Marketing Sceptics

A place to collect & discuss evidence for the inefficiency of today's crude marketing approaches.

[marketingsceptics]

Blue Monday Happiness

We all know that Blue Monday is scientifically speaking not a thing, so actually not worth talking about. However, as with many other “non-essential” things like cats, pornography and selfies, Blue Monday keeps colonising the web, and the fact that it is yearly recurring is probably not helpful in stopping the less meaningful conversations around this phenomenon. 

Whilst the pseudoscience around Blue Monday is obviously not even worth debunking, the fact that people’s digital as well as real life behaviour is constantly influenced by their emotional state has not only been acknowledged by emotion researchers and affective neuroscientists but has also been discovered as a relevant concept by more profit-oriented research entities. Emotional research becomes even more interesting as we add digital data into the mix and realise that people express their current emotions in real time on digital platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter - with the latter being the most interesting source for researchers as it contains public text based data and is therefore ideal for  both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

One research approach in this context is “We Feel”, which is basically a large scale emotion tracker that is using Twitter data to provide “a real time signal of the world’s emotional state”. It allows the export of social data categorised by emotion, geographical location and time to track emotional states over time, for example the emotional state of the UK over the course of 2016 (see Figure 1).

Plotting this data we can see in chart (Figure 1) how large socio-political events have influenced the mood in the UK over the course of the last year, with a dramatic spike - both in sad and happy conversations - around Brexit and a slightly smaller spike of mostly sad conversations around the US election.

These emotional events can be analysed in more detail when focusing on conversations that indicate personal relevance using social listening tools like Crimson Hexagon (see Figure 2).

The respective chart (Figure 2) shows how divided the British populus actually is about Brexit but also that the #Remain league obviously felt much stronger about the outcome of the EU referendum than the Brexit supporters. It also shows that the UK reacted quite unanimously negative towards the US election and that - surprisingly - Thanksgiving seems to have sparked more joy on Twitter than Christmas in 2016.

Moving from 2016 to a larger time scale, namely the current decade, we can use Hedonometer, a social mood tracking tool that is using linguistically calibrated indicator words to track the mood of the whole Twitter population over time (see Figure 3).

Interestingly, while the EU referendum did not seem to have impacted global happiness at all, the US election did - creating a drop in happiness only surpassed by the mass shooting terrorist attack on a nightclub in Orlando 12th June 2016.

Finally, it is also interesting to note that the overall level of global happiness measured via Hedonometer seems to follow a cyclical pattern rather than to constantly grow over time as could be assumed if we buy into the general idea of progress as a generally unquestioned socio-economic “truth”. The respective growth of the world’s largest market indices during the same time period (see Figure 4) is however the strongest indicator of a general detachment of our economical system and the level of wellbeing it is supposed to deliver.

It is therefore unsurprising that GDP is - although generally important - not able to explain more than roughly 20% of global happiness across countries and other than just economic happiness metrics are urgently needed.

[marketingsceptics]

10 Major Marketing Mistakes of 2014

Here comes my full broadside, covering the 10 biggest marketing mistakes of 2014: Fire!

"USS Iowa bb-61 pr" by Phan J. Alan Elliott. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia. 

Measuring Everything: Not everything that counts is countable, not everything that is countable counts. Whole KPI discussion assorts to the fact that managers have totally lost any grip and control over what they are doing - because a) there is less and less to control by brands in a highly competitive, buyer-controlled market. And b) most managers actually do not care or do not understand what they should actually pay attention to, so they require simple numbers to look at. The same numbers they are so keen on calculating when it comes to counting their profit and personal benefits.

Target Group Thinking back from 20th century: It is amazing how many big companies are planning their activities still with mental tools from the last century, when people were still stuck in stereotypes or better: when these stereotypes were still true. Now here is the bad news: you marketing folks have intellectually missed at least 50 years of individualization and social differentiation up to the present time where there is now no whatsoever “standard” customer profile any more. To put it with Joe Kraus from Excite: “The 20th Century was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st Century is about millions of markets of dozens of people.”

