OK. This is
a real biggie. It’s about an error – a misperception – that pervades everything
marketers do: their beliefs about how marketing works (and therefore what they
are trying to do when they do marketing), how
they seek to do it, and how they measure success.
What’s
more, like the evidence of the sun orbiting the earth – evidence that’s
apparently confirmed by our actual experience every day of our lives – these
mistaken beliefs seem to be supported by mountains of ‘hard evidence’.
So what is
this error? It’s the belief that marketing is a ‘stimulus-response’ activity –
an activity where marketers send out various types of stimuli to consumers,
whose attitudes and behaviours are then changed, to elicit certain desired
responses.
I don’t
believe this is how marketing works at all, and I believe there’s a growing body
of scientific evidence to back me. If I’m right, it means:
- Marketers are investing/wasting
huge amounts of money, time and energy looking for a holy grail that
doesn’t exist
- When their marketing does work
and when it doesn’t, they are ascribing the wrong reasons for success and
failure, thereby guaranteeing that they can never really learn from their
experience
- Their metrics aren’t measuring
what they believe they are measuring, thereby compounding these first two
problems.
Unfortunately,
stimulus-response assumptions are really deeply ingrained into the modern marketing
mindset, so to tackle them it requires quite a lot of unpicking - part of my current research project … so apologies
for the length of what follows!
How we were led astray
Stimulus-response
has its origins in 19th and 20th century psychology
starting with Konrad Lorenz who noticed that greylag geese fixated on the first
thing they saw moving.
Usually, in nature, it’s the mother. But in Lorenz’s case it was his Wellington boots.
Ivan Pavlov
built on this observation in his experiments with dogs. He showed he could get
them to salivate at a signal which they had come to associate with food – a
‘conditioned’ or learned response.
John B
Watson then took these learnings to develop the school of behaviourist
psychology whose founding belief was that:
"...the goal of psychological
study is the ascertaining of such data
and laws that, given the stimulus, psychology can predict what the responses
will be; or, on the other hand, given the response, it can specify the nature
of the effective stimulus."
“Psychology,” he wrote, “is a purely objective experimental
branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control
of behaviour …The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal
response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of
man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's
total scheme of investigation."
The great
behaviourist psychologist B. F Skinner followed Watson with a research effort
dedicated to the study of learning as ‘conditioning’ (association of stimulus
with response) for the purposes of control.
Skinner
argued that the human mind was a ‘black box’. We don’t need to look inside this
black box to understand what’s going on. Indeed we shouldn’t, because inside
there are just subjective thoughts and feelings. To be ‘scientific’ we need to study
only objective facts – the inputs that go
into the black box (stimuli) and the outputs
that come out (responses).
Skinner
believed we could understand all animal behaviour, including human behaviour,
in terms of correlations between stimuli and responses; and we could use this
understanding (by using rewarding stimuli to reinforce some behaviours and
punishing stimuli to stop others) to ‘condition’ animals and people to behave
as we want them to behave. Thus, for example, behaviourist child care manuals
taught mothers not to attend to babies
that cried, because this ‘rewarded’ crying behaviour. Babies rewarded in this way
would ‘learn’ to cry more. Instead, mothers had to ‘teach’ their babies to be
‘good’ by ignoring (i.e. punishing) crying behaviour, and by ‘rewarding’ non-crying
behaviour.
What we
need, Skinner wrote in his behaviourist manifesto Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) is “a behavioural technology
comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technologies.”
The task of
psychology, he continued, was to:
“dispossess man of his autonomy” by transferring causation
to the environment. “Effects once assigned to states of mind, feelings and
traits are beginning to be traced to accessible conditions, and a technology of
behaviour may become available. A scientific analysis,” he concluded, “shifts
both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment.”
This was
the intellectual milieu in which
modern theories of marketing were developed: with branding as a method of imprinting the consumer’s mind so that
he or she follows the brand as Lorenz’s goslings followed his Wellingtons; with
‘the marketing mix’ as the toolbox for effective conditioning, deploying rewards and disincentives to create ‘brand
associations’ and learned behaviours so that consumers mentally salivated at
the thought of their brand as Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell.
Thus,
writing soon after the second world war in his book The Process of Persuasion
Clyde Miller, a professor of education at Columbia University,
wrote:
“It takes time, yes, but think what it can mean to your firm
in profits if you can condition ten million children to grow up as adults
trained to buy your products as soldiers are trained to advance when they hear
the trigger words ‘forward march’.”
OK. We’re
not so naïve now – or are we? If you pick up marketing textbooks such as
Philip Kotler’s Principles of Marketing
– upon which recent generations of marketers have been weaned – you will find
the same behaviourist psychology swallowed hook, line and sinker.
