Category Archives: User Behavior

Got the UCLA Googlized Brain Study!

Thanks to UCLA, I just got a copy of the UCLA fMRI study of what happens to people’s brains when they use Google. This is fascinating..well..it is if you live in my skull.

The study was done by Dr. Gary Small, Dr. Susan Bookheimer and Dr. Teena Moody. Just got it so I haven’t had a chance to read through it, but I’m looking forward to it. As chance would have it, I just finished Gary Small’s book – iBrain – last night. The most interesting part of the book was references to several fMRI studies done around the world, showing what parts of the brain fire in given situations and while we’re undertaking different tasks. When it comes to searching, I have my own theories..which I talked about here and in my Search Insider Column. I’d like to see if the UCLA results match up.

Small’s discussion of Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants is really interesting as well, and something I want to take a much deeper dive on in future posts and articles. Briefly, natives grew up with technology, so their brain basically molded itself with hard wired capabilities, while immigrants learned their tech skills after the brain had largely formed itself. Think of the difference between growing up with a language and learning it as an adult. Digital natives are fluent in technology..for the rest of us, it will never be our native tongue. Small does make one serious transgression in the discussion which drove me nuts. He keeps swapping out neuroplasticity for the word “evolution”, giving the impression (which he never bothers to clear up) that genetic evolution can happen in one generation. It just doesn’t work that way.

That said, it’s pretty fascinating research and a question that seems to be of interest to many. I did a Search Engine Land article on it called “Are Our Brains Becoming Googlized” which picked up a healthy number of Diggs and became one of Search Engine Land’s most read articles. I’m trying to land an interview with one of the researchers. If successful, I’ll let you know how to access.

I’m very happy in my own nerdy little neuro-world!

Entertainment vs Usefulness – Which Builds More Loyalty?

On Wednesday, I talked about how digital marketers always tend to jump on fads, assuming they’ll become trends. I called it digital fluff. My position was that something has to become useful before it will have staying power. And our judgement of usefulness takes time. We have to get beyond the initial obsession with novelty. Marketers jump on channels when they’re still a novelty, which creates churn when the majority of these channels die away because they’re just not useful to the average person.

Lance Loveday posted a great comment and in it he brought up another potential factor of audience longevity and loyalty: entertainment value:

I’d add “entertaining” to usefulness as a requirement for achieving sustained behavior. TV and video games aren’t very useful, but they’ve definitely made sustained behavior status. I can only assume it’s because they’re entertaining.

Hmmm…the Psychology of Entertainment. Sounds like a good topic for a further post. In fact, I’m thinking a series of posts: How Our Brain responds to Entertainment.

After Lance’s post, I started doing some digging. In short time, I dug up a fairly rich vein of research into how our brain responds to entertainment. My goal is to find out why some types of entertainment have more staying power than other types. And then, once we discover the psychological underpinnings of entertainment, lets look at how that applies to some of the digital trends I disparaged: things like social networks, microblogging, mobile apps and online video. What role does entertainment play in online loyalty? How does it overlap with usefulness? How can digital entertainment fads survive the novelty curse and jump the chasm to a mainstream trends with legs? Why are we continually attracted to bright shiny objects to begin with? And is that trait universal or is it just a function of the early adopter tendencies of the current online audience?

I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to go through the research, but already, some interesting titbits have come to the top that present some compelling questions:

Why Does Fiction Typically Outsell Non Fiction?

If you look at the best selling books of 2009, or any year for that matter, you’ll almost always find that fiction tops the list. And, when you do get down to the fiction books, you’ll probably find that close to the top is a book by Malcolm Gladwell. Why? Well, in both instances, we’re suckers for the appeal of a story. We enjoy narratives much more so than rhetoric. Gladwell is a master of this. He wraps his points (and he always has a point) in a rich tapestry of anecdotes and stories.

Why do humans love stories? Well, it appears it’s a hardwired trait. Research seems to indicate our brains process narrative differently than rhetoric. This is one area I’ll be diving deeper into.

What Makes some TV Shows Great and Some Flashes in the Pan?

Lance brought up the example of TV as a bed for sustained behaviour. There is probably no source of sociological data richer in the past half century than our TV viewing habits. I’ll be taking a look at what separates a one season wonder from a multi season success story.

What is the Appeal of a Video Game anyway?