No Honesty: this is maybe the only real “strength” of marketing people: they are notoriously good liars. Unfortunately, they cannot stop lying so they are not only chronically over-exaggerating their brand’s strengths but also never ever stop being dishonest about the weaknesses of their brand and its products - which effectively leads only to the fact that their customers cannot take the communication seriously any more. Of course, any halfway intelligent person would know about this connection - however here is where the incredible power of marketing professionals’ ability for self-deceit kicks in: if they try really hard, they might actually identify most marketing bullshit of their peers - but they will never be able to identify (admit) their own bullshit.

No Guts: most consumers have already become indifferent to all marketing communication as marketing is being all about mainstream. Most marketing professional seem to run their activities by the rule ‘never stand-out, never stand up, never try something really new / original’. Reason for this is less the anxiety of putting someone off by a maybe too ballsy or not politically correct statement but merely by the fact that the “Median Voter Theorem” prescribes that mainstream always reaches the highest number of potential buyers of your product - which of course can only be true if the axioms behind the Median Voter Theorem are still true - which they are most probably not due to the structural changes of modern markets (see the above cited statement of Joe Kraus at #2).

No Brains: here we have a phenomenon at work called “Adverse Selection”: by being an intellectually quite adverse field of business (questioning certain practices is not much appreciated in marketing), this industry attracts disproportionately those with a rather average or low intelligence who, again, do not like to question themselves nor the field very much. Now it would probably go too far (because it would be an unfair generalization) to call marketing professionals straight out dumb, but it is most probably safe to say that an average marketer is most probably not able to challenge any average customer in any intellectually meaningful way - because he simply does not have the intellect to do that.

No Authenticity: we all know these kind of commercials: a brand or its product is portrayed in an overly positive atmosphere by always smiling faces? It is the well-known stereotypical scenery of perfect social serenity where products are presented by an always happy family that smiles into the camera like a complete moron - trying to convince us that a certain brand of butter, jam, cereals, cleaning agent, … has that magical effect not only on our but on all of our family’s happiness. Now what’s wrong with this picture? Is it the obvious fact that we all know that a cleaning agent - however well it might work - does not have the power to “clean our life’s miseries” away? We could probably still tolerate that preposterous lie. But what no one can tolerate for longer is the emotional monotony that this unauthentic way of marketing is transporting: the reality of life not only holds good but also bad experiences that make us suffer from time to time. And this is completely natural and ok, so we suck it up and get on with our life. But the artificially “frozen” positivity in marketing is a constant ridiculing of the reality of our inner, emotional life. It is as if someone is constantly laughing at our worries and emotional troubles.

Too Slow: with all the technical means of new (and fast) media channels at their hands, most brands are still astoundingly slow in reacting and picking up on new social trends and developments. This is especially surprising as most marketing professionals think of themselves as being kind of hipster, always picking up the latest fashions and trends. Unfortunately, reality is quite different. First: marketing pros working for big brands are employees of big, bureaucratic corporations who chose that career path for reasons of safety and predictability (mental inertia). This contradicts any spontaneous, original, creative behavior, which effectively leads us to the next point: corporations work with young, hip, creative, … agencies that are supposed to make up for that lack of own creativity and trendiness. However, to keep these agencies under control even beyond the ultimate leash of financial dependency, corporate brand professionals always claim the (conservative) interpretation sovereignty of their brands’ values and tonality translation. Because of that, they are effectively never “before the wave” but always a bit too slow in picking up new trends - even if their agencies deliver them tons and tons of new ideas, fresh from “hipster central”. Apart from the outlined organisational reasons, this might of course also have something to do with the marketing professionals’ mental set of skills or their lack of intuition and creativity. Whatever might be the ultimate cause: marketers rarely happen to pick up new trends fast enough and when they pick something up, their interpretation of “hip and trendy” is almost always wrong and more a caricature than a trend (think of the many ridiculous copies of internet memes like last year’s “Harlem Shake” or this year’s “Ice Bucket Challenge”).

