I've been thinking about how the human mind works - and what that means for marketing - on and off for awhile now. To be honest, I'm still thinking, but I've come up with some initial ideas. If you have any thoughts, leave a comment; I'd love to hear from other people on this.

Roughly speaking, it appears to me that there are three levels to the human mind.

1) There's the rational mind that we use to actively think through problems (e.g. logic problems). This is the upper mind.

2) Beneath the upper mind is the deeper mind. These thoughts aren't something we think out rationally, rather they're the deep human impulses that control a lot of our actions. For instance, our desire to connect with other people falls into this category; we don't need to think it out, we just feel it.

3) The final mind, and I suspect most people wouldn't think of this as a mind, is the body. The brain and the body are in constant communication, and the body produces many chemicals that alter how we think. One common example is that the feeling of being in love is induced by a chemical in the blood stream (people like this one because chocolate reportedly has the same chemical). Testosterone is another good example; hormones have a huge impact on how people behave.

(I've intentionally stayed away from the terms conscious and subconscious above as I suspect these refer to different understandings of the mind.)

These levels are all so closely connected that they are not really separate; they blend into each other and require each other to function.

The sensation of being thirsty is something the body mind controls, but if you've ever been really thirsty then you know that every part of your being, all levels of your mind, focuses on getting water.

The desire to connect with other people, e.g. to fall in love, is controlled by the deep mind. The upper mind will think up rational reasons why love is a good idea (sometimes even inventing virtues in the other person that don't exist), and the body mind gets in on the act by responding to pheromones and circulating chemicals to induce euphoric feelings. (Apologies, by the way, if I've just destroyed your romantic illusions.)

So what, you may reasonably be asking at this point, does all this have to do with marketing?

The connection is that it's worth being aware of the level of mind you're trying to appeal to.

To carry on the example from above of the very thirsty individual: There's not much point in appealing to a sense of community in order to market water if the person you're selling to is desperately thirsty; they simply do not care and it's a waste of time and effort.

On the flip side, if you're trying to promote a community, then appealing to deeper motivations is likely to be more effective then offering them a free bottle of water.

Tailoring the message to the underlying motivations is more effective and more targeted.

P.S. Thanks to A. for talking out all of this with me.

People for whom the power of the internet didn't click in time: Once word gets out about what customers have to go through to quit, who would ever sign up?

The original post can be found here.

One of the things marketers really excel at is testing - we A/B test and multivariate test and the most sophisticated of us test with the Taguchi method.

Then we measure, and we look at our results, and say "Ah-ha! This won. It must be the best choice."

And this is all well and good, but there's something missing.

Many marketers don't ask why the other splits didn't work.

You may argue that there's no point; it didn't work and therefore it's irrelevant. That information cannot be usefully applied except as something to be avoided in the future. This attitude misses the whole point of testing.

Testing should tell us more about the audience we're trying to reach, not just about what gives us the best numbers. If we look at what didn't work as well as what did, we can make much better judgments about what will work in the future. It's the difference between adding up numbers and understanding what they mean.

Last week, I finished reading The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton. The premise is that companies that actively foster a positive environment (and diligently get rid of jerks) are more successful and their employees are happier. A win-win situation.

I enjoyed reading this book; it's full of examples of appalling behavior that make for entertaining, if disturbing, reading, as well as being persuasive for a more civilized workplace.

Sutton defines assholes as anyone who makes other people feel humiliated or belittled and who aim their venom at others who are less powerful.

The author does a good job of reviewing why people are assholes and the reasons that they thrive. In case you find yourself in a situation like this, toward the end of the book, there is a chapter on how to survive an unpleasant work environment that has some practical tips.

Sutton also included a final chapter on assholes that are successful, which makes for a more nuanced look at jerks than appears elsewhere in the book.

I suspect this is one of those books that hits a nerve with people who already think a civilized workplace is important, but would be largely ignored by people who see co-workers as competition and not really as people.

The biggest use for this book for most people would be to bolster arguments for why a really unpleasant, though highly qualified, person shouldn't be hired.

The New York Times has published a piece about how it's very difficult for users to remove themselves from Facebook: How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free

Combined with the privacy issues that surfaced earlier with the Beacon system, it suggests the dark, or at least very careless, side of community building at Facebook.

One of the dangers of marketing is that it's easy to forget that the numbers we use and the individuals we market to are not separate entities. Once we start treating our customers as data pools, we risk losing their trust and our credibility.

I just finished re-reading The Tipping Point.

What I found most fascinating this time around was the author's point about how easily ideas are transmitted. In the book, this sounds like a fundamental human trait, to the point that we're not fully aware of how deeply the people around us influence our outlook on life.

