A BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP STUDY OF THE INTERNET’S IMPORTANCE IN OUR DAILY LIVES REVEALS SOME SHOCKING FIGURES.
How important is the Internet to us, really? That’s what Boston Consulting Group asked in their recently released study (PDF), which weighed the Internet’s importance on everything from the global economy (which will account for 5.2% of GDP for G20 countries by 2016) to individual lives (polls found that 21% of Americans would give up sex for Internet access, but only 10% would give up their cars).
The results offer us an endless array of discussion points, and thanks to a collection of simple infographics, we can peruse the data quickly.
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For one, despite the innovations from American companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, America isn’t the proportionate leader in Internet commerce. By 2016, we’re the 6th-placed country, and we fall below the average of developed markets. It sounds hard to believe until you examine the numbers. In the U.K., 12.4% of the entire GDP will be represented through online spending. In the U.S., it’ll be just 5.4%. We’re behind, and nothing is bucking the trend.
Things get really interesting though when you start asking people what they would give up to keep the Internet in their lives. 73% of Americans say they’d give up alcohol. 43% would give up exercise. And 21% would give up sex. (Is that high or low? Depends, I guess, on your own answer.) Just 10% would give up a car, which hints that most Americans would rather have a car than be celibate. America!
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However, the more interesting point (to me) is that our perceived value of the Internet is highly inflated. Americans see the services worth about $3,000 a year. (As a telecommuter for half a decade, I’d go even higher with that figure.) But what’s the Internet really worth, in terms of its cost? $472/year. So we’re all basically getting a 650% return on investment.
That’s really what it means when something is a productive technology, rather than a consumer good. In a world where most of us expect everything to plummet in price, and many of us lament companies like Apple’s high margins (50-100%) as generating “overpriced” products, we’re completely out of sync with the value of digital services and online products. It’s like the dot-com boom still lives and breathes in all of us, and we still see the images and videos streaming to our computer screens as a bit too wonderful to be true.
Given that we live in a world full of skepticism, where most of us take the ingenuity around us for granted (in part by necessity, since we can’t spend all day oohing and ahhing at flat displays and planes floating in the sky), the fact that we overvalue the Internet--that we intrinsically hold it sacred--is actually a somewhat beautiful idea, no?
COMMENTARY: Let's face it people, we are all addicted to the internet or slaves to it. There's no two ways about it. The internet has replaced or quickly replacing print, film and television media, and it's available to us 24/7, 365 days a year. It appears that everything is going into the cloud, insuring that we become slaves to the internet.
I don't know about you, but I can do without the internet, but as a blogger, I need the internet so that I can provide my loyal readers with interesting and informative content. That's my excuse. However, I would never giveup sex for the internet. Never, never, ever.
One of the new trends I have been reading about is how the internet has disrupted our intimate relationships. Couples and spouses are using the Internet to track each other. It is now one of the key sources of information for finding evidence in a divorce.
The internet has also given rise to social media snooping firms that track what we say and post online and provide this information to employers and insurance companies. The FBI, CIA and NSA now use the internet as a key source of information in their war against crime and terrorism.
I think one of the reasons that individuals are willing to give up sex for the internet, is because the internet has become the principal media for delivering sexual content of all times. If you can imagine it, you will find it on the internet, so it is quite possible, that the internet has in some ways supplanted sex from an intimate relationship. If your girlfriend, boyfriend or spouse won't do it, you can easily find somebody who will online. That sounds sad, but true.
Courtesy of an article dated March 21, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
My friend and mentor, David B. Wolfe, passed away Dec. 3, 2011, after a long illness. David’s special interest was mature markets. He wrote Serving the Ageless Market and (co-authored) Ageless Marketing, Firms of Endearment, and his last book, Brave New Worldview, was completed just before his death and will be published in the near future. He will be missed.
More than 20 years ago, our firm was created based upon David’s research and the principles of Developmental Relationship Marketing (DRM). This is a summary of the foundation/principles of Ageless Marketing.
The origins of Ageless Marketing stem from the five basic premises of DRM that define the origins of behavior, and its general path across the lifespan. They increase marketers’ effectiveness in linking product messages to the hidden (unconscious) drivers of consumers’ marketplace behavior by revealing behavior predispositions in various periods across the lifespan.
Finally, the five premises contain benchmarks for testing the validity of what people report about their attitudes, needs and motivations. This is critical given that recent brain research indicates that all motivations are rooted outside the realms of consciousness. We can only speculate about the foundations of our behavior; thus overly relying on the literal meanings of consumers’ testimonies doubtlessly accounts for many marketing failures.
First Premise: Origins of behavior
A person’s worldviews, needs, motivations and general approaches to needs satisfaction are predisposed – not predetermined -- by her/his current season of life, and originate in five systems of motivating underlying values (MUV Values). MUV systems, from which all behavior emerges, are biologically innate and constitute the basic building blocks of behavior. In effect, the five MUV systems are the DNA of behavior:
MUV Systems
Source of Needs, Motivations
Identity Values
Sense of Self, and differentiation, maximization and perpetuation of Self
Relationship Values
Connections for orientation, grounding, validation of Self, and resources for help in meeting needs; includes institutions and belief systems
Purpose Values
Commanding focus of Self’s energy output and efforts
Adaptation Values
Skills, knowledge, for fulfillment of the Self’s potential
Energy Values
Health and well-being of the Self in the physical, psychological domains
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Second Premise: Origins of motivations
Urges to satisfy needs arise from root motivations that are activated by tensions between five sets of bipolar forces. The first force (objective force) in each set dominates behavior in the first half of life; the second force (subjective force) in each set dominates behavior in the second half of life.
MUV Values
First half of life
Second half of life
Objective force
Subjective force
Identity
dependence vs.
autonomy
Relationships
materialism vs.
experiential
Purpose
egocentrism vs.
altruism
Adaptation
novelty vs.
habit
Energy
disengagement/escape vs.
engagement/involvement
Third Premise: Domains of personal development
Personal development evolves in two domains of the self. These domains contain the roots of all developmental potential. The two developmental domains are:
Physical domain - the organic Self, which encompasses all body systems. Primary development is completed in adolescence. Secondary development continues throughout life in order to keep body systems and functions in healthy states.
Psychological domain - the inorganic Self which encompasses the conscious and unconscious mind. Broadly speaking, following infancy, the mental Self develops through three cognitive styles across the lifespan as follows:
Subjective style: the primary cognitive style in childhood causing children to frequently experience the products of their imagination as reality.
Objective style: the primary cognitive style in adolescence and young adulthood when Self is experienced as an extension of the world. They do not experience reality as an integrated scheme of the whole. Reality to them is unambiguous, with truth being absolute or independent of context.
Integrated style - the primary cognitive style of people in midlife or older. This style reflects a complex integration of subjective and objective styles. Reality is seen in terms of relationships whose elements are in constant flux. Meanings depend on context. This nullifies absolutism and renders reality in “shades of gray.”
Fourth Premise: Keeping information flow to levels the conscious mind can manage
The brain resolves this problem by conducting information triage. The criterion the brain uses to determine what information will be sent to the conscious mind is the relevance of information to a person’s survival scenario, a matrix of needs whose satisfaction is vital to a person’s comfort and pleasure and avoidance of discomfort and pain.
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Fifth Premise: Seasons of life – stages of personal development
There are four seasons of personal development. The first two are dominated by social (psychosocial) development needs; the last two by inner (psychospiritual) development needs.
Season
Developmental Focus Years
Survival Focus
Spring
Initial development, 0 - 22
Play (learning) Comedic mode: “everything will generally break in my favor.”
Summer
Vocational development, 18+ - 40+
Work (becoming somebody) Romantic mode: heroic – “I can do anything I set out to do.”
Fall
Shift to inner development, 38+ - 60+
Work-play (search for meaning) Tragic mode: “I can’t do as much as I once thought; who am I really?”
Winter
Integration of life experiences, 58+ - ?
Reconciliation (making sense of life) Ironic mode: “There’s good in most every bad, bad in most every good – c’est la via!”
