure they would never take the opportunity to use this control to add to their bottom line. If you need proof, look how altruistically media – including the Internet – has evolved under the stewardship of corporations.

Now, their response would be that we can always decide to take the goggles off. We stay in control, because we have an on/off switch. What they don’t talk about is the fact that they will do everything in their power to keep us from switching their VR world off. It’s in their best interest to do so, and by best interest, I mean they more time we spend in their world, as opposed to the real one, the more profitable it is for them. They can hold our senses hostage and demand ransom in any form they choose.

How will they keep us in their world? By making it addictive. And this brings us to my second concern about Virtual Reality – we’re just not built for it.

We have billions of neurons that are dedicated to parsing and understanding a staggeringly complex and dynamic environment. Our brain is built to construct a reality from thousands and thousands of external cues. To manage this, it often takes cognitive shortcuts to bring the amount of processing required down to a manageable level. We prefer pleasant aspects of reality. We are alerted to threats. Things that could make us sick disgust us. The brain manages the balance by a judicious release of neurochemicals that make us happy, sad, disgusted or afraid. Emotions are the brain’s way of effectively guiding us through the real world.

A virtual world, by necessity, will have a tiny fraction of the inputs that we would find in the real world. Our brains will get an infinitesimal slice of the sensory bandwidth it’s used to. Further, what inputs it will get will have the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Ham fisted programmers will try to push our emotional hot buttons, all in the search for profit. This means a few sections of our brain will be cued far more frequently and violently than they were ever intended to be. Additionally, huge swaths of our environmental processing circuits will remain dormant for extended periods of time. I’m not a neurologist, but I can’t believe that will be a good thing for our cognitive health.

We were built to experience the world fully through all our senses. We have evolved to deal with a dynamic, complex and often unexpected environment. We are supposed to interact with the serendipity of nature. It is what it means to be human. I don’t know about you, but I never, ever, want to auction off this incredible gift to a profit-driven corporation in return for a plastic, programmed, 3 dimensional interface.

I know this plea is too late. Pandora’s Box is opened. The barn door is open. The horse is long gone. But like I said, I’m scared.

Make that terrified.

The Messy Part of Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mourning Becomes Electric

dreamstime_19503560Last Friday was a sad day. A very dear and lifelong friend of mine, my Uncle Al, passed away. And so I did what I’ve done before on these occasions. I expressed my feelings by writing about it. The post went live on my blog around 10:30 in the morning. By mid afternoon, it had been shared and posted through Facebook, Twitter and many other online channels. Many were kind enough to send comments. The family, in the midst of their grief, forwarded my post to their family and friends. Soon, there was an extended network of mourning that sought to heal each other, all through channels that didn’t exist just a few years ago. Mourning had moved online.

As you probably know, I’m fascinated by how we express our innate human needs through digital technologies. And death, together with birth, is the most universal of human experiences. It was inevitable that we would use online channels to grieve. So I, as I always do, asked the question – why?

First of all – why do we mourn? Well, we mourn because we are social animals. We are probably the most social of animals. So we grieve to an according degree. We miss the departed terribly. It is natural to try to fill the hole a death tears inside of us by reaching out to others who may share the same grief. James R. Averill believed we communally mourn because it cements the social bonds that make it more likely that we will survive as a species. When it comes to dealing with death, misery loves company.

Secondly, why do we grieve online? Well, here, I think it has something to do with Granovetter’s weak ties. Death is one of those life events where we reach beyond the strong ties that define our day-to-day social existence. Certainly we seek comfort from those closest to us, but the death also triggers the existence of a virtual community – defined and united by their grieving for the one who has passed away. Our digital networks allow us to eliminate the six degrees of separation in one fell swoop. We can share our grief almost instantaneously and simultaneously with family, friends, acquaintances and even people we have never met.

There are two other aspects of grief that I believe lend themselves well to online channels: the need to chronicle and the comfort of emotional distance.

Part of the healing process is sharing memories of the departed love one. And, for those like myself, just writing about our feelings helps overcome the pain. Online provides a perfect platform for chronicling. We can share our own thoughts and, in the expressing of them, start the healing process.

The comfort of physical distance seems a contradictory idea, but almost everyone I know who has gone through a deep loss has one common dread – dealing with a never-ending stream of condolences over the coming weeks and months, triggered by each new physical encounter.

When you’ve been in the middle of the storm, you are typically a few days ahead of everyone else in dealing with your grief. Your mind has been occupied with nothing else as you have sat vigil by the hospital bed. While the condolences are given with the best of intentions, you feel compelled to give a response. The problem is, each new expression of grief forces you to replay your loop of very painful memories. The amplitude of this pain increases when it’s a face-to-face encounter. Condolences that reach you through a more detached channel, such as online, can be dealt with at your discretion. You can wait until you marshall the emotional reserves necessary to respond. You can also respond to several people at a time. How many times have you heard this from a grieving loved one, “I just wish I could record my message and play it whenever I meet someone who wants to tell me how sorry they are for my loss?” It may seem callous, but no one wants to relive that pain over and over again. And let’s face it – almost no one knows the right things to say at a moment like this.

