“I’ll have what she’s having” – Mark Earls

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Marketing and social learning from Herdmeister, Mark Earls

Much of the 1989 Rob Reiner Romantic Comedy, When Harry Met Sally, is eminently forgettable toothsome fare but one scene has since become a classic of late 20th Century Hollywood: Sally (Meg Ryan) treats Harry (Billy Crystal) – and the other customers of what is in reality NYC’s Union Square Deli – to an exuberant, whooping demonstration of a fake female orgasm. When at last, Sally/Meg’s cries and tics and whimpers die away, an unnamed woman at the next table (in fact played by the director’s mother, Estelle Reiner) leans over to the waiter and intones the simple phrase: “I’ll have what she’s having”.
“I’ll have what she’s having”: this simple colloquialism captures one of the most important clusters of insights into human behavior to emerge from the human sciences in recent years: You see like Estelle (the woman at the next table), we all spend most of our lives in a world of other people (Freud famously quipped that we can never escape the Other) and much of what we do we do in imitation of other people or at least following the example of others (and not as the result of independent decisions, whatever we tell ourselves, our spouses, our therapists and any passing market researcher).

Moreover, “I’ll have what she’s having” turns out the key mechanism behind the spread of all kinds of things through human populations: feelings, ideas and behavior.

So if you’re interested in shaping behaviour or spreading the adoption of your brand, understanding the science behind what happened in that (fictional) NYC Deli might just turn out to be useful.

The Appliance of Science
In the last few years, there’s been an explosion of interest in the science of human behavior – from the best-selling books of the likes of Mr. Irrational, (Dan Ariely) and Mr. Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell) to the excellent campaign by current IPA President Rory Sutherland’s to champion Behavioral Economics and all things Nudge-y.

While this has proved extremely valuable to marketers of all sorts (if only as a pick-‘n’-mix of strategic insight) all Behavioral Economics and the like really does to our understanding of humans is to focus attention on how poor we are in perceiving the outside world and how dubious our powers of thinking are; it merely translates humans from being precise individual calculating machines to rather poor and unreliable ones. But Individuals nonetheless.

And in doing so, it misses the much bigger insight into human nature that the science highlights:  we are a fundamentally social creature, one evolved largely for a world of others like ourselves (and not for isolated, independent lives); we live almost all of our lives in the company of others (in the modern idiom, that we are always embedded in social networks of our peers. Most of what we do, we do in the company and under the shadow of other people – under the influence of others, if you like.

Implications for Marketers
So what are the implications for Marketers of the “What she’s having” world? How can we start to get to grips with a world in which our consumers are all connected to each other and spend their lives in the company of each other? What should we be doing differently to take advantage of all those Estelles out there sitting at the metaphorical next tables? How does this change how we think of marketing and its mechanics? Here are some things that I and my clients have found useful:

Summary of Implications for Marketers
1. The lie of the land: Independent choice or social one?
2. Role of marketing: persuasion or Curating Diffusion?
3. Targetting “The” Consumer?
4. Facilitating copying: Eyeline/stuff to do
5. Social brands serving social needs
6. A new kind of strategy: Lighting lots of fires

1. The lie of the land: independence vs. social choice
Probably the most important place to start is to understand what the behavior in your market and around your brand is like – to characterize it in terms of whether the product and brand choices in your market are independent ones (i.e. based on an individual consumer acting outwith the influence of their peers) and to what extent are they based on social learning? We tend to assume that most choices are independent (we talk of the relationships consumers have with our brands as if they were primary) but as suggested above, the data points to things being otherwise, more often than not.

It is worth checking what you’ve got before rushing off and strategizing in social terms. Not least because if the choice is independent then the focus of marketing really is on building a better mousetrap to satisfy consumer needs – a superior product etc. If the choice does turn out to be independent traditional market research which explores individual thoughts, perceptions and feelings about products and product characteristics is still appropriate. However, by contrast, if you discover that the choice is social then neither of these things apply: it’s much less about the product and more about the people and how they interact with each other and this means traditional market research can not help anywhere near as much here (it tends to focus on the individual-product or individual-brand interface and even when it asks about social influence it is less reliable).