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Ageless Marketing is an excellent primer on connecting more effectively with boomers and older adults and further exploring DRM summarized above. Knowledge gained should result in a better understanding of whole brain, true-to-life models of customer behavior and consequently more effective links with targeted populations.
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COMMENTARY: Before you get too entangled with the concepts and terminology presented in the above material, I would like to make the following very important points which relate to the above:
The marketing message is more important than the messenger.
A brand is the sum total of all the experiences, both good and bad, and heiarchy of human needs that a brand represents and satisfies in the mind of the consumer.
The brand experiences and heiarchy of human needs it fills become even more important as a consumer becomes older.
Therefore, in order to fully understand the above material, we need to backtrack a bit, and you need to familiarize yourself with the science of consumer marketing, not just what you read in Marketing 101 about the four/five P's and marketing strategy and tactics. What I am getting at, and something that I have preached for a long time, is that marketers need to understand how consumers think and what processes go on inside the mind of the consumer that will get them to trust a brand and finally make a buying decision. This is the very essence of Developmental Relationship Marketing (DRM).
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Armed with the above valuable points and concepts, marketers will be in a better position to fine tune their brand marketing messages so they are more customer-centric if you are targeting the Baby Boomer generation.
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Through the miracle of neuro imaging, brain researchers can now eavesdrop on the goings on between a person’s ears as thoughts are being formed and decisions made. While they don’t exactly see pictures,what they do see is radically changing our thinking about how motivations form, free will works, and information moves from our sensory receptors through the brain into the conscious mind.
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What is being learned about human behavior in brain science or neuroscience, as well as in the hotly developing field of genetics, will inevitably change how companies view those who work for them and those to whom they market and sell things. However, it is not only genetics and brain science that will be changing how companies see workers and customers. Developmental psychology, which is a treasure trove of information about human behavior, though rarely drawn on in marketing, stands to assume an elevated role in business, especially in marketing.
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Marketing revolves around predictions of consumer behavior. The primary purpose of consumer research is to get information that enables predictions of what consumers need, want, and do. However, developmental psychology, which delves deeper into the human psyche,offers crucial insights into consumer behavior that cannot be fathomed by traditional consumer surveys, interviews, and focus groups. In fact, developmental psychology may help resolve an ironic problem present in current marketing strategies: Despite information technology that provides us with more information on customers than ever before, marketing success rates have fallen over the past decade. Scary thought, isn't it?
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Marketers' continuing preoccupation with youth and young adult markets makes no logical sense in scores of product lines and for thousands of companies. The emergence of a New Customer Majority comprised of people 40 and older is the answer. This seasoned group of consumers is 45 percent larger than those between the ages of 18 and 39 (123 million versus 85 million), and will become even more numerous over the next decadeand a half. A fact overlooked by the prevailing Madison Avenue mindset is that the majority rules in the marketplace as well as in politics. This New Customer Majority, not youth and pre-middle-aged adults, is the primary source of today’s leading views, values, and behaviors in the marketplace. This historic change in consumer behavior has made much of what once worked in marketing obsolete. It has changed the rules of marketplace engagement.
- Adapting successfully to these circumstances requires a different mindset than the one that has long governed marketing. As many thought leaders in business have already recognized, marketing success increasingly depends on abandoning the traditional quantitatively framed product-centric mind-set to adopt a qualitatively framed customer-centric mindset. However, not many yet have figured out how to do this.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) was supposed to be the silver bullet to accomplish effective customer-centric marketing, but has failed miserably. CRM has become a more of a sales tool to assist salespeople track and qualify leads and communite with customers. Instead of developing into a customer-centric marketing technology, all CRM has done is build a wall between the company and its customers, while creating more work for the salespeople.
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Social media came along and has given birth to the era of brand engagement with consumers, but as you have found out from my numerous blog posts, I have often questioned the effectiveness of social media to sell much of anything because consumers view their social media pages as a very private almost holy social space, and advertising is considered very invasive and an infringement on that space. So long as social network users continue to blockout and resist social media ads, I don't see how social network sites like Facebook will become a marketer's Holy Grail. As I write this, social network sites like Facebook and Twitter are embarking on more aggressive advertising strategies and introducing advertising products to meet the needs of brand marketers and justify their huge stock valuations. Exposing social network users to even more ads is not the solution. When this experiment is finally over in about a year or two, I think you should revert back to this blog post and you will discover the reasons why it all happened.
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Since the social networks began selling ads, brand managers have encountered problems measuring the ROIs of their social media marketing campaigns. Spending more on social media advertising only exasperates this problem. It piles on bad money on top of more bad money. It represents wasteful spending on advertising that simply will not work. The smart ones, representing roughly 49% of brand managers have chosen to use social media the right way: to increase brand awareness, increase fan engagement and brand influence, conducting marketing research through questionnaires and polls, and improving customer service.
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With a growing body of knowledge, evidence and new information from neuroscience with which to work, we are now able to fold back the layers of the conscious mind to reveal the very origins of customers’ needs, motivations, and behavior, a feat that is simply not possible in conventional consumer research methodologies. In doing this, neuroscience responds to a long-standing deficiency in marketing that costs companies tens of billions of dollars annually due to misleading research and marketing blunders.
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The spectrum of refracted images that results from neuroscience makes it clearer why consumer behavior has become less materialistic (less product-centered) and more metaphysical (more experience-centered). This has occurred because for the first time ever, most adults are in the years when the forces of self-actualization needs (see below) exert decisive influences on lifestyle aspirations, buying decisions, and overall consumer behavior. The marketer who gains an understanding of the dynamics of self-actualization will have a decided advantage in today’s markets over the marketer who doesn’t.
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Thus far, marketing remains rooted primarily in the materialistic values (product-centered values) that generally hold the most sway over people in the pre-middle-age years of adulthood. Because of this, many members of the New Customer Majority feel marginalized by companies and their marketers. Perhaps no other single factor has done more to reduce the effectiveness of marketing.
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Here's an incredible thought that marketers should take note of: How a brand is perceived and what a marketing message means is more subjective in the older mind than is usually the case with younger minds.In fact, the older mind tends to be more resistant to marketers’ attempts to fully define the meaning, benefits, and values of a brand. That's another scary thought for marketers to chew.
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Abraham Maslow, a leader in the field of human developmental psychology and developer of Maslow's Hierachy of Needs postulates that an older, more mature mind “resists enculturation” (i.e. enculturation is the process by which a person learns the requirements of the culture by which he or she is surrounded, and acquires values and behaviours that are appropriate or necessary in that culture). This disposition calls for subtler and more deferential approaches in addressing older markets. This is made more challenging by the fact that unlike the young who tend to perceive matters in more absolutist black-and-white perceptions, older people tend to perceive matters in shades of gray. Absolutist perceptions of reality are easier to play to because they are generally more closely tied to social consensus. Shades of gray perceptions are more subjective, thus pose a fuzzier target to hit among members of the New Customer Majority.
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Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs
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Empathy—identifying with and understanding another’s circumstances, emotions, feelings, and motives—is the very core of an authentic customer-centric mind-set. The last season of life is a more fortuitous stage than many younger people believe is possible. It comes only with maturation. The blessings that can be one’s good fortune to experience in the mature stage of ones life at higher levels of psychological maturation include entry into a new dimension of human existence from which comes a steady flow of lofty experiences—what Abraham Maslow called peak experiences—and in which there arises enhanced coping abilities for dealing with any later life declines and losses that are inevitable. Of course, not everyone reaches such an advanced state of maturation. Nevertheless, because these aspects of self-actualization reflect perennial desires in life’s second half, the marketer who understands them is more likely to connect most deeply with the more than 123 million people who make up the New Customer Majority.
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Bottomline, if you are marketing to the Baby Boomer generation you must employ more hollistic, socially conscience, and more subtle messages that run counter to the Generation Y or Millennial and Generation X cultural marketing approach. To market the Millennial and Generation X, I highly recommend that you read by blog post dated September 30, 2011 in which I talk about how to reach Generation X and Generation X. Those two demographics require a Sensory Approach and Social Approach.