No Adaptation: in our modern ‘dialogical’ communication landscape, talking to your customers has become easy and an everyday routine on most social media channels. Unfortunately, talking WITH your folks is so much harder than just talking AT them - because in the latter case you never really expect an answer because you do not want to actively listen to what they have to say. Many marketers think that this effectively releases them of the obligation to adapt to customers’ opinions and finally do something about their problems and needs, for example by improving the dialogical communication of the brand or the quality and effectivity of its products.

No Opinion: this point is addressing mainly agencies, especially those that are literally willing to do and sell everything for the buck. Your are mainly responsible for the downfall of any moral and intellectual standard within marketing by behaving like cheap whores (apologies to any real prostitutes whose job is in comparison highly valuable). The here addressed agencies can not only be bought for money - you can actually also purchase their opinion. Because they are so cheap, they never afford to have an own opinion and are willing to say just about anything about everything, no matter how bad the product or brand might actually be. Ok, we get it: money talks everywhere. But here is the catch: By becoming buyable for about everything, you are turning yourself - and the whole industry - into an interchangeable commodity - and marketing communication into an empty vessel.

No Relevance: the last - and probably most serious - mistake we have to address here is the lack of relevance. Kurt Vonnegut, writer and much appraised godfather of storytelling, has put his first rule of storytelling this way: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” If you have nothing to say or nothing positive to contribute to the lives of your customers: shut your face - and do something where you can.

[marketingsceptics]

Digital Marketing undermines Willpower

Willpower is an intriguing psychological construct that has already been addressed by thinkers like Plato, who has been discussing it under the Greek term ‘ἀκρασία’ (akrasia) in his dialog ‘Protagoras’. Akrasia, or the lacking of command over oneself is there discussed as the phenomenon of acting against one’s own better judgement. Whereas Plato saw akrasia only possible where relevant knowledge was lacking, Aristotle took a much more empirical approach and explained an akratic action as the product of a misaligned, ‘unreasonable’ opinion. For him, the opposite of akrasia was therefore ‘Enkrateia’, being ‘in power’ (over oneself) as a result of reason.

In our time, the concept of willpower has of course become generally known with the studies of Walter Mischel and his iconic ‘Marshmallow-Test’, in which he tested the ability of children to defer gratification - finding that this competence was later linked to a whole series of positive correlates like academic success, physical as well as psychological health, and social competence. However, Mischel can certainly not be called father of the concept as Freud theorized already in 1911 about pleasure deferral as an indicator of maturity of the self. Further, Mischel’s conceptualization does not cover certain aspects of willpower that are especially relevant in today’s digitised economy.

In that regard, the work of Roy Baumeister has to be mentioned. Several of his studies have pointed to a view of willpower being rather like a muscle that needs continuous training to build up and can even be fatigued by being extensively exercised - a phenomenon he calls “ego depletion”. An especially intriguing aspect of his research is the fact that choice alone can already deplete our powers of self-control, seemingly rendering willpower a limited body-like resource that we constantly draw on to navigate ourselves more rationally through all the options that reality presents to us.

But it is exactly that reality that has substantially changed since the early days of human decision making in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). Meanwhile, we are living in a nearly fully digitised environment in which we are continuously bombarded with choices - be it the choice to act upon or ignore certain informational signals that we receive via a multitude of digital and social channels. Or be it the constant confrontation with more and more personalized offers that are following us through all digital media, ‘haunting’ us as retargeting based on our Google search behaviour or personalized Facebook ads drawing on information we shared in the biggest social network.        

