Munger: We’ve learned how to outsmart people who are clearly smarter than we are.
Buffett: And we have a wonderful group of friends, from whom we can learn a lot.
A weekend treat of advice, courtesy of Farnam St.
'They laughed when I sat down at the piano'.
Bernbach remarked "What if this ad had been written in a different language? Would it have been as effective? What if it had said, 'they admired my piano playing'. Would that have been enough? Or was it the talented, imaginative expression of the thought that did the job? That wonderful feeling of revenge.
Suppose" Bernbach continued, "Winston Churchill had said 'we owe a lot to the RAF' instead of 'never was so much owed by so many to so few', do you think the impact would have been the same?" He also said "logic and over-analysis can immobilise and sterilize and idea. It's like love. The more you analyse it, the more it disappears." And I think the reason for that in Watzlawick's language is that you cannot translate analogue communication into digital.
Let me leave you with seven propositions. And I believe that if you put these into practice you would achieve more effective brand building advertising and avoid a great deal of the agony that is often involved in producing it.
Define the advertising goal as building saleability.
Stop talking. Mostly about messages.
Start talking about associations and about relationships.
Recognise the power of analogue communication.
Shift your focus away from the abstract message or idea to the advertisement as a whole.
Resist the urge to over-analyse and over control.
And if all that fails, just concentrate on being a 'charming guest'.
The common assumption is that advertising works best when it delivers a rational message that tries to persuade and change beliefs. Most advertising models here in the US are underpinned by this approach.
But when we think about the brands we love, and the marketing that, over time, has gotten us to the point of love, do we recall the individual messages along the way or is it more of the total feeling?
The work of interpersonal communication psychologist Paul Watzlawick found that it's more of the latter. Emotion is the content that primarily endures, not the rational points. Thinking about The Home Depot, for instance, we remain excited about the possibilities of home improvement far longer than we're able to recall the featured products we saw in the ad.
The first reason emotion works in this way is through the "Reinforcement Model", which was originally coined by Andrew Ehrenberg in '74 but I came to understand the principle more recently through Godin's writing when he talks about worldviews. The Reinforcement Model says that it's far better (and more successful) to reinforce the current worldviews of the audience than it is to try and create new ones or change someone's mind.
We gravitate to the emotions that we want to experience ourselves when we're interacting with the product.
"Every communication has a content and a relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication."
"When relationships between couples were on the verge of collapse, the "communication" was often perfectly reasonable and sensible, but it was the metacommunication that was causing the breakdown. In other words, although people were saying good things, the way in which they said them was causing friction and negativity. They found that by correcting the metacommunication they could often repair the relationship rift, even when damaging and negative things were occassionally said."
It's how we say things that builds relationships. And I think this is true for brands just as much as it is for people.
For years I've maintained that one of the most important items on any creative brief is the "Tone". But it's usually just glossed over. Often we see a collection of non-defining, easy-to-approve words in the tone, like, "approachable," "spirited" and "fun". These typically aren't very helpful or ownable. Tolstoy wrote once that the more vague a definition of a word the more often we use that word and with greater confidence since we assume everyone knows what we mean. How true.
When it comes to tone we can be so much better! I once saw a creative tone that was "not James Bond but Jason Bourne." How great is that? Very visceral. Identifying a unique and consistent tone is paramount because it's the metacommunication that maintains the positive customer relationship.
So with the correct tone we're almost done.
But here's the next dynamic: How much attention do we want the audience to give? This is sort of a trick question... we want them to give a lot attention, but we don't want them to know that they're doing so.
A 1989 study by Robert Bornstein confirmed that the less aware we are of the emotional elements in advertising the better the ads are likely to work because the viewer has less opportunity to rationally evaluate, contradict and weaken their potency.
Emotion reinforces our worldviews and then establishes how the brand manages a successful, ongoing relationship with us.
But what happens to the logical sales points that also need to be advertised?
"Of course, the opposite is the case with message-based information processing communication, where more attention will provide more recall and more persuasion. Advertising that has the tactical aim of communicating factual information (i.e. product improvements, promotions, prices, etc.) will benefit from more attention, because that way you remember better what the message is.
So this raises something of a dilemma for the issue of engagement. Advertising that needs to get a factual message over works best if high attention is paid. But our evidence shows that if advertising wishes to build strong brand relationships, it needs to incorporate high levels of emotional content, and this emotional content will be most effective if less attention is paid to it."
There are times to get lost in an emotionally-forward brand message. And then there are times to get right to the point. Both need to be done. The wisdom and success comes from knowing when to do each and build them both into the master plan.
Find all of Dr. Heath's papers here.
Are people more pessimistic or optimistic? As we watch the nightly news and follow political commentary one might immediately say we're a pessimistic bunch. But science says differently. Human brains are built to tilt toward the positive according to a stellar report by Tali Sharot called The Optimism Bias.
