Category Archives: User Behavior

The Primacy of the Patch: Information Foraging is the Key to Behavior

As I said, this week I want to dissect some aspects of human behavior to show why Rupert Murdoch is seriously out of touch and how Bing can’t corner the news market.

The primary reason is that we’re changing how we get information. The implications of this are fascinating, because the implications will soon spread through all marketplaces and aspects of our society. And it comes down to one important factor to consider: Humans are inherently lazy.

Laziness is a Good Thing

Now, before you get all morally indignant on me, let me explain: humans are lazy in the evolutionary sense, the same way that Richard Dawkin’s genes are selfish. We’re lazy because it’s a natural advantage, it’s built into our genome. To be more accurate, we’re lazy when the expenditure of more energy doesn’t make sense. We’re lazy in a subtle, subconscious way. And, like all aspects of human behavior, we’re not all equally lazy. There’s a bell curve of laziness. Laziness has gotten a bad rap in our puritanical, WASPish culture, but the fact is, when it comes to survival, laziness is often the optimal strategy.

Look at it a different way. Say you need to drive from Detroit to Chicago. The only goal is to get to Chicago and pay as little for gas as possible on the way. What vehicle are you going to take – a Hummer or a Prius? The Prius is a no brainer. In terms of fuel efficiency, the Prius is a lazy car. It does what it has to do more efficiently than a Hummer. In a vehicle, this is a virtue, but somewhere in our twisted culture, it’s become a bad thing for humans.

Fat And Lazy? Maybe Not …

Calories are a human’s gas tank. We’ve been genetically hardwired to be very fuel efficient. In fact, we’ve developed very sophisticated subconscious mechanisms to ingest as many calories as possible without expending calories to find them. This worked well when we lived on the African savanna and the only food source was the odd Baobab tree. It doesn’t work so well when there’s a McDonald’s around every corner. It’s not a cruel joke what we’re attracted to high fat, high sugar foods. These provide lots of calories in one sitting. That’s why our society is fat (fat and lazy – how’s that self esteem so far?)

So, what the hell does this all have to do with search? Well, when humans are faced with new challenges, we’re stuck using the tools that evolution has endowed us with. We borrow from other abilities. The technical term for this is exaption. When digital information came along, we had to look into our evolutionary toolkit and find something that would work.

Foraging for Information

At Xerox’s PARC in the late 90’s, Peter Pirolli was exploring how humans navigated hypertext linked information environments. The invention of hyperlinking introduced a new challenge in information retrieval. Throughout history, information was structured into an imposed taxonomy or hierarchy. We sorted it alphabetically or by the Dewey decimal system. And, because information was static, it stayed within the boundaries we built for it. But the creation of the hyperlink meant that information suddenly became unstructured and organic. Topical links from source to source meant that imposed editorial restrictions no longer worked. Links kept leaping above the boundaries we tried to impose on information.

Given this new challenge, Pirolli wanted to explore the subconscious strategies we used to navigate this unstructured information environment. He wanted to reduce it to a predictable algorithm. Time after time, he was frustrated. Humans would start down a predictable path, only to suddenly take an expected turn. The patterns didn’t seem logical. But, as chance would have it, he had recently read some work on biological foraging patterns and decided to overlay that on the behaviors he was observing. It was Pirolli’s “A Ha” moment. Suddenly, the patterns made sense. Humans, Pirolli (along with Stuart Card and others) discovered, foraged for information. We used the same strategies to navigate the web that we use to look for food. And, just as is the case with calories, laziness (or efficiency) is a pretty good strategy for finding information.

In information foraging, there is one overriding concern: take the most efficient path possible to the information you seek. I won’t get too far into the mechanics of how we do that except to say this – it’s not a conscious calculation. We’re constantly scanning the environment to see if a richer information “patch” is on the horizon. Information foraging is fundamentally important to understand if you’re to understand human behavior online. Jakob Nielsen called it “the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993.”

So, let’s look at how this applies to the Murdoch-Bing scenario. For almost 20 years now, we’ve been retrieving information online, using our foraging strategies. In that time, we’ve become conditioned to go to the most efficient sources of information…the places where we get the biggest information “bang” for our buck – and in this case, our investment is our time. As I’ve said before, this is a conditioned behavior. We don’t consciously think our way through this. Our subconscious efficiency circuits kick in and we do this by habit. To think of how powerful these subconscious loops are, just think about how hard it is to walk past a cookie lying on the counter. It’s not that you’re a bad person if you pick it up. It’s not that you’re stupid, eating it even though you know it’s not good for you. It’s those inherent human behaviors taking over. It’s powerful stuff!

So, for well over a decade, we’ve discovered that the shortest line between our need for information and the right online destination is a search engine. If there was a more efficient retrieval mechanism, we’d use it. This isn’t about brand, or loyalty. It’s just walking past the kitchen counter and seeing a cookie there. We’ll do it without thinking.

Murdoch’s strategy is flawed because he doesn’t realize that we now seek information differently. In the past, we picked the editorial channel that best met our needs. The Wall Street Journal may have been one of our favored patches, because we agreed with it’s “editorial voice”, it met a sufficient number of our information needs and we felt the investment of our time was warranted by the information we retrieved. in return for that, we started to build up loyalty to the brand, giving the publishers the right to sell advertising against that loyalty.

But the hyperlink and the internet didn’t just make information patchy, it also created a “just in time” need for information. 30 years ago, we didn’t suddenly develop the need to know who the director of “Booty Call” was because there was no easy way to retrieve the information. It wasn’t worth the investment. But Google made instant retrieval of information possible. It dramatically improved the efficiency of information retrieval. We started Googling everything because we could, without wasting huge amounts of time.

It’s this paradigm shift in information consumption that Murdoch is completely missing. Yesterday in Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan did a good job showing how the social web and the indexing of content makes any attempt to wall it off to preserve a revenue model futile. The one thing I disagree with Danny on is his assertion that a mutually exclusive Murdoch/Google relationship won’t hurt Google or Murdoch:

So what happens if the WSJ is out of Google? Nothing. Seriously, nothing. Remember, for years the WSJ was NOT in Google, and yet Google grew just fine. Also, the WSJ seems to have been fine. Neither is crucial to each other.

What we have here is a significant shift in human behavior, and right now we’re in the transition period. Google and other engines have dramatically changed the game of information retrieval and that means a huge upheaval in the industry. Society is moving en mass from one behavior, which publishers had build a revenue model around, to another behavior, which still hasn’t been fully monetized (Google has only monetized one small slice of it). To say that both will do fine is ignoring the lessons of history. These massive behavioral shifts are ALWAYS a zero sum game..somebody wins and somebody loses. Guess who will lose? Hint, it won’t be Google.

So, what about Bing? If my theory is correct, will Bing become the new favored patch by signing with Murdoch? I doubt it. There’s just not enough critical mass there to disrupt conditioned behaviors. The “just in time” information economy has eroded our brand affinity for favored patches. We’ve become more publisher agnostic. Again, this isn’t universally true. We still appreciate “editorial voice” for some types of information and may seek out one specific publisher, but our new promiscuity means an erosion of page views and traffic, which is killing the traditional publishing revenue model. But, more about this in tomorrow and Thursday’s  post.