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Courtesy of an article dated March 5, 2012 appearing in MediaPost Pubications Engage:Boomers and the book titled Ageless Marketing by David B. Wolfe
As difficult as we make it sound, self-improvement can be a straightforward thing. It’s relatively easy to become more fit (diet and exercise) or even to become smarter (read more and attend classes on a topic). But how do you possibly approach making yourself a better person?
For his thesis project, Michaël Harboun, now a designer at Ideo, tackled that question through a concept called Transcendenz.
His vision was for an augmented reality interface that wouldn’t just tell you where the nearest burrito joint could be found in the city, but to help you discover something inside of yourself.
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Harboun writes us.
“Regular AR applications add a layer of objective data, informing us about our surroundings. They give us an instant answer, so that we immediately know what we see. Transcendenz doesn’t give answers, it asks questions. It believes in the user’s ability to put the world around him into question, and to not content himself eating instant available data.”
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The application builds empathy through a mature gamification. It tracks, not just your eyes, but your emotions and actions in the real world. As the user takes actions that are empathetic, they level up. But they’re also constantly challenged by the application to broaden their worldview.
Watch the embedded clip from 6:45 in, and you’ll see Transcendenz alter the worldview of someone who puts out their cigarettes on a tree. Writes Harboun.
“By transforming the perception of the user, Transcendenz points out to an invisible philosophy, hidden behind the everyday world. The application encourages us to leverage our consciousness of things and to transcend what we see.”
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And in doing so, Transcendenz functions differently from most technology we use in our lives. Rather than ignoring one’s spouse to play Angry Birds, Harboun’s app forces the user out of technology, to be “fully immersed into the present moment.”
Harboun writes.
“My hope for AR glasses is that it will make people look away from their screens. My fear is that it will make us see what’s overlaid, and not the underlaid anymore.”
Well put.
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COMMENTARY: Thankfully, an AR application and pair of bio-sensory glasses that doesn't try to sell you something or violate your privacy or someone else's. I love how Transcendenz puts you kinetically, emotionally and physically in better "touch" with the physical world in which you live. It uses input from your mental or kinetic energy to help you balance your emotions, by explaining what you are thinking and how you are reacting to a certain stimuli. I would love to wear a pair of those cool AR Transcendenz glasses to a party or social gathering to see if what I am feeling emotionally and psychologically actually registers that way using Transcendenz. This is truly a great way to improve your social skills and keep yourself in a meditative state of mind. Quite a concept. I wonder much Transcendenz will cost when it hits the stores.
Courtesy of an article dated February 28, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
The doctors have tried to tell her every way they know how over the past three months: delicately, constantly, even urgently. But as Heather Parker sips coffee in her weathered clapboard house, she still isn’t buying that the Tourette’s-like twitches that have consumed her 17-year-old daughter, Lydia, since she woke up from an October nap are a product of a psychological disorder, not a physical one.
Says Parker about her daughter Lydia.
“I just can’t make sense of it, it’s just so obvious that something is really wrong in her body.”
Parker, a single mother with a ponytail and glasses who’s lived all her life around Le Roy, a town of 7,500 near Rochester, where, before a slew of teenage girls started reporting such tics, the only attraction of note was the Jell-O museum. Beside her sits Lydia, an unhappy-looking girl with coal-black dyed hair whose right arm swings like an orchestra conductor’s every five seconds or so. Lydia, a senior, hasn’t been in school since the tics started. She’s supposed to be going to her tutor, but often she can’t get herself out of bed, so now she may have to drop out and get a GED. Says her mother.
“She was going to be the first person in the family to finish high school, but because of what’s happened to her health, that doesn’t look good now.”
When the girls—there are more than 20 of them now, with four new cases last week alone—started reporting similar symptoms, it didn’t take long for the TV cameras to descend. Since January, there have been dozens of crews crowding the counter at places like Java’s on Main, the local coffee shop, clutching tripods and cappuccinos, hoping for footage of the girls and their parents. In the past few weeks, producers fromGood Morning America, The Today Show, Anderson Cooper 360° and HLN's Dr. Drew (see below) have swooped in, offering anxious moms a chance to go on air with their daughters, to beg for answers.
There have been several theories as to what is causing this mysterious illness which is affecting the teens of Le Roy, N.Y.
Toxins from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the natural-gas wells that ring the girls’ school.
On January 28, 2012,Erin Brockovich, the environmental crusader, appeared on HLN's Dr Drew, and believes that a 1971 train derailment that spilled one ton of cyanide and 45,000 gallons of Trichloroethylene (TCE) only four miles from Le Roy High School is the cause of the mysterious illness. Ms Brokovich has made a career out of investigating and litigating toxic spills, recently sent a trusted aide to the scene to dig up soil samples from the school grounds, there was reason to suspect a cover-up.
On February 6, 2012, Dr. Rosario Trifiletti, a New Jersey neurologist reported on HLN's Dr. Drew that he reviewed blood tests on eight of the upstate Le Roy, New York teens who are suffering from a strange tic disorder — which has affected 18 girls and one boy since last fall — and diagnosed them with Pediatric Autoimmune Illness Associated with Streptococci or PANDAS.
Some folks on the Internet believe that vaccinations like Gardasil could be the source of the mysterious illness.
For months, the marquee on the front of the Living Waters Church on Main Street bespoke the community’s fears:
“We are praying for our h.s. girls.”
But amid the soundbites from contentious public meetings and the bustle of production assistants ushering red-eyed mothers to the makeup chair lies a very inconvenient truth: the cluster in Le Roy is, by all reasonable judgment, a mass hallucination. Aided by media of all sorts, what the girls are suffering from is perhaps the ultimate disease of our era.
Over the past months, even as health officials have methodically ruled out organic causes, the cases have stubbornly spread through this working-class community. Laszlo Mechtler, from the Dent Neurologic Institute, a leading neurologist in the area, at the request of the National Institute of Health, is investigating the mysterious illness for confirmation of PANDAS, and Dr. Mechtler has had 18 of the girls in his office says.
“It’s a very hard thing for parents, for people in general, to accept.”
Leaning forward in a leather chair at the end of a long day, he says that he and a female colleague recognized as soon as the girls started streaming into their office that they had “conversion disorder,” named because the mind unconsciously “converts” emotional disturbances into physical symptoms. In addition to the girls, one woman in her 30s and a teenage boy have also developed symptoms.
He says.
“This is nothing that people want to hear.”
Next door, in an examining room, a colleague is talking to yet another girl who tics uncontrollably as her mother stands by in horror. While as many as 15 percent of the people who come to him turn out to be suffering from a conversion disorder, “mass psychogenic illness,” as he refers to the cluster in Le Roy, is rare. When it does strike, it is almost always confined to groups of girls, often in rural areas. During the early 20th century it struck all-female factories; before that, nunneries, according to Timothy F. Jones, an epidemiologist who began studying the phenomenon after a similar outbreak in a high school in Tennessee in 1998. Mechtler says.
“This isn’t a sexist observation. It’s just a fact. These girls in this case are under an enormous amount of stress, and that has surfaced in this difficult way. The attention, the cameras, all the social media, it has made things much worse.”
Heather Parker doesn’t get all the talk about stress. She says
“Lydia didn’t even have a test in school the next day."
In fact, things had been looking up ever since 2009, when Parker had finally gotten up the nerve to kick out the kids’ father, who has done time for assaulting his daughter. That was a bad stretch, she acknowledges, but not as bad as what happened to another girl, whose mother had discovered that her boyfriend was secretly filming her daughter undressing in her bedroom. When the mother confronted him, the guy blew his head off, right in front of the girl and her mother. Mechtler says.
“The more you ask these kids about their lives, the more you find out. But if you ask them if there are stressors in their life they have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Treatment for conversion disorders includes therapy and medication for depression and anxiety. Some of the girls are already recovering, he says,
“The ones who’ve stayed off TV, whose parents are keeping them off Facebook.”
Some parents have persuaded Erin Brockovich to send an associate back to Le Roy on Feb. 20 (Brockovich did not respond to requests for comment). And Dr. Rosario Trifiletti, who has made a name for himself diagnosing PANDAS, is convinced the blood samples from some of the girls show that they have “triggers” for the disease. Dr. Tifiletti says.