There are a number of ways of doing this – from the ethnographic s of real world observation to the quantitative and analytic (looking at the characteristics of the choice data distributions) but the important thing is to be clear about what you’re dealing with.

2. The role of Marketing: Curating Diffusion
For most of us, our job has long been about doing something to individual consumers to shape their individual behavior – whether you call it persuasion or something softer, Marketing has long been thought of as something we do TO consumers.

If you discover that your market or your brand is based on socially-shaped choices, the role of your Marketing needs to be different, too. It needs to become much more about curating diffusion: “curating” as in facilitating a process that is already underway or can be unlocked and “diffusion” as in spread. Your job in other words is less about getting folk do stuff and more about helping them to get each other to do stuff and so on through the population. This requires a very different mindset and set of tools to those to which we default.

3. Targetting: “The” Consumer
One obvious area for change is in the way we think about our audience: we are used to focusing on the individual (as if they were independent) but perhaps we should start talking about “Consumers” only in the plural. Let’s perhaps go further and explore the communities and multiple social worlds in which our consumers live and love and buy our products and services. Let’s define our audience in terms of social groups and social contexts rather than merely in terms of individuals.

Another way of thinking about targeting is to consider what I call “the between space” – to focus on the interaction between people rather than on some illusory “trigger” or “buy-button” in individual people’s heads which does not exist. I have started to design and conduct fieldwork which focuses on the human interaction first and the market behavior second (the former being the real context and key to unlocking the spread of the latter). Whatever you decide to do, the between space is the battleground of diffusion.

4. Facilitating copying
Much of our work in this between space is not going to look like traditional marketing communication: we’re going to have to help individuals see each other (if you can’t see, you can’t copy). Apple are masters at this: the laptop I’m writing on has a beautiful illuminated logo which I rarely see: it’s on the lid so that others around me can see what I’m using. iPod’s white earpieces work in a similar way – no wonder the “silhouette” campaign has run again and again since the launch. Every time you see some one on a train or a bus with these brand signatures, the effect is reinforced. Very clever.

So one kind of activity in the between space is going to be about managing “eyeline”: what can individuals see of their peers’ behavior and choices? How can we make things more visible? Football teams do it with scarves and replica kit but Amazon does it without you or I realizing it: every product page has at least 16 “social” features, reviews, comments and behavioural information from other people which it bakes into your “choice-architecture” (as the Nudgers have it) and then does the same with your data for other people. How can you make this part and parcel of your consumers’ experience of your brand?

Another is providing connective activities that enable “eyeline” to work: giving folk stuff to do together during which they can see each other. Sometimes this will involve supporting existing enthusiasms (sponsorship and cause-related marketing are already playing in this space); sometimes it will involve creating experiences such as games, competitions or even brand new events that bring people together.

5. Social brands, serving social needs
As noted above, most brand choices seem to be at the social end of the spectrum so it would make sense to start to rethink our brands in social terms: what communities (of interest etc) does yours serve? How does your brand  help those communities interact with each other? What are you giving your consumers (yes, plural!) than enhances their shared social world? What “purpose” or social mission is your brand driven by? What higher order mission does it serve as a standard-bearer for people to gather around?

In recent years, far too much of the noise around “social” has been about tactics (social media etc) and far too little of it strategic – being at the heart of our brand thinking. We need to be more socially strategic and worry less about social as a tactic.

6. A new kind of strategy: lighting lots of fires
Finally, one of the most unusual things about the spread of socially-learned phenomena is that they are really hard to predict: it’s really hard to know ahead of time whether this particular fashion or tune or name will take off; only after the fact does it seem to us clear why the winners are the winners (this posthoc facility explains why case studies make good teaching materials but bad science).

This inherent unpredictability demands that we rethink the notion of strategy itself – or rather to make strategy less “grand”. Rather than betting everything on one execution of our grand plan, we need to get better at spreading the bets out: let’s test lots of different ways to implement and get better at learning as we go.

Posted: December 7th, 2010 | Author: Glen Dower | Filed under: Digital, Makes You Think, Uncategorized | Tags: Mark earls, the marketing society, the marketing society digital network | 1 Comment »

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