On page 143
of my edition of Kotler for example, he has an illustration showing “marketing
and other stimuli” entering the consumer’s head (labelled “the buyer’s black
box”) and coming out the other side as the “buyer’s response”. The accompanying
text explains:
“The central question
for marketers is: how do consumers respond to various marketing efforts the
company might use? The starting point is the stimulus-response model shown in
Figure 5.1. This figure shows that marketing and other stimuli enter the
consumer’s ‘black box’ and produce certain responses. Marketers must figure out
what is in the buyer’s black box.”
Of course, since
Skinner, there have been countless sophistications and embellishments around
this basic theme. After a while, for example, cognitive psychologists began to
study the thought or perceptual processes that intervene between the stimulus
and the response. More recently, neuroscientists have used new techniques such
as fMRI scanning to study how the brain processes incoming stimuli.
Along the
way marketing has also adopted a number of its own sophistications and
embellishments leading to a number of warring schools of thought. Their main
‘fall-out’ factor: which stimuli works best to get the desired response.
In the
olden days, marketers influenced by economists’ pink-elephant theories of human
rationality prioritised the ‘rational’ appeals of unique selling points. They
were challenged by the school of emotional appeals: the belief that consumers
are better influenced by brands’ ‘emotional associations’.
There are also
divisions over whether conscious or unconscious stimuli work better – is
‘effective’ advertising all about conscious attention and memory? Or is it best
delivered under the radar of consciousness by carefully placed ‘somatic
markers’?
More
recently, a new fault-line has opened up with a division between those who
think that personally targeted and ‘relevant’ one-to-one stimuli work best,
versus the ‘social’, ‘viral’ or ‘herd’ stimuli of the crowd.
What they
all agree on, however, is the underlying assumption of stimulus-response.
In fact, I
challenge you take any modern theory of marketing you like, peel away the
outward layers of apparent sophistication and look at its inner workings and
assumptions. Please, please tell me
if you can find a theory of marketing or advertising that doesn’t take behaviourist stimulus-response assumptions as its
starting point: ‘we issue this stimulus (a brand message, an emotional
association, a unique selling point, a promotional incentive) in order to get
that response’.
Nonsense on stilts
Trouble is,
it’s all nonsense. The phenomena we are looking at are real enough. Of course,
human beings are bombarded with stimuli: thousands – millions – of them every
day. And of course, there are occasions where we demonstrably respond to external
stimuli, as when we sit on a drawing pin for example. What’s wrong with
behaviourist theories of marketing is the way they extend something that's
true for one or two percent of behavioural phenomena to become a catch-all
explanation of everything. At the heart of this is their cause-effect
assumptions – that it is outside stimuli created by marketers that ‘cause’
internal emotions and thoughts which in turn ‘cause’ responses.
In fact,
recent discoveries in psychology seem to indicate the exact opposite. Yes,
human beings are constantly scanning their environment for opportunities and
threats, but they process this in-coming information largely according to their
own internally-generated agendas.
So,
incoming stimuli do not necessarily ‘cause’ us to think this or feel that. A
huge part of the brain’s processing function (probably by a factor of over a
thousand to one) is devoted to filtering out incoming stimuli and ‘deciding’ which
ones to ignore (the vast majority of them).
Most of
this is done unconsciously. You can get some idea of the scale of this
stimulus-filtering process by stopping
right now …and becoming aware of your surroundings.
Think of
the sounds you can hear, the sensations of your skin against your seat, your
clothes, your shoes; all the things you can see in your peripheral vision, the
feeling inside your mouth, what you can taste, the droopiness of your eyes, the
hair at the back of your neck, and so on. These are all stimuli which our brain
is monitoring for us, and deciding not
to respond to.
So, in
reality, the only stimuli which we respond to are the ones which we decide matter (most of these decisions taking
place unconsciously). We pay attention to – or ignore – incoming stimuli
depending on what we already think
and feel and what we are currently trying to achieve.
It is not external
stimuli, then, that ‘cause’ us to behave this way or that, but
internally-generated goals and motivations. We ‘choose’ which stimuli to
respond to, and we also ‘choose’ how
to respond. It’s not the cold outside that ‘causes’ me to put on a jersey for
example, it’s my desire to stay warm. You may decide that you want me to put on
a jersey, and to achieve that, you may decide to reduce the temperature of my
surroundings. It might work. But you might be disappointed. I might decide to
get warm by building a fire, doing some physical jerks, moving to a different
environment, or hugging you. Or a combination of all five. And if your
‘stimulus’ worked at all, it only worked because it connected with my
pre-existing desire for warmth and comfort.
The real
‘cause’ of human behaviour, then, is these internally-generated choices which
have very little to do with the stimuli that constantly bombard us. And most of
these internally-generated goals are ‘hard-wired’ into us by millions of years
of evolution: instincts of survival and safety for example. (Hard-wiring is a
terrible term, because actually, the brain is not hard-wired at all. It’s much
cleverer than that. But let’s stick with that terminology for the moment).