By the end of last Friday, my online social connections had helped me ease a very deep pain. I hope I was able to return the favor for others that were dealing with their own grief. There are many things about technology that I treat with suspicion, but in this case, turning online seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

How Activation Works in an Absolute Value Market

As I covered last week, if I mention a brand to you – like Nike, for instance – your brain immediately pulls back your own interpretation of the brand. What has happened, in a split second, is that the activation of that one node – let’s call it the Nike node – triggers the activation of several related nodes in your brain, which is quickly assembled into a representation of the brand Nike. This is called Spreading Activation.

This activation is all internal. It’s where most of the efforts of advertising have been focused over the past several decades. Advertising’s job has been to build a positive network of associations so when that prime happens, you have a positive feeling towards the brand. Advertising has been focused on winning territory in this mental landscape.

Up to now, we have been restricted to this internal landscape when making consumer decisions by the boundaries of our own rationality. Access to reliable and objective information about possible purchases was limited. It required more effort on our part than we were willing to expend. So, for the vast majority of purchases, these internal representations were enough for us. They acted as a proxy for information that lay beyond our grasp.

But the world has changed. For almost any purchase category you can think of, there exists reliable, objective information that is easy to access and filter. We no longer are restricted to internal brand activations (relative values based on our own past experiences and beliefs). Now, with a few quick searches, we can access objective information, often based on the experiences of others. In their book of the same name, Itimar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen call these sources “Absolute Value.” For more and more purchases, we turn to external sources because we can. The effort invested is more than compensated for the value returned. In the process, the value of traditional branding is being eroded. This is truer for some product categories than others. The higher the risk or the level of interest, the more the prospect will engage in an external activation. But across all product categories, there has been a significant shift from the internal to the external.

What this means for advertising is that we have to shift our focus from internal spreading activations to external spreading activations. Now, when we retrieve an internal representation of a product or brand, it typically acts as a starting point, not the end point. That starting point is then to be modified or discarded completely depending on the external information we access. The first activated node is our own initial concept of the product, but the subsequent nodes are spread throughout the digitized information landscape.

In an internal spreading activation, the nodes activated and the connections between those nodes are all conducted at a subconscious level. It’s beyond our control. But an external spreading activation is a different beast. It’s a deliberate information search conducted by the prospect. That means that the nodes accessed and the connections between those nodes becomes of critical importance. Advertisers have to understand what those external activation maps look like. They have to be intimately aware of the information nodes accessed and the connections used to get to those nodes. They also have to be familiar with the prospect’s information consumption preferences. At first glance, this seems to be an impossibly complex landscape to navigate. But in practice, we all tend to follow remarkable similar paths when establishing our external activation networks. Search is often the first connector we use. The nodes accessed and the information within those nodes follow predictable patterns for most product categories.

For the advertiser, it comes down to a question of where to most profitably invest your efforts. Traditional advertising was built on the foundation of controlling the internal activation. This was the psychology behind classic treatises such as Ries and Trout’s “Positioning, The Battle for Your Mind.” And, in most cases, that battle was won by whomever could assemble the best collection of smoke and mirrors. Advertising messaging had very little to do with facts and everything to do with persuasion.

But as Simonsen and Rosen point out, the relative position of a brand in a prospect’s mind is becoming less and less relevant to the eventual purchase decision. Many purchases are now determined by what happens in the external activation. Factual, reliable information and easy access to that information becomes critical. Smoke and mirrors are relegated to advertising “noise” in this scenario. The marketer with a deep understanding of how the prospect searches for and determines what the “truth” is about a potential product will be the one who wins. And traditional marketing is becoming less and less important to that prospect.

 

The Spreading Activation Model of Marketing

“Beatle.”

I have just primed you. Before you even finished reading the word above, you had things popping into your mind. Perhaps it was a mental image of an individual Beatle – either John, Paul, George or Ringo. Perhaps it was a snippet of song. Perhaps it was grainy black and white footage of the Ed Sullivan show appearance. But as the concept “Beatle” entered your working memory, your brain was hard at work retrieving what you believed were relevant concepts from your long-term memory. (By the way, if your reaction was “What’s a Beatle?” – substitute “Imagine Dragons.”)

1-brain-neural-network-pasiekaThat’s a working example of spreading activation. The activation of your working memory pulls associated concepts from your long-term memory to create a mental construct that creates your internal definition of whatever that first label was.

Now, an important second step may or may not happen. First, you have to decide how long you’re going to let the “Beatle” prime occupy your working memory. If it’s of fleeting interest, you’ve probably already wiped the slate clear, ready for the next thing that catches your interest. But if that prime is strong enough to establish a firm grip on your attention, then you have a choice to make. Is your internal representation complete, or do you require more information? If you require more information then you have to turn to external sources for that information.

Believe it or not, this column is not intended as a 101 primer in Cognitive Psych. But the mental gymnastics I describe are important when we think about marketing, as we go through exactly the same process when we think about potential purchases. If we can understand that process better, we gain some valuable hints about how to more effectively market in an exceedingly fluid technological environment.