"All eight girls tested show evidence of infection with at least one of these pathogens. Both of these agents have been associated with a PANDAS-like illness with the sudden onset of motor and vocal tics. Thus, a PANDAS-like illness is my working diagnosis, rather than a mass conversion disorder."
Although Trifiletti conceded that much about the disorder remains unknown, he said:
“I suspect that genetic, environmental factors provide an immune background where the PANDAS-like response is possible to common pathogens. The infectious exposure is simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
About 40% to 60% of childhood tic disorders are believed to be initiated by infections, but the exact numbers aren’t known due to lack of research.
However, the report by the New York State Department of Health released at the end of January states flatly:
“None of the cases meet the PANDAS criteria.”
Furthermore, Laszlo Mechtler, from the Dent Neurologic Institute, the leading PANDAS expert from the National Institute of Mental Health said that’s unlikely, given that PANDAS is exceedingly rare and has never occurred in clusters like that in Le Roy, N.Y. Nonetheless, Trifiletti, who last week was on Nightline, is treating the girls with antibiotics. He did not return calls for comment. Mechtler says.
“It’s ridiculous, but maybe this will give some of the girls a way to get better without shame.”
There are many reasons for skepticism. Dr. Susan Swedo, branch chief of pediatrics and developmental neuropsychiatry at the National Institute on Mental Health, who is responsible for having named PANDAS, says she has not “personally evaluated any of the teens in Le Roy, so would not be able to determine if they have PANDAS or not,” but notes discrepancies between what is known about the Le Roy, N.Y., cases and about PANDAS.
For one thing, PANDAS doesn’t usually occur in clusters. Indeed, Swedo says that she is “not aware” of any epidemics of PANDAS ever occurring. The last epidemic of illness following strep infections — a cluster of rheumatic fever, which is an inflammatory disorder — happened in the 1980s. (Both PANDAS and rheumatic fever are caused by overzealous immune responses to infections; immune cells mistakenly attack particular organs or tissues, in addition to the infectious agents.)
Another red flag: strep is extremely common and PANDAS is very rare. Only about 1 in 100 children have OCD or tic disorders — and they aren’t all caused by infections. In contrast, Swedo notes, “In some school-aged children, positive titers [for strep] are found in 60% to 70% of kids at this time of year.”
Further, the fact that virtually only females have been affected by the tic disorder in Le Roy weighs against a PANDAS diagnosis. Swedo says.
“Tic disorders, like childhood-onset OCD, are about three times as common in boys as girls, so if you had a ‘tic epidemic,’ one would expect to see 40 to 60 boys, if 14 girls were affected.”
Consistent with the prevailing diagnosis of psychogenic origin, Swedo notes that tic disorders may worsen in the presence of stress (regardless of what caused the tics in the first place). She says.
“Tics increase in times of stress and decrease during rest for most people, though sometimes the opposite occurs.”
As for Lana Parker, she disregards the talk of PANDAS. She and her daughter have accepted that the condition will remain a mystery, at least to them. For now, Lydia is on disability and Medicaid. Parker says.
“Overall I’m really proud of the way she’s handling it.”
On Main Street, the townspeople seem to be wearying of the whole affair. They tolerated the media when things looked dire, “and we certainly got a lot of extra business with all the crews,” says Melissa Lytle, who works behind the counter at Java’s on Main. But as the environmental fears subside and the cases keep mounting, tempers are starting to fray. At the back table of the coffee shop, a clutch of older men working the crossword together regard with obvious disdain a Swedish producer flipping madly through a local phonebook in search of girls who’ll go on air. “If they’d just go away, maybe this would all pass,” says one of the men in a fierce whisper.
At the Living Waters Church, as a light snow begins to fall, a worker emerges to silently slide the letters off the marquee out front. In minutes the prayer for the girls is gone. In its place: “Le Roy: Still a Great Place to Live.”
COMMENTARY: Whatever is causing the mysterious tic illness that has now afflicted 20 high school students in Le Roy, N.Y., appears to be localized in Le Roy, N.Y. This is good news for the medical profession.
However, there appears to be broad differences of opinion as to what is really the cause of this mystery illness. Hopefully, the medical profession and health institutions will come together compare results, and conduct more conclusive research into the illness.
I am inclined to believe that it is not mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, but a combination of the effects of environmental toxins stemming from the railroad derailment that released the cyanide and TCE into the ground, contaminated soil used in the construction of Le Roy High School, and PANDAS. These toxins could've weakened the autoimmune systems of the young victims enough to allow a Strep infection to trigger PANDAS. That's just my theory. Dr. Toy has said his peace.
Courtesy of an article dated February 12, 2012 appearing in The Daily Beast, an article dated February 6, 2012 appearing in Time Healthland
While it's probably not nearly as bad for you, social media may be even more addictive than alcohol and tobacco, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science. The study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago's Booth Business School, tracked the daily activities and attitudes of 250 people ages 18-85 from the German city of Würzburg as they attempted to abstain from social media use for one week; the study subjects were given BlackBerrys to register their responses.
Study subjects were asked at intervals whether they had experienced any urges to use social media, how strong the urge was, and whether they succumbed to it; they were also asked whether it conflicted with other life activities and desires. Overall the study collected 10,558 responses from the subjects over the course of the week, including 7,827 reports of "desire episodes".
Click Image To Enlarge
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the will power to resist using social media became lower as the day went on, reflecting growing feelings of stress and fatigue and a concomitant need for release and relaxation. Interestingly, social media was harder to resist than a gamut of other behaviors:
“In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money.”
Likewise, the subjects’ reports for alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine marked their desires for these substances at relatively low levels compared to social media.
Hofmann was quoted in the U.K. newspaper The Guardian:
“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist. With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs -- long-term as well as monetary -- and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people's time.”
This isn’t the first study confirming what many have long suspected -- namely, that social media can wield an unhealthy psychic power over us. In April 2010 I wrote about a study from the University of Maryland’s International Center for Media & the Public Agenda, which asked 200 U of M undergraduates to forego all media for 24 hours -- including the Internet, their mobile phone, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. The reactions -- especially to social media deprivation – were often indistinguishable from addicts deprived of a fairly powerful habit-forming drug, with subjects using language like “frantically craving, very anxious, extremely antsy, miserable, jittery, crazy.
Retrevo prepared a study on social media addiction and produced these interesting graphs:
Click Images To Enlarge
COMMENTARY: In a blog post dated August 10, 2011, I commented on a study on the psychological effects of social media by Dr. Larry Rosen of the California State University, Dominguez Hills, and another study by Case Western University, and they found a direct correlation between prolonged social media with increased addiction and other psychological problems.
Mobile devices of all types, including smartphones, tablets, ipods and laptop computers have increased our addiction to social media, because it makes it very convenient for us to access our social media accounts on a 24/7, 365 day basis. You know you are addicted when you wake up and 3:00 a.m. and the first thing you do is check your email and social medi accounts for the latest updates.
So long as social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others add features that make it more convenient for us to share content with our friends and fans, the more likelihood that social media addiction will increase.
If you are reading my blog regularly, crave it like a drug, you are not addicted. You are just a fan. Thank you.
Courtesy of an article dated February 3, 2012 appearing in MediaPost Publications The Social Graf
If you’ve ever felt like everyone else on Facebook seems to be having more fun than you, well, you’re not alone, according to a new study by Utah Valley University sociologists Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge, published in an academic journal called Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
The study, titled “‘They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am’: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others’ Lives,” is based on a survey of roughly 425 college students asking them about their own lives and the lives of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. The students were also questioned about their use of Facebook, including frequency, time spent, and common activities.
The survey revealed that students who spend a lot of time on Facebook are relatively more likely to perceive other people as having better lives than themselves. According to the authors,
“Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives. Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook ‘friends’ agreed more that others had better lives.” Meanwhile, people who spent less time on Facebook and more time in “real” socializing with friends tended to be happier than subjects who used Facebook intensively.