The Usability Acid Test

I slagged eMarketer last week for misleading reporting on Twitter usage, so in the spirit of fair play, I’ll show them some love for an interview they did with Kevin Ertell, Vice President of Retail Strategy for ForeSee Results.

In the interview, Kevin nailed the top thing that every single business should have on the top of their to do list:

“We’re seeing at many, many retailers that the amount of people that say they came to make a purchase today is 20% or higher. Yet, those people’s conversion rates are nowhere near 20%. So, there’s a massive gap there, and a lot of that gap can be attributed to usability issues. ”

Kevin is talking retailers, but developing a core usability practice should be a no brainer for any type of business, no matter what their online objectives are. It just doesn’t make sense to spend all that time, money and effort driving leads to a website that then lets those leads slip through hundreds of cracks. I’m a big believer in picking one thing and doing it really, really well. For online marketers, that one thing should always be delivering a great user experience. If you have to make a sacrifice to do it, do it. Nothing is more important than this.

This is one of those things that falls into the common sense category, but very very few companies do usability well. There are a lot of really horrible user experiences out there. Here are 5 usability acid tests to hold yourself to:

Have you crawled inside your customer’s minds? The percentage of companies I know that have done robust research into understanding how their prospect’s brains tick is almost nil. This is the first place you have to start. Why are they coming to your site? What do they want to do? Like I always say, a good place to start is just to stand over a prospect’s shoulder when they’re on your site and start asking why. Sure, it’s not sophisticated usability testing, but it’s a beginning. The important thing is just to start doing something!

Can they find what they’re looking for? Prospects are coming to your site because they’re looking for something. Everybody is looking for something. And the vast majority of your visitors will be looking for a handful of common things. Make sure they find them. Make sure the cues and paths are easy to find, clearly lit and simple to follow. Provide site wide assistance in the form of clear sitemaps and internal search tools that don’t suck.

Can they do what they want to do? Again, prospects come to your site with an objective – something they want to do. The better you understand that objective, the more successful you can be in helping them meet it. Your job – your only job as the site designer – is to understand the paths your visitors want to take and remove any possible friction on those paths. You’ll have business objectives (i.e. capturing lead information) but these should never take priority over your visitor objectives.

Do You Make Your Visitors Do Too Much Thinking? (thanks Steve Krug!) – We do very little thinking when we navigate websites. Most of our online wayfinding is done subsconsciously. The minute you make a prospect stop and think, you’ve introduced friction and reduced their site experience. You should be able to get to where you’re going on the site quickly and intuitively. It’s not a puzzle to be solved. It’s a tool to be put in the hands of your prospects to help them do the things they want to do.

Do you have a servant based site philosophy? – This final point sums up all the previous ones. You don’t own your website..your customers do. Your goal is to meet their needs. Call it a servant based site design philosophy. Never make them sacrifice their objectives to meet yours (as in collecting lead information in a long form before they can get to where they need to get). If you provide enough value, they’ll meet you half way, but never force the issue.

This acid test for usability, if answered honestly, will help you understand how far you are away from a robust usability discipline. Assess and then make it a priority for 2010. There is no better place to spend your time!

Socially, We’re Suckers for a Deal

Razorfish’s new FEED 2009 report found that consumers like to spread the word digitally about great deals on brands. In fact, this far surpassed their desire to just talk about brands.

Humans are still Humans, even Online

Here’s the thing that gets me. When we talk digital channels, we seem to forget that humans are humans. We’ll still be the way we’ve always been, we’ll just do in on a new canvas. The “finding” of FEED 2009 discovered that we like to talk about deals. This has been hardwired into humans since we crawled out of caves. In a bit, I’ll share the findings of an interesting study that looked at how this social news spreads through our networks.

The Results of FEED

But first, let’s look at the other results of the study. Despite my morning grumpiness, this is a report worth downloading:

FEED09_Chart-Q1765% of consumers have had a digital experience that either positively or negatively changed their opinion about a brand. Again, this is behavior that is common, we all have perception altering brand experiences. As we spend more time online, it’s natural that this will happen here too.

Branding is now a participatory experience. We’re no longer passive consumers of brand messaging. We now expect to roll up our sleeves, get in and muck around with the building of brands. We want to do things with the brand. We will now participate in building the aggregate story of a brand. 73% of study participants had posted a product or brand review on web sites like Amazon, Yelp, Facebook or Twitter. We now have a voice and we’re using it.

We’re becoming Brand Fans. 40% of consumers have “friended” a brand on Facebook and/or MySpace and 26% of followed a brand on Twitter. Again, this isn’t new, it’s just going digital. There are certain brands that inspire fierce loyalty: Apple, Harley Davidson, Nike. It’s natural that these Brand Fans would now be expressing themselves online. One word of caution for Brand Marketers here. People won’t suddenly become fans just because you’re on FaceBook. You have to be a brand that people care about.

FEED09_Chart-Q27Here’s the study tidbit that was “surprising”. Of those that follow brands on Twitter, 44% said access to exclusive deals is the main reason. Same is true for those that “friended” a brand on Facebook or MySpace..accounting for 37% of participants. The next highest reason for following a brand on Twitter? Being a current customer, at 23.5% And again, this would be for those brands that inspire an unusually high degree of loyalty.

Strength of Weak Ties

Sometime ago, I talked about a fascinating study by Frenzen and Nakamoto that looked at how rumors, or in this case, news of a bargain, spread through social networks. It explored the roll of Mark Granovetter’s famous “Weak Ties” in social networks. Social networks tend to be “clumpy”, rather than uniformly dense. There are dense clumps, representing our families, closest friends and co-workers that we see every day. You’re connected to these people with “Strong Ties”. But the clumps are also connected with “Weak ties” that span the gaps. These are ties between more distant family, casual friends and acquaintances. As Granovetter discovered, news spreads quickly through the strong ties within a clump, but it’s the ability to jump the weak ties that really causes word to spread throughout the network. We rely on the “connectedness” of these weak ties for things like news on potential jobs, social tidbits and yes, the scoop on a great bargain. If you look at the nature of these weak ties, you’ll realize that it’s exactly those types of ties we tend to maintain on Twitter and Facebook.

In 1993, Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto decided to explore the conditions that had to exist for news to jump from cluster to cluster across those weak ties. They tested the nature of the message itself and also how the news would impact the person delivering the message, a condition called moral hazard. In other words, would the messenger lose something by spreading the word? The scenario they used to test the conditions for this social “viralness” was news of a sale. There were three variables built into the study: the structure of the network itself (strongly connected vs weakly connected), the attractiveness of the sale (20% off vs 50 to 70% off) and the availability of the sale item (unlimited vs very limited quantities – introducing the aspect of moral hazard).

Frenzen and Nakamoto found that in all cases, news of the sale spread quickly through the strong clusters. But when the message wasn’t that remarkable (the 20% off example), word of mouth had difficulty jumping across weak ties. Also, when moral hazard was high (quantities were limited) again, the message tended to get stuck within a cluster and not be transmitted across the weak ties. If you look back at the original post, I go into more depth about how this impacts our inclination to spread news through our networks.

