naptime!, originally uploaded by strph.
This year, it's been my privilege to teach a class of student art directors at Miami Ad School. In our Intro to Strategy class, I've been trying to arm them for the coming horde of boot camp planners they'll have to work with. (I'm not saying that all student account planners are diagram-drawing, Piaget-quoting, Proust-reading nut jobs, but you can never be too safe.)
One of the things I've warned the students about is the dangers of over-abstraction. In trying to understand things, our Western brains try to find progressively more Platonic forms for everyday objects and events. Tobacco can become a "ritualistic post-satiation celebration after a meal or sex." I'd prefer to believe, as Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Let's not read too much into everything.
There have been two biology stories in the news recently that have me thinking that understanding (or cognition) isn't always that useful when understanding a marketing problem.
Firstly, there was the Freakonomics write-up about Emily Oster, an economist at the University of Chicago who studies health issues. In an article in Esquire, she refutes the supposition that promiscuity is solely to blame for the higher rate of AIDS in Africa. Generally, Western nations judgmentally look at Africa's AIDS problem as one of uneducated and promiscuous people. The answer, accordingly, seems to be sex education concentrating on condom use and abstinence.
Instead of buying the party line, Oster proposes that we are a lot less morally superior to Africans than we would like to think. The real culprit for the AIDS rate in Africa isn't ignorance or immorality. It's simple things like lack of access to care for common sexually transmitted diseases; this lack leads to more open sores which allows HIV to spread faster. Also, many Africans don't have incomes and life expectancies worth living longer for. In the places in Africa where people have better sexual health care and better incomes, AIDS is less prevalent.
She also looks at the "missing girls" mystery in Asia. It's conventional wisdom that Chinese families, pressured by a one-child system of population control, are systematically and selectively abandoning, aborting, or murdering baby girls. It's a horrible accusation, but one casually tossed around in Western culture. In a moment of insight, Oster sees a report on how Hepatitis B can cause a skewing of sex preference towards males in the womb. After a little research, she can account for a good number of (but admittedly not all) the missing girls by calculating the effect of rampant Hepatitis B in pregnant Asian women.
In both these cases, it's Western logic that pushes us to understand and force moral and narrative frameworks on these phenomena. Morality is a big, easy framework to use when looking at matters of life and death. But what if it's just a case of access? In this case, it's not upstanding moral behaviour that will save Africans from AIDS, but better access to health and prosperity. It's not teaching Chinese that murdering their own children is wrong, but vaccinating young women against Hepatitis B.
To put this into an infinitely less important marketing context, what if you assume that they're not buying your product because they don't like your brand, when really the problem is that there's no stores selling it? When we focus on cognition as the only way to understand the relationship between people and the choice we want them to make, we risk ignoring the physicality of a problem, or other underlying issues.
Here's another recent example that surprised and horrified me a bit. It turns out that a parasite in cat's feces - Toxoplasma gondii - might actually have mind-altering properties. (The parasite has already been implicated in harming fetuses of women who clean cat litter boxes while pregnant.) Apparently this single-celled organism, once installed in rodents, causes them to lose their fear of the smell of cat urine, which normally terrifies them. So if a rat's been hanging around the same area as a cat long enough, it might get infected by this parasite and will wander into open cat territory unafraid only to get killed by the cat.
Half of humans have been estimated to have the infection, and the infection might have the same effect on us, though the recent news was that it's been implicated in the onset of schizophrenia. This psychotropic effect on people makes me think: do we love cats because of all the conscious reasons we've layered on our idea of them - cute, loving, etc. - or is it because the symbiotic duo of cat and T. gondii has manipulated our race for millennia? Does this explain Egyptian feline worship?
For us planners, the lesson may be this: sometimes there is no suitably logical explanation for behaviour. Sometimes it's best to observe what's happening and then engineer ways to change it in our favour. Our only weapon might be simple incentives like price and distribution. It might feel blunt to use a network of incentives to change behaviour, but it's what big shot economists like Milton Friedman (who sadly passed away recently) have done.
One last note: when Paco Underhill's book "Why We Buy" first came out, I found it hard to digest. There just wasn't enough meaning in it; it just seemed like one observation after another. But I appreciate it a lot more now that I'm working on store signage and traffic flows. It's a good book to skim through to get a feel for a more behavioural approach.