This isn’t the first academic study to find a correlation between social media use and mental health issues including low self-esteem and depression. In March of last year I wrote about another study, published in Pediatrics, the official publication of the American Academy of Pediatrics, detailing a mental health phenomenon called “Facebook Depression” by pediatricians. In addition to obvious threats like cyber-bullying, by allowing some individuals to present idealized images of their own lives, social networks can subtly build unrealistic expectations in users of all ages, but especially among impressionable younger users who are still asserting their own identities. The AAP noted:
“Acceptance by and contact with peers is an important element of adolescent life. The intensity of the online world is thought to be a factor that may trigger depression in some adolescents.” What's more, the AAP warned that “parents may lack a basic understanding of these new forms of socialization, which are integral to their children's lives.”
In the same vein, in November 2010, Case Western Reserve's School of Medicine published a study warning that excessive use of social media -- specifically, “hypertexting” (sending more than 120 messages per school day) and “hypernetworking” (spending more than three hours per day on sites like Facebook) -- is linked to dangerous health problems and antisocial behavior in teens. Hypernetworkers were:
60% more likely to have four or more sexual partners;
62% more likely to have tried cigarettes;
69% more likely to be binge drinkers;
69% more likely to have had sex;
79% more likely to have tried alcohol;
84% more likely to have used illicit drugs;
94% more likely to have been in a physical fight.
Of course none of these studies showing correlation between social media use and mental health issues prove that there is a deeper, causal relationship -- meaning, that social media is actually the source of mental health issues. It’s equally plausible that people already suffering from low self-esteem and depression are more likely to spend excessive amounts of time on social networks, for example simply out of boredom.
COMMENTARY: I am not entirely sold on the idea that if you spend an exorbitant amount of time on Facebook, that you you are unhappy person or lack self-esteem. Furthermore, a lot of what "appears to be" on a social networkers page, may "not actually be" the true situation with that social networker. A lot of people have been known to exaggerate or outright lie. I don't think you can generalize that heavy social network use creates mental health issues. I actually get a lot of enjoyment out of blogging, then discovering that I received a lot of great feedback from my readers. When I am on Twitter, I am often retweeted. Sometimes, I create a new blog fan, and that is hardly making me feel bad. My traffic has gone from 15,700 visitors per month in mid-September 2011 to 38,800 visitors per month on January 22, 2o12, so I am very pleased with my efforts. I was more depressed after the 49ers lost to the New York Giants. That depression lasted about one hour. I have learned that it's just a game. Better luck next year. How about you. Do you feel depressed spending hours on Facebook or Twitter? Let me know by posting a comment.
Courtesy of an article dated January 23, 2012 appearing in MediaPost Publications The Social Graf
Contact with highly advanced extra-terrestrial beings from other worlds is a distinct possibility, but what happens when we finally do make contact?
This psychic claims that he can see mental "images" of future events. He predicted years in advance:
Rise of the Ayatolloah Khomeni of Iran
Chernobyl nuclear accident
Oil embargo of the late 70's
A Pearl Harbor-like attack of Los Angeles or New York City in the decade following the year 2000. New York's Twin Towers were in fact destroyed on September 11, 2001.
He claims he has not received any "images" after the end of the year 2012. However, what he says about the year 2012 is absolutely unbelievable. After watching this video, you'll agree that he hits on quite a few though not all of his predictions. For example, he predicted that between 2000 and 2005, the end of gasoline powered automobile's and rise of electrically powered automobiles, flying cars and even magnetic cars. Some of that is just now happening, but we are a long way from all-electric automobiles. The guy speaks French, but the video is subtitled in English. Let's hope he's wrong about 2012. Here's the video:
COMMENTARY: I don't have no way to confirm the authenticity of the video, or who the eyeglass-wearing Frenchmen men, but his other predictions were spot-on. The prediction for 2012 is truly unbelievable. Let me know what you think by posting a comment.
Courtesy of an article dated January 9, 2012 appearing in Before Its News
A. K. Pradeep knows what you like and why you like it. Take the sleek, slick iPad. Ask Mac lovers why they adore their tablet and they'll say it's the convenience, the touch screen, the design, the versatility. But Apple aficionados don't just like their iPads; they're preprogammed to like them. It's in their subconscious--the curves, the way it feels in their hands, and in the hormones their brains secrete when they touch the screen. He says.
"When you move an icon on the iPad and it does what you thought it would do, you're surprised and delighted it actually happened. That surprise and delight turns into a dopamine squirt, and you don't even know why you liked it."
Pradeep is the founder and CEO of science-based consumer-research firm NeuroFocus, a Berkeley, California-based company wholly owned by Nielsen Holdings N.V. that claims to have the tools to tap into your brain (or, as Woody Allen called it, "my second favorite organ"). You might say Pradeep was born to plumb the depths of our minds. The "A.K." in his name stands for Anantha Krishnan, which translates as "unending consciousness"; Pradeep means "illumination." Fortunately, he doesn't refer to himself as Unending Illuminated Consciousness, preferring, as is custom in his native region of India, a single name: Pradeep. "Like Prince or Madonna," he explains.
On this particular spring day, he's in New York to offer a presentation at the 75th Advertising Research Foundation conference. As he holds court on a small stage in a ballroom of the Marriott Marquis in Midtown, Pradeep seems to relish the spotlight. Swizzle-stick thin and topped with unruly jet-black hair, the effusive 48-year-old is sharply dressed, from his spectacles to his black jacket and red-and-black silk shirt, and all the way down to his shiny boots. He stands out, needless to say, from the collective geekdom gathered at this egghead advertising fest.
Speaking with the speed and percussive enunciation of an auctioneer, Pradeep is at the conference today to introduce his company's latest innovation: a product called Mynd, the world's first portable, wireless electroencephalogram (EEG) scanner. The skullcap-size device sports dozens of sensors that rest on a subject's head like a crown of thorns. It covers the entire area of the brain, he explains, so it can comprehensively capture synaptic waves; but unlike previous models, it doesn't require messy gel. What's more, users can capture, amplify, and instantaneously dispatch a subject's brain waves in real time, via Bluetooth, to another device--a remote laptop, say, an iPhone, or that much-beloved iPad. Over the coming months, Neuro-Focus plans to give away Mynds to home panelists across the country. Consumers will be paid to wear them while they watch TV, head to movie theaters, or shop at the mall. The firm will collect the resulting streams of data and use them to analyze the participants' deep subconscious responses to the commercials, products, brands, and messages of its clients. NeuroFocus data crunchers can then identify the products and brands that are the most appealing (and the ones whose packaging and labels are dreary turnoffs), the characters in a Hollywood film that engender the strongest emotional attachments, and the exact second viewers tune out an ad.
Pradeep and his team in Berkeley are hardly the first to make a direct connection between brain function and how it determines consumer behavior. Advertisers, marketers, and product developers have deployed social psychology for decades to influence whether you buy Coke or Pepsi, or a small or an extra-large popcorn. Like the feather weight of that mobile phone? Suddenly gravitating to a new kind of beer at the store? Inexplicably craving a bag of Cheetos? From eye-deceiving design to product placement gimmickry, advertisers and marketers have long exploited our basic human patterns, the ones that are as rudimentary and predictable as Pavlov's slobbering dog.
NeuroFocus, however, promises something deeper, with unprecedented access into the nooks and crannies of the subconscious. It's a tantalizing claim, given that businesses spend trillions of dollars each year on advertising, marketing, and product R&D, and see, by some estimates, 80% of all their new products fail. The hope that neuroscience can provide more accurate results than traditional focus groups and other traditional market research is why Citi, Google, HP, and Microsoft, as well as soda companies, brewers, retailers, manufacturers, and media companies have all become NeuroFocus clients in the past six years. When salty-snack purveyor Frito-Lay looked to increase sales of its single-serve 100-calorie snacks to women, it tapped NeuroFocus, whose research informed new packaging and a new ad campaign. CBS partnered with the firm to measure responses to new shows and TV pilots; Arts & Entertainment (A&E) had NeuroFocus track viewers' second-by-second neurological reactions to commercials to ensure that its programs work with the ads that fund them; and Pradeep's team helped ESPN display the logos of its corporate advertisers more effectively on-air. California Olive Ranch had NeuroFocus test its olive-oil labels for maximum appeal. And, as we'll see later, Intel hired the company to better understand its global branding proposition, while PayPal sought a more refined corporate identity.
