second brain

species variation

This helps with a few questions I've had for a while...

(Via Geek Media)

good old-fashioned advertising

Or, how to spend a huge amount of money and energy creating a finely crafted commercial based on a hopelessly flawed metaphor:

If I were an American with funds to spare, here are some things this ad would make me think:

1. Wow, cool ad.
2. What's it for again?
3. An investment fund. Something about thinking long term. Cool.
4. I'm putting my money in a savings account.

how things spread

The metaphor of epidemics or contagions for the spread of ideas, preferences, habits and more has become very fashionable in the last few years, partly as a result of Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point, and partly because of the increasing influence of the internet on our social lives. It has led to much prefixing of marketing with words like "buzz" or "W.O.M" or "viral", and confident assertions about the targeting of "influencers". But the truth is, scientists and sociologists are still getting to grips to with this phenomenon. We still don't know, for instance, whether so-called influencers have any more influence than anyone else.

It's definitely true, however, that the field of social network analysis is important and exciting, and anyone involved in marketing needs to be abreast of it. Social networks are getting easier to study and analyse: the rise of digital communications means that we're now leaving ever-richer data trails about where we are, what we're doing and what we're thinking and of course, who we're connected to.

For a brilliant survey of what we know about social networks, look no further than this article in the NYT.

thinking and drinking

Talking of the bias towards rationality...

"Know Your Limits" is part of a long-running campaign. There's another example, from last year, here.

It goes without saying that the problem of binge-drinking and its social effects is a very serious one. Which is why I'm concerned about how and whether this kind of advertising works. What follows is speculative and inquiring rather than evidence-based.

When I suggest there's a rational bias at work here, I don't mean that the ad itself is unemotional. Clearly it is designed to have some kind of visceral impact on the viewer (we can debate how much of one, but let's leave that to one side). My question is, what's the model of human behaviour that purports to link the experience of watching this ad in the cinema (as I did last night) with the "moment of purchase" - or in this case, the moment of being blind drunk at 2am in a group of similarly pissed mates?

I imagine it's meant to work via metaphor: when I'm drunk, I'll remember my mild revulsion at that man in the ad proposing all manner of silly stunts, think to myself "That's just like me right now", and stop myself from throwing up into the gutter.

As I say, I've not looked at any data, but to me that suggests an extremely implausible optimism about the power of the frontal cortex.

This is exactly the kind of problem that would benefit from a serious investigation into the mental processes of a mind under the influence, and how/whether it's affected by recently absorbed communications. Perhaps the client and agency have already done this, rather than rely on the conventional and deeply flawed assumptions about decision-making that are embedded in marketing-think. But I'd be surprised if they'd done so and come up with this as an answer.

the ambler

Here's a podcast of a fascinating interview with Tim Ambler of the London Business School on the potential of neuroscience to improve our understanding of how marketing works. It's worth five minutes of your time.

Ambler argues, in his pleasingly robust style, that most market research is based on a false premise: that we make our consumption choices rationally. The truth is, everything that we've learned about how our brains work in the last few years points to the overwhelming dominance of our unconscious, emotional brains in decision-making (if you haven't read this superb book, you must). But the in-built bias towards rational analysis in marketing (neither consumers nor marketers like to believe that they proceed largely by feeling and intuition) inhibits our investigation of what's really going on.

He makes the intriguing suggestion that marketers ought to work with scientists to investigate autism, because autistic people either lack, or display extreme versions of, universal human traits that marketers rely on or attempt to tap into (a pronounced tendency to entrenched habit and routine on the one hand, a lack of emotional empathy on the other).