Lance’s other example was video games. Here there’s a psychological buffet of hardwired enticements. In fact, some psychologists are worried that the jolt received from video games may be addictive – a mainline hit of dopamine producing stimuli wired directly to our pleasure centres.

Why Do Boys play Video Games Much more often than Girls?

Video games may be addictive, but the danger seems to be much greater with males than females. We’ll explore why.

What is the Entertainment Value of Social Networks?

Of all the trends playing out currently online, that of social networks seems to be the most prevalent. Are social networks useful, or simply entertaining? Are they in transition from entertainment to usefulness? What is the future of social networking?

Can Online Compete with TV for Entertainment Value?

When we look at where our entertainment comes from, we’re definitely a culture in transition. Increasingly, more and more of our video consumption is online. So, if we find that entertainment and usefulness are both factors in online audience loyalty, what does this mean for future marketing?

The Difference Between Entertainment and Usefulness in Targeting Strategies?

At some point, I’ll have to address the fundamental question raised by Lance: If entertainment is also important, what are the implications for marketers? What mental modes are in place in both instances? This gets to some of the fundamental questions I’ve been wrestling with in marketing – the nature of engagement, the role of intent, the question of attribution. What is the difference in a strategy for search (usefulness) vs a strategy for Hulu (entertainment). And, does online bring about a significant paradigm shift as the worlds of usefulness and entertainment come closer to merging?

Lance..you got me thinking. Stay tuned!

David vs. Goliath Brands on the Search Results Page

First published December 4, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about branding on the search page, effectively intercepting the user during consideration. Certainly if you’re a household brand name, you have to be at or near the top of searches for your product category if you want to defend your position in the prospect’s consideration scent. But what if you’re a new entry into the market or a relatively unknown brand. Can you still effectively play in the category? Yes, but you have to be smarter than your behemoth competitors. Fortunately, in most cases, that’s not too hard to do when it comes to search.

The Strategy: Play Broad, but Think Niche

First, it’s important to know the common behaviors of the searcher. We start at the top left and scan the results in the “Golden Triangle” first. Only after this will we look at the ads on the right. We look for relevance, based not just on the query we used, but the implicit labels we carry in our mind. We will start with the simplest query that we feel will yield acceptable results with the least amount of investment. And, we will click through on two or three results to compare the information scent on the landing pages. So, given this behavioral pattern, what can you do to catch the attention of prospects with broad generic queries?

First of all, you have to target your messaging with exquisite precision in the title of your ad. This is no mean feat, because the limit is 25 characters, including spaces. Each one of these characters is precious, because this is the part of your ad that will get read. At best, you’ll get spot scanning of your description (bonus hint, move your most important “hot button” words in your description so they’re in the line right under the title and near the front. And don’t be afraid to put prices in. They’re a disruption in the text-based pattern and so stand out to the eye).

Rule of thumb, start with the query (hit bolding of the query is an important relevancy cue) and then laser focus on the primary hot button for your niche target. Don’t be afraid to identify the target. If you’re on a broad category, but your target is B2B buyers, say so. If the differentiator is benefit, move it into the title. One example, laptops that are durable enough to stand the rigors of road warrior treatment: The query you’re bidding for could be “laptops,” but your title should be: “Rugged Laptops.” Because your brand is unknown to the prospect, don’t worry about putting it in the title.

Pick Your Spot

Secondly, in a broad category, you want to avoid unqualified clicks. So you’re going to have to move down the right rail, preferably targeting the #4 or #5 spot. Eye-tracking studies show that this spot gets decent visibility (because of how we move over to the right rail when we reach the bottom of the golden triangle) relative to the rest of the ads, yet doesn’t pull a lot of unqualified clicking. This position, together with your targeted message, stands a decent chance of catching the prospect’s eye without capturing ROI-deflating gratuitous clicking. The challenge will be fighting the tendency of Google’s quality score to push you off the first page of results.