It seems to me that if this is correct it leads to a major distinction in how we think about society and culture.

Society is what we create with geographic boundaries and laws; it's defined by who belongs to the group and where they're located. Culture is what happens spontaneously, generated by the ideas swirling around among individuals and is transient.

While culture can be bounded by the things that make up a society, and the two feed into each other, they are not not identical. Culture changes constantly as ideas change; societal changes are rarer.

It's much easier for marketing campaigns to alter culture than society; in other words, transient changes can take place. A really good viral or word of mouth campaign gets thrown from person to person and makes temporary changes in the culture (or, far more likely, in a subculture). Without constant reinforcement, though, the changes dissipate over time and are forgotten.

(The ironic bit, incidentally, is that the culture is changing so that The Tipping Point is just beginning to fall out of fashion.)

The author of The Tipping Point is an incredibly persuasive writer, which I think is part of why the book was so successful. He brings up very interesting ideas, especially about how people are influenced to act (which is rather the whole point). They do suggest a need for humility, though, about what exactly can be accomplished.

I'm suffering from one of the nasty little cold bugs that are going round right now. Not only is it giving me a cough, it's also doing a pretty good job of destroying my concentration. So I'm not that eloquent right now, but here are a couple links all about writing:

Why Good Ad Copy Works

How to Improve Bullet Point Copywriting - 2 Critical Rules

On Monday, I posted about how what appears to be irrational behavior may actually make complete sense from a different perspective. Or, more specifically, people don't think just in terms of self-interest, but also in terms of the group they identify with.

This got edited out of the final version of Monday's post, but Godin also has an argument about apparently irrational behavior. It can be summarized as 'if you want to understand someone, walk a mile in their shoes.'

In it he's arguing against the assumption that someone else is displaying bad judgment just because you don't like how they're behaving. Or to put it another way, just because someone's reaction seems to be irrational doesn't mean that it is; you may just not have all the facts.

I don't have a direct tie in to why this is important for marketers other than the one Godin cites; the more marketers think about what motivates people, the more likely they'll know how to reach customers.

With luck, this type of thinking may also make us slightly nicer, more understanding people, which is never a bad thing.

Marketing Profs put together an article about customer surveys and how they can be totally misleading. The crux of the argument is that surveys are fairly useless because people do not behave in predictable ways.

The article is worth a read, but they overstated their case a bit when they wrote:

"Customers are sensitive, emotional, and, let's face it, irrational beings. ... Shockingly, 95% of our brain activity centers on the irrational or subconscious, leaving a meager 5% busy trying to explain why we act or feel certain ways. And we do this not by tapping into our subconscious, but by making inferences based on our behavior. In essence, we make things up.

"So if we can't even tell ourselves the truth, why should we expect customers to provide truthful feedback on satisfaction?"

I don't actually buy into the idea that people are that irrational. People not behaving as we wish or expect them to does not make them irrational and unpredictable. What it really means is that we're not properly accounting for what motivates them (even if it is on a subconscious level).

In Made to Stick, the authors cite research that people behave as they expect other people in their self-identified group to behave. In the book they use the example that people will vote for candidates that do not necessarily support the voter's own self-interest.

I find this idea of social thinking persuasive. Based on what I've observed, this is the best model I've seen as it explains apparently irrational behavior.

While there tends to be a lot of emphasis on the individual (which is a good first approximation), looking only at the individual won't fully explain how people behave. By nature, humans are social creatures and we're stronger in groups than as lone individuals. It's hardly surprising, then, that social thinking influences human behavior.

This is one of the reasons that developing communities is potentially powerful. I am talking here about communities that foster a sense of interconnectedness between people, and communities in which the self-identity of the group is somehow wound up with the product. (I am not talking about a simple, flat community, e.g. an online forum.)

It also means that the community cannot be bogus and the product can't be shoddy. This has to be something people feel makes their lives richer and can serve as a positive connection between people.

Not an easy task, but potentially very powerful and positive. Certainly not achievable if, when people don't behave as expected, they are simply dismissed as irrational.

Influential Marketing Blog put up a post this past week with a partial theory about how information is being spread through MicroSharing.

What the argument boils down to is that there is a lot of content out there, and people need a way to deal with that content and find relevant information. So niche groups share content they're interested in among themselves (MicroSharing), with the effect that they promote some content while ignoring others. This has obvious implications for marketers who want to spread information.

It's a very interesting article (as they tend to be from Influential Marketing Blog) and worth reading. I wish it had had a few more details to flesh out the theory, though.