We imagine what could be. Apparently inside our brains our prefrontal cortex and the amygdala work together to keep us looking forward. It's a proactive survival mechanism. Because we are a species that is consciously aware of our pending mortality it is optimism that keeps us balanced. It's what motivated us to move out of caves in the first place.
"Optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one's mind. Our capacity to envision a different time and place is in fact critical to our survival."
Collectively we can be pessimistic, but when it comes to ourselves, we are mostly optimistic. For example, a recent survey found that while 70% of respondents thought families in general were less successful than in their parents' day, 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future of their own family.
We are hard-wired to think about what could be. In marketing let's not over think stuff: put the optimistic emotion of the product out there. People want that.
The next thing about optimism is that it's largely constructed out of experiences. The more experiences we have in our lives the more we learn. And the more we learn, interestingly, the more optimistic science says we tend to become. This is because prior experience allows us to find the silver lining in the clouds since we've been there before.
MC: "Oh, I love both. I have the possibility to travel into so many universes, and that is what really makes the job marvelous for me. I wouldn't say I prefer one or the other. It's the richness (of both) that makes me think I will always have sparkles in my eyes and in my heart."
The value is in the balance and being well-rounded.
And if we're going to be well-rounded from experiences then that's extra good for organizations. In Change By Design, IDEO's Tim Brown talks about the importance of T-Shaped people in an organization. T-Shaped people are those who vertically specialize in something (the vertical part of the "T") but because they push themselves outside their core competency they also have the ability to collaborate across disciplines (the horizontal part of the "T").
So it's important to seek experiences in ourselves and others... it makes for more optimistic and collaborative groups.
The science of optimism is fascinating. Read the full article here.
When drinking wine it is both true and untrue to say that the expensive stuff tastes better than the inexpensive stuff.
First the untrue. In a recent study of blind tasting, psychologist Richard Wiseman asked 600 people to say which wines were more expensive after sipping. People only picked correctly 53% of the time--the equivalent of a coin flip.
Now the true. We love to rank and score things but we can't really quantify taste on a 100 point scale. The more we know about the wine we're drinking--from imagining the region where it's from to seeing the transporting label design--the more we engage our full brain in the process, thus receiving a better experience.
The taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of that alcoholic liquid in the glass. It cannot be deduced by beginning with our sensations and extrapolating upwards. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories, wine shop factoids and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars pointed out, there is no reasonable way to divide sensory experience into what is “given to the mind” and what is “added by the mind.” When we take a sip of wine, for instance, we don’t taste the wine first, and the cheapness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisplonk, or thiswineisexpensive. Our senses are vague in their instructions, and we parse their inputs based upon whatever other knowledge we can summon to the surface.
Read the original post from Jonah here. There's tons of great stuff like this over at The Frontal Cortex.
Since the mid 1960s the Myers-Briggs questionnaire has been one of the world's leading ways to measure psychological preferences and how people perceive the world and make decisions. Everyone is born with certain ways of thinking and acting. This is important to consider when thinking about social media and the social web... especially after doing some math.
There are 16 personality types in Myers-Briggs, each with a specific four-letter designation. People are drawn to a tendency of either judging (J) or perceiving (P). Thinking (T) or feeling (F). Sensing (S) or intuition (N). But it's the way these feelings are expressed which is perhaps most important to consider when it comes to the social web: extroverted (E) or introverted (I).
Interestingly, if you break down the 16 personality types by median percentages of Extroverts vs. Introverts the world slices almost equally in half: 50% of us express our feelings through extroversion, the other half, introversion.
Extroverts draw their energy from expressing themselves outwardly. It they are inactive, their motivation tends to decline. To rebuild their energy extroverts need breaks from time spent in reflection and become very social. Introverts, on the other hand, are the exact opposite. They prefer time away from activity. At a cocktail party E's naturally feed off the interaction while the I's are in an environment where it takes extreme energy to participate.
We see the E's vividly in social. It's very natural, frequent and energizing for them. For the I's, not so much and it turns out that's 50% of consumers. In America, roughly 153,503,000 people who are present in social (watching, following, internalizing, liking) but may not show themselves as vividly in conversations. It's not that I's can't be extroverted, it just takes harder work. Like being right or left handed... we're born with a natural tendency to prefer one and shifting to use the other takes lots of concentration.
I find it interestingly clarifying to learn that we split right down the middle, introverts vs. extroverts. And I think this is most important to consider as we create, engage, measure and refine in social.
As many know, I'm fascinated with something that's casually referred to as "the flip theory" for education. The idea is basically using technology to enable students to do their homework while at school and then listen to the teacher's lecture at night over the web. Until recently this idea had just been loosely talked about. But Cooper recently pointed me to Salman Khan and his TED presentation this month. Terrific.