Plan Your Tactics in Context

All too often in search, we plan our messaging without paying attention to the user context that leads to engagement. Your ad will be appearing together with a number of other ads and organic results on a search page. Users will be scanning through those ads and making their choice based on not just what your ad says, but what all the others do as well. Additionally, there will be at least a few clicks through to competitive landing pages. You’re going to have to plan your messaging relative to what your competition is doing. Do a query yourself and see what the landscape looks like, through the eyes of your prospect. What other choices are available? How effective is the landing page experience, again, with your prospect’s potential intent firmly in mind? If you adopt this mindset, you’ll be amazed at how the biggest brands in the business (any business, yours included) routinely fumble the ball when it comes to delivering what the prospect is looking for on the search page. Unfortunately, non-targeted messaging and irrelevant landing page experiences seem to be the rule rather than the exception. There’s plenty of room for smart search marketers on the average results page.

Measure, Test, Optimize and Repeat

If you’re playing in the high traffic but generic keyword space, devote a lot of time to testing and tweaking. Find optimum positions and wording. Carefully watch your ROAS metrics. Capture the micro-conversions. Be smarter than the competition and you’ll find that search page where you can pull off a victory, even when you’re faced with David vs. Goliath odds.

A Cognitive Walk Through of Searching

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

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

Searching on Auto Pilot

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

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

The Google Habit

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

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

Conditioned Scanning

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

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

The “Pop Out” Effect

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

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

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

Picking and Choosing What We Pay Attention To

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

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

 

Lining Up for the Prefrontal Cortex

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

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

You Looked, but Did You See?

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

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

Advertising’s Attempted Break-In

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

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

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

Questioning the Power of the Influencer

First published October 2, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Word of mouth is powerful in marketing. In the last two weeks, we’ve seen how the opinions of others can cause us to change our own beliefs to match. We’ve also seen how the speed at which the word spreads is a function not only of the structure of the network itself, but also the value of the message and its impact on the people in the network, as well as how much they stand to gain (or lose) by spreading the word.

Influencers: Our Connection to Opinion?

In the world of marketing, one of the most cherished concepts has been the idea of an influencer or opinion leader, the super-connected individual who acts as a hub in an information cascade, rapidly disseminating the idea to many. According to this theory, most of us (90%) play relatively passive roles in information cascades, meekly accepting the opinions of these influencers and following the herd. Katz and Lazarsfeld introduced the two-step influencer model in the middle of the last century, showing how media first influences these influencers, or opinion leaders, who then act as a conduit and “infection agent” for the greater population.

It’s Not the Influencer, It’s Our Willingness to be Influenced

For the past 6 decades, marketers have allocated a lot of effort in reaching these influencers, assuming that once you capture the influencers, you capture the entire market. The assumption was that information cascades depended on these influential hubs. Malcolm Gladwell’s “TheTipping Point” brought this phenomenon to popular attention.

In the past few years, a number of researchers, including Duncan Watts from Columbia University, have questioned the impact of influencers on information cascades. They’ve created several network models which have shown that in most cases, ordinary individuals are all that’s required to trigger a word-of-mouth cascade. We are not merely sheep following the herd. We are all influencers in our own right, but only when we feel strongly about something. The necessary ingredient is not a hyper-connected influencer or super trend-setter, but rather a group of people willing to be influenced.

Passion by Word of Mouth

Which brings us to Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” When promoting the film, Gibson knew the most receptive audience would be church-goers. So he arranged for private screenings and the distribution of free tickets in churches throughout North America. We had Watts’ ideal model, a low variance network (similar levels of influence) that shared a vulnerability to influence, given the nature of the message. Word spread quickly before the launch of the movie (which also resulted in a firestorm of controversy), making “The Passion of the Christ” one of the most successful movies of 2004.

This example also leads us to a possible error in analysis of information cascades that has perpetuated the “influencer” theory. It’s relatively easy, when looking in hindsight, to make the assumption that if a cascade happened, the individuals at the beginning of the cascade had to be unique in their ability to influence others. A proponent of the Influentials Theory could look at the example of “The Passion of the Christ” and say that it was the pastors and ministers of the selected screening churches that acted as the influencers, spreading the word to their congregations.

But Watts’ theory offers an alternate explanation. The everyday, commonly connected members of the audience were willing to be influenced, and once captured by the message, went and spread it within their other social groups. It was the willingness to be influenced that was the critical factor. To use the analogy provided by Watts in his paper, assuming some unique level of influence by the catalysts of a cascade is like assuming that the first trees to burn in a forest fire are somehow able to spread flames farther than other trees. Often, the fact that the tree was combustible in the first place is overlooked.