These corporations vary widely, but they share a fundamental goal: to mine your brain so they can blow your mind with products you deeply desire. With NeuroFocus's help, they think they can know you better than you know yourself.
THE CHEETOS CASE
Orange cheese dust. That wholly unnatural neon stuff that gloms onto your fingers when you're mindlessly snacking on chips or doodles. The stuff you don't think about until you realize you've smeared it on your shirt or couch cushions--and then keep on eating anyway, despite your better intentions. Orange cheese dust is probably not the first thing you think of when talking about how the brain functions, but it's exactly the kind of thing that makes NeuroFocus, and neuromarketing in general, such a potentially huge and growing business. In 2008, Frito-Lay hired NeuroFocus to look into Cheetos, the junk-food staple. After scanning the brains of a carefully chosen group of consumers, the NeuroFocus team discovered that the icky coating [of Cheetos] triggers an unusually powerful response in the brain: a sense of giddy subversion that consumers enjoy over the messiness of the product. In other words, the sticky stuff is what makes those snacks such a sticky brand. Frito-Lay leveraged that information into its advertising campaign for Cheetos, which has made the most of the mess. For its efforts, NeuroFocus earned a Grand Ogilvy award for advertising research, given out by the Advertising Research Foundation, for "demonstrating the most successful use of research in the creation of superior advertising that achieves a critical business objective."
THE COKE VS PEPSI TEST CASE
This seemingly precise way of unveiling the brain's inner secrets is the ultimate promise of neuromarketing, a science (or perhaps an art) that picks up electrical signals from the brain and spins them through software to analyze the responses and translate those signals into layman's terms. While evolving in tandem with advances in neuroscience, the field owes much to a study conducted at the Baylor College of Medicine in 2004 to investigate the power of brand perception on consumer taste preferences. Based on the famous Coke vs. Pepsi tests of yesteryear, volunteers had their brains scanned in an MRI as they sampled each beverage. When they didn't know what they were drinking, half liked Coke and half liked Pepsi. When they did know, however, most preferred Coke, and their brain scans showed a great deal of activity in the cranial areas associated with memory and emotion. In other words, the power of Coke's brand is so great that it preps your brain to enjoy its flavor--and presumably to influence your purchasing decisions when you're in the supermarket.
EEG THE NEW STANDARD FOR NEUROTESTING MEASUREMENT
Since the Baylor study, neurotesters have turned to the EEG as their standard measurement tool, rather than the MRI. For starters, the MRI is bulkier, harder to administer, and expensive. Far more important, however, is the fact that an EEG measures the brain's electrical activity on the scalp, while an MRI records changes in blood flow inside the brain. This means that an EEG reading can be done almost in real time, while an MRI's has a five-second delay. MRIs provide beautiful, high-resolution pictures, ideal for identifying tumors and other abnormalities, but they are useless for tracking quick-hit reactions.
For example, imagine that you are asked to generate an action verb in response to the word ball. Within 200 milliseconds, your brain has absorbed the request. Impulses move to the motor cortex and drive your articulators to respond, and you might say "throw." This process happens far too fast for an MRI to record. But an EEG can capture virtually every neurological impulse that results from that single word: ball.
This is where modern neuromarketing exists--at the very creation of an unconscious idea, in the wisp of time between the instant your brain receives a stimulus and subconsciously reacts. There, data are unfiltered, uncorrupted by your conscious mind, which hasn't yet had the chance to formulate and deliver a response in words or gestures. During this vital half-second, your subconscious mind is free from cultural bias, differences in language and education, and memories. Whatever happens there is neurologically pure, unlike when your conscious mind takes over and actually changes the data by putting them through myriad mental mechanisms. It's all the action inside you before your conscious mind does the societally responsible thing and reminds you that artificially flavored and colored cheese dust laced with monosodium glutamate is, well, gross.
With the instantaneous readings of EEG sensors, neuromarketers can track electrical waves as they relate to emotion, memory, and attention from specific areas of the brain: namely, the amygdala, an almond-shaped region that plays a role in storing emotionally charged memories and helps trigger physical reactions (sweaty palms, a faster heartbeat); the hippocampus, where memory lurks; and the lateral prefrontal cortex, which governs high-level cognitive powers (one being attention). Once the brain waves are collected, complex algorithms can sift through the data to connect each reaction to a specific moment.
BUILDING THE CASE FOR NEUROTESTING OVER FOCUS GROUPS
Neuromarketers like Pradeep argue that this testing is much more efficient, cost effective, and precise than traditional methods like focus groups. While Gallup must poll roughly a thousand people to achieve a 4% margin of error, NeuroFocus tests just two dozen subjects for its corporate clients--and even that is a sample size larger than those deployed by leading academic neuroscience labs. This is possible because people's brains are remarkably alike, even though there are some differences between male and female brains, and between those of children and senior citizens. And NeuroFocus collects a massive amount of input, recording and analyzing billions of data points during a typical neurological testing project. This is the genius of neuromarketing, according to a booster like Pradeep. He promises an accurate read of the subconscious mind. Focus groups and surveys, on the other hand, give an imprecise measure of the conscious mind, of so-called articulated, or self-reported, responses. They are one step removed from actual emotion, inherently weak: like flashbacks in a film. They are fine for eliciting facts, less so for probing into what people really feel.
Not everyone agrees that neuromarketing is the next great thing, of course. Because its research has been primarily corporate funded and its tangible results primarily anecdotal, neuromarketing is not without detractors, who tend to lump it in with the array of businesses, like biometrics or facial mapping, that promise all sorts of new-wave marketing breakthroughs. Ray Poynter, founder of the Future Place, a social-media consultancy in Nottingham, England, colors himself a skeptic on all of them but saves his harshest criticism for neuromarketers. He believes they offer far more hype than science. "Neuromarketers are overclaiming massively," he says. "While it is likely to reduce the number of bad mistakes, and slightly increase the chance of good things happening, it's all a matter of degree."
Even so, it's hard to imagine neuromarketing proving less reliable than traditional market research. For decades, marketers have relied on focus groups and surveys to divine what consumers want, using these methods to solicit feedback on their attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and perceptions about an advertisement, a product and its packaging, or a service. Each year, hundreds of thousands of focus groups are organized around the world, and about $4.5 billion is spent globally on qualitative market research.
This kind of "mother-in-law research," as ad exec Kirk Cheyfitz calls it, has all manner of shortcomings. It's not statistically significant, so it's risky to graft your findings onto the population at large. One or two blowhards may hijack an entire panel, and researchers can, without knowing it, influence participants. The world has changed, and yet so much market research is still conducted the same old way.
Brain Eaters
Companies try to keep their neuromarketing efforts secret. Here are six that we flushed out.
Pradeep says.
"I bet you, long ago if you looked at cave paintings, there were a bunch of Cro-Magnon men and women sitting around a fire in focus groups wondering whether to go hunt mastodon that night. Today, our focus groups are no different."
In the tale of our inner lives, we have always been unreliable narrators. Pradeep believes he can get at the truth.
THE INTEL CASE
When David Ginsberg joined Intel in 2009 as the company's director of insights and market research, he was something of an expert on the slippery nature of "truth," having spent 15 years working on political campaigns for John Edwards, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. Ginsberg was downright skeptical of neuromarketing, or, as he calls it, "nonconscious-based research." He thought it had more to do with science fiction than reality. But he also knew that Intel had been conducting market research as if it were still 1965, with surveys that were the equivalent of sending Gallup off to knock on thousands of doors. That may have worked decently in the days when a person bought a computer based on specs--processing speed, RAM, etc. But in an age where virtually every computer is sold with power to spare, Ginsberg knew that the rationale for buying a certain computer was as much emotional as it was rational. To compete in this new market, Intel the company had to understand how people felt about Intel the brand.
Ginsberg says.
"If you ask people if they know Intel, something like 90% will say they know Intel. Ask if they like Intel, a huge percentage will say they like Intel. Ask them [to rank or name] tech leaders, however, and we come out much lower on the list."
