Chapter One
Dogs, Cats, and Marketing
It must have been one of those "light bulb moments." A Russian scientist ambles through his laboratory one day, thoughts of digestive secretions on his mind. Idly he watches a lab-coated assistant lean down to pet one of the dogs.
The dog starts drooling, and this routine sight stops the scientist in his tracks. Assistant pets dog, dog salivates (the involuntary, slobbery confirmation the dog is thinking about food). Yet there is no food in sight. Aha! The assistant always wears his lab coat when he feeds the dog. The dog sees the lab coat and thinks food is on the way.
Most of us, faced with a drooling dog, would simply shake our heads and reach for the nearest paper towel. Not Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who worked with dogs to help him understand the human digestive system.
To get a handle on the relationship between stimulus and response, Pavlov replaced the lab coat with a sound and began an investigation into the world of conditional reflexes. The rest is history. Pavlov won a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his medical inquiries into the physiology of digestion, but he is best remembered as the man who got dogs to salivate to the sound of a bell.
So what does dog drool have to do with marketing?
Since the time of Pavlov, marketers have been "bell ringers", and customers have played the role of the drooling dog. Bells ring everywhere-there are even ads in urinals-but today fewer customers are panting and whining for a bite. Even worse for marketers, many customers simply find all that bell ringing annoying.
What changed? The bell? The dogs? Why aren't customers responding? And what can marketers do about that?
Cooking up a conditioned response
A conditioned response is a simple form of branding, and you can't create a conditioned response in the blink of an eye. That's why marketers insist on creating the most salient ads possible, then broadcasting those to as many people as possible as frequently as possible.
Here is the recipe for "Customers a la Pavlov":
1. Find your dog and keep him a bit hungry. This takes time. 2. Ring your bell, and offer the dog meat.2 Dogs love meat; meat is salient. If you try to associate bell ringing with sawdust, the dog will simply ignore you. No self-respecting dog drools for sawdust! 3. Repeat step #2 over and over and over again. When "bell" becomes synonymous with "food" in the canine's gray matter, you can ring the bell, withhold the food, and the dog still salivates. 4. Conditioning can wear off. To keep your dog conditioned, repeat this process frequently.
Modern psychology considers Pavlov's behaviorist experiment an example of "classic conditioning," the goal of which is to instill an association between stimuli (usually external ones like the bell) so that encountering one will bring the other to mind.
Far-reaching implications
In 1909, the implications of Pavlov's results came to the attention of American behaviorist John Broadus Watson, then on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University. In 1930, Watson wrote:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts, and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary, and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.
Watson gained notoriety through his "Little Albert" experiments, in which he conditioned a fear response in an eleven-month-old boy, using a white rat and a loud sound. Forced to leave academia when he was caught in a sex scandal involving the student who assisted him in this research, Watson turned his attention to advertising and went to work for J. Walter Thompson (now JWT):
... where, using techniques from his behavioral psychology, he showed that people's preferences between rival products were not based on their sensory qualities but on their associations. He went on to develop the selling of products like Maxwell House Coffee, Pond's Cold Cream, Johnson's Baby Powder and Odorono (one of the first deodorants). By 1924 he was one of the four vice-presidents of this very successful agency.
"So here we have J.B. Watson," wrote Chris Locke in Chief Blogging Officer, "father of American behaviorism, packing up all he knows about eliciting the Pavlovian slobber reaction, and wholesaling it to Madison Avenue."
Through men like Pavlov and Watson, the seeds for over half a century's worth of marketing practice were planted, then nourished by the "science" of behaviorism and its successful application in the spheres of marketing.
"Tom" foolery
Pavlov used dogs because their digestive systems are similar to those of humans. As all his equipment was set up to accommodate dogs, Pavlov carried out his conditional reflex experiments on dogs.
We suspect Pavlov would have had a harder time-and wonder what it might have meant to the development of behaviorist marketing practice-had he been working with cats. You can classically condition a response in many creatures, but the ease depends in large part on the nature of your subject and the reinforcement you use.
One basic difference between cats and dogs is motivation. Centuries of cat and dog humor captures the stereotypes: A dog wants to please you; a cat couldn't care less. Dogs are devoted and loving and selfless. Cats are aloof, indifferent, and self-indulgent. Dogs are social and act in ways that maintain and support the social order. Cats are solitary and act in ways that benefit themselves.
Cat Haiku
The food in my bowl Is old, and more to the point Contains no tuna.
Most problems can be Ignored. The more difficult Ones can be slept through.
Am I in your way? You seem to have it backwards: This pillow's taken.
Yes, a cat may come running when she hears you going for the can opener, and with enough effort you can teach her to roll over on command some percentage of the time. Ultimately, though, her engagement with you lasts only as long as she wants it to last. A cat is not out to please you; she's in it for herself.
She is not, and never will be, a dog.
Consumer branding: calling all cats
Early marketers, supported by Pavlov's research and studies with human subjects, attempted to "prove" that when businesses rang the right bell the right number of times, they could command desire and behavior in their audience through branding alone. Early successes helped them feel advertising gave them control over their audiences.
When the available advertising media choices were limited and communities were more localized, people's exposure to alternative experiences was restricted. It seemed possible that this theoretical control, or behavior-centeredness, of marketing was the key. Customers did, indeed, appear to salivate to marketing's bells and responded by buying the most heavily marketed goods and services.
Few anticipated the full effect of blossoming media options on the behaviorist marketing models. Even as late as the mid-1980s, people looked upon burgeoning media-broadcast and cable television and radio-as growing vehicles for delivering messages to even larger audiences who were predisposed to "devour information and constantly clamor for more." Expanding media markets seemed to offer brilliant opportunities to ring better bells for increasingly more dogs.
Even a casual reading of a newspaper's business section, with headlines that herald the death of mass-marketing and advertising, reveals the opportunities haven't played out the way we'd hoped.
To everyone's disappointment, emerging media are shattering behaviorist marketing tenets. Businesses are not in control of the strings; they can command neither desire nor response. Customers now have access to an unprecedented amount of information and can communicate any time and place they please. As media fragments, so does the "mass" in mass-marketing.
The window that emerging media has opened for us reveals a personal-experience economy, in which customers are in control. Brand is defined in customers' minds by their personal experiences with a particular product or service. Attentive only to the information that matters to them, customers are behaving a lot more like cats than like Pavlov's dogs.
Interactivity has changed the nature of marketing. Marketers must now reach beyond their traditional roles of raising awareness and driving traffic and extend themselves into the more intimate world of sales and customer relations. They are now responsible for creating powerful "persuasive systems" that anticipate and model customer needs, personalize information and processes to meet those needs, and then measure the return on investment for every discrete process in that system.
Technology may evolve at a pace that leaves us breathless, but the essential qualities of human behavior aren't nearly that transitory. The road may have changed, but those traveling on the road haven't.
We are not, and have never been, the metaphoric equivalent of Pavlov's dogs.
Actually, when it comes to consumer behavior, we've always been like cats. All it took was a little media fragmentation and a critical mass of information for management to notice. Understanding the "What's in it for me?" focus in our customers' behavior patterns is central to success.
We don't suggest you find better ways to ring better bells. Instead, we present you with the context for celebrating meows.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?by BRYAN EISENBERG JEFFREY EISENBERG Lisa T. Davis Copyright © 2007 by Bryan Eisenberg. Excerpted by permission.
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