Twitter: The Weak Tie Pipeline

So, let’s take this back to the Razorfish study. There needs to be a few conditions present for news to spread along weak ties: The information has to be valuable (50 to 70% off) and it can’t put the person holding the information in moral hazard (if I share this information amongst too many people, there will be nothing left for me or my family). The example given in the study, following a Brand on Twitter to get news of exclusive offers, is our “weak tie” to the brand, so we can be first to benefit. And, if the discount is substantial and there is low moral hazard, we will in turn Tweet about it ourselves.

The Razorfish study indicated surprise that more people were engaging in social networks to learn about discounts and not to evangelize brands. Again, if we look at human behavior, there is no surprise here. Brand evangelization engages a completely different part of our brain, the same part, incidentally, that gets triggered when we talk about religion and other unusually strong beliefs. These are things most of us hold closer to our chest. We share them with our strong ties, but we don’t usually spread that across weak ties. There are exceptions, of course, but I think most marketers assume all of us are willing to build public shrines to their products. That’s just not how humans tick.

But, humans can’t resist spreading the word if that word has social value (a great bargain) and we don’t miss out ourselves by spreading the word. Those are the messages built to set Granovetter’s weak ties singing in a social network. We’ve been this way for a long, long time. And now that Twitter and FaceBook are here, we’ll still be that way.

The Common Denominator between Brains, Cities and the Internet (..oh..and ants too)

If you took the time to look at an ant colony..really look at it…you’d be amazed. In his book Emergence, Steven Johnson did just that. And here’s what he found. Ant colonies are perfectly designed. The food supply of the colony is the perfect distance away from trash pile, and both are strategically placed to be the greatest possible distance from the ants’ graveyard. It’s as if some ant mastermind somewhere took the time to plot out the colony design on some ant-sized draftboard. Of course, that didn’t happen. What did happen is that even ant sized brains can remember a set of simple rules and over time, even with the complexity of thousands of ants doing their thing, a sort of order emerges. Patterns that look to be deliberated planned emerge out of complex and seemingly chaotic activity.

The Organized Cesspool: Manchester

In the 1800’s, the industrial revolution caused the city of Manchester, England to explode in size, from 24,000 in 1773 to 250,000 by 1850. The growth was not steered by any form of urban planning. Factories sprung up anywhere. Factories needed workers, so new neighborhoods, many shantytowns housing the poorest of the poor seeking work, suddenly sprouted up. People need some basic form of support, so new shops and services suddenly appeared. All this happened without a plan in place, a seemingly hopeless mishmash of urban development. Alex De Toqueville described it like this, “From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.”  Dickens was even less kind, ” What I have seen has disgusted and astonished me beyond all measure.”

One of the visitors to Manchester saw something different, however. Frederich Engels, who would become co-author of the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, came to Manchester to see first hand the horrific struggles of the Industrial-era working class. Certainly he found what he came looking for, but he also saw something that surprised him. There, in the squalid chaos that was Manchester, he found a strange sort of order that had emerged. Manchester had developed so that the factory owners that lived in the upper class neighborhoods could live for years in the city without seeing a working class neighborhood. Thoroughfares, businesses and social institutions emerged so that the city just “worked” for it’s inhabitants. Just like the ants, the citizens of Manchester had some social rules that dictated the pattern of the city that emerged.

Brains and Cities: Evolved Functionality

citybrainThis natural evolution of cities is the subject of a recent study that comes from Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute. The finding? Cities are organized like human brains.As cities grow, they not only increase in physical size, they also become more densely interconnected. As brains increase in complexity from species to species, you don’t just get more neurons, you also get more efficient neurons. Both can handle more traffic.

The study used Seattle and Chicago as examples. You couldn’t just take Seattle and triple it to become Chicago. The traffic corridors wouldn’t be able to handle the increased flow. There wouldn’t be enough on ramps and off ramps, and the ones that did exist would be would be too small. The services and support needed to accommodate the population wouldn’t be efficiently planned. As cities grow, they evolve to meet the needs of their citizens. Every time I visit New York, it amazes me that Manhattan can work at all. It seems to be an impossibly delicate act of magic..keeping that many people on an island fed and functioning. This is one of the reasons high growth cities struggle to keep up with infrastructure such as required freeways and public transit – they’re growing faster than the infrastructure, handcuffed by the need for administrative approval, can change to support them.

And if I think Manhattan is a miracle, the complexity of what the human brain has to deal with daily represents a feat of impressiveness several magnitudes greater. Indeed, the functioning of the human brain is so complex, all the combined efforts of science have barely scratched the surface of how the damned thing actually works.

The Emergence of the Internet

This common theme of functional evolution and patterns emerging from complexity is also playing out currently on the Internet. Much like Industrial age Manchester, the Internet is growing exponentially without any master plan. And yet, it seems to work. And, as the internet evolves, just like brains and cities, it becomes more interconnected. Functionality is increased through API’s and mash-ups. The internet is evolving into an incredibly complex ecosystem that is remarkably workable. And, like all complex systems, the emergence of workable patterns will depend on a handful of universal rules: the ability to find information, the ability to do things, the ability to talk to people, the ability to have fun and the ability to buy stuff. That’s all we really want and the Internet will naturally emerge in the way best suited to accomplish those simple goals.

The Cult of Technology

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

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

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

bell_curve

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking Search with Dr. Jim Jansen at Penn State

JimJansen032105This is the full transcript of an interview with Professor Jim Jansen at Penn State University. Excerpts from the Interview are running in two parts (Part One ran a few weeks ago) on Search Engine Land. I wrote a column that provided a little background on Dr. Jansen on Search Engine Land.

Gord:
Jim, we’ll start by laying out some of the research you’ve been doing over the past year and a half and then we’ll dig deeper into each of those as we find interesting things. Just give me the quick 30- or 60-second summary of what you’ve been working on in the last little while.

Jim:
I have several research projects going on. One that I really find interesting is analyzing a five calendar year search engine marketing campaign from a major online retailer and brick-and-mortar retailer. It’s about 7 million interactions over that time, multi-million dollar accounts and sales and stuff. A fascinating temporal analysis of a search engine marketing effort.
I’ve been looking at that at several different levels – the buying funnel being one, aspect of branding being another, and then the aspect of some type of personalization, specifically along gender issues. And so that’s been very, very exciting and interesting and (has offered) some great insights.

Gord:
I’m familiar with the buying funnel one because you were kind enough to share that with me and ask for my feedback, so let’s start there. I know you went in to prove out some assumptions, for example, is there a correlation between the nature of the query and where people would be in the buying funnel? Is there identifiable search behaviours that map to where they might be in their purchase process? What did you find?

Jim:
I looked at it at several different levels. One goal was to verify whether the buying funnel was really a workable model for online e-commerce searching or was it just a paradigm for advertisers to, you know, get their handle around this chaos. And if it’s an effective model, what can it tell us in terms of how advertisers should respond?
In terms of the first question, we had mixed results. At the individual query level you can classify individual queries into different levels of this buying funnel model. There are unique characteristics that correspond very nicely to each of those levels. So in that respect, I think the model is valid.