Starting a Brand Fire

So, when we talk about brand, what makes a tree ready to catch on fire? Here we have another important insight from Watts’ work. Too many marketers make the assumption that influencers are the critical component of success. Proctor and Gamble has made influencer marketing a cornerstone of its strategy. But the fact is, if “The Passion of the Christ” was an unremarkable movie that audiences couldn’t connect with, all the influencers in the world wouldn’t have caused the word to spread. It was a powerful message connecting with an audience primed to accept it.

Watts’ models show that the success of a cascade depends on the vulnerability to influence. If that is present, ordinary individuals can cause the word to spread as far and just as quickly as hyper-connected influencers. And the vulnerability to be influenced, the “combustibility” of the audience, depends on many factors, perhaps the most important of which is the back story of the brand.

The Combustible iPhone

Look at what has been one of the most successful cascades of recent times: the Apple iPhone. The iPhone is a tremendously combustible product. It’s not technology mavens causing the word to spread (although they do have influence. Watts is quick to point out that they have impact, but it may not as disproportionally large as everyone believes), it’s the person sitting next to you on the plane who says she loves it. And we’re receptive to that message because we have that magic connection of brand (Apple makes cool products) and a remarkable product. We’re ready to be set on fire.

I’ve spent the last few columns detailing the aspects of word of mouth because they have a tremendous impact on brand and how we create our own brand beliefs. And it’s these brand beliefs that are triggered when we interact with search results. Next week, we return to more familiar territory and see how this interaction plays out.

Traveling at the Speed of Buzz

First published September 25, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What makes up buzz? And what determines how fast it travels? Last week, I talked about how important the opinions of others are in shaping our brand beliefs. Today, I want to look at one category of word of mouth, the juicy tidbit, recently christened “buzz,” and see what makes it leap from person to person.

Buzz is Nothing New

For some reason, we think buzz is a new thing that lives online. In fact, it’s as old as human behavior and has its roots in our very social fabric. We need to pass on information. We’re driven to do so. We gossip because it’s inherently satisfying, both to ourselves and to the recipient. But the spread of gossip through a social network is neither uniform nor consistent.  In the ’70s, Mark Granovetter discovered that, like many things, social networks are patchy, made up of tightly linked clusters of people who spend a lot of time together (families, friends, co-workers) which are loosely connected to each other through “weak ties,” more distant social relationships. The survival potential of a viral piece of information (Richard Dawkins first coined the term “meme” as a cultural equivalent of a gene in his book, “The Selfish Gene”) lies in its ability to jump Granovetter’s weak ties.   If the meme doesn’t jump out of a cluster, it ceases to propagate itself and can die an isolated death.

It’s Not Just the Network

In 1993 Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto launched an interesting study showing that the ability of a “meme” to spread through a social network depended not only on the structure of the network (the main point of Granovetter’s work) but also on the impact of the meme’s message on the carrier (akin to the idea of a phenotype in genetics) and the value of the meme itself.

Frenzen and Nakamoto worked with three different variables: First of all, they altered the value of the message. In the first variation, it was news of a 20%-off sale, in the other variation; it was the more valuable news of 50% to 70% off. Secondly, they varied the amount of product available at the sale price. In one case, there was unlimited inventory. In another, the supply was very limited. Finally, they varied the structure of the network itself, in one case having a network of strong ties, and in another, strong tie clusters linked by Granovetter’s weak ties.

What they found was that the value of the message (20% off vs. 50% to 70% off) has a significant impact on the rate in which the word spread, as did the availability of items at the sale price. The second factor introduced a moral hazard aspect. It made spreading the news a zero-sum game: if I tell you, I might lose out.

Frenzen and Nakamoto also found that in strong tie clusters, word seemed to spread relatively quickly regardless of the nature of the news. There were variations, but in all cases, the majority of the strongly linked network came to know of the news fairly quickly.

Social Speed Traps

If the discount was fairly low, the news tended to get stuck within clusters and had difficulty jumping the weak ties. If the news was valuable (50% to 70% off) and supply was virtually unlimited, the news was much quicker to jump the weak ties, spreading through the network very quickly. But, if the discount was large and the supplies were limited, suddenly the news tended to get trapped within the strongly tied clusters. People were reluctant to spread the news because the more people that knew, the more it was likely that they and their close family and friends (the people within their strong tie clusters) would lose out on a great deal.