Ginsberg felt that he needed to understand consumers' feelings at a deeper level: What words did consumers associate with Intel? Were these associations altered by one's culture? Ginsberg decided to run pilot tests with a number of market-research firms, and despite his sense of neuromarketing as mumbo jumbo, he included NeuroFocus. What he learned surprised him and turned him into a believer.
NeuroFocus structured its test for Intel as it does most of its market research, patterning it after something called the Evoked Response Potential test, a staple of neuroscience. Test subjects were paid to come to a NeuroFocus lab and put on a cap with 64 sensors that would measure electrical activity across the brain. Because the U.S. and China are two very important markets for Intel, NeuroFocus tested groups of 24 consumers (half men, half women) in Berkeley and in a midsize city in China's Sichuan Province.
In a quiet room, each test subject was shown the words "achieve," "possibilities," "explore," "opportunity," "potentiality," "identify," "discover," "resolves," and "solves problems." Each flitted by on a TV screen at half-second intervals. The subject was instructed to press a button whenever she saw a word with a letter underscored by a red dot. After several minutes of this subconscious-priming word test, she was shown a few Intel ads. Following this, the words were again presented on the screen, this time without the dots.
The exercise served two functions: First, the red dots focused the subject's attention; second, they gave NeuroFocus a baseline measure of the brain's response, since each time a test subject saw the red dot, her brain went "A-ha! There's a word with a red dot." Click.
When NeuroFocus later analyzed the EEG readings, it looked for those same "a-ha" moments from the period during which the subject had viewed the Intel ads. The words that provoked the most such responses were "achieve" and "opportunity." Interestingly, women in the U.S. and in China had virtually the same response post-advertisements, as did American men and Chinese men. The differences were in the genders; on both sides of the pond, men and women had strikingly different reactions. "Achieve" prompted the most intense reaction among women, while men gravitated toward "opportunity. "
Says Ginsberg:
"This was incredibly fascinating to us. There seem to be fundamental values across humanity."
He believes that Intel would have never learned this through traditional market research and focus groups, where cultural biases come into play. He also concluded that there are differences in how men and women think, and that these differences cross cultural boundaries. This is not news to Pradeep, who points out that male and female brains are different, and not in a Larry Summers women-aren't-as-good-at-math-and-science-as-men-are kind of way. The female brain is our default brain when we are in the womb. But at week eight, about half of all fetuses are bathed in testosterone. These now-male brains close down certain communication centers in the brain while opening up others geared toward sex and aggression. In female brains, meanwhile, the communication pathways continue to evolve, intricate neural routes are constructed across both hemispheres, and areas dedicated to emotion blossom. Life seems to imitate a beer commercial, doesn't it?
Now Intel is changing its marketing strategy. Ginsberg says.
"A brand that helps people achieve and offers opportunity has a phenomenal brand attribute. It gives you a new perspective on things, to understand your consumer better."
The NeuroFocus findings have informed the next round of creative advertising you'll see from Intel, due to emerge later this year. Ginsberg adds.
"I guarantee when you see these ads you'll see a straight line. The study gave us fresh insights to talk about things we didn't have permission to talk about before."
It is conceivable that Intel could have redirected its advertising toward achievement and opportunity with the help of focus groups. But Ginsberg feels, and Pradeep fervently believes, that neuromarketing has a much better shot at getting closer to the unconscious truth, and therefore proving more effective. Still, the difference between the two forms of research sometimes seems to be just a matter of degrees.
THE PAYPAL CASE
Barry Herstein left American Express to join PayPal in October 2007 as global chief marketing officer with the goal of giving eBay's transaction-processing division a coherent marketing strategy. After the first few weeks, he knew just how difficult the task would be. Almost every time he asked a PayPal employee, "What's the big idea behind PayPal?" the following response came back: "Safe, simple, wow!"
"Safe, simple, wow?" Herstein scoffs. "That's not a big idea. It's a tagline." It didn't even make sense. Wasn't any payment product supposed to be safe and simple? He supposed that software engineers might know that paying for things was complicated, but having worked at American Express and Citi, he knew that the consumer didn't think that was the case. And "wow"? He cringed. Then, after a series of brainstorming sessions and conversations with a broad range of customers, he hired NeuroFocus to help him figure out the basic concepts around which he could build a new global identity for PayPal.
As part of its standard methodology, NeuroFocus captures the subconscious resonance consumers have for seven brand attributes: form, function, and benefits, as well as feelings (the emotional connection a brand elicits from consumers), values (what it represents), metaphors (aspirations, challenges, lessons, or life events that seem connected to the product), and extensions (the unexpected and perhaps illogical feelings it inspires). Based on his earlier brainstorming sessions, Herstein asked NeuroFocus to home in on three attributes and create three phrases for testing within each. For function he offered "convenient," "fast," and "secure"; for feelings, "confident," "hassle-free," and "in the know"; and for benefits, "new opportunity," "on my side," and "empowering." The 21-person panel had 11 men and 10 women and was also segmented into regular, light, and non-PayPal shoppers.
According to NeuroFocus, "fast" ranked the highest in the function category. (Notably, "fast" was not acknowledged in any way by "safe, simple, wow.") In fact, according to the brain heat map that NeuroFocus created from the aggregated data, speed is a huge advantage that sets off extremely positive feelings, especially from regular users. The more people use PayPal, it seems, the more they appreciate how quickly they can close transactions. For the feelings category, "in the know" resonated best, and in benefits, "on my side" won out.
Examining brand attributes is a standard of traditional market testing, of course. Herstein ran a parallel, more conventional track at the same time as his NeuroFocus study, creating a conventional online survey. The results were significantly different. While the word "fast" resonated with this group, the phrase "on my side" wound up at the bottom of the benefits category, which was topped instead by "confident"--a word that had finished dead last among men in the NeuroFocus study.
Herstein trusted the NeuroFocus results, though, and set out to create a coherent global image for the company based on them. That image would humanize PayPal by emphasizing the outcomes it delivers, not the act of paying; nowhere in the new marketing would you find any dreaded, dreary images of two people hovering around a computer. Herstein says.
"People don't want to see that. They want to see people enjoying either what they just bought or the time that it gives them by paying fast."
Not everyone at the company was sold on his new approach. The heads of some foreign markets--Herstein declined to name which-- predicted that the new campaign would bomb. Herstein says that his boss, PayPal president Scott Thompson, told him he was crazy--but Herstein was willing to stake his reputation on the new approach.
What happened? According to Herstein, when he changed PayPal's visual and verbal identity across the company's email and web pages, click-through and response rates increased three to four times. He says.
"I'm telling you, in the world of direct marketing, the words '400% improvement' don't exist. If you can go from 1.2% response rate to 1.3%, you'll get a promotion, right? And if you can take something from a 4% response rate to 16%? Unheard of."
Herstein has left PayPal to join Snapfish and now sits on NeuroFocus's board as an unpaid adviser. While eBay confirms the basics of his account, it won't confirm his description of the outcomes from the marketing campaign he created; a spokesman repeatedly asked Fast Company not to include this information in our story.
THE FEAR OF NEUROMARKETING
This bid for secrecy is entirely in keeping with the aura around neuromarketing, an industry that is both highly confident about what it can deliver and very nervous about its perception in the broader world. Several neuromarketing firms were approached for this story, but the only one that would do more than provide vague descriptions of its work was NeuroFocus, which is by all accounts the industry leader. Out of dozens of its corporate clients, very few would agree to discuss their work with the firm.
Neuromarketing outfits are afraid of being branded as trendy voodoo science, no more trustworthy than palm readers. Such a perception, they believe, will wither with good results. Perhaps more worrying is the other end of the speculative spectrum, which posits that corporations armed with our neurological data will be able to push a secret "buy button" in our brains. This is a fear promulgated by, among others, Paul B. Farrell, a columnist for Dow Jones and author of The Millionaire Code. He calls this buy button your brain's "true decision-making processor," a "weapon of mass delusion." You end up like a computer "without virus protection" and "exposed to every Wall Street banker, politician, and corporate CEO with gobs of cash and a desire to manipulate your brain."
Ron Wright, president and CEO of Sands Research, a rival neuromarketing firm based in El Paso, Texas says.
