How we learn socially is key to marketing

Within an hour of being born, humans are busy copying and learning from the actions of those around them. Mark Earls looks at what this means for the ways that ideas and technologies are spread in society

Much Of the 1989 Rob Reiner romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally is eminently forgettable toothsome fare. But one scene has since become a classic of late 20th century Hollywood: Sally (Meg Ryan) treats Harry (Billy Crystal) – and the other customers of what is in reality Katz's Delicatessen in New York – to an exuberant, whooping demonstration of a fake female orgasm. When at last, Sally/Meg's cries and tics and whimpers die away, an unnamed woman at the next table (in fact played by the director's mother, Estelle Reiner) leans over to the waiter and intones the simple phrase: ‘I'll have what she's having.'

'I'll have what she's having': this simple colloquialism captures one of the most important clusters of insights into human behaviour to emerge from the human sciences in recent years. Like Estelle (the woman at the next table), we all spend most of our lives in a world of other people (Freud famously quipped that we can never escape the Other) and much of what we do is in imitation of other people, or at least following the example of others (and not as the result of independent decisions, whatever we tell ourselves, our spouses, our therapists and any passing market researcher).

As a result, ‘I'll have what she's having’ turns out to be the key mechanism behind the spread of all kinds of things through human populations: feelings, ideas and behaviour. So, if you're interested in shaping behaviour or spreading the adoption of your brand, understanding the science behind what happened in that (fictional) NY deli might just turn out to be useful.

THE APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE

In the past few years there's been an explosion of interest in the science of human behaviour – from the bestselling books of the likes of Mr Irrational, (Dan Ariely) and Mr Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell) to the excellent campaign by current IPA president Rory Sutherland to champion behavioural economics and all things ‘nudgey', and the COI's Common Good project to understand the mechanics of behaviour change.

While this has proved extremely valuable to marketers of all sorts (if only as a pick-'n'-mix of strategic insight), all behavioural economics and the like really do to our understanding of humans is to focus attention on how poor we are in perceiving the outside world, and how dubious our powers of thinking are.

It merely repackages the precise, individual calculating machines of classical economics as rather poor and unreliable ones. But individuals nonetheless.

And in doing so, it misses the much bigger insights into human nature that the science highlights: we are a fundamentally social creature, one evolved largely for a world of others like ourselves (and not for isolated, independent lives).

We live almost all of our lives in the company of others (in the modern idiom, that we are always embedded in social networks of our peers). Most of what we do is in the company and under the shadow of other people – under the influence of others, if you like.

WHAT SHE'S HAVING, DOING, FEELING ETC

Given this, perhaps it's not surprising to discover that learning from others ('social learning') is so prevalent and important to the highly social creature we are: ‘what she's having’ is central to what it is to be human.

From shortly after birth – 42 minutes is the earliest observed – humans copy what those around them are doing. Babies are copying machines: they mimic the behaviour of their parents, their peers and then anyone else who comes in range.

And we go on doing it, thanks partly, at least, to the so-called ‘mirror neurons', which we possess in greater number and in greater variety than in our close relatives. We copy the feelings of those around us, their gestures, their behaviours, the way they talk, their techniques and the tools they use. We do it more accurately and persistently than other primates, even when there is no obvious purpose to it. Chimps give up very quickly when there is no reward for copying.

'What she's having’ then doesn't just help describe and understand behaviour at an individual and group level but it also turns out to be the mechanism through which ideas, behaviours and technologies spread through populations.

If I can readily learn what you've learnt from some third party that I've never met, not only do I have greater knowledge at my fingertips but new ideas and knowledge can spread more rapidly so that all of us are better off.

Indeed, many scientists now believe that this kind of social learning is precisely what has allowed our curious ape species to be so successful in evolutionary terms, some going so far as suggesting that we rename our species ‘homo mimicus', or ‘copying man'.

Of course, our culture is generally disdainful of copying – we punish it as cheating when we discover it – but learning from those around us is a peculiarly human ability. ‘Monkey see, monkey do’ gets it completely wrong; ‘I'll have what she's having’ is much nearer the truth.

CATS AND SWIMMING

But to be clear, I'm not suggesting that there's no such thing as an independent decision, just that it's much rarer than we (or the consumers in our market research) imagine. As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman has suggested, independent thought is as rare in humans as swimming is in cats; it's not that we can't do it, it's just that we'll do almost anything to avoid having to.

Our own research and analysis supports this. While there are some interesting exceptions (the choice of format in certain toiletries does seem to be something that an individual chooses for independently), it seems that all kinds of behaviour – the names we give our children, what and how much we drink, where we choose to live, the cars we drive, the words and jargon we use, the tools and technologies we deploy, the music we listen to, the TV we watch and the clothes we wear – are shaped and spread through populations by some kind of social learning, not by independent decision-making.

And just to complete the picture, our analysis across a whole range of markets suggests that brand choice is almost invariably a social rather than an independent decision.