Where it may not be valid is specifying this process that online consumers go through. We found that, no, it didn’t happen quite like we assume.  There was a lot of drop-out and they would do a very broad query and that might be all.
So we looked at the academic literature – you know, what theoretically could deal with that or explain that? – and the idea of sufficing seemed to fit. If it is a low cost, they won’t spend a lot of time, they will just purchase it and buy it.
In terms of classifying queries in terms of what advertisers’ payoff is, I think the most interesting finding was that the purchase queries – the last stage of the buying funnel – were the most expensive and had no higher payoff than the awareness or the very broad, relatively cheaper queries. From talking to practitioners, that is a phenomena that they have noted also … which is why a lot of people bid still on very broad terms, to snatch these potential customers at an early stage.

Gord:
Based on what you’ve seen, there are a couple of really interesting things. You and I have talked a little bit about this, but we similarly have found that you can’t assume a search funnel is happening because people use search at different stages and they’ll come in and then they’ll drop out of the process, and they may come in later or they may not, they may pursue other channels. But the other thing we found is sometimes there’s a remarkable consistency in the query used all the way through the process and that quite often can be navigational behaviour. It can be people who say, “Okay, the last time I did this, I searched on Google for so-and-so and I remember the site I found was the third or fourth level down,” and they just use the same route to navigate the online space over and over again. If you’re looking at it from a pure query level, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher because you’re going, “Well, why did they use the same query over and over?” but again, it’s one of those nuances of online behaviour. Did that seem to be one of the possible factors of some of the anomalies in the data?

Jim:
Well, that trend or something similar to it has been appearing in a lot of different domains and researchers are attributing it to “When I do a query, I expect a certain result.” So, you know, a query that may be very informational, what we’re finding is that searchers expect a Wikipedia entry. So in other words, a very navigational intent behind that very informational query. And I think the phenomena you’re describing is very similar. We have a transactional-type query and users are expecting a certain web page, a navigational aspect, and that “Okay, I have an anchor point here that I’m going to go to.” And then off search engine, maybe they do more searching and actually do some type of buying funnel process. But at the search engine, yes, we’re seeing a lot of that navigational aspect. I just looked at a query log from a major search engine and an unbelievable amount of queries were just navigational in nature.

Gord:
We’ve certainly seen that. A lot of our recent research has been in the B2B space, so it’s a little bit different but certainly it follows those same lines. When we looked at queries that people would use, a large percentage of them were either very specific or navigational in nature.

You know, the idea of satisficing, of taking a heuristic shortcut with their level of research is also interesting. It seems like if the risk is fairly low, the online paths are shorter. Is that what you were finding?

Jim:
Yes, and the principle of least effort is how it’s also presented. We see it in web searching itself generally in how people interact with search engines and how they interact with sites on the web. They may not get an optimal solution, but if it’s something that’s reasonable and if it’s good enough, they’ll go for it. That seems to be occurring in the e-commerce area also: “I want to buy something relatively cheap. This particular vendor may not have the best price, but it’s close to what I’m thinking it should be. Just go and get it done, get it over with, buy it.”

Gord:
I would suspect that that would also be true in product categories where you have mentally a good idea of what an acceptable price range would be, right?

Jim:
Yes.

Gord:
So if it’s a question of making a trade-off for $2 but saving yourself a half hour of time, as long as you’re aware of what those price ranges would be, you’re more apt to make that shortcut call, correct?

Jim:
Yes. It does assume some knowledge and risk mitigation –if it’s a small purchase and that varies a little bit for each of us, but you’re willing to cut your costs of searching and trying to find the best deal just to get it done.

Gord:
I suspect part of this would also  be your level of personal engagement with the product category you’re shopping in. So I’ll spend way too much time researching a purchase of a new gadget or something that I’m interested in just because I have that level of engagement. But if it’s a purchase that’s on my to-do list, if it’s just one task I have to get done and then move on to the next thing, I suspect that that’s where that satisficing behaviour would be more common.

Jim:
Yes. Now you bring up a really good point. If it becomes entertainment – like a gadget that you enjoy researching – it’s no longer work, it’s no longer something you get done. The process of doing it makes it enjoyable so you don’t mind spending a lot of time. In those kind of cases, the goal really is not the purchase, the goal is the looking.

Gord:
We found that alters the behaviour on the search page as well. So if it’s a task-type purchase where I just have to go and get there, you see that satisficing play out on the search page too. Typically when we look at engagement with the search page, you see people scan the top four, three or four listings. If it’s that satisficing type of intent where they’re saying, “I just want to buy this thing,” you’ll see people scan those first three or four and pick what they feel is the path of least effort. They go down and say, “Okay. It’s a book. Amazon’s there. I know Amazon’s price. I’m just going to click through and order this,” but if it’s entertainment, then suddenly they start treating the search page more like a catalogue where they’re paying more attention to the brands and they’re using that as a navigational hub to branch off to three or four different sites. Again, it can really impact the nature of engagement with the web… or with the search page.

Jim:
Absolutely, and I really like your analogy of a catalogue. You know, there are some people that love just looking at a catalog – flipping through it, looking at the dresses and shirts or gadgets or sporting gear or whatever. And so that’s a much different engagement than flipping through the classified ads trying to find some practical thing you need. The whole level of engagement is at totally opposite ends of the spectrum, really.

Gord:
As an extreme example of that, we did some eye-tracking with Chinese search engines and we found that with Baidu in particular, people were using it to look for MP3 files to download. So when we first saw the heat maps – and of course it was all in Chinese, so I could understand what the content on the page was without having it translated – I saw these heat maps going way deeper and much longer than we ever saw in typical North American behaviour. We saw a level of engagement unlike anything we had ever seen before. And it was exactly it. It was a free task – They were looking for MP3 files to download and they were treating the search page like a catalogue of MP3 files. They were reading everything on the page.  I think that’s just one extreme example of this catalogue browsing behaviour that we were talking about.

Let’s go to one of the other findings on the buying funnel: that quite often the more general, broader categories from an ROI perspective can perform just as well as what traditional wisdom tells us is your higher return terms.  Those closer to the end of the funnel – the ones that are more specific, longer, more transactionally oriented. What’s behind that?

Jim:
Like a lot of these questions there’s no simple answer because there are plenty of exceptions to the rule you just described. There are some very broad terms that are very cheap, others that are very expensive. On the purchase side, there are some key phrases that are very cheap because they’re so focussed and others are expensive. But in this particular analysis – and again, this was 7 million transactions over 33 months, from mid-2005 to mid-2008 – the awareness terms were cheaper than the purchase terms and they generated just as much revenue.

I think a lot of it is that perhaps the items this particular retailer was selling fell into that sufficing behaviour: gifts, fairly low-cost items – there was just no need to progress all the way to that particular purchase phase.

To me it was really very unexpected. I really expected those purchase terms to actually be cheaper because they were more narrowly focussed and to generate more revenue, but it didn’t turn out that way.

Gord:
That brings up an interesting point we’ve seen with client behavior, especially given the current economic condition. We found is a lot of clients are tending to optimize down the funnel – they are tending to look at their keyword lists they’re bidding on and move further and further down to more and more specific phrases, because the theory is – and generally they do have analytics to back this up – that there’s greater ROI on that because these are usually people that are searching for a specific model or something which is a pretty good indicator that they’re close to purchase. But I think one of the by-products of that is as people optimize their campaigns, those long tail phrases are getting more and more expensive because there’s more and more competition around them, and as people move some of their keyword baskets away from those awareness terms, maybe the prices on that, it all being based on an auction model, are starting to drop. Do you think that could be one of the factors happening here?