Weak Ties on the Web

In both the online and offline worlds, the speed with which buzz will spread depends on the value of the message (is the gossip juicy? Is the price unbelievable?) and how much we stand to gain or lose (does sharing reduce the chances of me and my close circle getting ahead?). Gossip’s primary purpose is to create social bonds, and the sharing of intensely interesting information is something we’re programmed to do. Similarly, we’re programmed to share opportunity with those closest to us, either through kin selection (we want those with whom we share the most genes to get ahead first – W.D. Hamilton did the foundational work on this) or reciprocal altruism (doing a favor for a friend knowing that at some point, we’ll benefit from the payback — Robert Trivers is the name to search for if you’re interested). In most cases of online buzz, there is no moral hazard. In fact, unless a meme has what it takes to jump the weak ties in a real-world social network, it will never make it onto an online forum. Posting on the Internet is, by its very nature, a weak tie, a reaching out from ourselves to everyone.  We don’t publically post memes if it costs our strong ties the opportunity to capitalize on them. Similarly, we’re less likely to post unremarkable news, although I’m still trying to reconcile Twitter and Facebook status updates with this theory.

So, in the world of social networks, some people have more influence than others, right? Some are mavens, or super connected hubs, or natural salespeople (borrowing from Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”). Not so fast, says Columbia University’s Duncan Watts.  But more on that next week.

False Memories: Was that Bugs Bunny or Just My Imagination?

First published September 11, 2008 inn Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve talked about how powerful our mental brand beliefs can be, even to the point of altering the physical taste of Coke. But where do these brand beliefs come from? How do they get embedded in the first place?

A Place for Every Memory, and Every Memory in its Place

Some of the most interesting studies that have been done recently have been done in the area of false memories. It appears that we have different memory “modules,” optimized for certain kinds of memory. We have declarative memory, where we store facts. We can call these memories back under conscious will and discuss them. Then we have implicit memory, or procedural memory, that helps us with our day-to-day tasks without conscious intervention. Remembering how to tie your shoes or which keys to hit on a keyboard are procedural memories

Declarative memory is further divided into semantic and episodic memory. In theory, semantic memory is where we store meaning, understandings and concept-based knowledge. It’s our database of tags and relationships that help us make sense of the real world. Episodic memory is our storehouse of personal experiences. But the division between the two is not always so clear or water-tight.

The Making of a Brand Memory

Let’s look at our building of a brand belief. We have personal experiences with a brand, either good or bad, that should be stored in episodic memory. Then we have our understandings of the brand, based on information provided, that should build a representation of that brand in semantic memory. This is where advertising’s influence should be stored.

But the divisions are not perfect. Some things slip from one bucket to the other. Many of our inherent evolutionary mechanisms were not built to handle some of the complexities of modern life. For instance, the emotional onslaught of modern advertising might slip over from semantic to episodic memory. There will also be impacts that reside at the implicit rather than the explicit level. Memory is not a neatly divided storage container. Rather, it’s like grabbing a bunch of ingredients out of various cupboards and throwing them together into a soup pot. It can be difficult knowing what came from where when it’s all mixed together.

This is what happens with false memories. Often, they’re external stories or information that we internalize, creating an imaginary happening that we mistakenly believe is an episode from our lives. Advertising has the power to plant images in our mind that get mixed up with our personal experiences, becoming part of our brand belief. These memories are all the more powerful because we swear they actually happened to us.

That Wascally Wabbit!

University of Washington researcher Elizabeth Loftus and her research partner Jacquie Pickrell have done hundreds of studies on the creation of false memories. In one, under the guise of evaluating a bogus advertising campaign, they showed participants a picture of Bugs Bunny in front of Disneyland, and then had them do other tasks. Later in the study, the participants were asked to remember a trip to Disneyland. Thirty percent of them remembered shaking Bugs Bunny’s hand when they visited the Magic Kingdom, which would be a neat trick, considering that Bugs is a Warner’s character and would not be welcome on Disney turf.

We all tend to elaborate on our personal experiences to make them more interesting. We “sharpen” our stories, downplaying the trivial and embellishing (and sometimes completely fabricating) the key points to impress others. When we do this, we will draw from any sources handy, including things we’ve seen or heard in the past that we’ve never personally experienced. To go back to last week’s Coke example, our fond memories of Coke might just as likely come from a Madison Avenue copywriter as from our own childhood. We idealize and color in the details so our conversations can be more interesting. It goes back to the human need to curry social favor by gossiping. When you have this natural human tendency fueled by billions of dollars of advertising, it’s often difficult to know where our lives end and our fantasies take over.