"There's still this mystique that there's a way to control consumers and turn them into robots to purchase products. That is simply not the case."
Nevertheless, after spending time with Pradeep, you get the feeling we've only just begun to tap the potential of this new movement. Pradeep is not a neuroscientist. He's a former GE engineer and consultant who became fascinated by neuromarketing after a conversation with a neuroscientist who sat next to him on a cross-continental flight. After seven years at the helm of NeuroFocus, he sees every product relationship in terms of the brain, like a virtuoso musician who hears music in everyday sounds, from the clackety noise of a woman's heels on a wooden floor to the melange of notes from a car engine.
DR. PRADEEP ON WHY PEOPLE LOVE APPLE PRODUCTS
On a sun-drenched afternoon in Berkeley, we tour the shops at the local mall. We stop in front of a Victoria's Secret plate-glass window and Pradeep points out the ambiguous expression of a lingerie model on one of its posters. He explains that the brain is constantly looking out for our survival and as part of that is always ready to measure another person's intent. Is that stranger happy? Angry? Sad? When an expression is not easy to decipher, we do a database search through our collection of faces--curious, worried, nervous, threatening--to choose which is closest to the one we see, and match it. He says.
"If the expression is easy to decipher, I hardly glance. But if the expression is relatively hard to decipher, she makes me open the cupboard of memory."
Contrast this with the nearby Bebe store, where Pradeep shakes his head at the headless mannequins in the window.
"Now that's what I call a crime against humanity. Money down the drain."
At the Apple store, we pause at a desktop computer and he explains why it's always better to put images on the left side of the screen and text on the right:
"That's how the brain likes to see it. If you flip it around, the right frontal looks at the words and has to flip it over the corpus callosum to the left frontal lobe. You make the brain do one extra step, and the brain hates you for that."
Pradeep loves Apple, and he loves to talk about Apple, in part because Steve Jobs never has been and probably never will be a client. (Apple doesn't even use focus groups. Jonathan Ive, Apple's top designer, famously said they lead to bland products designed to offend no one.) But the real reason he loves talking about Apple is that he believes the company has elevated basic design to high art, a hugely successful strategy that Pradeep thinks is justified by our most basic neurological underpinnings.
Which brings us back to that iPad. Pradeep claims the brain loves curves but detests sharp edges, which set off an avoidance response in our subconscious. In the same way our ancestors stood clear of sticks or jagged stones fashioned into weapons, we avoid sharp angles, viewing them as potential threats. NeuroFocus has performed several studies for retailers and food manufacturers and found that test subjects prefer in-store displays with rounded edges over those with sharper edges. In one instance, when these new rounded displays were rolled out to replace traditional store shelving, sales rose 15%.
But curved edges are only one reason for the iPad's success. We also like how the tablet feels, how sleek and well balanced it is. Signals generated by our palms and fingers, along with lips and genitals, take up the most surface area within our brain's sensory zone. The way a product feels in our hands can be a major selling point. It's why we prefer glass bottles to cans, which NeuroFocus product-consumption studies bear out, although it's not just the material, it's also the slender curve of the bottle and the ridges in it. The touch screen, too, is a mental magnet and can induce those hormonal secretions Pradeep likes describing.
Why we like these curves no one knows for sure. Perhaps our brains correlate curves with nourishment--that is to say, mommy. (Calling Dr. Freud.) In men, it could be sexual. One study asked men to view before-and-after pictures of naked women who underwent cosmetic surgery to shrink their waists and add to their derrieres. The men's brains responded as if they had been rewarded with drugs and alcohol. But this response to curves may be even more primal than sex, or beer. Another study suggested that men seek women with curves because women's hips and thighs contain higher doses of omega-3 fatty acids, which nurture babies' brains and lead to healthier offspring.
THE IMPORTANCE OF NEUROMARKETING IN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
This is the flip side to our fears of neuromarketing: the potential to look at our choices in a new way that blends science, psychology, and history. Lately, NeuroFocus has been moving into product development, providing research to companies that will influence how products look, feel, and function before they hit the market. That's what the firm is doing with its Mynd crown of sensors. But Pradeep has visions that go far beyond testing products, packaging, and commercials. He imagines neurotesting as ideal for court-room trials: A defense attorney could pretest opening and closing arguments for emotional resonance with mock juries. And while NeuroFocus is not getting involved in politics, he says that competitors of his helped Republican politicians shape their messages for the 2010 midterm elections.
One stunning application of neurotesting is the work of Robert Knight, Pradeep's chief science officer, and a host of other neuroscience researchers who are trying to develop a way for quadriplegics to control their wheel-chairs just by thinking alone. When you watch someone move a hand to grab a can of soda, mirror neurons in your brain react as if you were grasping it yourself. Knight is studying which brain signals can be translated into software commands to drive a wheelchair. To further this research, Knight, part of the team that invented the Mynd, plans to give it away to scientists and labs around the world. And the next iteration, he promises, will be a big step up, with eye-tracking capability, a built-in video camera, and three times as many sensors for greater brain coverage. Pradeep says.
"If our limbs will not respond to the beauty of your thinking or your feeling, that is a horror beyond horrors. Restoring a little bit of gesture, a little bit of movement, a little bit of control to that beautiful mind is an extraordinary thing to do."
He seems sincere, passionate even, though of course I cannot read his mind.
COMMENTARY: As a "student" of neuromarketing, an area of marketing that has always fascinated me eminsely, I believe that understanding how the brain reacts to external physical and psychological stimulu is the key to better marketing and ultimately creating brand awareness and lasting consumer loyalty. When you come to think about it branding is the end result of how individuals respond emotionally to a company and its products. And when you think emotions, you think about the human BRAIN.
I also believe that neuromarketing will eventually become commonplace and the basis upon which most marketing decisions will be based including new product design and prototyping, packaging design, media creation, marketing communications, pricing and product distribution.
When Dr. Pradeep explains why he loves Apple products so much, he is seeing neuromarketing in practice, and the master of neuromarketing is none other than Steve Jobs. If you read "The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs" by Carmine Gallo, about seven innovation principles of Steve Jobs, there are two principles that exemplify the very essence of neuromarketing:
Principle #4: "Sell Dreams, Not Products." To Jobs, people who buy Apple products are not "consumers." They are people with dreams, hopes, and ambitions. Jobs builds products to help them fulfill their dreams.
Principle #6: "Create Insanely Great Experiences." Jobs has made Apple Stores the gold standard in customer service. The Apple Store has become the world's best retailer by introducing simple innovations any business can adopt to make deep, lasting emotional connections with its customers.
Like Dr. Pradeep, Steve Jobs is not a neuroscientist, but he is a master of human psychology. Product design is the secret sauce that has made Apple customers worldwide such rabid brand evaneglists that are willing to stand hours or even days in front of an Apple Store to be the first to buy his products.
The importance of product design to Jobs is exemplified in Principle #5: "Say No to 1,000 Things." Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, according to Jobs. From the designs of the iPod to the iPhone, from the packaging of Apple's products to the functionality of the Apple website, innovation means eliminating the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
The ability to finally measure how humans react emotionally to a product changes everything in the marketing mix. It's no longer the 4P's: Price, Product, Place and Promotion, but you can add a fifth 'P': People. Not just their demographics or psychographics, and how they react and connect emotionally with a brand and its products. Measuring the peaks and valleys of those EEG readings is going to separate the winners from the losers.
Althought some marketer's view neuromarketing with some suspicion, and brand it as "voodoo" marketing, and some consumers even call it a form of "brainwashing", the brain doesn't lie, and Dr. Prakeep is on the right track.
Neuromarketing as a marketing tool will become the equivalent to DNA and fingerprint testing in biomedical research and criminology. Just how far neuromarketing will reach into our daily lives remains to be seen, but I can see in the not too distant future when there will be vast databases containing the neuro-footprint of every individual consumer. That neuro-footprint is the equivalent of an emotional DNA. Products will be designed and marketing specifically to consumers with a specific emotional DNA, and I have no doubt that Neurofocus will be at the forefront of that new neuromarketing frontier. (8/10/11)
Courtesy of an article dated August 8, 2011 appearing in Fast Company
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