Much of advertising is built on the first half of the process – building associative brand concepts and triggering the prime that retrieves those concepts into working memory. Most of what isn’t working about advertising lies on this side of the cognitive map. We’ve been overly focused on the internal activation, at the expense of the external. But thanks to an explosion of available (and objective) information we’re less reliant on using our internal knowledge when making purchase decisions. Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen explain in their book “Absolute Value”: “A person’s decision to buy is affected by a mix of three related sources: The individual’s Prior preferences, beliefs, and experiences (P) Others. Other people and information services (O) and Marketers (M).”

Simonson and Rosen say that with near perfect information available for the consumer, we now rely more on (O) and less on (P) and (M). Let’s leave (M) and (O) aside for the moment and focus on the (P) in this equation. (P) represents our internal spreading activation. After we’re primed, we retrieve a representation of the product or service we’re thinking of. At this point, we make an internal calculation. We balance how confident we are that our internal representation is adequate to make a purchase against how much effort we have to expend to gather further information. This calculation is largely made subconsciously. It follows Herbert Simon’s principle of Bounded Rationality. It also depends on how much risk is involved in the purchase we’re contemplating. If all the factors dictate that we’re reasonably confident in our internal representation and the risk we’re assuming, we’ll pull out our wallets and buy. If, however, we aren’t confident, we’ll start seeking more information. And that’s where (O) and (M) come in.

Simonson and Rosen lay out a purchase behaviour continuum, from (O) Dependent to (O) Independent. It’s at the (O) Dependent end, where internal confidence in retrieved beliefs and experience is low, that buying behaviors are changing dramatically. And it’s there where conventional approaches to advertising are falling far short of the mark. They are still stuck in the mythical times of Mad Men, where marketers relied on a “Prime, Retrieve (Internal beliefs), Purchase” path. Today, it’s much more likely that the Prime and Retrieve stages will be followed by an external spreading activation. We’ll pick up that thread in next week’s Online Spin.

 

Consuming in Context

npharris-oscarsIt was interesting watching my family watch the Oscars Sunday night. Given that I’m the father of two millennials, who have paired with their own respective millennials, you can bet that it was a multi-screen affair. But to be fair, they weren’t the only ones splitting their attention amongst the TV and various mobile devices. I was also screen hopping.

As Dave Morgan pointed out last week, media usage no longer equates to media opportunity. And it’s because the nature of our engagement has changed significantly in the last decade. Unfortunately, our ad models have been unable to keep up. What is interesting is the way our consumption has evolved. Not surprisingly, technology is allowing our entertainment consumption to evolve back to its roots. We are watching our various content streams in much the same way that we interact with our world. We are consuming in context.

The old way of watching TV was very linear in nature. It was also divorced from context. We suspended engagement with our worlds so that we could focus on the flickering screen in front of us. This, of course, allowed advertisers to buy our attention in little 30-second blocks. It was the classic bait and switch technique. Get our attention with something we care about, and then slip in something the advertiser cares about.

The reason we were willing to suspend engagement with the world was that there was nothing in that world that was relevant to our current task at hand. If we were watching Three’s Company, or the Moon Landing, or a streaker running behind David Niven at the 1974 Oscar ceremony, there was nothing in our everyday world that related to any of those TV events. Nothing competed for the spotlight of our attention. We had no choice but to keep watching the TV to see what happened next.

But imagine if a nude man suddenly appeared behind Matthew McConaughey at the 2015 Oscars. We would immediately want to know more about the context of what just happened. Who was it? Why did it happen? What’s the backstory? The difference is now, we have channels at our disposal to try to find answers to those questions. Our world now includes an extended digital nervous system that allows us to gain context for the things that happen on our TV screens. And because TV no longer has exclusive control of our attention, we switch to the channel that is the best bet to find the answers we seek.

That’s how humans operate. Our lives are a constant quest to fill gaps in our knowledge and by doing so, make sense of the world around us. When we become aware of one of these gaps we immediate scan our environment to find cues of where we might find answers. Then, our senses are focused on the most promising cues. We forage for information to satiate our curiosity. A single-minded focus on one particular cue, especially one over which we have no control, is not something we evolved to do. The way we watched TV in the 60s and 70s was not natural. It was something we did because we had no option.

Our current mode of splitting attention across several screens is much closer to how humans naturally operate. We continually scan our environment, which, in this case, included various electronic interfaces to the extended virtual world, for things of interest to us. When we find one, our natural need to make sense sends us on a quest for context. As we consume, we look for this context. The diligence of our quest for that context will depend on the degree of our engagement with the task at hand. If it is slight, we’ll soon move on to the next thing. If it’s deep, we’ll dig further.

On Sunday night, the Hotchkiss family quest for context continually skipped around, looking for what other movies J.K. Simmons had acted in, watching the trailer for Whiplash, reliving the infamous Adele Dazeem moment from last year and seeing just how old Benedict Cumberbatch is (I have two daughters that are hopelessly in love, much to the chagrin of their boyfriends). As much as the advertisers on the 88th Oscars might wish otherwise, all of this was perfectly natural. Technology has finally evolved to give our brain choices in our consumption.