Jim:
That very well could be. The whole online auction is designed around (the concept that) as competition increases, cost-per-clicks will increase also. It also may be that those particular customers don’t mind clicking on a few links to do some comparison-shopping and may end up going somewhere else. They may have a higher aspect of intent to purchase, but the competition among where they’re going to buy is more intense.

You know, compare that to this sufficing shopper: you just have to get that person’s attention first with a reasonably priced product and you will make the sale. That is the one issue with analytics in terms of transaction log analysis – we can analyze behaviours and we can make some conjectures about what happened, but you need lab studies and surveys to pan all data, to get the why part.

Gord:
That’s a great comment and obviously something that people have heard from me over and over again, because we do tend to focus more on the quantitative approach. I think this goes back to what we were talking about originally –online information gathering is a natural extension of where we are in our actual lives so it’s not like a distinct, contained activity. It’s not like we set aside an hour each day to go through all our online research. More and more, we always have an outlet to the internet close by and as we’re talking or as we’re thinking about something, it’s a natural reaction just to go and use a search engine to find out more information. And I think because it’s such a natural extension of what’s happening in our day-to-day lives, that the idea of this one linear progression through an online research session isn’t the way people act. I think it’s just an extension of whatever’s happening in our real world. So we may do a search, we may find something, it may be an awareness search, and then we may pursue other paths to the eventual purchase. It’s not like we keep going back and forth between a search engine with this nicely refined search funnel. It’s not that neat and simple, just like our lives aren’t that neat and simple.

Jim:
Yes, all models get rid of all the noise that reflect reality. So the neater they are, the less accurate they are, and the buying funnel is obviously very neat and so I think it’s reasonable that it represents a very small number of searches that actually progress exactly like that. We’re very nonlinear in things we do and so I assume our purchase behaviors are too.

Gord:
I want to move on to the question of branding a little bit, because you mentioned that that was one of the areas you were looking at. And at Enquiro, we’ve done our own lab-based studies on branding, so I’d be fascinated to hear what came out as far as the impact of branded search.

Jim:
This year, I’ve really got into this whole idea of branding in terms of information seeking. That’s really my background, web searching and how people find and assemble information. One of my first studies was to look at the comparison of what a search engine brand would do to how searchers interpreted the results. So I ran a little experiment where I switched the labels from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and the results were the same. Certainly the search engine brand has a major lift to it.
In this particular study using the search engine marketing data, we did multiple comparisons of brand or product name and the keyword in the title, in the snippet, in the URL to see if there was a correlation with higher sales. And without a doubt the correlation between a query with a brand term and an advertisement with a brand term is extremely, extremely positive. That particular tightness seems to resonate with online consumers.

Gord:
So just to repeat, so if somebody’s using a branded query and they see that brand appear in the advertising, there’s obviously a statistical correlation between the success of that, right?

Jim:
Yes. In that particular case, one, that the click will happen, and two, that the click will result in a sale was yes, very positive. It really relates to the whole idea of dynamic keyword insertion in advertisements…

Gord:
So to follow that thread a little bit further, obviously if people have a brand in mind and they see that brand appear, then that’s an immediate reinforcement of relevancy. But what happens if the query is generic in nature, it’s for a product category, but a brand appears that people recognize as being a recognized and trusted brand within that product category? Did you do any analysis on that side of things?

Jim:
Not specifically. No, I did not. That’s a real good question though, but no, I did not do that type of correlation.

Gord:
The last thing I want to ask you about today, Jim, is this idea of personalization by gender. I believe from our initial discussions that you’re just in the process of looking at the data from this portion. Is that right?

Jim:
Well, we finished the analysis. Now we’re just writing it up.

Gord:
So is there anything that you can share with us at this point?

Jim:
Again, the results to me were counterintuitive from what I expected. Usually, the idea of personalization is that the more personalized you get, the higher the payoff, the efficiency and effectiveness is. We took queries from this particular search engine marketing campaign and classified them based on gender probability using Microsoft’s demographic tool, which will classify a query by it’s probability of being male or female. We looked at it this way: now whether the searcher was male or female but did the particular query fit a gender stereotype – did it have a kind of a male, for example, feel to it or stereotype implications.

Gord:
So more women would search for “Oprah,” and more men would search for “NASCAR”?

Jim:
Exactly.

Gord:
What did you find?

Jim:
In terms of sales, far and away the most profitable were the set of queries that were totally gender-neutral. We took the queries and divided them into seven categories: “very strongly male,” “generally male,” “slightly male,” “gender neutral,” “slightly female,” “strongly female,” “very female.” By two orders of magnitude, the most profitable were the ones that were totally gender-neutral.

Gord:
Fascinating.

Jim:
Yes, as a researcher who does personalization research, my guess would be “Ah, the more targeted they are, the more profitable.” But no, the means were two orders of magnitude different.

Gord:
So give us an example of a gender-neutral query.

Jim:
We defined gender-neutral to be were queries that the Microsoft tool classified somewhere between-  exactly gender-neutral is zero – up to like 59% either side. So we had a fairly big spread here. And there was a trend that was somewhat expected –  that the queries that were more female-targeted generated higher sales than the corresponding male counterparts.
So here’s some examples of queries based off the Microsoft tool:  “Electronic chess,” 100%. You know, the Microsoft tool classified that 100% male. For a gender-neutral query, I’ll just randomly pick up a couple here: “Atomic desk clock.” “Water purifier.”

Gord:
I know you’re just writing this up now, but any ideas as to why that might be?

Jim:
One thing that is coming out in the personalization research is that at a certain level, we have totally unique differences. You can personalize to a general category and to a certain level, but beyond that, it’s either not doing much good or may actually get in the way. And that may be something that is happening here – that these particular, very targeted gender keyword phrases are just not attracting the audience that the more gender-neutral queries and keywords are.

Again, it’s a “why” thing.  We spend a lot of time in web search trying to personalize to the individual level and really haven’t got very far. But now people are trying to do things like personalize to the task rather than the individual person, and there’s some interesting things happening there. Spell checks and query reformulations and things like that are very task-oriented rather than individual searcher oriented.

Gord:
I remember Marissa Mayer from Google saying that when Google was looking at personalization, they found by far the best signal to look at was what’s the string, what immediately preceded the search or a series of search iterations. They found that a much better signal to follow than trying to do any person-level personalization, which is what you’re saying. If you can look at the context of the tasks they’re engaged in and get some kind of idea of what they’re doing or trying to accomplish in that task, that’s probably a better application of personalization than trying to get to know me as an individual and to try to anticipate what I might say or query for any given objective.

Jim:
Yes, It’s just so hard to do. You know, Gord is different than Jim, and Gord today is different than Gord was five years ago. Personalizing at the individual level is just very difficult and may not even be a fruitful area to pursue.

Gord:
I remember when Google first came out with talking about personalization there was this flurry around personalization in search. That was probably two, two and a half years ago and it really seems to have died down. You just don’t hear about it as much. And at the time I remember saying that personalization is a great thing to think of in ideal terms – you know, it certainly would make the search experience better if you could get it right or even half-ways right, but the challenge is doing just that. It’s a tough problem to tackle.