The relevant point here is that, although we usually perceive our digital environment as enriching and many of its offers as free, navigating digitalia comes at a certain cost. This cost is not only a cognitive one - which manifests for example in a measurable atrophy of our memory - it more and more often is also a cost to be measured in loss of willpower. This problem starts already early on, when children have to face the challenge of balancing their use of digital media with their schoolwork and stays at our side throughout our whole adult digital life because novelty seems to be a driver for deficient self-regulation - especially given that the digital realm is known for a high degree of novelty both technically as well as content-wise. The idea behind this problem has been nicely formulated by Prof. Vohs from Carlson School of Management, MN:

"There is research that shows people still have the same self-control as in decades past, but we are bombarded more and more with temptations. Our psychological system is not set up to deal with all the potential immediate gratification." Source: Pick the Brain.

And just the same way that we have not evolved to deal with the incredible amount of YouTube videos or Facebook posts that we see on average on a daily basis, we also did not evolve to make (or better suppress) purchasing decisions triggered by online ads served to us in an endless daily stream: a quick first research suggests numbers as high as 200 video ads, 90 classic Google display ads and an unbelievable number of 1,500 Facebook ads that everyone is on average exposed to in every given month (1).

This inflationary increase in ad impressions equals an unparalleled increase in willpower drainage that we are constantly facing simply by being online. Because unlike in the ‘offline world’, where your body and its physical limitation of local information intake creates a natural boundary for choice overload even in the face of the already high number of around 50,000 product offers in a typical supermarket, that limit to information overload does not exist in the digital realm. Further, research suggests that, once our egos have been depleted by an over-exposure to forced suppression and negative choices, our willpower is already at such low levels that any further exposure will leave us making generally more irrational decisions - creating a vicious circle of diminishing willpower.

But how can we escape this trap - and what would be a better way for marketers to deal with this psychologically as well as ethically critical situation? First of all, as users we have to be aware of the fact that we do have a choice - at least in the beginning. The choice is ours to - at least temporarily - opt out of the digital environment, be it by regularly holding a ‘Digital Sabbath’ or by taking a longer ‘Digital Detox’ against the digital dementia that is threatening us in this era of complete digitisation. Concepts like the Finnish ‘Sisu’ as well as findings from embodied cognition research also suggest that regular (bodily) workout - disconnected from the digital world - might be helpful in building and restoring our willpower.

Finally, as a word of advice to marketers - every intelligent marketing practitioner might easily understand that the whole marketing world is nothing but a closed system with its participants actively reacting to any changes in the amount of information overload. As we are already massively ‘over the edge’ with regard to the amount of information to which we are exposing consumers, the solution is not to increase the amount of commercial information from every single brand involved some more - even if each brand ‘player’ for itself might find this approach ‘rational’. As monetary deterrents (ad costs) are obviously (yet) not working, brands should try to differentiate themselves with a quality instead of a quantity-approach, meaning that they should advertise in a way, that actually increases the willpower of potential consumers. This can only be done by introducing limitations to exposition - which makes sense given the possibility of brands to charge higher prices for premium products shown by Veblen goods combined with the fact that people do not ‘need’ more products - they need better solutions for their general life situations.

So, instead of undermining our willpower by making things ever more easily and instantly available to us and thereby destroying our innate ability to delay gratifications, marketing should finally turn to a more sustainable approach - by actually holding us back and making us curious again of really useful products. If we can finally afford these sustainable goods, we will probably also be worthy and ‘earned’ them - by having delayed our impulse to instantly satisfy our needs. Given the slim chance of marketing actually acting upon this advice, I would strongly urge governments to impose a steep tax on digital ads to protect consumers from the unhealthy side-effects of digital marketing on our ability for self-regulation and our general mental health.

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1) The indicated numbers are only best guess approximations based on publicly available information (see link references for exact sources of numbers - in some cases numbers are based on information that is not current, so current number of average ad impressions / user might actually be even higher). Further, promoted posts on Facebook are not taken into consideration. The general upward trend in ad impressions (on Facebook) is also confirmed by recent report on ad delivery.