IMPLICATIONS FOR MARKETERS

So what are the implications for marketers of the ‘What she's having’ world? How can we start to get to grips with a world in which our consumers are all connected to each other and spend their lives in the company of each other? What should we be doing differently to take advantage of all those Estelles out there sitting at the metaphorical next tables? How does this change how we think of marketing and its mechanics? Here are some things that I and my clients have found useful.

THE LIE OF THE LAND: INDEPENDENCE V SOCIAL CHOICE

Probably the most important place to start is to understand what the behaviour in your market and around your brand is like – are individuals largely choosing independently of each other or are they taking their lead from each other, courtesy of social learning?

We tend to assume that most choices are independent (we talk of the relationships consumers have with our brands as if they were primary) but as suggested above, the data points to things being otherwise, more often than not.

It is worth checking what you've got before rushing off and strategising in social terms. Not least because if the choice is independent then the focus of marketing really is on building a better mousetrap to satisfy consumer needs – a superior product.

Moreover, if the choices in your market turn out to be independent traditional market research which explores individual thoughts, then perceptions and feelings about products and product characteristics are still appropriate.

By contrast, if you discover that the choice is social then neither of these things apply: it's much less about the product and more about the people and how they interact with each other. This means traditional market research cannot help anywhere near as much here as it tends to focus on the individual product or individual brand interface.

There are a number of ways of doing this – from an ethnographic approach to the hardcore analytics of Alex Bentley, Matt Salganik and Paul Ormerod. However you choose to do it, the important thing is to be clear about what kind of behaviour you've got before you start ‘strategising'.

THE ROLE OF MARKETING: CURATING DIFFUSION

For most of us, our job has long been about doing something to individual consumers to shape their behaviour – whether you call it persuasion or something softer, marketing has long been thought of as something we do to consumers.

If you discover that your market or your brand is based on socially shaped choices, the role of your marketing needs to be different, too. It needs to become much more about curating diffusion: ‘curating’ as in facilitating a process that is already under way or can be unlocked and ‘diffusion’ as in spread.

Your job, in other words, is less about getting folk to do stuff and more about helping them to get each other to do stuff and so on through the population. This requires a very different mindset and set of tools to those to which we default.

TARGETING ‘THE’ CONSUMER

One obvious area for change is in the way we think about our audience. We are used to focusing on the individual as if he or she were independent, but perhaps we should start talking about ‘consumers’ only in the plural. Let's perhaps go further and explore the communities and multiple social worlds in which our consumers live and love and buy our products and services. Let's define our audience in terms of social groups and social contexts rather than merely in terms of individuals.

Another way of thinking about targeting is to consider what I call ‘the between space’ – to focus on the interaction between people rather than on some illusory ‘trigger’ or ‘buy-button’ in individual people's heads which does not exist. I have started to design and conduct fieldwork which focuses on the human interaction first and the market behaviour second (the former being the real context and key to unlocking the spread of the latter). Whatever you do, the between space is the battleground of diffusion.

FACILITATING COPYING

Much of our work in this between space is not going to look like traditional marketing communication: we're going to have to help individuals see each other – if you can't see, you can't copy.

Apple is the master at this: the laptop I'm writing on has a beautiful illuminated logo which I rarely see: it's on the lid so that others around me can see what I'm using. iPod's white earpieces work in a similar way – no wonder the ‘silhouette’ campaign has run again and again since the launch. Every time you see someone on a train or a bus with these brand signatures, the effect is reinforced. Very clever.

So one kind of activity in the between space is going to be about managing ‘eyeline': what can individuals see of their peers’ behaviour and choices? How can we make things more visible?

Football teams do it with scarves and replica kits but Amazon does it without you or I realising it. Every product page has at least 16 ‘social’ features, reviews, comments and behavioural information from other people which it bakes into your ‘choice-architecture’ (as the nudgers have it) and then does the same with your data for other people. How can you make this part and parcel of your consumers’ experience of your brand?

Another is providing connective activities that enable ‘eyeline’ to work: giving folk stuff to do together during which they can see each other.

Sometimes this will involve supporting existing enthusiasms (sponsorship and cause-related marketing are already playing in this space); sometimes it will involve creating experiences such as games, competitions or even brand new events.

SOCIAL BRANDS SERVING SOCIAL NEEDS

As noted above, most brand choices seem to be at the social end of the spectrum so it would make sense to rethink our brands in social terms: what communities of interest does yours serve?

How does your brand help them interact with each other (through digital or real-world means)?

What are you giving your consumers to enhance their social world? What purpose drives your brand? What higher-order mission does it serve for people to gather around?

In recent years, far too much of the noise around ‘social’ has been about tactics (social media etc) and far too little of it strategic – being at the heart of our brand thinking. We need to be more strategically social.

A NEW KIND OF STRATEGY: LIGHTING LOTS OF FIRES

Finally, one of the most unusual things about the spread of socially learned phenomena is that they are really hard to predict: only after the fact does it seem to us clear why the winners are the winners.

This inherent unpredictability demands that we rethink the notion of strategy itself. Rather than betting everything on one grand plan, we need to get better at spreading the bets out: let's test lots of different ways to implement and get better at learning as we go.

Mark Earls is the principal of Herd Consulting, [email protected] http://herd.typepad.com