Jim:
Yes, and as you mentioned earlier, we’re nonlinear creatures, we’re changing all the time. I can’t even keep up with all my changes and I can’t imagine some technology trying to do it. It just seems an unbelievably challenging, hard task to do.

Gord:
I think the other thing is – and certainly in my writings and readings this becomes clearer and clearer – that we don’t even know what we’re doing most of the time. We think we have one intent but there’s much that’s hidden below the rational surface that’s actually driving us. And for an algorithm to try to read something that we can’t even read ourselves is a task of large magnitude to take on.

Jim:
That’s a really good way of looking at it. I’ve commented on that before in terms of recommending a movie or book to me. I don’t even know what books and movies I like until I see them. Sometimes I pick up a book and say, “Oh, I’m going to really love this,” only to get a chapter into it and realize “Okay, this is horrible.” And I think you see that in the NetFlix challenge –  So many organizations have laboured for a decade now, and finally it looks like perhaps this year someone may win by combing 30 different approaches simultaneously to the very simple problem of “Recommend a movie. It’s just amazing the computational variations that are going on.

Gord:
Amazon has obviously been trying to do this. They were one of the first to look at collaborative filtering and personalization engines, and they probably do it about as well as anyone. But even then, when I log on to Amazon, it’s not that they’re that far off base in their recommendations to me, but given what I buy on Amazon, it’s like they’re dealing with this weird fragmented personality because one time I’m ordering a psychology textbook because it has to do with the research I’m doing for something and the next time I’m turning around and ordering a DVD box set of The Office or even worse, the British version of The Office which really throws it for a loop.

Jim:    [laughs]

Gord:
Then I’m ordering a book for my daughter like Twilight.  Amazon is going, “I don’t know who this Gord Hotchkiss is, but he’s one strange individual.”

Jim:
From my interaction with Amazon, the recommendations I have found most effective are “You bought this book. Other people that bought this book bought these books” which I view as a very task-oriented personalization. And the other is a very broad, contextual one, “Here’s what other people in your area are buying,” which fascinates me. It’s almost like a Twitter, Facebook, social networking thing: “Oh, wow. I like that book,” you know? These task-oriented context personalizations, at least in my interactions, have been the most effective.

Gord:
You obviously bring up that intersection between social and search, which is getting a lot of buzz with the explosion of Twitter and the fact that there’s now real-time search that allows you to identify patterns within the complexity of the real-time searches. We’ve known in the past in other areas that generally those patterns as they emerge can be pretty accurate, so that opens up a whole new area for improving the relevancy of search.

Jim, one last question while we’re talking about personalization. This is something I wrote about in an article a little while ago and I’d love to get your take on it as the last word of this interview. We were talking about personalization and getting it right more often, and the fact is the way we search now, engines can be somewhat lax in getting it right. There’s a lot of real estate there, we scroll up and down. The average search page has something between 18 and 20 links on it when you include the sponsored ones. It’s more like a buffet: “We’re hoping one of these things might prove interesting to you or whet your appetite.” But when we move to a mobile device, the real estate becomes a lot more restrictive and it becomes incumbent on the engines to get it right more often. We can’t afford a buffet anymore, we just need that waiter who knows what it is we like and can recommend it. What happens with personalization as the searches we’re launching are coming from a mobile device?

Jim:
That’s a great question. I think it’s one of those areas that have got a lot of talk – everybody is saying (again) “This is the year mobile searching’s going take off.” It’s been going on for four or five years now, and really, I mean at least here in the US, it hasn’t really happened yet. But what I think is going to make it hit the mainstream is this combination of localized search.
When you have a mobile device, the technology has so much more information about you: it’s got your location to within a couple feet, the context that you’re in can really start entering the picture and information gets pushed to you –I’m thinking tagged buildings and restaurants and cultural events and on and on. And so with my mobile device, where I can talk into it, I don’t even have to type anything. I want “what’s going on in the area?” and it automatically knows my location and the time and perhaps something about me and the things that I’ve searched on before. “Oh, you like coffee shops where there’s some music playing. Guess what? Boom. There’s five right near, in your area that have live entertainment right then.” So I think in that respect it’ll be a little more narrowed search, but the technology will have so much more information about us that in a way it makes the job easier. The problem’s going to be the interface and the presentation of the results.

Gord:
We’re talking about, you know, subvocalization commands and heads-up display. You start looking at that and say, “Wow, that would be pretty cool,” but…

Jim:
Yes. Imagine being able to walk through a town … I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. Tons of history here from 400 years ago when Europeans first settled here, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc., etc. Being able just to walk down Main Street and have tagged buildings interface with my mobile device… I’m a big history buff and so getting that particular information, one, pushed to me or at least available to push when I ask for it is a wonderful, wonderful area of personalization. This idea of localized search and mobile devices and mobile search may be the thing that brings it all together and makes mobile search happen.

Gord:
It’s fascinating to contemplate. And I know I promised that was going to be my last question, but I’m going to cheat and squeak one more in, and it’s really a continuation. You remember the old days of Longhorn with Microsoft, when they were working what eventually became Vista. They were talking about building search more integrally into everything they did and they had this whole idea of Implicit Query – which really excited me because if anyone knows what you’re working on at any given time, it should be Microsoft, at least on the desktop. They control your e-mail, they control your word processing, they control your calendar. If you could combine all this… all those as signals – the document you’re writing and the next appointment you’ve got coming up and the trip you’re taking tomorrow – imagine how that could intersect with search and really turn into a powerful, powerful thing. I remember saying…this was years ago… “That could kill Google. If Microsoft can pull this off, that could be the Google killer.” Of course we know now that that never happened. But if we take all that integration and all that knowledge about what you’re doing and what you’re doing next and where you are and move that to a mobile device, that’s really interesting. In looking at where Google is going, introducing more and more things that compete directly against Microsoft… is that where Google’s heading, to become our big brother that sits in our pocket and continually tells us what we might be interested in?

Jim:
You know, the “Big Brother” idea label has certain negative connotations, so I don’t want to say that they are Big Brother-ish in that regard. But certainly I think with their movement into free voice and free directory assistance, they will soon have a voice data archive that will allow them to do some amazing things with voice search, which would be an awesome feature for mobile devices. Being able to talk into a mobile device, have it recognize you nearly 100% of the time and execute the search.
Google of course is the one that knows what they’re doing, but certainly I think it would be naive not to be exploring that particular area. And I think the contrast from what you said about Microsoft and the desktop, the desktop is just so busy. You’re getting so many different signals in terms of business, personal things, my kids use my computer sometimes. And so the context is so large on the desktop, but the mobile device, it’s narrower. You know, you have some telephone calls, you can do some GPS things, so the context is narrower but very, very rich in that very narrow domain. I think it’s a really hot area of search.

The Library of Human Behavior: 11 More Titles for Your Reading List

First published October 22, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I shared 11 titles that explore the intersection between marketing, psychology and neurology. In retrospect, though, I think I approached this backwards. While the titles I discussed are all interesting (and fairly easy reads), they are somewhat dependent on a fundamental understanding of why humans do what we do. So this week, I’ll share a good starting library of human behavior, which can then be applied more generally.