[marketingsceptics]

Thoughts on Today’s Speed of Marketing

Efficiency & speed have become almost self-sufficient values in our fast-paced marketing world of today. As part of this development, communication is changing to faster channels as brands are trying to communicate to consumers more and more in real-time. As part of this development, buzzwords like ‘hyper-relevance’ are indicating marketers’ ambition to tap into the needs of our here and now, delivering a stream of personalized offers to us by way of an algorithm-driven just-in-time supply for everything we hunger for at each given moment in our life.

As consumers, we have also grown into expecting more and more goods and services to be delivered to us instantly - so to speak ‘in a click’. With the increasing digitalisation of our consumption, we have learned that everything we want can be obtained by a mere twitch of our index finger. With the same speed we are consuming digital content faster and faster, tripping into an ever increasing spiral of minimally reflective interaction with a gargantuan flood of endless stimuli.

A frequent reflex and obviously incompatible coping mechanism of consumers for this overabundance of branded stimuli is to in turn increase the speed of consumption of goods as well as of the informational bow wave that today’s marketing is producing for them. In consequence this leads to a general strategy shift of the way today’s consumers are processing information: instead of keeping a clear focus of attention, consumers are now more and more conditioned to take up whatever bits and pieces of information they get thrown at in the digital and social channels they have subscribed to, quickly scan them for novelty and short-term instrumentality for their current goals. If a piece of information is neither new nor instrumental to reach their current goal, it is mentally dropped without further processing.

Biologically speaking, this strategic shift can be expressed with the simplified Verhulst model of population dynamics, which depicts the change of the population N to the current population size and expresses the effect of the two parameters r (growth rate) and K (carrying capacity). 

This model is supposed to mathematically describe the selective pressures that drive evolution either in the direction of an r- (high reproduction rate) or K- (high maintenance / quality) reproduction strategy.  

The analogy here is that the evolutionary forces for our (digital) behavior are currently clearly driving us towards an r-strategy of informational reproduction where we become quality-insensitive ‘content-ragpickers’ that are more and more conforming to the automated and fast paced production of over-recycled content-detritus that is delivered to us by branded entities that behave like social ‘spambots’.

Unfortunately, this development is not only completely unnecessary but also driven by a huge misunderstanding. Because r-strategies do only apply to unstable or unpredictable environments in which our (intellectual) offspring has only a very low probability of surviving to adulthood. While the metaphor of “digital darwinism” is implying that this is in fact the case, its application to our very own intellectual activity in the digital sphere is misinterpreting the critical substrate in question when it comes to the correct understanding of the digital ecosphere. Harvard’s David Weinberger has correctly stated that “the internet is not the medium: WE are the medium.”

So by lowering our own quality thresholds of communicative interaction - assumedly in face of the increasing terror of the ever-increasing pace of automated low-quality content - we have effectively lost sight of the much more important fact that the actual informational battle is not being fought against the seemingly endless information-technologies of Facebook, Google & Co. but only against our own intellectual capabilities and our willingness to drop our quality standards of digitally shared thoughts and conversations. In that light, we are dealing with a highly limited resource - clear, precise and original thinking - which is worth all the effort in the world when it comes to the question of whether or not to invest some more time in an original thought of yours.

Therefore, this blog-post is - in remembrance of the cluetrain manifesto - meant as a digital manifesto in favor of applying and upholding our quality standards of digital communication, of actively and consciously choosing an informational K- over the always impending r-strategy. Don’t succumb to the menace of social spambots, don’t become a bot. Stay human, even in the face of an inhuman marketing. Thank you @dweinberger, @RealJaronLanier! If you need some time to think ‘outside the box’, go detox, put yourself on an informational diet. Don't just 'consume & reproduce' information, think!