In fact,
ironically, the very experiments the behaviourists used to prove the power of
conditioning actually demonstrated precisely the opposite: the pervasive nature
of this ‘hard-wiring’.
‘Imprinting’ doesn’t work on geese younger
than 13 hours and older than 16 hours for example: geese are ‘programmed’ to
imprint during that window and not to
imprint at other times. No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to condition
an adult goose to fall in love with your Wellies. It’s already made up its
mind.
Likewise, dogs
can never be conditioned to salivate
at flowers, because they want food and they’re not interested in flowers,
except for territory marking purposes. This ‘wanting’ isn’t caused by an
external stimulus, it’s internally-generated. Ditto: dogs cannot be conditioned
to not salivate at the sight of food
no matter how much you punish them, because the salivating process is hardwired
and has nothing to do with conditioning.
In fact, so
scant was the laboratory evidence of the power of conditioning that Skinner’s
own students at Harvard
University formulated the
‘Harvard Law of Animal Behaviour’. It goes like this:
“Under controlled experimental conditions of temperature,
time, lighting, feeding and training, the organism will behave as it damn well
pleases.”
(Quoted on page 177 of Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate.)
Facts and evidence
Every sinew
and instinct of every marketer is drawn naturally towards stimulus-response
theories of marketing. It’s what marketers appear to do every day. “Look. We
issued that stimulus, and look there! You can actually see the responses!” (If
you’re lucky you can count them too).
These
experiences are real. Just as the experience of the sun rising in the east and
setting in the west is real. We can see
the sun move.Yet, it is we who are moving, not the sun.
Something
similar is happening in marketing. Marketing ‘works’ when it aligns to what
people want. That’s about all we need to know. When it aligns, people pick it
up and use it. In such cases, they appear to be ‘responding’ to our
‘stimuli’. When it doesn’t align, they
ignore it. When this happens, we assume that there must have been something
wrong with the stimulus. There wasn’t. There
was something wrong with the alignment.
This
distinction is important because the belief that marketers’ ‘stimuli’ can
‘change’ consumer attitudes and behaviours sets them on to a wild goose chase – the search for ever more powerful stimuli rather than ever better alignment.
When pushes
comes to shove, the belief that the right ‘marketing mix’ can change consumer
attitudes and behaviours in ways that marketers want them to change is a dangerous conceit. It has as much intellectual
foundation as the alchemists’ conceit that they could turn lead into gold. Both
conceits spawned enormously wasteful wild goose chases.
Yes, OK. This
bald, bold statement does need a little bit of tempering. There are some
short-term, superficial layers of effective influence – where marketers take
advantage of consumers’ ‘predictable irrationalities’ for example. It's very important we measure these effects. But their
ultimate effect is only to obscure the underlying reality, just
as friction helps obscure the underlying reality of matter always being in
motion.
What does this mean for us?
Behaviourist
inspired stimulus-response theories have five devastating effects
on marketing.
1. They
place marketing on about the same scientific level as alchemy. The alchemists
built up an impressive body of ‘knowledge’ in the form of known facts,
experimental results and correlations. But they could never understand why these results occurred, so they
ended up repeating the same errors again and again.
Stimulus-response
has the same effect on marketing. It means we can never learn from our
mistakes, because we cannot distinguish between what’s mistaken and what’s not
mistaken. (Ever heard the maxim ‘50% of my advertising works but I don’t know
which’?).
2. As with
the alchemists and their quest for the magic ingredient of transmutation – the
philosopher’s stone – stimulus-response places marketers on the
wild-goose-chase quest for the perfect, all-powerful stimulus. It doesn’t exist.
We will never find it.
3. In the
meantime, the same stimulus-response theories tell marketers not to look where they should be
looking: how to generate and deliver greater alignment, not only with their products but with their marketing, with customers?
4.
Stimulus-response assumptions have made a complete dog’s dinner of marketing
metrics (saliva included). Stimulus-response theories induce us to:
a) focus our attention on measuring the
wrong things
b) misinterpret the measures we do use
(because, very often, these measures aren’t measuring what we think they are measuring)
My next article for Marketing magazine (published October 14)
goes into detail on this.
5. The
practice of stimulus-response marketing tactics generate adversarial
relationships and destroy trust because it treats human beings as a ‘target’
for stimuli – like a punch bag. The stimulus-response marketer inevitably ends
up on a quest for control: the philosophy and practice of ‘using’ other people,
including their weaknesses, for his own ends. Guess what? People don’t like
being used – something Skinners’ poor old tortured rats could never tell him.
Put these
things together: a theory which misdirects attention and creates confusion rather than clarity, metrics
that compound and reinforce this confusion, and practices which undermine trust
and you have a recipe for … well, you tell me.
As I said,
this is a biggie. We have to get over it. If we don’t, we will never be able to
reinvent marketing.
Alan
Mitchell www.ctrl-shift.co.uk