“The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are”  — Robert Wright.  If you’re on the fence about or simply do not believe in evolution (along with 50% of Americans) you probably want to stop right here. The first three titles in this list are by authors who together create a pantheon for evolutionary psychology and Darwinism. In the first,  “The Moral Animal,” Wright employs an interesting literary device: exploring human behavior by referencing biographical details in Charles Darwin’s own life. He discusses monogamy, child rearing, differing attitudes towards sex and self-deception, among many other mysteries of the human condition. A compelling and highly intelligent read.

“The Selfish Gene” — Richard Dawkins. This book was first published over 30 years ago, and somehow still manages to remain controversial. Perhaps it’s because Dawkins’ assigning the human characteristic of selfishness to our genes has confused many, many readers. If you take the time to read the book, Dawkins explains at length that humans are not necessarily selfish. In fact, one chapter is titled: “Nice Guys Finish First.” Dawkins’ premise is that our genes only care about propagation. That’s it. End of story. Morality and all the ethical trappings that go with it only survive if they help the gene meet this one objective.  A couple of other noteworthy nuggets in this book include the first introduction of memes — ideas that share the propagation directives of genes — and an exploration of how the impact of genes can extend into all aspects of our lives and society.

“The Third Chimpanzee” — Jared Diamond. Diamond starts off the book by stating that we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, then spends the rest of the book describing how that remaining 2% can make all the difference. In that thin wedge of genetic difference lie all our culture, achievement and history. Some human achievements are admirable, even remarkable. Some are regrettably base and cruel. Diamond chronicles both the good and the bad, along with a warning: our dominance of our world may end up spelling our doom. A professor of geography who combines the eye of a naturalist, the curiosity of a sociologist, and the ponderings of a philosopher, Diamond makes “The Third Chimpanzee” a masterful book.

“The Stuff of Thought” — Steven Pinker. Following in the steps of Noam Chomsky (up to a point), psychologist Steven Pinker uses language as a door to explore the shadowy recesses of how our minds work. This book is a seminal piece of work in this area. Pinker is masterful at exploring complicated concepts without “dumbing down” his commentary.  He has written an entire library of books worth reading, but this is as good a place to start as any.

“Descartes’ Error” — Antonio Damasio. Damasio was introduced to the common masses in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink,” but Damasio’s work on somatic markers and the role of the prefrontal cortex in how we make decisions goes much further than Gladwell was able to cover. “Descartes’ Error” delves deep into our gut instincts, explaining why pure rationality is an unworkable model for humans. To paraphrase Descartes’ famous quote: We feel, therefore we are.

To round out my 11 suggestions, here are six other titles worth exploring:

“The Mind and the Brain” – Jeffrey Schwartz

“Synaptic Self” – Joseph LeDoux

“A Whole New Mind” – Daniel Pink

“Mapping the Mind” – Rita Carter

“The Emotional Brain” – Joseph LeDoux

“The Female Brain” – Louanne Brizendine

The Meeting of the Mind and Marketing: 11 Books to Read

First published October 15, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s official! With this column, I break David Berkowitz’s Search Insider column count record, with 225 of my own. And to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to follow up on a request that came in response to my column two weeks ago. I had warned any would-be students of human nature that this wasn’t a quest to be taken lightly. A few readers responded by asking for a recommended reading list.

So this week, I went through my bookshelf at home and jotted down a list of titles that I found particularly insightful or interesting in understanding the human condition. Today, I offer them as suggestions for some fall or winter reading. I came up with 22 titles, so I’ve broken them into two groups. This week, all the titles are specifically for those who want to explore the intersection between marketing and the way our minds work.“How Customers Think” — Gerald Zaltman. Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman has carved out a nice little career by exploring the psychology of consumerism. The foundation of Zaltman’s approach is his metaphor elicitation technique. Metaphors are linguistic keys to some of the darker workings of our mind, and Zaltman shows how these can be used as a Rosetta stone to unlock consumers’ true feelings towards brands and products. A fascinating approach suffers a little from Zaltman’s dry and overly academic writing style, but it’s a very worthy candidate for the list.

“The Culture Code” — Clotaire Rapaille. If Zaltman is a little stodgy and academic, Rapaille is an unabashed French nouveau-riche pop psychologist who has used his decidedly qualitative approach to dig down to the cultural common denominators behind our brand relationships. This book looks for those labels cultures apply to some of the best-known brands in the world. Being French, Rapaille brings an occasionally charming European cultural arrogance to his subject (i.e. in France, the culture code for cheese is “alive”, but in the U.S. it’s “dead”). This is  an easy and interesting read; while you might have some quibbles with Rapaille’s findings, he has plenty of willing customers among the Fortune 500.

“Buy-ology” — Martin Lindstrom. Lindstrom’s ego is almost matched by the insight he brings in his latest book. Lindstrom is the self-styled guru of brand perception and has written before on how our senses interpret brands. In “Buy-ology,” he goes one step further and launches an extensive brain scanning research project to see exactly what happens in our brains when we think about brands. For example, do the warning labels on a pack of cigarettes have any impact on our desire for a smoke? Does product placement really work? (The answer, in both cases, is no, according to Lindstrom) Don’t worry about getting caught in academic jargon here. Lindstrom keeps it light and readable.

“Why Choose This Book?” — Read Montague. Baylor University neurologist Montague was behind the original Pepsi Challenge fMRI test — and in this book, he takes on no less a challenge than explaining how we make decisions. The writing style’s a little uneven, as Montague tries to balance his academic background with a style overly determined to appeal to a wider audience. That said, Montague knows his stuff and the insights here are solid, supported by both his own and others’ research.

“Predictably Irrational” — Dan Ariely.  Ariely follows in the footsteps of behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky by looking at some of the common irrational biases of humans. For example, why does a 50-cent aspirin eliminate a headache better than a 5-cent generic brand, even though the pills are identical? And why would offering your mother-in-law $300 for a fabulous meal be an unforgivable social transgression, yet be expected in a restaurant? The territory has been covered before, but Ariely deals with a highly interesting topic with a nice, light touch.

“The Mind of the Market” — Michael Shermer. Last but not least, Michael Shermer delivers what I consider to be a tour-de-force on this topic. Shermer’s approach is well-grounded in evolutionary psychology (he labels it evolutionary economics), so he and I share a common approach to understanding consumer behavior. He strikes the right balance in his writing, delivering solid information without worrying too much about how it might play for a wider audience. This is probably my favorite on this list.

If these six titles whet your appetite, here are some other titles you might consider:

“Driven” by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria

“Why We Buy” by Paco Underhill

“The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz

“The Advertised Mind” by Erik Du Plessis

“Brain Rules’ by John Medina

Next week I’ll share another 11 books, as well as some reader suggestions. Feel free to keep the suggestions coming!

The Prerequisites for Being a Student of Human Nature

First published October 1, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week I asked for input on the upcoming Search Insider Summit. Of the seven possible topic areas I presented, the highest level of interest was in the role of human behavior in digital marketing. You, the Search Insider faithful, have made me very happy. But being an avid student of human nature, I feel it’s only fair to warn you what to expect as you continue down this path.  Some years ago, I too was intrigued by human behavior and thought it would be interesting to “learn a little bit more.” But learning about human nature is pretty much an all-or-nothing proposition. Think of it as having a baby. The first few minutes of the process might be fun, but soon you learn you’ve just signed on for a lifetime commitment. You’d better make sure you’re ready.