This mix of personal experience and implanted images explains part of where our brand beliefs come from. Next week, I’ll look at the power of word of mouth and the opinions of others.

Brand Labeling: Building Our Beliefs

First published August 14, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Up to now in this series on search and branding, I’ve been looking exclusively at how and why we use search engines. But the idea of the series is to show how branding and search can work together. So in this column, I’d like to start from the opposite end of the spectrum: our brand relationships, from a memory retrieval perspective.

Storing Complex Concepts

In the computational theory of mind, the prevailing theory that seems to best explain how our minds work (although it’s not without its detractors), the elegance with which the brain processes complex patterns of information is remarkable. These are called constructs, and brands are no exception.

For any complex concept, the components of the concept are individual and scattered memory patterns, called engrams. Engrams are groups of activated neurons that fire together. But the more complex the concept, the greater the network of engrams. For a person we know well, like our mother, we could have a huge number of scattered components that make up our concept. Snatches of memories, what her voice sounds like, what she looks like, what her banana loaf tastes like. All these, and many more, individual memory components make up our concept of “mother.” And these fragments are stored in various parts of the brain. When we remember what our mother looks like, it’s an engram in our visual cortex that fires, the same part of the brain that fires when we’re actually looking at her. We’re actually picturing her in our mind. When we hear her voice, it comes from our auditory warehouse.

Our Neuronal Warehouse

The concept of a vast neuronal warehouse is actually a good analogy. When we call up our concept of “mother,” it’s assembled on the fly from the individual sections of the warehouse. The retrieval call goes out, depending on the need, to the various parts of the brain, and the required components are brought together in our working memory and assembled in the conscious part of our brain. Each memory is custom made from available parts. If we were looking at a model of the brain, we’d see maps of neurons “lighting up” across the cortex, almost like a lightning storm seen from above the clouds.

But with a construct as complex and extensive in scope as our mother, there needs to be a shorthand version. We can’t retrieve every single piece of “mother” every time we think of her.  So, the parts retrieved are restricted to the context we do the retrieval in. If we’re buying a dress for our mom, we retrieve components that include her body shape, her color preference and probably memories of other things she’s worn in the past. We don’t retrieve her banana loaf recipe because it’s not relevant.

Executive Summaries of Memories

But there’s also a labeling process that goes on. For complex constructs, like our mother or a familiar brand, we need a quick and accessible “label” that sums up our feelings about the entire construct. This is the top of mind impression of the construct, the first thing that comes to mind. It helps us keep the world straight by providing a shorthand reference for the many, many constructs stored in our memory warehouse. These labels have to be simple. In the case of people, the summing up usually determines whether we like or dislike the person. It’s a heuristic shortcut that is built up from the sum of our experience and exposure which determines whether we’re willing to invest more time in the person. The same is often true of brands.

The power of these labels for brands is absolutely essential, because they determine our attitudes to everything that makes up the construct. The brand label, or belief, is a gut feeling that impacts every feeling or attitude towards the brand.

Top-of-Mind Brand Beliefs

Often when I’m speaking, I’ll do a little exercise where I’ll show well-known brand labels and ask people to write down the first thing that comes to mind when they see it. What I’m capturing is the brand label, the top-of-mind belief about the brand. Apple generally brings out labels like “cool,” “cutting edge” or “design.” Starbucks is labeled “indulgence,” “great smell,” “delicious” or, less positively, “overpriced.” The entire scope of our experience with the brand is labeled with a few words. Obviously, our entire concept of Starbucks is usually much greater than just the way it smells or tastes, but for the people that have assigned it this label, that’s the best overall descriptor and the easiest access point. The rest of the details that make up our concept of Starbucks can be unpacked at will, but for these people, they’re all packed in a box that is labeled with “great smell” or “delicious.” If the label is “overpriced,” this may be a box we seldom unpack.

Next week, we’ll continue to look at how we store our concepts of brands, what can make up our brand constructs and the role emotion plays.

Needs, Beliefs and Search

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

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

Computing Concepts

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

Irrational Short Cuts

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

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

Search and Our Subconscious Baggage

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

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

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

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