[marketingsceptics]

Factors of Marketing Scepticism

Marketing has never had a particularly good reputation. A vivid description of the situation has been given by Rory Sutherland on Edge:

“Everybody assumes outside the advertising industry—outside business, outside marketing—that marketing is full of incredibly cunning, evil people. That you'll walk through an advertising agency and stumble through a door and find people experimenting with electrodes attached to the brains of rats.” (Source: Edge).

This is of course a much distorted view on marketing, but the aspect of reality that is most eye-opening is not the fact that this level of cunningness does not exist in marketing. Because marketing is simply lacking the required level of intelligence to understand the mechanics behind its crude attempts of consumer persuasion. Surprising is rather the actual role marketing is playing in an informationally ‘messy’ market context. Because - and this is probably still contradicting with the worldviews of some of the older generation CFOs of multinational corporations - the homo economicus assumption of perfect markets based on fully transparent informations available to all its participants is just not true. Or to quote our friend Rory again:

“after all, in such a world of perfect information and perfect trust, marketing and advertising wouldn't need to exist.” (Source: Edge).

Now, if we accept that kind of messiness of markets, why is it that classic approaches of marketing - the ones that simply told us what to do, think, or buy - are becoming more and more ineffective, especially for younger generations? Has the world become any less messy overnight, has the internet brought us full transparency on all decision-relevant information in markets?

Well, in some areas we may certainly have gained some inches of transparency, especially when it comes to price transparency in online buying. But then, of course, this transparency is quickly gone when we have a closer look, especially when it comes to the daily increasing number of brands and the more and more complex products and services. You may only look on how price comparison engines are leading an ongoing struggle against brands that are trying to fix prices across all sales channels or services that are trying to outsmart the demand for discounts by splitting or adding extra costs wherever they can.

In the light of this new type of complexity it seems unlikely that the marketing skepsis especially of younger generations is due to increased levels of informational transparency. It is much more likely to consider one of the following factors to drive this skepsis:

A generation with less attention / attention being more divided

Younger, digitally more savvy generations have been growing up with a much denser stream of information confronting their daily amount of attention. Now - however good someone might ultimately be at multitasking - it is finally a myth to believe that our attention is infinitely big. We all have our limits of attention and there is just so much information anyone can receive and process. If in conflict, any more new incoming information will be either completely ignored or only superficially processed. In any case, this makes the jobs of marketers much more difficult because their message will be less likely to ‘cut through the clutter’ of already existing information.

A more sceptical, questioning generation

Maybe because they have been growing up in world where more information is available and even traditionally secret or private information is eventually leaked and becoming accessible, the authority of formerly high-status organisations and individuals is being much eroded within this generation. In consequence, this generation is much more skeptical about hierarchy as they see “more major media figures are scamming, cheating, lying, and exploiting than ever before”. As a result, anyone that is trying to 'tell' something to this generation will have a hard time if the message does not stand the trial of their digitally enabled social questioning.

A generation with new values and changed status symbols

No other generation before had access to such an overabundance of seemingly free technology which translates into an attitude of ‘entitlement’ common to this generation. The result is an expectation of constant gratification and a dismissal of any traditional values that require any long-term industrious behaviour and delay of gratification. With so many new digital and social tools on hand, anyone can become a blogger, online-journalist, web-star or digital advisor of some kind. Consequently, the new status symbols are also digital: mobile phones are not only the connection to their peers but evermore fulfill the role of both mental and physical prostheses - with respective consequences for this generation’s skills and identity.

These factors do of course not include any valuation of the underlying trends and drivers of generational change. They do however contain a warning to everyone who is trying to market products or brands in an old-fashioned ‘top-down’, telling kind of way and is unaware of today’s information-laden and socially dense context: your message if most likely to remain unheard, if heard it is likely to be ignored, if not ignored it is likely to be deemed irrelevant, if not deemed irrelevant it is likely to be derided, and even if all of that does not apply - you still need to get your message to be talked about among the peers of the recipient to find acceptance for it.

Good luck!