The True Meaning of Customer-Centricity

I’ve been criticized in the past for using the term “customer-centric” (the practical application of studying human nature), but I suspect it’s because the term has lost its original meaning as it’s been adopted into the lexicon of “Dilbert-speak.” Customer-centric is one of those terms bandied about in board meetings and corporate retreats, along with “synergistic” and “holistic.”

But customer-centricity represents much more than a quick paragraph in the annual report. It’s the core you build a company around. It’s a commitment that lays the foundation for everything an organization does: the people it hires, the way it develops products, the way it formulates business processes, the way it markets and even the way who sits beside whom in the office gets decided. Customer-centricity is a religion, not a corporate fad.

There Aren’t Any Shortcuts

As I found out, if you are going to commit to learning more about human behavior in the goal of becoming a better marketer, don’t be surprised when you discover that this commitment can’t be met in a one-hour session or by reading a book. Humans are a lot more complex than that. There’s a lot of weird and wonderfully quirky machinery jammed in our skulls.

I was humbled to learn that people devote their entire lives to exploring just one tiny part of why we humans do what we do. Joseph LeDoux, one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, has spent years exploring how fear is triggered in rats. Ann Graybiel  at MIT has made a similar commitment to exploring the role of the basal ganglia in how habits form and play out.  Antonio Damasio’s  extensive work with patients with pre-frontal cortical lesions led to his somatic marker theory, foundational insight into the area of human behavior Malcolm Gladwell explored and popularized in his book “Blink.” These are all tiny little pieces in the overall puzzle that is human behavior, yet each of these is integral in understanding how we respond to marketing messages.

Beyond the Cocktail Party Quip

Today, several years after I started down this road, I hope people find my insights on human behavior interesting. There’s that brief light bulb moment that happens when “what” is matched with a plausible “why” — when a psychological or neurological trigger for a puzzling human trait is identified.  “Hmm – that’s really interesting,” is the common response, and then it’s on to the next thing (possibly mumbling something about me being a “pedantic bore”). Yes, it is really interesting, but it wasn’t a quick or easy path to get here.

Sometime ago I decided a quick primer in human behavior would be interesting. I started with the more accessible books (such as Gladwell’s) and was instantly hooked. I next moved to books by academics doing the actual research that provided the fodder for Gladwell and other’s popularizations: LeDoux, Damasio, Edelman, Rose, Pinker, Chomsky and others.  Before I knew it, I was wading through academic papers. Today, the bookshelf in my home office is packed with fairly hefty tomes on everything from evolutionary psychology to the social patterns of the 20th Century. My wife and kids can’t remember the last time I read a book that didn’t have a brain on the cover.

I share this as a warning. I discovered developing even a basic understanding of human behavior is at least a multiyear commitment. I’ve never regretted it, but I also know that this is not everyone’s cup of tea. But here’s what I also discovered along the way. Even a basic understanding will give you a whole new perspective on pretty much everything, including marketing. The one common denominator in all marketing is that it’s aimed at people. If you’re ready to start the journey, I’m sure you won’t regret it.

Summer Stories: How I Became a Researcher

First published August 13, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

About six years ago, I had one of those life-changing moments that set me on a new path. I’ve always been curious. I’ve always had questions, and up to that point in my life, I was usually able to find an answer, with enough perseverance. But in 2003, I had a question that no one seemed able to answer.  It didn’t seem to be an especially difficult question, and I knew someone had the answer. They just weren’t sharing it.

The Unanswerable Question

The question was this: what percentage of searchers click on the organic results and what percentage click on the sponsored ads? Today, that’s not even a question; it’s common knowledge for search marketers. But in 2003, that wasn’t the case. Sponsored search ads were still in their infancy (Overture had just been acquired by Yahoo, and Google’s AdWords was only a couple years old) and no one at either engine was sharing the clickthrough breakdowns between organic and paid.

I reached out to everyone I knew in the industry, but either they didn’t know, or they weren’t willing to go public with the info. My connections into Google and Yahoo were nonexistent at the time. No one, it seemed, had the answer. My curiosity was stymied. And that’s when my revelation happened. If no one had the answer, perhaps I could provide it.

At the time, research was not something Enquiro did. When we wanted to find out an answer, we combed through the forums, just like everyone else. But there seemed to be a noticeable gap in available information. There was plenty of discussion about technical SEO tactics, but no one seemed to be interested in how people actually used search engines.

To me, this was an unforgiveable oversight. If we were using search as a marketing channel, shouldn’t we have some understanding of how our prospects used search?  Off the top of my head, I jotted down a list of several questions I had about how people actually search; questions that appeared to have no readily available answers. It was at that point that I officially became a researcher.

Discovering “Why”

Our first research project proved to set the path we would go down for much of the follow-up: we just looked at how people used search to do things. Our methodology has become much tighter and we now have added eye-tracking and even neuro-scanning to our arsenal, but from the beginning, our research was more focused on “why” than “what.” The first paper was called “Inside the Mind of the Searcher” and it’s still referenced on a regular basis. Frankly, we were surprised with how quickly it was picked up in the industry. Suddenly, we became the experts on search user behavior, a crown I was uncomfortable with at the beginning. Yes, we were exploring new ground, but I always worried about how representative this was to the real world. Did people really do what we said they did, or was it just a research-created anomaly?

Defining the Golden Triangle

For us, the groundbreaking study was our first eye tracking study, done through Eyetools in San Francisco. I had read the Poynter study about how people interacted with online publications and was fascinated. “What if,” I wondered, “we did this with a search engine?” I found a similarly curious cohort in Kevin Lee from DidIt and together with Eyetools we launched the first study, which discovered the now-famous “Golden Triangle.” I remember sitting with Kevin in a speaker prep room at a show whose name escapes me, looking at the very first results of the data. The pattern jumped off the page:

“Look at that!” I said, “It’s a triangle!”

Kevin, always the search optimizer, said, “We need something catchy to call it, something that we can optimize for. The Magic Triangle?”

Because the heat map tends to indicate the most popular areas in a reddish yellow color, the answer was right in front of us. I can’t remember whether it was Kevin or I that first said it, but as soon as we said it, we knew the name would stick: “It’s a gold color… The Golden Triangle?”

Is It Real?

Even with the release of the study and the quick acceptance, I still questioned whether this represented real behavior. It was later that year when I got the confirmation I needed. I had just presented the results during a session at an industry show and was stepping down from the stage. Someone was quietly standing in the corner and came over as I started to head out of the room.

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know. I work with Yahoo on user experience and your heat map looks identical to our internal ones. I actually thought you had somehow got your hands on ours.” The validation was a few years in coming, but very welcome when it finally arrived.

Today, ironically, things have come full circle. I have talked to sales and engineering teams at all the major engines and much of the research they refer to about user behavior comes from Enquiro.

And the answer to my original question has held remarkably consistent in the past 6 years: What percentage of users click on paid ads vs. organic listings? For commercial searches, it’s about 70% organic, 30% paid. Just in case you were curious.