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.

The original post can be found here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

The advantage of telling a story over stating a position outright is that a story invites sympathy, whereas making a point outright invites debate. Ideally, people end up thinking about the idea behind the story and how to apply it, rather than judging the point you just made and trying to find the flaws.

I liked this as an idea, and it made sense, but I wasn't completely convinced it would work. I couldn't think of an example that had fallen in my own range of experience that worked quite this way.

I recently picked up The Tipping Point again, and realized that the author is a master of this use of stories. In fact, I think that it's safe to say that without the stories he includes — if he had just drily discussed the merits of his idea with facts and figures — it would never have been such an influential book. The approach draws the reader in and helps to dissipate hostility to his take on the world.

I'd missed this the first time I had read the book; I was too involved in the message to give much thought to how it was being delivered. I'm doubly impressed on re-reading the book.

In it, he asked readers to come up with a one-word description of different people that they knew, e.g. jerk, kind, stylish, sloppy, etc. Then he asked them to do the same for themselves. Coming up with a one-word description of yourself, of course, is tough.

Why I find this so interesting is what it's saying about how the human brain works. We're fundamentally social creatures, and have to sort out a lot of complex social interactions. We're also pretty well optimized. So while we understand and acknowledge our own complexity, we tend to break other people down into labels that indicate their emotional relationship to us.

It's easier to tag people with a label (e.g. jerk or kind) which acts as a sort of short hand about how we should interact with them. Most of us would want to avoid the jerk and hang out with the kind person. From a social point of view, this has obvious problems; it means we miss complexities in other people's behavior. What it does do, though, is make it easier to map our social relationship with other people quickly.

So what does this have to do with marketing? People tend to think about companies in the same, flat way. They're unlikely to worry about the complexities of everything the company does and instead break it down into a simple tag. For instance, depending on the person, some possible tags: Apple=cool; Microsoft=monopoly; Google=smart; Chevron=oil spill; etc.

So what word do you want associated with your company? is it the one most people think of?

In this post, a group is a collection of people with common interests who are not connected to each other. A community is a more organized and aware group of people. They feel a connection that differentiates them in a significant way from the rest of the population.

(To take a frivolous example, I've recently been reading Shakespeare plays. I don't know anyone else who reads Shakespeare plays recreationally, but I'm willing to bet there are others out there. So I am part of a group that reads Shakespeare plays recreationally. In order for a community to form I'd have to find other people with this same interest and behavior pattern, and feel that we had a connection.)

It seems to me that the easiest way to set up a community as a marketer is to find a sentiment that is already in the population that can be tapped into. People think in terms of groups and other people that they can relate to. So a product that seems to relate naturally to the group can serve as a focal point for a community.

(To carry on the example above, a book publisher could produce special Shakespeare plays for the recreational reader, as well as provide ways to connect readers. A motivated publisher could host speakers to talk about Shakespeare and set up events where people could form connections with each other. The goal, of course, would be to grow the readership, generate loyalty and sell more books.)

Trying to force a community to form around a product is often going to be a losing proposition. But tapping into a group of people with common interests and pitching the product so it meshes well with that group has great potential.

So I was interested to see Seth Godin's post about how hard it is to get word of mouth marketing going.

This made me think about why the people I know talk about products (the story from the previous post is certainly not an isolated example).

My friends talk about the products they like and enjoy recommending exceptional products to each other. It's a way of pooling knowledge and, honestly, people bond around this.

To take a trivial example, if your friend can tell you where the good hand lotion is, you don't have to try six different brands and waste time and money. This generates a certain amount of gratitude, and, if the hand lotion is good, then it's more likely you'll trust your friend's recommendation in future.

It does take an exceptional product, though, to generate this sort of discussion. To take an example at random, tooth floss is almost never a source of conversation. The product itself has to be worth talking about.

And this may be Godin's point. Give people a reason to talk about your product, whether it's because it's an exceptional product, it's promoted by brilliant marketing, or has some other remarkable quality, and your marketing will be that much easier.